A Night of Serious Drinking

by Rene Daumal

  Daumal, the philosopher of consciousness, picks on the Fidgeters, who keep exceedingly busy doing one thing or another, and if one of them “flounders and acknowledges his inner being,”23 he usually ends up by blowing his brains out.

  He parodies the fashionable Orientalism and followers of cult diets of the thirties, particularly the Theosophist followers of Krishnamurti, as well as pseudo-Hinduists, Vedantists, and others (although Daumal’s opinion of Krishnamurti altered favorably when he met with him in 1930). He lists their behaviors as one of the methods of population control along with drug taking and other forms of suicide:

  Other literati compose treatises, supposedly translated from Oriental languages in which they explain the art of becoming rapidly neurasthenic, neuropathic, demineralized, and finally cadaverish, by the practice of dietary regimes and respiratory practices. But it only works on the so-called artistic and intellectual youth.24

  He also describes the organized destruction of young people as another means “to organize death without which life would be nothing but a perpetual, vicious circle.”25 It is clearly a description of Hitler’s Youth or any other fascist mobilization of children:

  The method is straightforward; the children are taken at a time when their intelligence is not fully developed, and their passions respond to the slightest stimulation; they are made to live in companies, dressed and armed uniformly, and by means of magical speeches and collective physical exercises, whose secret is ours alone, we give them what we call “the cult of the common ideal”; this is an absolute devotion to a loud-mouthed, authoritarian person. Then they let two opposing groups go at each other, for after all “The young man who is not killed in the flower of his youth … is the old man of tomorrow.”26

  Almost exactly halfway through the book, the inmate guide Aham Egomet suddenly explains the philosophical basis of the three sections within the limits of the “drinking” metaphor. He tells the narrator that he is going to write a book and call it A Night of Serious Drinking. The first section will depict the nightmare of lost souls who seek ways of feeling a little more alive, but instead, remain drunken, stupefied, and thirsty. In the second, he will describe the phantasmal lives of the Escapees and the illusory drinks of their illusory paradise. In the third, he will hint at the existence of subtler, more real drinks “which must be earned with the glow of your brow, the anguish of your heart, and the sweat of your limbs.”27 Why does Daumal save this bit of structuring until halfway through this meandering dream? This appears to be an example of his focus-blur technique: let the reader flounder a bit without familiar conventions; let him really be in a dream.

  In the third and final section, the main character falls through a trap door and lands on a straw mattress in a room without doors—out of that whirlwind dream tour into part three and “the cold light of day.” Yet the dream continues, even as the author questions, “Which is the dream?”28 As he mimics Shakespeare’s “Perchance to dream,” when the narrator cries, “Perchance to wake!” the author Daumal suddenly intrudes over the narrator and discusses the advisability of waking his hero from the dream, casting doubt on the traditional literary convention that assumes that dream states are false and waking states true. Then the phantasmagoria intensifies. There is a huge conflagration, wherein the narrator burns all the trappings of his former life—his books, his clothes, and his furniture in a sacrifice by fire, a ritual of renunciation. He chants four prayers to the sun reminiscent of the Rig Veda. Then the element of water comes in to complete this ritual cleansing.

  The walls and floors began to deliquesce like wax in an oven, puckered, ran in deepening grooves which closed over and became flaccid pipes which oozed viscous, lukewarm liquids.29

  Thus Daumal returns again to the collective myth of death through sacrificial fire (agni or the Greek ekpyrosis), then rebirth and purification by water. So much of Daumal’s youth had been focused on the idea of liberation through death. He had seen it evoked in Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” and Nerval’s “Aurelia” where the personal image of hell is more frightening than the traditional Christian version. This emotionally charged concept of dying and being reborn, symbolized in ancient times by the image of the serpent biting its own tail, is everywhere present in Daumal’s tale. Just as fire and death are mentioned in virtually every one of his poems, so in Serious Drinking the fireplace is ever present in the background as the drinkers sit around it. Then at the climax, everything goes up in smoke.

  Overall, A Night of Serious Drinking is so swift and compact, so poetic and multimeaningful, it can hardly be absorbed in one reading. And Daumal achieves this effect, not by convoluted French existential complexities, but rather by imaginative leaps often rendered in simple words and images.

  His style is crisp. He likes beginning his brief numbered sections with short, clipped sentences. The book itself begins with “It was late when we drank,” dropping us right into the midst of the perpetual conversation that man carries on with himself. The second section starts with “We were in thick smoke,” and section eight, “We were drinking like fish.”30

  In some places, on the other hand, the text is a cornucopia of elaborate surrealistic imagery. In his desire to amplify the effects, he gives us frequent barrages of inventories that, as we saw in his poetry, have an incantatory effect on the reader. Whereas his Le Contre-Ciel was filled with imagery of geophysical elements, anatomical parts, and macabre violence, here we have colorful lists of household items, foods, flowers, and scientific details. Among the Sophers (Scientists) of every kind, and very much in fashion, were the Astromancers, Idyllomancers, Palmologists, Iridomancers, Flatulencers, Astragalomancers, Molybdomancers, Fritillarists, and Rhabdologists, all of whom were skilled in telling the past and the future and in conjuring away the present. This verbiage is the literary evidence of the endless multiplicity of the phenomenal world; it contrasts with his sparse selective wording when describing the simple overall scene. Daumal the set designer creates a full stage for each farce he presents: “Couches deep as coal trucks, covered in cascades of artificial silk, bright fountains gushing verbena, chamomile, mint, and lemonade.”31

  Daumal also costumes his characters with exacting Pataphysical detail. His three favorite writers make a gratuitous appearance: François Rabelais, Alfred Jarry, and Leon-Paul Fargue. Rabelais is disguised in a nun’s habit with a large, floating coif like a sea manta, while Jarry had “a thin oval belly like a long fish, and the tips of his mustache painted green.”32

  We owe the theatrical quality of A Night of Serious Drinking undoubtedly to the influence of Bharata, “who felt that the dramatic form was the most perfect fruition of aesthetic creativity … the embodiment of feeling in sensuous tissue.”33 Almost any page in the book could be staged. Each particular vignette has its own internal logic and parody-message, always presented in a sensually palpable context, a requirement of Hindu poetics. There is a definite variation of tone throughout the novel. In her essay, “Regarding La Grande Beuverie,” Helen Maxwell quotes Daumal’s own comments about his book: “The leaps in tone are deliberate—it was for me an experiment; I didn’t want to be dominated by a tone, a style, so I ventured a work in three distinct tones, dominant in each of the three sections respectively.”34 The rasa of the overall composition seems to be comedy-parody with a subtle mixture of seriousness, mock heroic, tragedy, and faint optimism.

  He achieves a kind of realistic surrealism by juxtaposing the nebulous atmosphere of the dream world with the journalistic, matter-of-fact reportage of the narrator. Daumal continually injects dislocations of identity, time, and place—the smoky darkness and dirtiness of the tavern, the view of the people through the trap door, the confusion of “I” with the collective “we” and “one.”

  Daumal the Gurdjieffian is everywhere present in the book, and always has the final word. On virtually every page there are allusions to man’s sleep state and weak thinking. Gurdjieff contended that we hardly ever think; “it” thinks. What we cal
l thoughts are merely mental associations endlessly linked together. Here Daumal calls them “little creepy crawlies,” and elsewhere “inner ticklings.”

  Daumal skillfully depicts man’s habit of negative thinking. When the main character runs into his black thoughts, he anthropomorphizes them as animated cartoonlike characters, little creatures called pride, vanity, fantasy, greed, and illusion. They are the same ones depicted in “The Holy War,” who whisper, “We dress you up; without us, what kind of presentation would you make in society?”35 Here in Serious Drinking, the narrator recounts:

  They threw their arms around my neck with cries of joy, calling me “dear uncle” and shrieking all manner of endearments, words like: “At last you’re back!” …. They clung to my hair, ears, and fingers, removed by spectacles, etc.”36

  Both Daumal and Gurdjieff are very concerned with the whole undertaking of writing a book, as well as communication in general. Gurdjieff’s preface is entitled, “The Arousing of Thought,” while Daumal’s foreword begins with the sentence, “I refuse to accept that a clear thought can ever be inexpressible.” Then he proceeds to discuss the three conditions necessary for clear discourse: “a speaker who knows what he wishes to say, a listener in a state of wakefulness, and a language common to both.”37 Then follows part one entitled: “A labored dialogue on the power of words and the frailty of thought.” Neither author employed whimsy and fantasy just to appear clever; these elements were a deliberate part of their arsenal for effective communication.

  Daumal was influenced not only by the philosophy of Gurdjieff but also by his literary style. The similarities are unmistakable between A Night of Serious Drinking and Gurdjieff’s opus, All and Everything. Daumal took part in numerous readings of this book until the time of his death. (All and Everything was published in 1948, a year after Gurdjieff’s death.) Certain corollaries also link Daumal’s Mount Analogue with All and Everything and with Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men. All four works share in common the inclusion of fantasy elements: in All and Everything we find extraterrestrial myths and fictions, in Serious Drinking we find surrealistic dreamscapes; in the two authors’ later works we find inexplicable marvels and improbable events, such as the crossing of the Gobi desert on stilts (Meetings), and talking plants (Mount Analogue).

  Gurdjieff’s work has rarely been considered from a literary point of view, apparently because its style is so foreign and indecipherable to the Western critical mind. In his book, Notes Inédits, Charles Duit places All and Everything in a long line of traditional humorous fables, along with Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and Voltaire’s The Ingenue, to which I would add The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Just as Jarry created the planet Haldernablow, so in All and Everything, Beelzebub, an old man from the planet Karatas, exiled to Mars, makes several connoitering visits to Earth to observe the strange ways of the “three-brained beings” there. His visits occur over millennia; he visits the ancient civilization of Atlantis, Babylon at its height, and then visits present-day countries, documenting their current state of degeneration.

  Duit points out that the baroque and preposterous form of All and Everything belongs to the very old tradition of The Thousand and One Nights. Since Beelzebub is addressing a child, his grandson Hassein, he narrates the cosmic tale in the Oriental style designed to give a “childish” pleasure. This kind of storytelling was familiar to Gurdjieff, growing up in the Caucasus; his own father had been a bard, capable of relating hundreds of tales from memory. Duit tries to isolate the element that most deters the modern reader:

  What for a “childish” mind constitutes the charm and strength of Beelzebub—as of the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland and the Thousand and One Nights—namely the constant harping on the same images, the same expressions, and the tide-like ebb and flow—is just what the intellectualized reader finds hard to take.38

  Daumal uses this same primitive technique as he constantly harps on the theme of drinking, deliberately choosing the most earthly, even plebeian behavior of wanting to get drunk, in order to camouflage, by contrast, his more important theme of waking up.

  The comparisons that Duit makes in reference to All and Everything could also be applied to Serious Drinking. He compares Gurdjieff’s book to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as “a work which speaks of all and everything; refuses to make any haste at all, and imposes its own pace on the reader.”39 Both Gurdjieff’s and Daumal’s books are extended satires of the modern mind of science and literature. While Gurdjieff uses Greco-Armenian jargon, for instance, “saliakorriap” for “water,” “Havatvernouis” for “religions,” or “perambarrsasidean” for “tuning fork,” Daumal mocks the scientific mind of the “Politologists,” the “Anthropographers,” the “Philophasists,” and the “Clarificators of clarifications.” By such means, they both attempt to achieve an effect of absolute disorientation. Since Beelzebub speaks in the language of the planet Karatas, the reader is forced to consider Earth vocabulary and the behavior of mankind from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of Karatas. Duit shows how this comic ethnology thoroughly “exoticizes” us until the very structure of our everyday lives is questioned, “for in ‘explaining’ all phenomena by laws unknown to Earth science, Gurdjieff insinuates a fundamental doubt.”40

  With much Jarryesque dark humor, Gurdjieff hardly conceals his sarcasm when he seeks to “defend” the denizens of our planet. The following examples of the forty-eight chapter headings express both his humor and seriousness:

  Chapter X: Why “Men” Are Not Men;

  Chapter XIII: The Impudent Brat Hassein, Beelzebub’s Grandson, Dares to

  Call Men “Slugs”;

  Chapter XI: A Piquant Trait of the Peculiar Psyche of Contemporary Man;

  Chapter XLIII: Beelzebub’s Survey of the Process of Periodic

  Reciprocal Destruction of Men, or Beelzebub’s Opinion of War.41

  In the case of Serious Drinking Daumal’s chapter headings, though not as provocative, do help to interject bits of structuring into the randomly flowing dream. The categorizing of nonsensical persons and places makes the categorizing itself seem nonsensical. Yet it does provide the minimal structure necessary to allow Daumal’s imagination to run free. Jean Richer writes: “The influence of India is noticeable in Daumal’s penchant for arranging notions and persons in neat categories; it is both Cartesian and Hindu to classify, to order and to analyze.”42

  As in Dr. Faustroll, All and Everything, and in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, so in this pataphysical enterprise, Daumal creates numerous new word entities. In Bharata he writes:

  In the dialogues of the Upanishads, the speakers decompose and recompose words, marry them in new ways and present them at different angles … in order to charge them up with power. This will create many different relationships for the man which will engage him in a real act and incite him to rise above his merely verbal understanding.43

  He also applies the Hindu science of etymology (Nirukta) in order to make a point in a humorous way: he claims the term Scients comes from scier (to saw), a sly comment on how the sick bay’s scientists (whom he refers to as “failed Cannibals”) like to slice up a subject in order to study it.

  Daumal shows no timidity in his book. He seems to be able to let loose every last vestige of Surrealist flamboyance remaining in him, yet controlling it with consummate adroitness to serve his aim. With his fingers again on a literary focusing lens, he focuses and blurs, focuses and blurs, pulling us in and out of a dream state. He describes Leon-Paul Fargues’s get-up:

  One minute on his chin and the next in his hand was a false Armenian beard, and depending on the various phases, curves and knots of the conversation, his face went from smooth to hairy and from hirsute to shaved just like the amazing evolution of a human shooting star.44

  In the final pages Daumal presents an allegory of the human machine. As parts of the body are immolated, in a ritual conflagration shaken loose and melted away, the narrator climbs into the upper sto
ry or cockpit representing the human head. He peers through two lenses embedded in the walls (eyes). Then he describes all the levers, dials, pumps, and bellows and the anthropomorphic apes that run the machinery.

  Then suddenly Daumal ends the dream and finally ends the book with a straightforward message. The narrator abruptly walks out into the street, musing on the interconnectedness of all things, “the infinity of unities which joined once more into oneness,”45 as each element changes into the next:

  the river was lost in the sea, the sea in the clouds, clouds in rain, rain in sap, sap in wheat, wheat in bread, bread in man—but at this point there was resistance, as man looked on with that air of bewilderment and discontent, which sets him apart from all other animals on our planet.46

  He describes the turning gyre of evolution from protoplasm to elephant:

  And the turning of this circle would have been without impediment for all time but for mankind that, resisting transformation, attempted with great travail to live for itself in the tiny, cancerous tumor it made on the universe.47