About René Daumal
René Daumal (French pronunciation: [ʁəne domal]; 16 March 1908 – 21 May 1944) was a French poet, essayist, novelist, dramatist, literary critic, translator and scholar of Sanskrit and Indian aesthetics. He was a founder of the Phrères Simplistes and one of the principal writers and editors of the avant-garde magazine and group Le Grand Jeu. His work brought together the visionary poetics of Arthur Rimbaud and Gérard de Nerval, the pataphysics of Alfred Jarry, experiments in altered consciousness, Sanskrit and Indian poetics, the metaphysical writings of René Guénon, and the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff. Daumal published many poems, essays, translations and reviews in periodicals, but only two full-length books appeared during his lifetime: the poetry collection Le Contre-Ciel in 1936 and the satirical novel La Grande Beuverie in 1939. His unfinished novel Le Mont Analogue, in which an expedition searches for a mountain linking the visible world to a higher order of reality, was published posthumously in 1952. Other posthumous collections established the extent of his writing on poetry, language, Indian aesthetics, metaphysics, theatre and spiritual practice. Although Daumal and the Grand Jeu worked within the wider field of Surrealism, they did not belong to the organisation led by André Breton. The two groups shared an admiration for Rimbaud, hostility to positivism and bourgeois rationalism, and an interest in dreams, automatism and altered states. Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, however, gave these experiments a more explicitly metaphysical and initiatory interpretation and placed Indian non-dualism and Guénonian thought near the centre of their programme. Daumal's intellectual development is often described as a movement from attempts to provoke exceptional states through intoxication, trance and psychic experimentation towards conscious attention, non-attachment and disciplined work involving the body, emotions and intellect. This was not a complete repudiation of his early avant-garde activity: its revolt, humour and demand that poetry transform life remained present, but were redirected from the exploration of unconscious automatism towards what he regarded as a more lucid and durable awakening. Literary scholar Roger Marcaurelle interprets Daumal's work as a sustained challenge to the assumption that individual consciousness is irreducibly finite. In this reading, Daumal's recurring oppositions—finitude and infinity, terror and serenity, night and day, solitude and communion—form a dialectical movement towards an impersonal or transpersonal unity. Marcaurelle also treats Daumal's writing and theory of reading as practical disciplines intended to expose and transform habitual consciousness rather than simply to represent spiritual ideas. A Fundamental Experiment, New York / Madras: Hanuman Books, 1987; first published: René Daumal, "A Fundamental Experiment", X magazine, Vol. As an adolescent, Daumal co-founded the art group Les Phrères Simplistes with the poets Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland. Although courted by André Breton, the journal was founded as a counter to Surrealism and Dada; the Surrealists reacted to its publication with some hostility.
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