Precarious Ascent: Trace and Terrain in René Daumal's Mount Analogue

Mountain Reverence

"The poetic valorization of the mountain," "the discovery of the mountain as a source of exaltation," must be considered, writes Julien Gracq, "a revolution of capital importance in man's geographic Weltanschauung" (104–05). Having played a formative role in "the construction of what we call European Romanticism" over the course of the nineteenth century this discovery leaves transformed the set of attachments, projections and investments that make up the "landscapist sensibility." The mountain is even the emblem, if we follow Gracq one step further here, of a new form of aesthetic community and a new means of communicability. The sensibility to which it is tied—"the first organically European collective creation"—emerges under fundamentally altered conditions of production, transmission and reception. Having developed concomitantly across several otherwise unconnected territories through the "remarkable phenomenon of a spontaneously unified echo chamber" (106), the Romantic community that finds itself in this experience is neither rooted in nor bound by the strictures of a geography conceived in nationalist terms. If this sensibility thereby disrupts the longstanding bond between poetics and nation that sees the former as nothing but a function of the latter, then the mountain is an expression of this new lingua franca, the first symbol forged under these new conditions.

In any case, on either side of its "discovery" this aspect of the landscape is attributed a very different sense. No longer disparaged as an anomalous presence within Nature's design, an aberrant element at odds with the frames of reference underwriting Nature as something ordered; no longer seen as a terrain devoid of all charm, its asperity making it inhospitable, its verticality leaving it untraversable, resistant to all forms of cultivation and thus best left to itself at the landscape's outer reaches, if it isn't simply expunged altogether; no longer, finally, the scene of an anxiety that cannot be assuaged, the terrain upon which harmony with or mastery of Nature falters, instead the mountain becomes a primary setting for the "new ways of feeling" that increasingly make themselves known to the subject of experience in this period, whether these are experienced directly or vicariously.¹ The repercussions of the mountain's discovery are not restricted to the aesthetic sphere alone. They extend well beyond it in more than one direction. To take one example, Alain Corbin has shown the extent to which mountain reverence informed the period's revised idea of the expedition: "A revolution in travel occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century. A new experience would occupy a prominent place in people's dreams […] Travelers set out to acquire a new experience of space and of other people outside the normal context. They thirsted for grandiose scenery and wild landscapes, camped out on mountains and contemplated the sunny peaks above calm valleys below" (508). In the context of this newly discovered terrain and the attributes for which it is now prized—a wilderness that breaks with the quotidian; a promise of sanctuary, of elevation, of panorama; above all, an intimation of the infinite—the expedition becomes exploratory, and here the mountain is not simply an excursion's end-point, but an opening, the site of an encounter that holds out the possibility for augmentation. "The chief aims of travel," Corbin concludes, "became self-affirmation and self-enrichment" (508). Not only does the mountain's discovery redetermine the material and formal arrangement of the landscape as a whole, as well as the subject's position within the schema of this environment, it has its part to play in recasting the configuration of faculties within the subject itself.

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René Daumal's Mount Analogue, unfinished on account of his death in 1944, is situated some time after the high point of this phenomenon. The mountain's valorization having long since become a commonplace, shopworn and frayed through overuse, its "capital importance" less and less apparent, by then it can no longer be treated as a privileged point of reference for the cultivation of aesthetic experience. "… We have seen certain regions of the earth come...