Mount Analogue
Mount Analogue (full title: Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing) is a classic allegorical adventure novel by the early 20th-century French novelist René Daumal. The novel describes an expedition undertaken by a group of mountaineers to travel to and climb the titular Mount Analogue, an enormous mountain on a surreal continent which is invisible and inaccessible to the outside world, and which can only be perceived by the application of occult knowledge. The central theme of mountaineering is extensively explored through metaphysical and philosophical lenses.
Composition
The novel was based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who taught that people are not conscious of themselves and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic "waking sleep."
Daumal's sudden and premature death from tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with recreational drugs, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death. The novel ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence, and there is no way to know for certain which parts he might have wanted to rewrite/revise prior to final publication. Given the strange twists of the narrative, it is nearly impossible to speculate on how the novel would have ended.
In attempting to determine the direction Daumal might have taken with the story, scholars have examined the notes he left behind, which mostly compare art with mountain climbing:
- "Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action."
- "You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again."
- "So what's the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully."
- "There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know."
Content
The novel is both bizarre and allegorical, detailing the discovery and ascent of a mountain which can only be perceived by realising that one has traveled further in traversing it than one would by traveling in a straight line. Pierre Sogol ("Logos" spelled backwards) is the leader of the expedition to climb the mysterious mountain, which is believed to unite Heaven and Earth.
Sogol invites the narrator to join the expedition, along with various other specialists, including scientists, artists, philosophers, and writers. He explains that he inferred the existence of the massive mountain from the general balance of Earth's gravitational field despite the apparently uneven distribution of landmasses on its surface – determining that its geographical location is somewhere in the South Pacific. Because no such landmass seems to exist in nautical charts of the region, Sogol determines that the mountain must exist on a hidden continent made entirely imperceptible to the rest of the world by the gravitational anomaly caused by the mountain's mass, which bends light and all other signals around it. The continent can only be perceived or accessed in any way from a precise location when rays of sunlight hit the earth at a certain angle.
"Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible."
- Pierre Sogol
Sogol and the others undertake a voyage to the hidden continent, where they discover various populations of humans living in harmony, completely unknown to the outside world. These people are the descendants of historical explorers who had also inferred the continent's existence and traveled there. The native flora and fauna include many bizarre creatures unknown elsewhere on the planet, and the local economy operates largely to serve the ambitions of mountaineers intent on climbing the mountain. Climbers are required to adhere to a complex system of rules and regulations involving professional guides, porters, and a network of camps, and are punished severely for causing any disturbance to the mountain's delicate ecology.
Characters
There are originally twelve members of the expedition, but four drop out for various reasons during the planning stages, leaving only eight people.
- Theodore - a journalist, and the narrator.
- Renée - his wife.
- Father Pierre Sogol - leader of the expedition. An occultist, former monk, and mountaineering teacher.
- Judith Pancake - American painter of mountain peaks.
- Arthur Beaver - physician and owner of the yacht upon which they travel.
- Hans and Karl - two Austrian brothers skilled in acrobatic ascents studying physics, astronomy and metaphysics.
- Ivan Lapse - a Finnish-Russian linguist.
Publication
Daumal died before the novel was completed, providing an uncanny one-way quality to the story. The remnants of the unfinished story were first published posthumously in French in 1952, and the first English translation was published by Vincent Stuart Ltd. in 1959.
Some of the paintings of the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo were used in the illustrations for the first edition of the novel, such as Embroidering the Earth's Mantle and The Ascension of Mount Analog. The Australian artist Imants Tillers created his own version of Mount Analog without having knowledge of Varo's previous work.
Legacy
The novel marks the first use of the word "peradam" in literature, an object that is revealed only to those who seek it.
The book was one of the sources of the 1973 cult film The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Dr. William J. Welch, a personal friend of Daumal's spiritual teacher Gurdjieff, performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.
John Zorn recorded an album of the same name inspired by the book and the teachings of Gurdjieff.
Irish artists Walker and Walker produced a short film based on the book entitled Mount Analogue Revisited in 2010 which was used as part of a 2012 installation in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin.