ABSTRACT
This chapter critically explores Heather I. Sullivan’s notion of ‘dark pastoral’ in relation to mountaineering literature – that is, literature in a pastoral mode that engages with the paradoxes of the Anthropocene in a strategic ‘doubled movement closer towards and away from green fantasies’. Taking a narrative scholarship approach by opening with a poem that focuses upon the tension between beauty and risk in judging conditions in the mountains, the writer takes as a sample the five books shortlisted for a mountain literature award for which he was recently a judge. Each of these reveals in very different ways elements of darkness and of pastoral. They also, to varying degrees, engage with what is now recognised as the Anthropocene in ‘double movements’ of beauty and risk. The chapter returns to the question of the place of hope in a future dominated by climate change which the dark pastoral appears to exclude. The question is asked about the theory’s capacity to account for the persistence of the pastoral, of the need for journeys of retreat to mountains and the return of articulations about the experience, concluding that if darkness overwhelms pastoral the theory becomes another critique, lacking the positives of post-pastoral theory.
