By RENE DAUMAL (Tusk Ivories; 1952/2004)
This “Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing” is an unfinished metaphysical thriller by France’s late Rene Daumal (1908-1944) that inspired the Alejandro Jodorowsky feature THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973). MOUNT ANALOGUE’s precise relationship with Jodorowsky’s film is open to interpretation, but taken on its own terms the novel, adroitly translated by Carol Cosman, is energetic and exciting, presenting highly esoteric, symbolically rich subjects in a relatable manner.
MOUNT ANALOGUE was dreamt up by Daumal after tuberculosis robbed him of his passion for mountain climbing: “If I couldn’t scale the mountains, I would sing of them from below.” The story was a symbolic recounting of Daumal’s immersion in the Gurdjieff Path, manifested as a quest for a mythical mountain uniting the Earth and the heavens that serves as “the path by which humanity can raise itself to the divine and the divine reveal itself to humanity.”
The unnamed narrator is one of ten highly enterprising artists and intellectuals corralled by one Pierre Sogol, an impossibly worldly mountaineering teacher based, allegedly, on George Gurdjieff. Inspired by a magazine article written by the narrator, Sogol utilizes “mysterious calculations” to locate Mount Analogue on an unknown continent in the South Pacific where the laws of physics have been irretrievably warped by the mountain’s sheer scale.
The expedition, from which four of Sogol’s ten adherents abstain, occurs on a yacht named, appropriately, IMPOSSIBLE. Upon reaching the continent, the protagonists find a bizarre netherworld marked by odd solar optics, unearthly flora and fauna, and people descended from explorers hailing from the four corners of the Earth who, like the protagonists, sought out Mount Analogue. After much intense preparation the explorers, who are implored by the natives to respect the mountain’s ecological conditions, begin their climb…and the novel ends abruptly, having been stopped in mid-sentence for Daumal to answer a knock at his door. He died a few days later without completing the manuscript.
An afterword by Vera Daumal (1892-1962) outlines what was supposed to happen in the later chapters, which included a disastrous alternate expedition undertaken by the group’s four abstainers and a focus “on one of the laws of Mount Analogue: to reach the summit, one must go from camp to camp. But before leaving a camp, one must prepare those who are coming to occupy the place one leaves behind. Only after preparing them can one climb higher.” Yet the final portions, detailing what the explorers find at the top of Mount Analogue, remain frustratingly obscure.