Guest post by Chris Allen: 'Creative Craziness and The Great Game'
An oddity has just appeared on UK bookshelves: Theory of the Great Game, vivid repository of a Parisian group’s dreams and esoteric experiences.
In the 1920s, French iconoclastic artists eager for new sensations joined their forces around a journal called The Grand Jeu, which only ran to three published issues before collapsing because of its editors' infighting and narcotic over-indulgence. In 2015, thanks to Dennis Duncan’s translating and editing work, Atlas Press gives this journal a second life. Chris Allen, publisher at Atlas Press, has very kindly accepted to tell us more about the story of this amazing book.
Theory of the Great Game presented by Chris Allen, from Atlas Press
When a group of school-friends in Reims in the early 1920s found that they had a shared passion for the poètes maudits of the 19th century and certain orientalist and esoteric learning, they soon came to recognise each other as kindred spirits. They formed a sort of secret society, with strict codes of conduct and new names for themselves, and a mythology in which they were characterised as types of angels, each with different personalities and attributes. Taking their belief in their own invulnerability into the wider world in order to test themselves with ever more extreme states and experiences, the group found their various enquiries beginning to coalesce into a coherent project. Thus, the controlled use of narcotics and stimulants was accompanied by experiments in perception by occult or parapsychological means, eventually leading to a system of “experimental metaphysics” intended to show that the same liberation of the mind they believed they had discovered could be achieved by everyone.
This was the Grand Jeu, the group of artists and writers that became focused around core members René Daumal and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte in 1929. On moving to Paris their encounters with other artistic movements culminated in a falling out with André Breton; having been initially courted by the Surrealists, they found themselves ostracised from any association with the movement, but this only intensified their dissident energy, and investigations which had been touched on earlier were now pursued with greater zeal.
As was ever the case, they founded a magazine, and the contributors to Le Grand Jeu included not only Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte but also their friend Roger Vailland, the poet and artist Maurice Henry, the photographer Artür Harfaux and a number of other fellow travellers. The review ran to three issues (with a fourth left unpublished), but covered a wide range of topics that reveal the group’s uncompromising politico-mystical outlook and excoriating critique of contemporary Western society, while at the same time urging a cult of abnegation and self-immolation of the ego, allied to leftist revolutionary politics. All of this is expressed in a style that is markedly fresh and articulate throughout, which manages to be concise in its rational voice as well as arch and even torrential once the shackles are removed. Gilbert-Lecomte especially is the figure ripe for rediscovery here, a prophetic poet in the mode of Artaud (who uniquely wrote the preface to Gilbert-Lecomte’s first book of poems) whose work remains scandalously under-valued even in France. Issues of Le Grand Jeu contain critical writing too, a special issue devoted to Rimbaud, with superb essays by Vailland and Gilbert-Lecomte, and, less eulogistically, Daumal’s ongoing polemic with Breton and the Surrealist movement.
Had this material been translated and published in the 1960s it could not have found a more sympathetic audience than the counter-culture of the day, and plenty of us would no doubt now be familiar with the Grand Jeu as a result, perhaps even more so than any of the other avant-garde movements of their time. As it is, this is the first, and definitive collection of these writers’ works to appear in English, and introduces the group’s short-lived flowering in all the blaze of its youthful brilliance.
Chris Allen
Theory of the Great Game, translated and edited by Dennis Duncan and published by Atlas Press
We are proud to celebrate Theory of the Great Game as our Book of the Week. You can browse through the book at the French Institute’s library or get a chance to win a copy by entering our Facebook and Twitter competition!