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.

“Paris Compounded” argues that the text of Finnegans Wake prompts readers to engage in sentient thinking. Joyce’s last work stages a heterogeneous and potentially limitless profusion that resists any preconceived order and disallows the passive reception associated with the commodity and with authoritarian discourse. The chapter situates the Wake’s textual assemblages within the literary practices of Paris of 1910 and 1920, showing that Joyce’s problematization of value and meaning are indebted to Apollinaire’s verbal montages but also, and more particularly, to Alfred Jarry, whose pataphysics deploys scatology, Lucretian materialism, and coincidentia oppositorum in an avant-garde mode. The chapter draws on the aesthetic theories of Benjamin, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas to argue that, as the Wake compounds the city under capitalism, it calls for ideal communities that respond to its material features with imagination, spontaneity, and joy.