Pataphysical Essays

By René Daumal

Pataphysics: the science of imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry’s posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, first appeared in 1911, and over the next 100 years, his pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In 1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found the College of ’Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal was the first to elaborate upon Jarry’s unique and humorous philosophy. Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly translated volume of writings offers a glimpse of often overlooked Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects Daumal’s overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, “The Pataphysics of Ghosts.” Daumal’s “Treatise on Patagrams” offers the reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public urinal. This volume also includes Daumal’s column for the Nouvelle Revue Française, “Pataphysics This Month.” Reading like a deranged encyclopedia, “Pataphysics This Month” describes a new mythology for the field of science, and amply demonstrates that the twentieth century had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781939663566

Book preview

PATAPHYSICAL ESSAYS

Self-portrait of René Daumal as a student

Once their faces were turned

outward, men became

unable to see themselves,

and that is our great weakness.

No longer able to see ourselves,

we imagine ourselves.

—René Daumal, The Head Inside Out

PATAPHYSICAL ESSAYS

RENÉ DAUMAL

TRANSLATED BY THOMAS VOSTEEN

WAKEFIELD PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris

Copyright © Éditions l’Age d’Homme

Frontispiece courtesy of Marie Jacqueline Daumal.

Thomas Vosteen’s translation of "Pataphysics and the

Revelation of Laughter" originally appeared in different form

in You’ve Always Been Wrong by René Daumal, published

by the University of Nebraska Press in 1995.

This translation © 2012 WAKEFIELD PRESS

Wakefield Press, P.O. Box 425645,

Cambridge, MA 02142

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CONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction

Pataphysics and the Revelation of Laughter (1929)

Treatise on Patagrams (1929–1932)

Pataphysics This Month (1934–1940)

A Pataphysical Invention, January 1934

Pataphysics This Month, June 1934

Pataphysics This Month, July 1934

Pataphysics This Month, August 1934

Pataphysics This Month, November 1934

Pataphysics This Month, December 1934

Pataphysics This Month, February 1935

Pataphysics This Month, July 1938

Pataphysics This Month, January 1939

Pataphysics This Month, August 1939

Pataphysics This Month, January 1940

The Pataphysics of Ghosts (1941)

Sources

Notes

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

René Daumal (1908–1944) continues to command attention, thanks in large part to the celebrity of his unfinished novel Mount Analogue, a modern allegory of the spiritual quest, as well as to his voluntary non-association with (or, if you wish, rejection of) the Surrealist movement, which in the late 1920s had attempted to attract him to its ranks and create division among his comrades of the Grand Jeu group (which included Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland, among others). The body of work he left behind extends significantly beyond Mount Analogue, however, and is as provocative today as it was in his lifetime. It was a brief lifetime, prematurely ended at the age of 36 from tuberculosis and a generally weak constitution aggravated by his youthful experiments inhaling carbon tetrachloride as an experiment just to see, that is, to try to glimpse the threshold of death without crossing over. Obsessed by the void he intuited, his quest, at first youthfully rebellious, evolved into a more quietistic spiritual practice, and today a good half of the writing devoted to him concentrates mainly on Daumal the seeker rather than on Daumal the writer of much material of depth and richness, qualities it holds in spite of its fragmentary and often unfinished character.

However fragmentary his writing may have been, Daumal’s essays, poetry (Le Contre-ciel), and fiction (Mount Analogue, A Night of Serious Drinking) were nonetheless consistent in how they emerged from, reflected upon, and illustrated his overriding, lifelong preoccupation with death and the absurd. The writings gathered in this volume lean more to Daumal’s interest in the absurd than they do to death (though the two were equally serious and interwoven topics for him). His understanding of the absurd was, from an early age, through the lens of pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions first proclaimed by Alfred Jarry, and this is the same lens utilized by this collection. Less well known than Daumal the Sanskrit scholar, Daumal the Gurdjieff disciple, or Daumal the iconoclast untamed by Surrealism has been Daumal the pataphysician, and this missing perspective is all the more striking in that Daumal’s pataphysics was not simply a youthful folly, but a long-term interest and way of thinking that accompanied his other more serious intellectual pursuits throughout his life (as the dates of composition of these essays will attest).

Daumal grew up in northern France and went to secondary school in Reims, where he made friends who became fellow travelers interested in writing and living poetry—especially poetry in the lineage of Arthur Rimbaud, another teenager whose revolt against bourgeois values was instrumental in revolutionizing the tenor of French letters. (In fact, Rimbaud was also a native of the same region.) But the group of adolescents, calling themselves les Phrères Simplistes, also displayed the influence of the equally revolutionary literary figure of Jarry and his notion of pataphysics. (This influence is signaled in their naming themselves Phrères rather than Frères, for example, which echoed Jarry’s derisive spelling of words like finances as phynances—visually rooting such base concepts in their earthy grounding of physics.) The group of brothers remained friends and eventually founded a literary review, Le Grand Jeu (The Great Game), which would quickly draw the attention of the Surrealists. The covers of the three issues that were published (as well as the fourth, which did not make it into print) all exhibited the gidouille: a spiral background borrowed from the belly of Jarry’s eponymous main character of Ubu Roi, displayed on the white garment covering his round belly, and subsequently the insignia of pataphysics and the College of Pataphysics that assembled in later years. The metaphysically inclined Phrères took open inspiration from Jarry; but Jarry’s pataphysics was far from metaphysical—and therein would lie the difference.

Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician, Jarry’s primary exposition of pataphysics, nevertheless spoke volumes to a group of sensitive and intelligent young men who had lived through the absurdities of the Great War and wanted to find a way out of the spiritual impasse it had created. Jarry’s extended definition can be taken as the ideological starting point for their approach to pataphysics:

Pataphysics … is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental, pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions ….

DEFINITION. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.¹

It is not hard to imagine the metaphysical interpretation that the Phrères were able to give Jarry’s words, particularly in the notion of a universe supplementary to this one. But though Daumal’s quest for an immutable ground of being beyond the dichotomy of life and death was manifestly mystical in nature, it would be unjust and flatly untrue to characterize him as irrational. For the epigraph to his essay Pataphysics and the Revelation of Laughter, Daumal utilized the concluding line of Jarry’s Faustroll: La Pataphysique est la science …. The full sentence that Jarry had left hanging would presumably be the aforementioned Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions …, but by itself, La Pataphysique est la science easily lends itself to "Pataphysics is science, or, perhaps, Pataphysics is the science. Indeed, Daumal’s primary aim was to examine the metaphysical scientifically through what he termed with his Grand Jeu cohorts experimental metaphysics." One need only cite as an attestation of his inclinations his employment as a proofreader in the mid-1930s by the Encyclopédie Française, a project sponsored by Léon Blum’s Front Populaire, not, as might be expected, of texts on literature or Eastern religion, but on the