Panel: The Great Beyonds
Copanelists: Clare Brant and Tino Ramirez
Since its publication in 1988, Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival, his account of his nearly fatal accident during a climbing expedition with his partner Simon Yates to the summit of the 21,000-foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985, has become a veritable contemporary classic of mountaineering literature. Just like other critically acclaimed and commercially successful accounts of death and near escapes—for example Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster (1997)—Touching the Void has not only been favorably received by mountaineering enthusiasts, but it has also been embraced by a general public apparently eager to read about the tribulations of individuals and to identify with quasi-mythic figures of heroic proportions.
While Simpson’s straightforward story of survival against all odds seems simple enough, Touching the Void turns out to be more complex and intriguing once it is juxtaposed with Kevin Mcdonald’s 2003 adaptation for the screen, which could best be described as a blend of traditional documentary film and Hollywood adventure movie. A comparative analysis of these two texts yields a compelling array of questions for critics of life writing and autobiographical documentary film. Which one of these two versions is or pretends to be the more authentic translation of personal experience into a text? Considering the fact that fifteen years have passed between the publication of the book and the release of the film, are there any discrepancies between the print and the visual version of Simpson’s account? How are generic conventions used in both of these documents? In this fifteen-minute conference paper, I hope to answer some of these questions by analyzing the multiple experiential and generic translations represented by Simpson’s Touching the Void and Macdonald’s cinematic adaptation of this text.
Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich is a PhD candidate enrolled in the American Studies Program at Johannes Gutenberg-Universit¨at in Mainz. He is currently working on his dissertation on ecobiographical life writing.