Mount Analogue
The phrase “it’s a classic” is much abused. Still there may be some appeal in the slant of the cap Overlook sets in publishing a list of books the editors at Overlook feel have continuing value, books usually dropped by other publishers because of “the realities of the marketplace.” Overlook’s Tusk Ivories aim to give these books a new life, recognizing that tastes, even in the area of so-called classics, are often time-bound and variable. The wheel comes around. Tusk Ivories begin with the hope that modest printings together with caring booksellers and reviewers will reestablish the books’ presence and engender new interest.
As, almost certainly, American publishing has not been generous in offering readers books from the rest of the world, for the most part, Tusk Ivories will more than just a little represent fiction from European, Asian, and Latin American sources, but there will be of course some “lost” books from our own shores, too, books we think deserve new recognition and, with it, readers.
This Tusk Ivories edition is first published in the United States in 2004 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Text, afterword, copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1981
English translation © 2004 by Carol Cosman
Introduction reprinted by permission, from René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide by Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt, The State University of New York Press © 1999, State University of New York. All rights registered.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-451-0
Contents
Copyright
INTRODUCTION BY Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt
Chapter 1: In Which We Meet
Chapter 2: In Which Suppositions are Made
Chapter 3: In Which We Make the Crossing
Chapter 4: In Which We Arrive and the Problem of Currency Becomes Specific
Chapter 5:
NOTE FROM THE FRENCH EDITION
AFTERWORD BY Véra Daumel
About Mount Analogue
Mount Analogue
Non-Euclidian Mountain Climbing
Eternity
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise
—WILLIAM BLAKE
Mount Analogue is generally considered René Daumal’s masterpiece, for it combines his poetic gifts and philosophical accomplishments in a way that is both entertaining to read and profound to contemplate. It is a many-leveled symbolic allegory of man’s escape from the prison of his robotic, egoistic self. At the same time, it is well-grounded in scientific data and the facts of our physical existence.
After conducting his readers on an adventure into the depths of human materialism and spiritual ignorance in his previous book A Night of Serious Drinking, Daumal turns our attention to the heights of self-knowledge. The catharsis of the contraction phase of Daumal’s life, as depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking, is followed by the phase of expansion and hope in Mount Analogue, a book dedicated to Alexandre de Salzmann. Looking away from the lower depths of the Counter-Heaven of Le Contre-Ciel, the peak of the holy mountain emerges out of the fog.
In a letter he described his passage from the drinking bout to the mountain, a place where the caterpillar could transform itself into a butterfly:
After having described a chaotic, larval, illusory world, I undertook to speak of another world more real and coherent. It is a long récit about a group of people who realized that they were in prison and who realized that they had to renounce this prison (the drama being that they [we] are attached to it).1
The book is subtitled A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. Jack Daumal relates that René first began serious mountain climbing in 1937. Jack was better trained professionally and was able to pass his knowledge on to his brother. He says that René was a natural in the mountains and a quick learner. They made many climbs together in the two years preceding the outbreak of World War II. In a 1987 interview that I conducted for Parabola magazine, Jack said that in 1939 to 1940, the doctors recommended mountain air for René but no more climbing due to his tuberculosis. That is when the idea of Mount Analogue crystallized. Now that he was stuck in the lower climes, he remembered his métier was that of a writer:
If I couldn’t scale the mountains, I would sing of them from below. Then I began to think seriously with the heaviness and awkwardness with which one jostles one’s thought processes, when one has conquered one’s body by conquering rock and ice. I will not speak about the mountain but through the mountain. With this mountain as language, I would speak of another mountain which is the path uniting the earth and heaven. I will speak of it, not in order to resign myself but to exhort myself.2
Daumal’s real-life passion for the mountains allowed him to transpose to the page the rasa of his own experience. This serves as an analogy expressing Daumal’s own experience of a seeker’s initiation into the “Path” (Dharma). A more specific interpretation is that it is an allegory for Daumal’s experience in the Gurdjieff Work. The leader of the group, Sogol, like Totochabo of A Night of Serious Drinking, is generally considered to be a character based on Alexandre de Salzmann or Gurdjieff himself.
The narrator recalls an article he had written on “The Symbolic Significance of the Mountain,” and this gives Daumal the opportunity to discuss various interpretations of this symbol from the Old Testament, Egypt, Islam, Greece, and especially from India, drawing on Guénon’s study of symbolism of the mountain. The narrator recounts:
The substance of my article was that in the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the connection between Earth and Sky. Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity, and its base branches out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the path by which humanity can raise itself to the divine and the divine reveal itself to humanity.3
Throughout the entire novel there will be an interpenetration of symbols and concrete reality. The Hindus were the first to describe this way of seeing the world. According to Jan Gonda, the author of Vedic Literature, Vedic authors were always convinced of the existence of a correlation between the visible and invisible world—ritual acts, natural phenomena, and phenomena of divine agency: “The hold that nature has over man comes from the unseen powers within it.”4 This explains the Vedic tendency to avoid unequivocalness for reasons of taboo.
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