Reveries of Obscurity: Delving into the Alephs of René Daumal
René Daumal is one of those phantasmagoric figures in literature whose very obscurity weaves a kind of mystique around his life and work. A French surrealist, mountaineer, mystic, satirist, and seeker of arcane truths, Daumal lived a brief life (1908–1944) that unfolded less like a linear narrative and more like an exploration of mirrored corridors within the psyche. While he remains under-read compared to his contemporaries in French letters, Daumal’s spectral voice continues to echo compellingly through the caves of metaphysical inquiry. His writings, penetrating and often paradoxical, seem to issue from the rim between dream and gnosis.
Born in Boulzicourt in the Ardennes region of France, Daumal was something of a wunderkind. By his teens, he was proficient in Sanskrit, engaged with Eastern philosophy, and intrigued by speculative linguistics. In the late 1920s, together with Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and others, he co-founded the short-lived literary group Le Grand Jeu—a movement often juxtaposed with Surrealism, though Daumal himself rejected what he called the ‘automatic nihilism’ of the Surrealists. He defined their approach as “nothing that leans on nothingness,” and instead sought “the ineffable,” ephemeral points of alignment between mysticism, science, and laughter.
A profound example of Daumal’s exploratory methods lies in his unfinished magnum opus, *Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing* (1952). The novel, published posthumously, is a metaphysical parable about a group of climbers in search of a hidden, impossible mountain—Mount Analogue—that physically and philosophically links Heaven and Earth. Though the story cuts off mid-sentence due to Daumal’s untimely death from tuberculosis (further complicated by past drug use), what remains is penetrated by a crystalline brilliance. “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again… So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above” (Daumal, *Mount Analogue*, p. 35). This aphorism, nested in a climbing rule, unfolds as an episteme: one that both dignifies and demands an ascent toward consciousness.
Daumal was deeply influenced by the spiritual teachings of Gurdjieff and the Eastern philosophies of the Upanishads and Zen. He placed less stock in ideology or dogma than in direct, often painful realization—a purification of perception that could only occur through reified inner struggle. His mature thought reflects a devotion to what he termed “the science of the self,” a striving that went beyond artifice into a living ordeal of thought and awareness. In his prose poem “A Night of Serious Drinking” (*La Nuit des Serres Humides*), Daumal scripts an allegorical bacchanalia where the protagonist meets various emissaries of epistemic illusion before stumbling toward awakening. He writes: “I learned early that one must die while still alive, and I drank this death drop by drop…” (Daumal, *A Night of Serious Drinking*, p. 88).
The pivotal act in Daumal’s authorship is perhaps the attempt to formalize a grammar of interior transcendence. This was neither an exotic flirtation nor a conceptual amusement. His relationship to language was martial, even ascetic. Words were tools for excavation, not decoration. He believed that the true function of poetry was not self-expression but self-destitution. Replace the self with a still center, call it silence, God, or Mount Analogue. Only then, his work suggests, does language re-awaken as sacrament and cipher rather than spectacle.
From such a vantage point, we may approach one particularly elliptical citation that has long haunted this writer: “I can be reborn only if I have first known death” (*A Night of Serious Drinking*, p. 114). For Daumal, death is never an endpoint; it is a gate. But not the bombastic, romantic death courted in the tropes of war or opium dreams. Death, for Daumal, was the continual subtraction of illusion. In this light, he becomes a scribe of negative theology—what the mystics call *via negativa*. Each breath is a vanishing. Each thought limits the real, unless annihilated in the furnace of awakened perception.
The reader who seeks clarity in Daumal must therefore discard the commonplace compass of linear meaning. His cosmology winds rather than climbs. He wrote in paradox, like the Zen koan, not to confuse but to abolish lazy certainties. His phrases have the quality of being intonations rather than messages, like Sanskrit mantras or Tibetan syllables meant not to explain but to unseat. To read Daumal properly is to read backwards, upwards, inside out. As when he observes: “There is only one language—one—in which truths can be directly communicated. It is the language of awakened consciousness” (*Letters on the Search for Awakening*, p. 47). That language, presumably, remains unuttered, though always speaking.
It is tempting, as modern readers inoculated by irony and deterritorialization, to see the mystical ambition in Daumal as quaint. But to do so is to miss the core of his radicalism. He eschewed systems, institutions, and artistic pretensions alike. What he chased was naked reality: the foothill, the abyss, the summit hidden in the clouds. In this way, Daumal remains kin not only to mystics but to mountaineers and perilous thinkers like Simone Weil or Gustav Meyrink. They shared a trust in gravity as much as in grace.
Yet Daumal’s perspective exceeds narrow mysticism by insistence on method. He insisted on effort, preparation, experiment. “A vital demand is not a pleasure, nor a desire—it is an imperative,” he said (*Les Pouvoirs de la Parole*, p. 62). The demand he speaks of surfaces not from whim or aesthetic craving, but from a sunken internal strata—what he called “the true imagination.” In our age of noise and algorithm, where thought succumbs to passive consumption, to encounter such a demand is to be shattered. And perhaps this is Daumal’s secret intent. He does not wish to be read. He wishes to be inhaled, like the air at high altitudes: thinner, rarer, fatal to all that is comfortable.
Daumal’s dying words, reportedly addressed to his wife Vera Milanova, are as enigmatic and luminous as any he ever penned: “I see something. Just a little more effort…” What he saw, where it led—these questions remain open, but burning. And perhaps that is the story he leaves us with: a parable not concluded, but lived. We, readers on our own precipices, are left with the echo of that effort.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, mountaineering, surrealism
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1. Daumal, René. *Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing*. Translated by Roger Shattuck, Shambhala Publications, 2004.
2. Daumal, René. *A Night of Serious Drinking*. Translated by David Coward and E.A. Lovatt, Overlook Press, 1999.
3. Daumal, René. *Les Pouvoirs de la Parole*. Gallimard, 1955.
4. Gross, Kenneth. “The Poetics of Ascent: René Daumal’s Sacred Geography.” *Comparative Literature*, vol. 61, no. 1, 2009, pp. 45–68.