You've Always Been Wrong

by René Daumal, Thomas Vosteen (Translator)

You’ve Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These “cadavers of thought,” Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, “must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples.” 

 

Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic’s effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) “vision of the absurd.”

 

Daumal’s important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You’ve Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal’s thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen’s nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

Genres: France, Poetry, Fiction

133 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 1970

About the author

René Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.

In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte. He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskrit language and translated some of the Tripitaka Buddhist canon into the French language, as well as translating the literature of the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki into French.

He married Vera Milanova, the former wife of the poet Hendrik Kramer; after Daumal's death, she married the landscape architect Russell Page.

Daumal's sudden and premature death of tuberculosis on 21 May 1944 in Paris may have been hastened by youthful experiments with drugs and psychoactive chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride. He died leaving his novel Mount Analogue unfinished, having worked on it until the day of his death.

The motion picture The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky is based largely on Daumal's Mount Analogue.

William Walsh, an English poet, was a personal friend of Daumal and performed a radio presentation of Mount Analogue later in his life.

Reviews

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

-You’re right. But you, you I’m talking to, I’d like you to be multiple, as many of you as possible. I’m writing a book, and I think I’m responsible for whatever good or bad it might do. If men used it contrary to my intention, I could only accuse myself of having written an ambiguous work subject to misinterpretation.
-- Okay, but why write a book?
-- First, formally, your question is lame and is subject to a refutation ad absurdum.

This probably isn’t the best place to start with Daumal – as I here have done – but I had this and A Night Of Serious Drinking sitting next to each other on a shelf, and I liked the title and cover of this one better. Prior to this I’d only really be passingly familiar with Daumal because of the whole Jodorowsky/Holy Mountain connection, but have been meaning to check him out, and came across these couple books on a used jaunt. I’ll read the other here in a moment – so my eagerness to read Daumal is not diminished – this particular book is just an odd place to start.

The majority of the text here is a long form philosophical (metaphysical/pataphysical) essay - titled You’ve Always Been Wrong; that’s not just some tongue in cheek title, it’s actually the opening words of the essay and should be taken at face value. The work begins with an exhortation for the reader to wake from their lifelong complacency and to become aware of a greater truth. As to what that greater truth might be, the essay tends to meander and change directions with frustrating frequency. It starts promisingly enough:

There’s no way to take the first step, it simply must be done. Do I have to repeat the famous ‘Credo quia absurdum’? The absurd is the only believable thing. I go forth in the dark, the real night holding forth no hope for sunlight, for the infinitely distant goal is in the heart of darkness. I go forth, and my bump against the night lights up the path taken, where reason sprouts and is clad in surrogate light. Any one deed taken as is, at its most real and most conscious degree, is said to be absurd in the language of logic; but taken from within, it escapes its own ghostly empire. That is why, if I believe in what I know clearly, I believe only in the absurd.

which at least promises to be interesting. And it’s strikingly obvious at points what a literary talent Daumal was:

This laughter’s shaking is for the body a blast of bones and muscles torn apart by the great wave of anguish and screaming love piercing into the last inner intimate atom, and so what! And so with that cosmic smack, there go pieces of pataphysician jumping inside that guy’s skin and pouncing on the appalling lies lining indefinite roads in space and springing at length toward chaos; the individual who has cognized himself within the whole can well believe for a moment that he will scatter like a dust so homogeneous that it will spread like a dust filling an absence of dust in no place, at no time: he explodes,
that lucky Earthling, but the all too solid skin, the elastic sack holds him together and puckers only at the most flexible parts of his face, makes the corners of his mouth rise and his eyelids slant upwards, and distended as far as can be, it all suddenly contracts and snaps back on itself at the same time the lungs fill up with air and then empty out; thus bursts forth the rhythm of laughter, cognized and sensed in oneself just as clearly as in the eyes of another laugher. Each time he thinks he’s going to burst once and for all, the laugher is held back by his skin, I mean his form, by the bounds of his own particular law of which form is the outer expression, by the absurd formula, the irrational equation of his existence which he has not yet solved. He constantly bounces back at that absolute star that pulls at him, never getting to equipoise, and heating up from all the incessant impacts, he turns maroon, then cherry-red, then white, and shoots off boiling corpuscles and bursts again even more violentky, and his laughter becomes the mad rage of wild planets, and the gent snaps something, yocking it up like that.

Unfortunately the majority of the book – the vast middle section – is mostly indistinguishable from many other works of eastern philosophy and comparative religion, and is pretty much a slog. There are bright spots – the poem Poem to God and Man is incredible, the small amount of additional text contained in the Appendices is worth visiting both to show Daumal’s thought process in putting the work together, and to get an overview of Pataphysics in Daumal’s voice – but the majority of this book works as a curiosity, but, again, is likely not the best place to start with Daumal.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got chills from the very first page because I realised that what I was about to read was the new book I began writing back in October last year (before I'd even read Le Grand Jeu!). Daumal truly is a spiritual peer. Just knowing they existed gives me the fortitude to endlessly persist with the revolt. And it doesn't even matter if the books are similar—if only everyone were to awaken to the same truth and write the same book! Each telling is a different iteration harkening back to the ancient mystics and our universal awakening. May we all crush dogmas and negate illusory ideologies of thought! May we all realise the only truth worth telling: there is no I, only unity.

All of this will be familiar, of course, if you've already spiritually awoken, or if you've read Daumal's essays. But what separates this collection from Daumal's other work, is that they delve more into the politics resulting from an absolute idealism. And that is what I love the most about Daumal: they always strove to incorporate the material and the entirety of the person via conscious acts instead of remaining solely abstract.

I would recommend reading this one only after you've first read Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu Magazine. You've Always Been Wrong would be the next logical step after that.

[Carlton Duff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A passage from You’ve Always Been Wrong

The sail of throbbing flesh cruises on,
My good old brother's corpse deaf and blind,
Still hauling the ship,
The good ship Christendom through the ages.
He hadn't planned on that...But after all this corpse is a corpse,
Even though I love you from the depths of despair,
Man my good old brother, you're just a piece of carrion.
Your tortured body, which you threw to us as fodder,
stinks just like my human corpse will stink,
It's chewed up by millions of worms: by
Roman Catholic worms, by
Orthodox worms, by
Protestant worms, by worms
each one out-groveling the next
each one more faithful than the next
to the true and authentic purity
of the great Christian pestilence

And how you ask could I give the book 3 stars with such near perfect prose (!) well dear reader as usual much of the intellectual splendor on display is above me unfortunately.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great, great title.