by Rene Daumal
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.
Copyright
This Tusk Ivory edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York and London
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LONDON:
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French edition © 1938 Editions Gallimard
Translation copyright © 1979 Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Introduction reprinted by permission from René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystsic 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 978-1-4683-0484-8
Introduction
“Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.”
—Aham Egomet quoting Oinophilus in A Night of Serious Drinking1
Daumal began writing A Night of Serious Drinking (La Grand Beuverie, literally “The Great Drinking Bout”), during his 1932 sojourn in the United States. Claudio Rugafiori, the editor of Daumal’s posthumous publications, reported that the misery and squalor of New York City during the Depression opened Daumal’s eyes to the grim reality of the world. He realized how narrow was his little circle of intellectuals and poets in Paris.
Among Daumal’s notes written on the steamer returning to France in 1933, is his self-questioning as to the reasons for his voyage. He asks, “Why New York?” “I know that Paris was too full of my old trappings, my old clothes, the failures of my deliriums. I needed a cleaning. I needed a cruel city.” His earnings as press secretary for an Indian dance troupe were not sufficient to provide for adequate food and lodging. Consequently, his U.S. stay was problematic and uncomfortable. He continued in his notes to describe the sleepless nights and nightmarish days spent in New York writing A Night of Serious Drinking. His account is more than just an imaginative series of metaphors for mild depression: “this same, untenable, bitter and just suffering struck its steel rays through my flesh, cut through my stomach, quartered my ribs, burst in my head, and caused spasms in my Adam’s apple and my lower lip.”2
This is the suffering of a man “between two stools,” Gurdjieff’s term for the state of one who has had a taste of a higher consciousness but who cannot maintain it. He cannot go back to “sleeping” comfortably, taking life on the level of appearances and ordinary pleasures (one stool), nor can he summon the strength needed to remain continually “awake” (the other stool). Furthermore he is surrounded by resistance, that is, temptations to dreamy, pleasant sleep, as well as the depressing example of all the sleeping people around him. This will be the stuff of which A Night of Serious Drinking is made: the bric-a-brac and eternal fidgeting of the world of sleep and the frustration of the struggle to awaken. While still on the ship, he wrote:
Nevertheless, there still remains the big drinking bout. It is a myth. This morning, forging through on this advancing steamer, which implacably cuts through the water, is also myth. There is never anything but the big question to resolve; all the rest, life and thoughts, is the necessary myth, the revolving expression of my battle with that.3
In the final 1938 version, first published in English in 1979, under the title Night of Serious Drinking, Daumal reveals his sense of the comic, the marvelous, and the repugnant—or, shall we say, the bizarre, the incongruous, and the perverse—all of which serve to touch on a higher truth by looking at its underside. Daumal chose the recit or initiatic tale as his mode of expression in both A Night of Serious Drinking and Mount Analogue. This form had been used by many great writers, including François Rabelais, the sixteenth-century erudite, free-thinking monk, whose humanistic spirit and proto-Surrealism was greatly appreciated by Alfred Jarry and Daumal. In his 1934 review of Rabelais’s Complete Works, Daumal wrote: “A pocket-size book of Rabelais—the best reason to go off on vacation. There is no one other than Plato that I reread so willingly.”4
Serious Drinking is a cross between Rabelais’s Pantagruel, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Fautroll, Pataphysician, as it leads us on an itinerary of strange persons and places. The book is made up of three sections, entitled:
I.
A labored dialogue on the power of words and the frailty of thought [an Ionesco-like comedy of words that presents the language of confusion].
II.
The Artificial Paradise [the longest and most developed section—a corrosive critique of modern society, presenting the experts in the world of language substitutes].
III.
The Ordinary Light of Day [man carries out the ritual fire sacrifice—the metamorphosis of the body/machine expressed finally through a language of clarity].
Although there are virtually endless possibilities of interpretation, the most obvious is this: Daumal is conducting his readers on a tour through the labyrinth of the mind’s convolutions. Using thirst as a metaphor, he reveals normal life to be a state of endless intoxication. He conveys us through a topsy-turvy, comic inspection of Dante’s realm of Hell, a voyage into the center of the self. It is a book about the psychology of consciousness that dumps the reader right into the maelstrom. In an article on Daumal, Marcel Lobet writes:
This misunderstood writer revives “novelistic esotericism,” which, according to Pierre de Boisdeffre, prefers over the seductions of realism, “a symbolic representation of life, pushed sometimes to the point of myth.” With Daumal, literature becomes a metaphysical experience, an exploration of the invisible, a descent into what Boisdeffre calls the infra-world. Like Rimbaud, Daumal applies himself to the disarrangement of all his senses [often incorrectly translated as “derangement”] and he spends a “season in hell.” He is a seeker of the Absolute.4
In this book, we now enter the contractive stage of Daumal’s evolution. After delineating the “I” from external forms in his early poetry, here he has us descend like Orpheus into the underworld, in order to inspect man in his lowest state.
In the first section, the state of dreaming and drunkenness is used as a parody for our usual waking state. The characters are so b
esotted with liquor that their functioning is impaired. They move in a thick haze. The continual drunken banter of section I is reminiscent of the fifth chapter of Rabelais’s Gargantua, entitled “The Remarks of the Drunkards.” In Serious Drinking, we hear “bacchic litanies” such as:
Oh! the thirst …
(Chorus: which may which may which might)
… of the stomach
(Chorus: which reeks which reeks which rots)
… of the chest
… of the brain.6
In Gargantua, we find six pages of similar inane drunken repartees, also without narration:
“Drink up!”
“I drink, I wet my whistle, I sprinkle my throat, and all out of fear of dying.”
“Keep on drinking and you’ll never die.”
“I don’t drink, I’m dry, and that means I’m dead already. My soul flies away to some frog-pond. For the soul never inhabits a dry spot.7
In Serious Drinking, one of the drunken responses is:
We all know that thtuff! We’ve read Pantagruel ath well, you old thoak!
“If only you knew how much I’d like to stop talking, you wouldn’t be so thirsty.”8
In the lengthy second section, Daumal’s critique concerns individuals more than institutions, since Daumal was more concerned with the rehabilitation of man. With a sort of wild hilarity, he passes in review the “Fidgetors,” “Fabricators of Useless Objects,” the “Pwatts,” the “Nibblists,” the “Kirittiks,” the “Sophes,” and the “Scienters.” Daumal shows us the human machine in its most degenerate, unredeemed state, wherein none of the characters are conscious of anything other than their current mood or their most recent ambition. They are blind puppets, prakriti, pushed around by nature and society. The concept of renunciation in order to evolve is beyond their scope. What we see in Serious Drinking is a parody of our present day era, Kali Yuga, the Age of Confusion, mentioned in the Sahittya Darpana, during which “men engage in activities only for their external fruits.”9
In this book we see all the many sides of Daumal in action: the poet, the philosopher, the Surrealist, the Pataphysician, the political activist, the Hinduist, and the Gurdjieffian, each in turn parodying his favorite bête noire. In the first section he picks on them all and epitomizes the entire decadent age of Kali Yuga in one sentence. It rings more current than the year 1935:
Then he jotted down the rudiments of an extraordinary poem which would be plagiarized the following day and betrayed in every language by two hundred and twelve minor poets; from it sprang the same number of avant-garde artistic movements, twenty-seven historic brawls, three political revolutions on a Mexican farm, a famine in Gibraltar.10
He is particularly ferocious about the abstract theorizing of modern-day intellectual art critics and their cant. One of the Fabricators of Useless Objects states: “Art is a synthetic transference of the dynamism of volume into its relativist reabsorption,”11 a statement reminiscent of the Pataphysical geometric theorems of Alfred Jarry.
In a procedure reminiscent of the eighteenth-century writer Jonathan Swift, Daumal divides artists into several groups, including the Fabricators of Useless Objects. Some live in “glass houses” that they call “ivory towers,” some live in “dark rooms” that they call “nature,” and in “vampire caves,” or in “flea circuses” that they call “the world.” They succeed in rendering unusable even the most usable things, and this they call the “triumph of art.” One architect describes the perfectly uninhabitable house:
The bird is the parasite of the tree as man is the parasite of the house. The edifice I built has its own meaning. See the simplicity and the audacity of the lines; a cement pole sixty meters high which supports rubber spheres. No walls, no ceiling, no windows; we rejected those superstitions long ago.12
He further explains that the Fabricators all dote and pamper one of their own internal bodily organs, usually one with something wrong with it, embellishing it with flowers and jewels and calling it “my soul” or “my life”:
Into each unusable object that he creates he hides a small fragment of that organ. When it is all used up the man dies. But this darling sickly organ lives on, sometimes for centuries.13
Here and there the tongue-in-cheek attitude gives way to a serious description of how things should be, but these are rare:
In reality, a true painter, as you know, possesses within himself—in his muscles, his sensibility, even in his thinking—the golden number or numbers and the law of color. He makes them live through everything he experiences and sees, not just on canvas; his work is, therefore, useful and universal.14
These straightforward statements of Daumal’s serious beliefs are brief; in Serious Drinking, Daumal generally uses the underhanded method of humor to deliver the same message indirectly. In a 1942 response to a disgruntled female reader, four years after the book’s publication, he explains why this is so:
You didn’t notice that each time I exposed one of the fakes, I immediately gave a definition of the real thing. The alphabetical index will help you in tracking my thoughts about scientists, artists, religion, love and philosophy. I wanted to do a satire, not a panegyric. That is why my positive affirmations take little space typographically compared to the rest but they’re there.
What remains unfinished, unsaid in the book is something else: the practical method to get out of this hell (laughter is the faint trace of the first step out). I wanted to make it known that this practical method could not be put in a book.15
Nothing in their society goes unparodied; there is hardly a single sentence that is not mock serious or deliberately silly. Professor Mumu administers holy water intravenously to reconcile Faith and science in “contaminated Scienters.” At the first inoculation he admits the reality of the miracle of Lourdes. At the second, the Blessed Mother appears to him. At the third, he recognizes the infallibility of the pope. At the seventh, Faith speaks in him: “Seek no more to understand.”16
Another group in society that receives the Daumalian treatment are the actors, here known as “Actées” or Preactors in the English (les Agis, i.e., those who are passively acted upon). First the narrator’s guide gives a straightforward description of how actors used to be:
In ages past, an actor knew how to call up the gods and allowed them to enter him. Through him the gods conversed with men. … They danced and played together, men and gods. They lent their bodies to the gods, whereas today we fabricate gods according to size to fit the actees.17
Daumal had just experienced the performer’s sensibility first-hand, having spent long months with the entourage of Shankar. Yet this satire is most likely a send-up of the Parisian theater scene. In the early forties, when he would have begun to hear readings from Gurdjieff’s book, All and Everything, he would have heard reiterated the same attitude toward the presumption of contemporary actors. In his twenty-four-page tirade, Gurdjieff is equally ruthless against their “swaggering” and “dramatizing.” He claims their complete vacuity and self-conceit are clothed in “such a fairy-like exterior” that they are treated like gods. “Their arrogance is such that the only thing they carry with modesty is their hemorrhoids.”18
In a similar fashion, Daumal has a field day picking on the writers or Pwatts. He gives a comic treatment to one of his favorite themes: the role of the poet and poetry. He presents the Pwatts’s definition of lyricism:
a chronic disorder of an individual’s internal hierarchy, which is manifested by an irresistible urge, called “inspiration,” to make useless, rhythmic utterances. Unconnected with what the ancients called “lyricism,” which was the art of drawing harmonies from the human lyre suitably attuned by long and patient effort.19
In his final essay “Black Poetry, White Poetry,” Daumal describes the black poet as one who exploits poetry for his personal satisfaction, who believes himself to be either the true originator of his poems or better yet, “the chosen” spokesman of a higher being. His poetry is the result of pri
de, fallacious imagination, or laziness. He gives a comic depiction of the black poet, here called a passive Pwatt: in the process of practicing automatic writing he first waits for the initial phase of inspiration—a state of uneasiness induced by eating too much or too little, letting oneself be deceived by one’s wife, or losing one’s wallet. And then?
Next you shut yourself up in your room, take your head in your hands and start bellowing until the bellowing brings a word to your throat. You spit it out and write it down. If it is a noun, you start bellowing until an adjective or a verb turns up. But above all, never think about what you mean or better still, never mean anything at all, but let whatever wishes to be said, be said through you. We call it the fine poetic frenzy.20
In contrast to the passive Pwatts, the active Pwatts have a poeticizing machine implanted into their pineal gland. One Pwatt lifts off the top of his skull to reveal a metal sphere hung on gimbals; it is hollow, filled with thousands of tiny aluminum strips on each of which is engraved a different word. The sphere turns on its two axes and it grows still, allowing a word to drop through an aperture underneath. In this manner the Pwatt can achieve the certainty
that a sentence arrived at will be a phenomenon without precedent and that it will have no useful meaning whatsoever. It will be the pure materia prima of poetry.21
Sometimes his cold humor turns to indignation and anger, as it does toward politicians, when he considers the devastating effects of colonialism, which was reaching its peak in the thirties. [In 1939, the Exposition Coloniale de Paris was a venue where the imperialists could show off the booty from their conquests.] Daumal was troubled by the current hegemony of certain countries over much of the world. He gets in a political jab, by describing a parlor game about mother countries and their colonies, and men with national flags stuck in their skulls. René mocks the Communist philosophizing by depicting a group who lock themselves in a cupboard with a lighted wax taper and bottles of beer, to compose a treatise in ten volumes entitled “Errors Yet to Be Made in Deciding What Materialistic Dialectics Is Not.”22