Chapter 13 - Pataphysics

Summary

This chapter presents a reading of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) in the context of its relations with Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysical or ’neo-scientific novel’ Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911). Like that of many surrealists, Daumal’s humour was nurtured in adolescence on Jarry’s idiosyncratic, absurdist, and blackly comic Umour. Mount Analogue is Daumal’s most sustained expression of such humour. The novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death in 1944, tells of the narrator Theodore’s encounter with Père Sogol, an expert climber and non-Euclidean navigator (i.e. spiritual guide), who leads a small group of novices on a quest to scale an unclimbable mountain. With much intertextual wit, Daumal weaves together his own peculiar mixture of Jarryesque scientific satire, the spiritual mythos of René Guénon, and the Gurdjieffean teachings of Alexandre de Salzmann into an ecological morality tale and Rabelasian adventure story. The chapter situates Mount Analogue within Daumal’s concern with what he and the other members of the Grand Jeu called “experimental metaphysics” – a lived, experiential foray into situations which pushed the limits of rational and conventionally scientific understanding of life.