RENÉ DAUMAL AT THE URSULINES STUDIO
The epic poet will express himself through cinema.
Apollinaire (*)
The first published poem by René Daumal – "The Law, the full world…" – appears in the pamphlet Saturday, February 18, 1928 at the Ursulines studio (avant-garde cinema that Daumal frequented since his arrival in Paris in autumn 1925 [1]). In the letters of 1926-1927, allusions sometimes go to a way of conceiving poetry tangent to the cinematographic mode, for example: "what corresponds to the word, in cinema it is the gesture, what corresponds to automatic writing, in cinema, it would be an improvised dance, of inspiration (certain discoveries of Charlot often come close to it) filmed as the invention progresses [2]."
Although Daumal"s considerations most often go from poetry to cinema, a newborn art, it is possible to see the incidence of a cinematographic mode in his first poetic texts, with a strongly diegetic appearance, where the story is above all given to be seen. Kinship of mode indirectly confirmed by an unnoticed affirmation by Roger Vailland: "We will also make cinema scenarios: his [R. Daumal] little Max Jacob-style poems put into very short little films [3]."
Moreover, the most important filmic vision, in Daumal, is the one he gives to himself ("from time to time the sensation of a little fall and the vision of a film unfolding on the screen of my eyelids [4]"), which explains his aptitude for paroptic (extra-retinal) vision experiences promoted by his high school teacher René Maublanc, who takes over from J. Romains in this [5].
Given these facts, the poem born at the Ursulines studio — later published in Commerce and inserted in the first Contre-Ciel under the title "The Head and the Hole" — and other poems from the first Contre-Ciel – "Entry of the Larvae," "The Cavalcade," "The Revolution in Summer," "Sorcery" — entirely moved by gesture and action will be the subject of our analysis. Our hypothesis being that the epic dominant [6] becomes one of the criteria of purification in the passage from the first to the second Contre-Ciel, in the sense that pieces with event content, in the third person, will be sacrificed in favor of a lyrical and familiar speech, also later surpassed. (One never finishes with the corpses of oneself.)
So in the 1st Contre-Ciel (1930-1931), two prose poems composed in 1927 (René Daumal is nineteen years old): "Entry of the Larvae" and "The Cavalcade," the order being that imposed by the collection — order that we consider as prior to chronology, without being able to neglect the dates of composition.
"Entry of the Larvae" is published, a few months after "The Law, the full world…," in Le Grand Jeu I (summer 1928). In issue XXIV of Commerce, which contains twelve poems by Daumal [7], the title will become "The Entry of the Larvae": being the last publication of the poem during the author's lifetime and, above all, the last before the release of Contre-Ciel — expected end of 1930, beginning of 1931 — the definite article would perhaps have been kept in the collection, by analogy with similar titles ("The Prophet," "The Cavalcade," "The Revolution in Summer"…) and to dispel, henceforth, in 1930, the rupture that occurred with the surrealists, any risk of assimilation to titles such as Entry of the Mediums (Breton) or Entry of the Succubi (Aragon).
Entry of the Larvae [8]
The church sexton was leading his goats to graze in the empty avenue.
A few children were dying or drying up at the windows – it was spring and the hands of men were unfolding in the sun, offering to all the bread of their palms that the children had not yet bitten.
On the terraces we found ourselves between earth and sky; there were many broken skulls that day, young people who wanted to fly above the gardens.
The seagulls and handkerchiefs were snapping in the air and breaking blue in the windows, crystal steamers were fleeing beyond the clouds.
When evening [9] came, it was the turn of the old men; they invaded the streets, sitting on their rough wooden stools, they charmed the pigeons and drank hot milk.
The sky was only a little darker and higher.
The trees stretch in the park and set traps for night butterflies; the sexton has returned to the church and the goats sleep in the crypt.
The women suddenly all howl with wolf throats because in the suburbs has slipped a naked and white man coming from the countryside.
Each paragraph visualizes one or more actions, in this larval world [10] — there exists a striking parallel in Aurélia [11]- of which the goat is the opening emblem[12]. World desiccating for children (the unfortunate destiny of the child has begun, in the 1st Contre-Ciel, as early as "Poem to debone the philosophers…" and is not about to end). Attempts at revolt by young people: flight attempts and subsequent "broken skulls."
Paralyzing value of windows. Seagulls, noisy and violent handkerchiefs, fleeing crystal steamers.
Evening brings old age. Vain actions of these "seated [13]" old men, for whom Rimbaud's title, "The Seated," functions as a detonator of condemnation to the derisory. If youth knows the freedom of attempt (third paragraph), old age has lost all its bite. It would moreover be possible to hear Rimbaud's poem as a germinative/explanatory nucleus of other images from "Entry of the Larvae." The "invisible hand that kills" ("The Seated," v. 29) can be seen, in filigree, behind "the hands of men […] offering to all the bread of their palms that the children had not yet bitten": the inexplicable death of children ("A few children were dying") would thus result from contact with invisibly killing hands ("Morality, terrible instrument in the hands of men," to say it with M. Henry [14]). It is certain that in writing – in Commerce – "sun" instead of "evening," at the beginning of the paragraph devoted to old men ("When the sun came"), Daumal was openly paying his debt to Rimbaud"s poem ("These old men… / Feeling the vivid suns…", v; "The soul of old suns…", v. 15).
Sixth paragraph: close-up on the sky.
Sudden change in the last two paragraphs. While until now all verbs were in the imperfect — time of monotonous duration, of habitus — the present suddenly makes its appearance. In the penultimate paragraph, it is still to say, by contrast, the vegetative and dormant state of beings, larval state of which the "crypt" – intermediate level between basement and God – becomes the new emblem of closure. Finally, in the last paragraph, the irruption of the present makes pendant to the irruption of "a naked and white man come from the countryside," man doubtless awakened [15] – vis-à-vis the dormant state of the larvae – whom the women, quickly transformed into "she-wolves [16]," are the first to scent.
Published in Commerce following "The Entry of the Larvae," the poem "The Cavalcade" was probably written very early in 1928, if not at the end of 1927. (A letter from March 1927 gives what we believe to be a beginning, still provided with its captivating genetic gangue: "Often during the day my eyes close for a fraction of time – and wonderful landscapes emerge: a too-blue sea tilts and lets escape a vast fish or ship white as a newborn – a bamboo puppet dances at the foot of a mountain of lacquer and jade that a zigzag staircase climbs, also of bamboo [17].")
The Cavalcade
From north to south, from ice crests to sea robes, from snow fingers to the sleeping lands of temples, the cavalcade runs, swells, explodes and reconstructs itself in thigh carcasses and painted cardboard chimeras.
The giant with white eyes makes a tidal wave noise by blowing into the organs of her hollow fingers. Put carpets of cut hands on her passage. Keep the children away, their pale nails would die among the red laughter of shining lips and the monstrous gestures of mechanical women.
On the beach the tongues of the sea turn back and lick the sand against the grain. Two arms raised to the sky fly away at full throat to announce the procession. Above the line of dunes an architecture of varnished beams rises, where large eyes without depth open.
Humanity seeks the hero who will save it. Where is David, the little shepherd David? He is sought everywhere, all the coal sacks are emptied in all the warehouses of the world. At the song of telegraphic cicadas, false news strangles space. From all points of the world, one can now see, rising on the horizon, and growing a little each day, an arm or a cardboard mouth, or a plaster finger that crushes between the teeth of celestial crystals. One no longer dares to go out except at night, slipping along the houses.
The last day, a man disembarked on the beach, brought by a child steamer, of white iron and spring. His high black tin hat bore this word in chalk: DAVID. A horribly false trumpet blast laid him stiff dead, and everything was drowned in a flood of soured beer and dishwater. The procession of giants had burst like a dropsical man, and this time it was really over.
The cavalcade mentioned in the text must be understood as a primordial force, earth-sea-sky in its initial movement[18]: vital élan whose human/animal traces are united with the cosmos ("ice crest," "sea robes," "snow fingers," "sleeping lands of temples'); balance that reproduces, on the syntactic level, the correspondence between the three circumstantial complements of place (from… to…) and the three verbal predicates describing the action of the cavalcade: "the cavalcade runs, swells, explodes [19]." The continuation of the cavalcade's life shows a supremacy of the human component and a survival of the initial force in the mode of appearance and simulacrum: "reconstructs itself in thigh carcasses and painted cardboard chimeras." This is the world we know.
(One will be sensitive to Artaud's use of the same word — "the rapid cavalcade of waves' — at about the same period, to name, in a scenario drawn from The Master of Ballantrae, what the Scot Stevenson had defined as "heavy water" and which Théo Varlet translated, in 1920, very reasonably, as "rough sea [20]").
Second paragraph. Passage, not without degeneration ("hollow fingers'), from the cavalcade to the giant (giant whose antecedents Baudelaire and Rimbaud have posed, in poetry [21], the examples of Rabelais and the Bhagavad-Gîtâ are nevertheless no less operative). "The Prophet" — poem that precedes "Entry of the Larvae" in the 1st Contre-Ciel — had put us in the presence of the "great Maw." Common blood tribute demanded by their passage: there ("The Prophet"): "He needs your nurslings / your freshly cut noses, / he needs a harvest of toes for his supper"; here: "Put carpets of cut hands on her passage." The giant's life therefore proves inseparable from a law of construction and destruction of human bodies ("thigh carcasses," "carpets of cut hands'). Law antinomic to that of the gospel ("Keep the children away" vs "Let the children come to me," Luke, 18,16). Demonic procession designated metonymically[22] ("red laughter of shining lips," "monstrous gestures of mechanical women"), as by metonymy – close-up on the bodily detail – humanity is designated ("thigh carcasses," "cut hands," "pale nails'). The degeneration of the simulacrum continues to be signaled by "architecture of varnished beams," "large eyes without depth": everything says the hollow appearance, the image devoid of thickness.
Fourth paragraph. New phase. Desire for salvation on the part of humanity. Expectation of a messiah. If for the giant one asked – with an imperative all the more exceptional as it marks the only intervention of the speaker in the text — the removal of children, it is now from a shepherd child that liberation is expected [23] (moment of Christian Judaism). Several simulacra seem to be approaching their end ("an arm or a cardboard mouth, or a plaster finger that crushes between the teeth of celestial crystals').
Last paragraph: irruption of the simple past to relate the event/advent: "a man disembarked on the beach, brought by a child steamer." Derisory finale compared to expectations (think of the miniaturization that closes The Drunken Boat: child, frail boat…): the habitus of falsity ("horribly false trumpet blast") prevents any renewal, leading, moreover, to the annihilating distortion of the inaugural matrix of excess and violence ("the procession of giants had burst like a dropsical man").
One will notice, in these two contiguous prose poems – contiguous in time and especially in space (order wanted in Commerce and planned for the 1st Contre-Ciel): 1) the elocutory absence of the subject and 2) the temporal leap (abrupt passage from past to present), which detaches the last paragraph from those that precede it. Now, in a 1933 article on cinema at the turn of sound – later inserted in Questions of Poetics – R. Jakobson had noted, first, the semantic addition inherent in any leap contravening the "law of the connection of planes' — not without glimpsing a kinship between cinema and epic ("in a very surprising way, the editing of the sound film follows with precision the very ancient principles of epic poetics'), second, the marginality of the human component on screen — "speech, in cinema, is a particular case of the acoustic thing, alongside the buzzing of a fly and the splashing of a stream, alongside the din of a machine, etc." Had not the Russian futurists, following the Italians, reduced the traditional primacy of man ("We have no reason to accord in the art of movement the essential of our attention to man" [24])? The time was not so far when M. Foucault was to note the accidental presence of man and announce his imminent disappearance.
In the same register – absence of the I, priority given to action seen from outside, striking temporal leap – is situated "Sorcery," prose poem that closely follows, in the 1st Contre-Ciel, "Entry of Larvae" and "The Cavalcade," but which was composed a few months before: a letter to Maurice Henry dated [25] [March 26, 1927] shows us this same poem under the apparently neutral title of "Tale," in fact revealing of its imposing diegetic framework.
Sorcery
A child looks stupidly at the crack in a window. The man who is behind the window turns a small copper wheel. The window oscillates, the crack tilts and the child has his skull split.
The man made the child enter the large empty shop. A bull reduced by who knows what process to the size of a mouse was galloping furiously in the dust of the floor. In a corner, an old rooster was swallowing nuts.
"This child is mine!" cried a lady crawling on the sidewalk. She had the pink and wet snout of young lambs.
The man made the copper wheel turn a second time in the opposite direction, tapped his brass temples with his fingers, and returned the child to the woman.
The child took his mother on his back and left through the city crying: "Glazier."
Is it a coincidence if the neutral title of "Tale" changes (by becoming semantically more precise) to "Sorcery," just at the moment when A. Artaud uses this term to designate "a whole occult life with which [cinema] puts us directly in relation" [26]?
Story as transparent in its unfolding as it is opaque in its transitions and meaning.
First paragraph. "Split skull," by the crack of a window, for the child. Everything seems to be in the hands of the man, as symbolized by the "copper wheel' that only he handles.
Second paragraph. Surprising temporal leap, with solution of continuity from present to past, and new version of the same story. Fantastic presences [27]: "a bull reduced by who knows what processes to the size of a mouse." Bull doubtless coming from Roger Gilbert-Lecomte's imaginary network ("Black bull: it's the devil')[28], issued from the great reservoir that was R. Kipling's Kim ("Nine hundred thousand first-class devils whose god was a Red Bull [29]"). But diminished bull that will soon be part of surrealist comedy [30].
The "second turn in the opposite direction of the copper wheel' restores the child – first seen "skull split" — to his mother, "woman" whose animal instinct is indicated by the "pink and wet snout" (one thinks of the "wolf throats' of "Entry of the Larvae") and whom it will henceforth be impossible to draw under the name of "lady" (only variant of some relief that separates "Tale" from "Sorcery"). The source of the "copper wheel," in which the child's destiny is manifestly involved, could still be indicated in Kim [31], and still via Roger Lecomte [32], if it were not the traditional symbol of Fortune of the West and Samsâra of the East, symbol [33] that Daumal will soon find again in Aurélia[34]; image, above all, that will take on a cardinal role with the "howling copper wheels' of "I speak in all ages," poem that closes the 1st Contre-Ciel. On "a new turn of the wheel' will end, moreover, the Contre-Ciel published in 1936.
Doubtless the inversion of roles in the finale, although having illustrious precedents (one thinks of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back, of the Rondanini pity of old Michelangelo…), holds to this "turn in the opposite direction of the copper wheel' and could not be conceived outside of this gesture. The final invocation "Glazier," memento of the entire story and sign of a passage of instructions, moreover launches an intertextual bridge toward Baudelaire's "The Bad Glazier," completing the transfer to the child of the negativity emanating from the man [35].
One must recognize in these prose poems devoted to the recording of resounding actions (sometimes close to the Gidian gratuitous act) seen from outside, and from which the subject is evicted, a coincidence of mode, in general with the action films loved by futurists and surrealists, in particular with some of the technical-theoretical aims of which Antonin Artaud is the bearer: "I have sought in the scenario that follows [The Seashell and the Clergyman] to realize this idea of visual cinema where psychology itself is devoured by acts[36]." One is grateful to Breton for the eviction of psychology.
A form, quickly surpassed by Daumal, of objective poetry — momentarily coinciding with certain filmic laws — whose origins are to be sought in what the 19th century has said and produced best in terms of poetry.
Rimbaud: "your subjective poetry will always be horribly insipid. One day, I hope […] I will see […] objective poetry. [37]"
Nietzsche: "The subjective artist always seems to us a poor artist, and what we demand in all genres and at all levels of art is, above all and especially, that one triumphs over the subjective, that one delivers us from the I. [38]"
Mallarmé: "elocutory disappearance of the poet. [39]"
Idea that gains the first gatherings of 20th century poets demanding, after the Parnassians, "a revenge of objective art over frenzied subjectivism" (Romains [40]). Imperative, above all, that the avant-gardes knew how to take literally. Marinetti: "Destroy the I in literature, that is to say all psychology. [41]"
As for Daumal, he removes from his poem "Entry of the Larvae" the only phrase involving the first person ("above the gardens. / I was also told that larks committed suicide by throwing themselves against a tree. / The seagulls…") [42].
So, finally, "The Law, the full world…," poem published under the signs of the Ursulines, February 1928; prose poem that constitutes an arrival point of the epic vein (represented in the 1st Contre-Ciel by poems such as "Entry of the Larvae," "The Cavalcade," "Sorcery") while containing marks of the lyricism that will give its dominant tone to the collection.
The Law, the full world, the stone breasts and the animals crushed to the ground
The great silence of sorceries, then the swaying behind the huts of red eyes and skins that shine and vibrate.
The grandmother brings a bowl of milk for my disgust[43]. We must flee.
The wings are also of clay, the whip no longer bites the flesh.
The world is not full enough for me to be obliged to leave it. But where is this void that attracts me? Void that resembles me, void equipped with arms and legs, but more disappointing than a statue carved in the night. Must I wait for someone to come fill this void, or must I fill it myself? There is too much room for me in the world. What is called sacred horror, the dead with plaster heads, the demigods with goat feet and the monstrous rites in the black blood of victims, that would be rest for me.
Let everything be full, and let there be nothing but everything.
One will have recognized lexical components – substances, ideas, connotations – already encountered, proof of the continuum that rhythms the book to come: "sorceries," "shining skins," "plaster," "monstrous rites'… If one relates great Maw, grandmother, cavalcade and giant, a major law of this continuum will be manifest: "Female-grandmother first" (Clavicles 15) in its multiple passages from large to small; especially since the metaphor of stone breasts, indicating the Mountain[44], constitutes a new image of the Giant (brought closer to death, she will be the Void…)
The break transports itself this time from the plane of the verbal predicate (temporal leap) to that of the subject of enunciation (unexpected appearance of the "I"): hitherto in retreat, the personal point of view swells the fifth paragraph, typographic segment overloaded compared to those that precede it. Abundance that becomes the visual correlate of the very important theme of the full world that Daumal will be considering and that he will develop, discursively, in The Great Drunkenness (II, 39) [45].
Arrival point of the epic vein, departure point of the lyrical vein, "The Law, the full world…" is emblematic of a passage in the process of being made between objective poetry – culmination of the filmic vision of 1927 – and poetry of the subject who enters into contact with Death ("I was in love with My Death," Daumal will say [46]). Loving contact illustrated by the lyrical familiar address of Death and her man (second section of Contre-Ciel), whose rhythmic models are Baudelaire's "Lethe," Nerval's "Artemis' (frequencies attested by Daumal's correspondence) and – let us advance – Artaud"s "Invocation to the Mummy."
Supreme appendage of this epic language and its objective speech is "The Revolution in Summer": appendage since this poem was composed after "The Law, the full world…" (toward the end of 1928?), supreme since it constitutes, in many respects, its accomplishment. It is not indifferent that Daumal placed this text following "Entry of the Larvae" and "The Cavalcade" in Commerce, order reproducing that of the 1st Contre-Ciel.
Still a prose poem, same erasure of the subject — except for a negative imperative, mark of carried lyricism also overflowing from "The Cavalcade" -, with a supplement of refinement in the distance from the described object for it is, here, manifestly, the spectacle of a spectacle.
The Revolution in Summer
The light is excessive. Men run to buy scarves, and it's not to blow their noses.
Last resort: the eclipse, celestial acrobatics.
In the cosmic carnival, this man who takes seriously his role as planet. The sun is burned in effigy, irony of fate, joke of slaves.
Let us not laugh too much. The slaves now turn around the mill that grinds emptiness. Their sweat intoxicates the stars, the pot-bellied sun drags itself in the dust of the roads, a gouged eye opens in the sky and the corpses laugh, the shining shoulders.
Vision of the spectacle that is the world: "carnival' as meticulously described as Raymond Roussel's views, "back of the set" (this is the title of an important poem from Contre-Ciel) that recalls the cave imagined by Plato in his Republic (including for the exhortation that is joined to it: "Let us not laugh too much[47]".) Not bearing the light [48], men attack simulacra ("the sun is burned in effigy") and identify with the roles that determine their state of slaves. The "sweat" betrays the effort of an apparent work ("mill that grinds emptiness') accomplished without grace. The conceptual leap that involves the abrupt passage from the word "slaves' to the appellation of "corpses," definitively ranges these men in the realm of the dead image, of unconscious laughter ("the corpses laugh, the shining shoulders," to be compared with the "red laughter of shining lips' of "The Cavalcade"). It must still be specified that the text of "The Revolution in Summer" published in Commerce – only publication during the author's lifetime – keeps the word "slaves' until the end. Although the image of the corpse, notably associated with laughter, becomes a sort of cipher of Daumal, who can say which of the two terms the poet would have elected for the release of his first collection of poems?
Slaves or corpses, it is the negative of the cinema era that Saint Pol-Roux advocates [49]: light (vs "the light is excessive"), age of the sun (vs "the sun, pot-bellied drags itself in the dust"). Now, had not Bergson – in pages dear to Daumal, to Lecomte, to Vailland – said, by a famous rapprochement, "the cinematographic character of our knowledge of thing [50]"? Supreme achievement of the filmic vision of the world that Daumal — in accordance with Plato and Bergson for ideas, with Roussel for manner – knows how to reach, "The Revolution in Summer" constitutes a summit – a summa – not susceptible to further poetic deepening. Will come film reviews [51], often alimentary prose, certainly interesting. Significantly, René Daumal will have nothing to say for the issue of Les Cahiers jaunes devoted to cinema, in which most of the ex-members of Le Grand Jeu participate. Will come, above all, the unequivocal words — from "black poet" that he was, Daumal will have meanwhile become "white poet" — of The Great Drunkenness ↑ casting blame on the "cardboard' set, the "sweat" of the "acted' and the "semblance of being" [52] that "The Cavalcade," "The Revolution in Summer," "Entry of the Larvae" had masterfully staged.
UNIVERSITY OF PADUA
(*). Interview published in SIC in 1916, Complete Prose Works II, Gallimard, "Pléiade," 1991, p. 986.
1 — . Cf. R. Daumal, Correspondence I, Gallimard, 1991, p. 67. ↩
2 — . Ibid., p. 147. ↩
3 — . Document published in R. Daumal, Correspondence I, p. 88. ↩
4 — . Ibid., p. 83. ↩
5 — . Cf. Y. Duplessis, "R. D. and experimental research on a 'paroptic sense' in man," in René Daumal, "dossiers H," L'Age d'homme, 1994, pp. 56-78. ↩
6 — . "epic poetry has as its aim to paint, not the subjectivity of the poet, but concrete facts and events," Hegel, Aesthetics. Poetry, Aubier-Montaigne, 1965, p. 145. ↩
7 — . p. 98 of the journal: "Copyright by Éditions Kra (Extracts from a collection to appear: Contre-Ciel)." This first Contre-Ciel will never be published. ↩
8 — . The text that we reproduce, here and subsequently, is that provided by C. Rugafiori for the "Poetry" collection of Gallimard (R. Daumal, Le Contre-Ciel followed by Les Dernières Paroles du poète, 1990). ↩
9 — . The Commerce version gives sun here instead of evening. ↩
10 — . The term larva enters the French translation of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ by E. Burnouf. The word belongs to simplistic jargon: "You, you belong to the world of larvae," R. Gilbert-Lecomte, Correspondence, Gallimard, 1971, p. 124. ↩
11 — . "an implacable sun devoured these regions, and the weak children of these eternal dynasties seemed overwhelmed by the weight of life. This imposing and monotonous grandeur, regulated by etiquette and hieratic ceremonies, weighed on all without anyone daring to escape it. The old men languished under the weight of their crowns and imperial ornaments, between doctors and priests, whose knowledge guaranteed them immortality. As for the people, forever engaged in caste divisions, they could count neither on life nor on freedom. At the foot of trees struck by death and sterility, at the mouths of dried-up springs, one saw on the burned grass withering children and young women enervated and without color." G. de Nerval, Les Filles du feu… Aurélia…, Mercure de France, coll. des plus belles pages, 1905, pp. 334-335. ↩
12 — . Dictionary of Symbols by J. Chevalier and A. Gherbrant (Laffont, 1969, 1982): "In India, because the word that designates it [goat] also means unborn, it is the symbol of unmanifested primordial substance." ↩
13 — . "My thoughts sleep if I seat them," M. de Montaigne, Essays, book III, ch. III. ↩
14 — . M. Henry, "Discourse of the Rebel," same issue of Le Grand Jeu as "Entry of the Larvae." ↩
15 — . Cf. the awakened man of "Liberty without Hope," same issue of Le Grand Jeu as "Entry of the Larvae." ↩
16 — . "Woman displays her animal desire, has the form of her desire," A. Artaud on The Seashell and the Clergyman, Complete Works III, 1961, Gallimard, p. 76. ↩
17 — . Correspondence I, p. 145. ↩
18 — . Cf. Timaeus: "this body in perpetual flux and reflux," "an abundant flow" (43a); "uninterrupted current" (43c). Translation by L. Robin. ↩
19 — . "Universal death resembles the marine flux / Tranquil or furious, having neither haste nor truce, / Which swells, roars, rolls and goes from shore to shore," L. de Lisle, "Fiat nox" (Barbarian Poems). ↩
20 — . R.-L. Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae. Adventure novel translated from English by Théo Varlet, Paris, aux éditions de la Sirène, 1920, p. 224. ↩
21 — . Cf. for Baudelaire "The Giant" (XIX, Flowers of Evil) and for Rimbaud "Cybele […] / gigantically beautiful' (Sun and Flesh). ↩
22 — . "Pars pro toto: it is the fundamental method for transforming things into signs in cinema." R. Jakobson, Questions of Poetics, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 106. ↩
23 — . Cf. "the shepherd David' of the second of The Songs of Maldoror. ↩
24 — . 1922 Manifesto of the group founded by Dziga Vertov. Citation according to Les Cahiers du cinéma, 220-221, 1970. ↩
25 — . With the usual precision, by H.J. Maxwell: R. Daumal, Correspondence I, pp. 144-149. ↩
26 — . A. Artaud, Works…, pp. 79-82. If the first publication of this text, even partial, dates from 1949, it is certain that its writing goes back to 1927, since it is a question, in these terms, of the film shown at the Ursulines: "The Seashell and the Clergyman participates in this search for a subtle order, for a hidden life that I wanted to make plausible, plausible and also as real as the other." ↩
27 — . "Cinema will come closer and closer to the fantastic," ibid., p. 81. ↩
28 — . Cf. "Black Bull' and its first version commented on by C. Rugafiori in the introduction to R. Gilbert-Lecomte, Caves in Full Sky, Fata Morgana, 1977. ↩
29 — . R. Kipling, Kim, Mercure de France, 1925, p. 7. It is known, according to Roger Caillois, that it is from this novel that the title of the journal Le Grand Jeu comes. ↩
30 — . Cf. in Are You Mad? by R. Crevel (April 1929) the "apartment bull' and the "rat that weighs fifty kilos." ↩
31 — . "The Wheel of Things," R. Kipling, Kim, p. 87. ↩
32 — . "in the Wheel of Things," R. Gilbert-Lecomte, Correspondence, p. 158. ↩
33 — . Widely exploited in the cinema of the '20s (The Wheel, The Infernal Wheel), for its close junction to the speed of the machine. ↩
34 — . G. de Nerval, Les Filles du feu […], p. 332. ↩
35 — . Remains unpublished, at the time, Mallarmé's "The Glazier," quatrain whose final verse recites: "On the glazier's back." ↩
36 — . A. Artaud, Complete Works, t. III, p. 22. ↩
37 — . Letter to G. Izambard of May 1871. ↩
38 — . The Birth of Tragedy [1872], Gallimard, 1949, p. 41. ↩
39 — . Crisis of Verse, Complete Works, Gallimard, "Pléiade," p. 366. ↩
40 — . Literary Review of Paris and Champagne, April 1906. Extract from the dossier of La Vie unanime, Gallimard, "Poetry," 1983, ed. by M. Décaudin. ↩
41 — . Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature ↑. We translate. ↩
42 — . Thanks to Claudio Rugafiori for having opened for us the doors of his archives and those of his clear mind. ↩
43 — . "a bowl of cold milk received from the hands of an old woman skilled in cultivating the dead." Correspondence I [Sept. 1927], p. 179 ↩
44 — . Cf. Baudelaire, "The Giant," vv. 13-14: "To sleep nonchalantly in the shadow of her breasts, / Like a peaceful hamlet at the foot of a mountain." Among Daumal's contemporaries, cf. M. Leiris, Great Flight of Snow [1934, but written in 1926], Fata Morgana, 1982, p. 14: "a fleshless mountain gave birth to me, fertilized by the sweat of volcanoes. […] my nurses were stones, whose rough breast […]". ↩
45 — . Cf. Hugo, Les Contemplations: "The firmament is full…". Cf. Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: "is the number of souls finite or infinite?" (Complete Works I, Gallimard, "Pléiade," 1975, p. 681). See this same subject in the hands of Ribemont-Dessaignes: "The world is full of lambs, wolves, butterflies…" (Coll. "Poets of Today," 1966, p. 96, presentation by F. Jotterand.) ↩
46 — . Cf. Keats: "I have been half in love with easeful Death," Ode to a Nightingale, v. 52. ↩
47 — . "if one had the desire to laugh…" Republic 518b. Translation by L. Robin. ↩
48 — . Cf. Republic 515. ↩
49 — . Living Cinema, Rougerie, 1972. ↩
50 — . Creative Evolution, ch. IV: "The cinematographic mechanism of thought and the mechanistic illusion…" ↩
51 — . Daumal's notes on cinema, published mostly in La Nouvelle Revue Française between December 1933 and August 1934, have been inventoried and republished by P. Sigoda (in the René Daumal issue of "dossiers H" and in René Daumal and his immediate surroundings, Mont Analogue, 1994) and by A. and O. Virmaux (Le Grand Jeu and Cinema, Paris expérimental, 1996). ↩
52 — . The Great Drunkenness, II, 22. ↩