René Daumal's Mugle and the Silk

Translation (with introduction and bibliography) of René Daumal's two short stories, written in 1925-26. Mugle is written automatically in the style of the surrealists. The text's interest is twofold: it is a cluster of intertexts, paraded and parodied, grouped into two major areas. First, the urban perambulation which combines Lautréamont and the surrealists and a philosophico-religious cluster combining Bernanos and an eclectic reworking of major philosophers. Second, the text is a rigorous philosophical allegory of liberation, predicated on the struggle of consciousness to free itself, related to Daumal's 'fundamental experiment' with the drug carbon tetrachloride. The stories are allegories of self-destruction and self-destructing writing.