“This Fabulous Rainbow of Sensations”: The Haptic Sublime in Modern Polish Mountaineering Literature

Abstract

This article looks at Polish mountaineering literature in the context of modernist aesthetics. Selected extracts from nineteenth-century travel writing are presented in which the essence of one’s experience of mountains is associated with the sublime. The article then explores the emergence of a new type of climbing sensibility and its literary representation on the basis of twentieth-century mountaineering texts that show the inefficiency of earlier forms of the sublime. Polish mountaineers gradually developed a new language that allowed them to specify the experience of vertical space. The aesthetics of the haptic sublime, which was born of the clash of the literary discourse with the concreteness of the climbing experience, resolved the problem of satisfactory expression and introduced new narrative patterns. It placed the climbing experience in a new conceptual framework, deriving its unique character from the contradictions of modern culture. It also showed the autotelic character of climbing and constituted mountaineering literature as a type of narrative that is autonomous with regard to other kinds of travel narratives.