10 - Into Thin Air: Extreme Landscapes, Self-Discovery, and Narrative in Christoph Ransmayr’s Der Fliegende Berg

Summary

Vermessen und kartographiert ist so gut wie alles, aber weitgehend unbekannt ist immer noch, was sich in einem selber auftut, wenn man durch eine ungeheure, übermächtige Landschaft geht.

[Almost everything is measured and mapped but mostly unknown is still what opens up within oneself when one is walking through a tremendous, overwhelming landscape]

—Christoph Ransmayr, Geständnisse eines Touristen: Ein Verhör

Introduction

IN TIMES WHEN TRAVEL NARRATIVES increasingly focus on personal experiences of the traveler, geographical and cultural characteristics of travel destinations reflect and affect the traveler's subjective experience. In recent postmodern travel literature, rough and dangerous terrains, such as arid deserts or polar regions, feature prominently. The challenges of a particular landscape are reflected in the quest of the traveler: they test travelers’ physical and mental strength, revealing resilience or vulnerability and, in the process, challenge their sense of identity and belonging. In addition, the features of the topography often seep into the text's narrative structure and assume semiotic meaning, reinforcing a connection between content and structure.

Christoph Ransmayr's fictional texts have dealt with travel, landscapes, and their complex symbolic entanglement from the beginning of his literary career, and journeys into challenging landscapes are particularly common; one example is extreme mountainscapes, such as the Himalayas, which figure prominently in his 2006 book Der fliegende Berg. The text recounts the Transhimalaya expedition of two Irish brothers, Pad and Liam, in pursuit of the unmapped fictional “flying” mountain Phur-Ri, in the hope of discovering one of the highest peaks in the world. The narrative follows their expedition from the planning stages to the journey through Tibet as they travel under the protection of a nomad Khampa tribe—during which Pad learns from the widow Nyema about their culture and myths and falls in love with her—and the brothers’ ascent of Phur-Ri. Their journey ends with Liam dying while descending the “flying mountain” and Pad's subsequent return to Ireland, albeit in a state of mourning and faced with an existential crisis of meaning and perception. Pad, the narrator, recounts the story of the journey retroactively in flashbacks, jumps, and superimposition of different layers of time, geography, and consciousness, thus producing a dense and complex text.