Feeling bad
one evening after encountering some (relatively trivial) adversity of my own, I
watched the documentary Touching the Void,
about a mountain-climbing expedition gone terribly wrong and the amazing
survival story that ensued when one of the climbers, who had been left for
dead, crawled down off the mountain with a broken leg. (Whenever something goes
badly in my life, it always serves me well to put it in perspective—I can say,
yeah, well, OK, I didn’t win that poetry prize, but at least I’m not at 19,000
feet in the Andes with a broken leg in a snow storm.) I became unexpectedly
obsessed with the story, so one film, two books and several google searches later,
I’m still thinking about mountains, students, responsibility and contemporary
culture.
The
documentary is really a “docudrama” because it uses re-enactments—a technique I
usually find rather illegitimate, but which in this case I was willing to accept
because of how gripped I was by the story it told. The film mixed the
reenactments with interviews with the two climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon
Yates, and a fellow traveler who waited in the basecamp, Richard Hawking, to
unfold a story that turned out to be so engaging that it kept me up an hour an
a half past my customary bedtime. It wasn’t just the high drama of Simon’s failed attempt to
rescue Joe after he’s broken his leg and Joe’s subsequent almost unbelievable
rescue of himself that captured my attention. Rather, it was something that
Richard said about what he was thinking when Simon and Joe were overdue to
return from the mountain. “I started to think is one of them dead, or
are both of them dead? Even, if one of them’s dead not which one do I want to
be dead, but if one comes back, who do I want it to be? It’s kind of quite cold
to say it, but I guess I would have rather it had been Simon.” He felt that way because Simon was a nice,
friendly guy, and Joe—well, Joe wasn’t. But of course, being me, I thought—you
have to be a little bit mean to be able to drag yourself 3000 feet down a
mountain through snowstorms down ice fields through strewn boulders with a
shattered knee. I thought that was the whole of the story for me until I read
the screen title at the very end that said: “Simon returned to England to face
intense criticism from many in the climbing community for cutting the rope on
his partner.” Given the story as portrayed in the film that criticism seemed
very wrong, and the film left me curious.
So I went to
bed and dreamed of mountains and snow and woke up still wondering about what
Simon could possibly have done other than what he had done. I did a google
search and found out that although I’d never encountered this story before, the
book on which it was based, Touching the
Void, written by Joe Simpson, is considered to be one of two contemporary
classics on mountaineering, the other being Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the 1996 disaster on Everest in which eight
people died, a book I had read some years ago. I poked around a number of sites and found that most of the
online criticism of Simon’s decision to cut the rope was based in highly
technical ideas about how he could have done the belay differently, used the
equipment differently, and I thought well, that’s just a load of Monday-morning
quarterbacking, but I did note that the most recent post I found was dated
2010, rather extraordinary since the incident happened in 1985, the book came
out in 1988, and the film in 2003. It’s clearly a story that has continued to
fascinate many people. I then switched from searching on Simon Yates to
searching on Joe Simpson, because another screen title had said that he had
gone on to continue climbing and I was curious about how he managed that given
the shape his leg had been in after the accident. That’s when I ran across the
story that is what I really want to write about here.
Simpson’s
book Touching the Void had been
selected some years ago to be the subject of the General Certificate of
Secondary Education (GCSE) in the U.K. (this is the successor to the old O Level exams,
probably most familiar to Americans as the O.W.L. exams in the Harry Potter series). In 2012, Simpson
had been subjected to what the British press had called a “twitter mob”
attacking him because they had failed their GCSE exam in English Literature.
Some of the tweets are reported in the stories cited below. “Your book is shit
and you should feel bad," was one. But what really struck me was this one: “YOUR BOOK IS THE REASON MY ENTIRE YEAR
WILL FAIL OUR ENGLISH EXAM!!" Another, identified as being from a Turkish
student, was in the same vein: "I
wrote you a few months ago. I said I had an exam about your book. I failed
because of you. You owe to me!"
For several years now students have been regularly saying to
me and to my colleagues things that indicate that they do not feel a sense of
responsibility for their own actions. They ask “why did you give me that
grade?” I normally reply that I have “given” them nothing—that I have assigned
the grade that they earned. This seems to be an ungraspable concept for some
students. Their automatic response to anything in which they don’t succeed is
“that’s not fair.” The definition of “fair” seems to be changing from
“impartial” to “going favorably for me.” I rarely have conversations with
students in which they say, “that was a fair test and I was underprepared and
didn’t do well.” (Rarely—not never. I always find it very gratifying when a
student does say something like that and vows to do better next time).
The idea that students who had failed an exam would contact
the author of the book on which the exam was based and blame him for their
failure seems to me the ultimate expression of that lack of responsibility. And
it seems even worse that the author they chose to attack was not a novelist,
but a memoirist whose book was about a near-death experience in which he had
survived great suffering. (One of the tweets read: “Three chapters of
crawling didn't inspire me to write about your book in my exam. It was rather
boring really.” Perhaps another topic might be lack of compassion and/or
empathy in this generation along with lack of a sense of responsibility.)
Actually,
I was somewhat glad to see that this lack of taking responsibility is an
international phenomenon, not specific to the millennial generation of
Americans. (I’m not saying that students—young people—in previous generations
always wholeheartedly took responsibility for themselves. Of course they
didn’t. What I am saying is that the phenomenon seems increasingly widespread
and pronounced among the current generation of students and young people.)(Oh,
and yes, Joe Simpson did tweet some nasty comments back at them. Yes, not
necessarily a really nice guy, but definitely someone I’d like to meet in a
pub!)
I suppose that the irony in this case is particularly sharp
because neither Joe nor Simon has ever blamed each other or anybody else for
the accident and the aftermath. Quite the contrary.
In the documentary, Simon says that as he was walking down
the glacier after he cut the rope, believing Joe had fallen to his death, finally
knowing that he was going to make it down and not die, he started thinking
about how he was going to tell Joe’s parents and his friends about what had
happened, and that, “maybe I could think of a decent story that would make me
look better. And I did think about that for quite awhile.” But he did not do
that. As soon has he saw Richard back in base camp, he told him the whole
truth. In the book Touching the Void, Simon says of telling the story to Richard:
“there was so much more [Joe and I] had managed to do that should be told. The
rescue in the storm, the way we had worked together….I couldn’t do him the
injustice of lying” (Kindle Loc 2058-59). Perhaps Simon’s comment points to
what I find so disturbing about the students not taking responsibility for
failing their exam, and blaming Joe Simpson for it: to do so is to do an
injustice, and if there is anything at all I believe in, it is the necessity
for justice.
Joe actually wrote the book because of the criticism Simon
had been subject to, which he felt had been unjust. The dedication reads: “To
Simon Yates, for a debt I can never repay.” Quite the opposite of blaming Simon
for cutting the rope, Joe writes that he would have done the same and praises
Simon for saving his life. Both of them knew when they were starting the ascent
that by choosing to climb to a remote Andean 20,814-ft peak as a two-man team
they were on their own. Joe quotes what he wrote in his diary in base camp
before starting the climb, about preferring this mountain to the Alps: “no
hordes of climbers, no helicopters, no rescue—just us and the mountains”
(Kindle loc 184). He reiterates: “We had
responsibilities to no one but ourselves now, and there would be no one to
intrude or come to our rescue” (Kindle loc. 228). They never went back on that
and whined “somebody should have saved us.” Simon and Joe ultimately concluded
that they were responsible for a near-fatal mistake in not taking enough fuel
to melt snow to make drinking water, so that they were both dehydrated and in a
rush to get off the mountain and kept going after dark and in a storm. Both
take full responsibility for that error. Simon wrote in his own book,
“Ultimately we all have to look after ourselves…In my view that is not a
licence to be selfish, for only by taking good care of ourselves are we able to
help others.”
So here’s the question I’m left with: how do we teach
responsibility? How do we teach that the definition of “fair” is that if you do
the work required you’ll pass the test, and that if you don’t, you won’t?
Touching the Void.
Dir. Kevin McDonald. 2003
Simpson, Joe. Touching
the Void. ebook. Copyright 1988.
Yates, Simon. Against
the Wall. ebook. Copyright 1997.
