Le Grand Jeu (journal)
Le Grand Jeu (French for "The Great Game") was a French avant-garde literary magazine and the name of the group associated with it. The group was active chiefly in Paris from 1927 to 1932. Three issues appeared, in June 1928, spring 1929 and autumn 1930; proofs and other material prepared for a fourth issue were published with a reprint of the magazine in 1977.
The group grew out of the Phrères Simplistes, formed in Reims in 1922 by René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat. Its principal Paris members were Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Vailland, the poet and essayist André Rolland de Renéville, and the Czech painter Josef Šíma. Vailland proposed the title. Roger Caillois later connected it with Rudyard Kipling's Kim and with the group's interest in India, saying that the colonial "great game" had become a figure for metaphysical research.
The group called its programme "experimental metaphysics". Its writings brought together poetry, altered states of consciousness, psychical research, Hindu philosophy, Western mysticism and political revolt. It had close personal and intellectual links with Surrealism, but remained a separate group. Contemporary observers could therefore place it within a wider surrealist field without treating it as part of Breton's organisation: in 1930 Karel Teige described the Grand Jeu and the Bretonian group as distinct factions sharing a common atmosphere of dream, revolt and the breakdown of boundaries between reality and unreality. The Grand Jeu's early engagement with René Guénon and Hindu non-dualism, especially in the writings of Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte, had no sustained equivalent in Breton's circle. Relations with André Breton's group became openly hostile at the Bar du Château meeting of March 1929. Political and personal disputes, together with financial problems, ended the group in 1932.
Origins in Reims
Before Daumal arrived at the Bon-Enfants secondary school in Reims in 1922, Gilbert-Lecomte, Vailland and Meyrat had produced six issues of a handwritten review called Apollo. Daumal joined them and introduced the others to Alfred Jarry and pataphysics. They read the nineteenth-century poètes maudits, especially Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and Arthur Rimbaud, and wrote poetry of their own.
They called themselves the Phrères Simplistes, sometimes translated as the "Simplist Phraternity". The altered spelling of frères combined schoolboy wordplay with the suggestion of a spiritual brotherhood. Simplism was meant to preserve the imaginative freedom of childhood against the adult world of logic and utility, and to recover a unity that preceded distinctions such as dream and waking or the visible and invisible. Pierre Minet was also associated with the wider Simplist circle.
The Simplists created pseudonyms, rites and private sacred figures. "Saint Pliste" was their patron, while "Bubu", a grotesque infant partly derived from Jarry's Père Ubu, served as a talisman. Gilbert-Lecomte was also known as "Rog Jarl", Daumal as "Nathaniel", Vailland as "Dada", and Meyrat as "La Stryge". At times they described themselves as one angel divided among several bodies. They also produced the short-lived Bubu-Magazine.
Formation of the magazine
Daumal and Vailland moved to Paris in 1925, while Gilbert-Lecomte initially remained in Reims. Through the publisher Léon Pierre-Quint, Gilbert-Lecomte met Robert Desnos and other figures in the Parisian avant-garde. The circle expanded to include Renéville, the poet and artist Maurice Henry, the photographer and illustrator Artür Harfaux, Pierre Audard, André Delons and Minet. The Czech poet Richard Weiner introduced them to Šíma, whose studio became a regular meeting place.
In 1927 they planned a journal under the provisional title La Voie ("The Path"). Vailland opposed a conventional manifesto because he regarded Simplism as a way of life rather than a literary doctrine. He proposed issues built around a central subject, with poetry, prose, criticism and visual art. The journal followed this plan under the title Le Grand Jeu.
The first two issues were divided into "Essays", "Texts" and "Chroniques"; the third used much the same mixture without those headings. The magazine published essays, surveys, fiction, poetry, reviews and current commentary, together with work by Šíma, Henry, Harfaux, Mayo and other artists. Its main themes were revolt, poetic experience and myth. Contributors from the Surrealist milieu included Desnos, Michel Leiris, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and André Masson.
The first issue appeared in June 1928. The second answered the review's early critics in a combative editorial and review section. The group also organised lectures and exhibitions, including an exhibition at the Galerie Bonaparte in June 1929.
Ideas and practices
The phrase "experimental metaphysics" referred to the attempt to experience states that ordinary analysis could only describe abstractly: the relation of the finite to the infinite, multiplicity to unity, and individual consciousness to a wider order. The group's use of "tradition" referred largely to René Guénon's primordial or perennial Tradition, according to which different religious traditions expressed a common metaphysical truth. It did not mean inherited custom. Henri Bergson was another important influence.
The Grand Jeu's appeal to the sacred did not amount to a defence of established religion. Gilbert-Lecomte distinguished what he regarded as a primordial religious consciousness from organised religion, which he saw as having hardened into political power, moral regulation and mass organisation. Patrick Lepetit accordingly places the group within a wider surrealist attempt to recover the sacred from the institutions that claimed to administer it, while noting that the Grand Jeu gave this attempt a more openly metaphysical and initiatory form than Breton's group usually did.
Indian philosophy was especially important to Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte. Daumal began learning Sanskrit as a teenager and read the Upanishads and other Hindu texts. Members of the Reims circle had been reading Guénon by 1924. Gilbert-Lecomte discussed La Crise du monde moderne in the first issue, while Daumal published "Encore sur les livres de René Guénon" in the second. Daumal accepted Guénon's distinction between metaphysical knowledge and religious belief, but criticised his withdrawal from historical revolt; he presented revolt as a force working through the human individual rather than merely as a voluntary political duty. Guénon later praised Daumal, although he was dismissive of Surrealism. Lepetit interprets the Grand Jeu's ideal of knowledge becoming identical with being in the light of Guénon's "intellectual intuition", and sees Daumal's later Mount Analogue as continuing Guénonian themes of initiation, hierarchy and the junction of terrestrial humanity with a higher order. This interpretation goes beyond the explicit programme of the magazine and is best treated as a reading of Daumal's later development rather than as a definition of the group as a whole.
The Simplists also read Bergson, the psychologists Théodule Ribot and Pierre Janet, the psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers, and Nerval. They discussed paramnesia, depersonalisation, dissociation and the possibility of impersonal memory. Their philosophy teacher René Maublanc encouraged experiments in "paroptic" or eyeless vision, and an account of Daumal's work appeared in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
Their experiments included dreams, intoxication, trance, somnambulism, mirrors, sensory deprivation, induced asphyxia and collective states of depersonalisation or "doubling". Some were dangerous. Duncan recounts a game of Russian roulette involving Daumal and Meyrat as an extreme example of the group's effort to place life and death within the "great game".
Rimbaud supplied the chief poetic model. The second issue was devoted to him and reprinted his 1871 Lettre du voyant. Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte adopted his figure of the poet as a seer who deliberately disordered ordinary perception. Gilbert-Lecomte used the term punctum stans for an "immobile point" at which opposites and the separate self disappeared; the first issue stated the same aim more tersely in the maxim that the player wins by losing himself.
Gilbert-Lecomte's writing on paramnesia treated poetic images as impersonal or prenatal memories rather than the possessions of an individual author. The related "philosophy of participation", indebted to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, challenged fixed boundaries between subject and object, part and whole, and individual and collective life.
Šíma's work gave visual form to several of these ideas. Donna Roberts links the spiral on his cover for the first issue with inward descent and the relation between microcosm and macrocosm. She reads his portrait of Gilbert-Lecomte and the 1928 painting Midi as images in which figures and natural forms lose their usual boundaries.
The group described itself as revolutionary but resisted party discipline. Vailland regarded Communism as close to Simplism while warning against uncritical adherence to the French Communist Party. The magazine's first issue included Maurice Henry's "The Necessity of Revolt", Gilbert-Lecomte's "The Force of Renunciation" and Daumal's "Freedom without Hope". The third included material on Giordano Bruno. The Czech critic Karel Teige praised the review's attack on rationalist civilisation.
Relations with Surrealism
The Simplists encountered Surrealism in Paris in 1925. Pierre-Quint connected them with the circles around Discontinuité, led by Arthur Adamov, and Bifur, directed by Ribemont-Dessaignes. Renéville's Rimbaud le voyant impressed Breton and Louis Aragon, who invited him to contribute to La Révolution surréaliste. Several people associated with Breton's group later contributed to Le Grand Jeu.
The two groups had much in common. Both treated poetry as a means of changing life, invoked Rimbaud's seer, opposed positivism and investigated dreams, automatism, somnambulism and altered states. Bretonian Surrealism also drew on psychiatry, psychical research and mediumistic practice. Breton rejected the Spiritualist belief that mediums communicated with the dead, but valued trance and automatic expression as ways of studying the creative unconscious.
The groups differed most clearly in the conclusions they drew from these experiments. Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte related them to metaphysical unity, initiation and the loss of the individual self, and gave Hindu philosophy and Guénon's Traditionalism a central place in their programme. Breton treated comparable material mainly as psychic or poetic and as part of a surreality present within experienced reality. His use of occult sources did not normally entail acceptance of their doctrines.
Lepetit's account places greater weight than Bauduin's on continuities between Surrealism, initiation and the esoteric traditions. He treats Breton's "supreme point", the Grand Jeu's punctum stans and the initiatory language used by later surrealists as related attempts to overcome ordinary dualities and recover psychic unity. At the same time, he preserves an important distinction: Bretonian Surrealism remained atheist, anti-clerical and committed to an immanent surreality, whereas the Grand Jeu more readily spoke of metaphysical knowledge, higher states and Tradition. His broader use of "surrealist" therefore describes a shared field or atmosphere rather than common membership or an identical doctrine.
Their sources also differed. Daumal read Sanskrit and Hindu texts, while the magazine published discussions of Guénon and Vedanta. Bretonian Surrealism remained chiefly oriented towards French Romanticism and Symbolism, psychiatry, psychical research and Western occultism, and drew little from Eastern religious traditions. Bauduin argues that the Grand Jeu's relation to Guénon should not be projected onto Breton's movement.
Breton's own contacts with Guénon were limited. An approach through Pierre Naville in 1924 came to nothing, and the two men never met. Most of Breton's direct references to Guénon belong to the post-war period: he quoted Aperçus sur l'initiation without naming Guénon in two essays from 1949, wrote "René Guénon jugé par le surréalisme" in 1953, and mentioned him again in 1956. In the 1953 essay Breton praised Guénon's critique of the modern world and defence of metaphysical thought, but rejected Guénon's hostility to Freud.
Breton's group was not simply rationalist or hostile to occultism. In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, he called for the "profound, veritable occultation of Surrealism" and proposed research into astrology, clairvoyance, cryptesthesia and mediums. Bauduin reads "occultation" first as concealment and avant-garde distinction, but also as a tentative opening towards occult knowledge. Breton's engagement with esotericism became more extensive in the 1940s, although he continued to reject religious faith and sustained occult practice. Occult material remained subordinate to Surrealism's aims of poetry, love and revolution.
Political strategy also divided them. Breton's group was seeking a closer relation to Marxism and collective political action by the end of the 1920s, while the Grand Jeu linked revolt to renunciation, the destruction of dogma and the transformation of consciousness. Surrealist critics regarded this programme as evasive or idealist; the Grand Jeu regarded it as political in a broader sense.
Relations deteriorated after the Yugoslav poet Monny de Boully left Breton's circle for the Grand Jeu. On 11 March 1929 about thirty avant-garde writers and artists met at the Bar du Château in Montparnasse. The invitation, drafted by Raymond Queneau, proposed discussion of collective action, but Breton first demanded an examination of the participants' "individual moral qualification". He criticised the Grand Jeu's references to God, its political positions and a pseudonymous article by Vailland that appeared sympathetic to the right-wing Paris police prefect Jean Chiappe. Ribemont-Dessaignes called the meeting an ambush and walked out.
The meeting was not a formal expulsion: the Grand Jeu had not joined Breton's organisation and retained its own identity. Breton and Aragon nevertheless tried to recruit individual members, and the Second Manifesto of Surrealism criticised the group. Daumal answered with an "Open Letter to André Breton" in the third issue, published in October 1930.
Breton's later interest in occultism and the esoteric background of Romantic and Symbolist poetry brought some of his concerns closer to those of the Grand Jeu. In an unpublished review of Arcane 17 written around 1948, Renéville argued that Breton had belatedly recognised links between poetry and occult thought that the Grand Jeu had discussed in the 1920s. The convergence was partial: Breton did not adopt the Grand Jeu's synthesis of Hindu metaphysics, Western poetry and Guénonian Tradition, and continued to use occultism chiefly as a source of poetic analogy, myth and images rather than as a settled doctrine.
Dissolution
Vailland's article on Chiappe became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the group's politics. Although the Grand Jeu had refused Breton's demand that it expel him at the Bar du Château, Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte compelled him to withdraw in early 1930. His only contribution to the third issue was a joint statement announcing the suspension of his involvement.
Gilbert-Lecomte's opiate addiction led to repeated hospitalisation and attempts at detoxification, and Daumal took on much of his care. On 9 November 1930 Daumal met the artist Alexandre de Salzmann, a disciple of G. I. Gurdjieff, and came to regard Gurdjieff's teaching as a disciplined path towards aims he had pursued since adolescence. This widened the distance between Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte. Material for a fourth issue was ready by early 1931, but financial problems and Gilbert-Lecomte's condition prevented publication.
The final crisis followed the 1932 "Aragon affair". Aragon was prosecuted for the revolutionary poem Front rouge, and Renéville published an article in the Nouvelle Revue Française that criticised the poem. Audard and Delons resigned rather than continue working with him. Renéville then resigned after refusing Daumal's demand for a retraction, while Henry and Harfaux accused Daumal of speaking for the group without authority.
The members met for the last time in Daumal's apartment on 30 November 1932. Two days later Daumal left for New York with the company of the Indian dancer Uday Shankar. Gilbert-Lecomte subsequently drew closer to Breton's Surrealists and joined the Association of Revolutionary Artists and Writers. The group did not meet again.
Aftermath and publication history
Harfaux and Henry joined the Surrealists and later worked together as screenwriters; Henry also became known as a cartoonist. Daumal continued his study of Gurdjieff's teaching and Indian poetics, published Le Contre-Ciel and La Grande Beuverie, and left the novel Le Mont Analogue unfinished at his death in 1944. Gilbert-Lecomte published two poetry collections and died in 1943. Vailland later joined the French Resistance and the Communist Party and became a novelist and screenwriter; he won the Prix Goncourt in 1957 for La Loi.
Jean-Michel Place reprinted the surviving issues in 1977, together with proofs and other material prepared for the fourth number. Dennis Duncan edited and translated a selection of the magazine's writings for Atlas Press in 2015 under the title Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu.
Issues
- No. 1 — June 1928
- No. 2 — spring 1929
- No. 3 — autumn 1930
- No. 4 — planned for autumn 1932 but not published; surviving proofs and other materials appeared in the 1977 reprint.
Members, contributors and associates
Phrères Simplistes
- René Daumal
- Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
- Roger Vailland
- Robert Meyrat, who withdrew before the Parisian magazine was established
- Pierre Minet, associated with the wider circle
Principal members of Le Grand Jeu
- René Daumal
- Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
- André Rolland de Renéville
- Roger Vailland
- Josef Šíma
Other contributors and associates
- Pierre Audard
- Monny de Boully
- Hendrik Cramer
- André Delons
- Robert Desnos
- Artür Harfaux
- Maurice Henry
- Marianne Lams
- Michel Leiris
- André Masson
- Mayo
- Léon Pierre-Quint
- Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
- Richard Weiner
Sources
Further reading
- Le Grand Jeu, nos. 1–4, 1928–1932, Jean-Michel Place, Paris, 1977.
- Catalogue Le Grand Jeu, preface by Bernard Noël, Librairie Fourcade, 2003.
- "Le Grand Jeu" dossier, L'Herne, no. 10 (1968), introduction by Marc Thivolet.
- Šíma – Le Grand Jeu, exhibition catalogue, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1992.
- Michel Camus, L'Enjeu du Grand Jeu, Éditions Mont Analogue.
- Jean-Paul Clébert, Dictionnaire du surréalisme, Éditions du Seuil, 1996.
- J.-B. Pontalis, "Une boule de feu", in Le Dormeur éveillé, Gallimard, 2004.
- Claire Barré, Phrères, Robert Laffont, 2016.