This chapter presents a reading of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952) in the context of its relations with Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysical or ’neo-scientific novel’ Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911). Like that of many surrealists, Daumal’s humour was nurtured in adolescence on Jarry’s idiosyncratic, absurdist, and blackly comic Umour. Mount Analogue is Daumal’s most sustained expression of such humour. The novel, unfinished at the time of the author’s death in 1944, tells of the narrator Theodore’s encounter with Père Sogol, an expert climber and non-Euclidean navigator (i.e. spiritual guide), who leads a small group of novices on a quest to scale an unclimbable mountain. With much intertextual wit, Daumal weaves together his own peculiar mixture of Jarryesque scientific satire, the spiritual mythos of René Guénon, and the Gurdjieffean teachings of Alexandre de Salzmann into an ecological morality tale and Rabelasian adventure story. The chapter situates Mount Analogue within Daumal’s concern with what he and the other members of the Grand Jeu called “experimental metaphysics” – a lived, experiential foray into situations which pushed the limits of rational and conventionally scientific understanding of life.

This chapter expands a little on the idea that gravity is geometry, and then describes how the geometry of space and time is a subject for experiment and theory in physics. In a gravitational field, all bodies with the same initial conditions will follow the same curve in space and time. Einstein’s idea was that this uniqueness of path could be explained in terms of the geometry of the four-dimensional union of space and time called spacetime. Specifically, he proposed that the presence of a mass such as Earth curves the geometry of spacetime nearby, and that, in the absence of any other forces, all bodies move on the straight paths in this curved spacetime. We explore how simple three-dimensional geometries can be thought of as curved surfaces in a hypothetical four-dimensional Euclidean space. The key to a general description of geometry is to use differential and integral calculus to reduce all geometry to a specification of the distance between each pair of nearby points.