André Rolland de Renéville

André Rolland de Renéville (8 July 1903 – 23 August 1962) was a French poet, essayist, literary critic, lawyer and magistrate. He was one of the principal members of the avant-garde magazine and group Le Grand Jeu and became its principal theorist of the relationship between poetry, mystical experience and occult traditions. His best-known books are Rimbaud le voyant, L'Expérience poétique (1938) and Univers de la parole (1944).

Renéville treated poetry not primarily as self-expression or an autonomous art, but as a form of knowledge capable of altering the relation between the individual and the world. His criticism brought together Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, William Blake, Gérard de Nerval and other visionary poets with Orphism, Hindu non-dualism, Christian mysticism, the history of occultism and Asian religious texts. The Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine characterises his intellectual project as an attempt to affirm lyric poetry as an initiatory path of mystical experience.

Early life and first works

Renéville was born in Tours on 8 July 1903. A second small collection, Pour elle, was privately printed in Tours in 1925.

Les Ténèbres peintes followed in December 1926. The book contained an introductory text by Philippe Soupault and illustrations by Serge de Feularde. Its publication brought Renéville into contact with writers and editors in the Parisian avant-garde.

Renéville began corresponding with Jean Paulhan in 1927. Their surviving correspondence extends to 1956 and documents his relationship with the Nouvelle Revue Française, his literary projects and his continuing study of poetry and mysticism.

Le Grand Jeu

Joining the group

In late 1927 the publisher and critic Léon Pierre-Quint introduced Renéville to René Daumal. Pierre-Quint had recognised that the two shared an interest in occult studies. Through Daumal, Renéville met Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and entered the circle from which the Grand Jeu magazine was then emerging.

Renéville was not one of the original Phrères Simplistes, the Reims schoolboy circle formed by Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger Vailland and Robert Meyrat. He was five years older than Daumal and joined the expanded Parisian group as it was preparing its public review. His existing knowledge of mysticism, occult literature and the history of poetry gave him a different role from that of the founding Simplists.

The principal Paris members of the Grand Jeu were Daumal, Gilbert-Lecomte, Vailland, Renéville and the Czech painter Josef Šíma. Three issues of the magazine appeared between June 1928 and autumn 1930. Proofs and other material prepared for a fourth issue were published only with a reprint of the magazine in 1977.

The review combined poetry, fiction, literary criticism, visual art, political commentary, altered states of consciousness, psychical research, Hindu philosophy and what the group called “experimental metaphysics”. Renéville supplied a systematic theory of poetic experience for a project that Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte had initially developed through adolescent experiments, visionary poetry and metaphysical speculation.

Contributions to the magazine

Renéville contributed poetry, correspondence and theoretical essays to the Grand Jeu. His most important contribution to its second issue was “L'élaboration d'une méthode: à propos de la Lettre du voyant” (“The Elaboration of a Method: On the Letter of the Seer”), published in the spring of 1929.

The third issue, published in autumn 1930, contained “La Parole” (“The Word”), described by the editors as one part of Renéville's larger study of poetic creation. “Les Images” (“Images”) was prepared for the fourth issue, which remained unpublished. These essays were later incorporated into the wider argument of L'Expérience poétique.

Renéville also corresponded on behalf of the Grand Jeu with the Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux. His interest in Saint-Pol-Roux's “ideorealism” formed part of his attempt to trace a continuous visionary tradition from Romanticism and Symbolism to the modern avant-garde.

Rimbaud and visionary poetry

Rimbaud le voyant, published by Au Sans Pareil in 1929, grew from Renéville's study of Rimbaud's 1871 Lettre du voyant and from the collective work devoted to Rimbaud in the second issue of the Grand Jeu.

Renéville interpreted the “disordering of all the senses” not as permission for arbitrary intoxication or unregulated self-expression, but as part of a method directed towards the destruction of habitual consciousness. The poet was to empty himself of received images, social identity and aesthetic technique so that poetic creation would no longer appear to be the property of an isolated individual.

He placed Rimbaud within a wider history of visionary and initiatory poetry. “L'élaboration d'une méthode” connected the self-negation of the poet with Hindu non-dualism and with a Western tradition that Renéville traced through Orphism, mysticism and the visionary poets. In his account, poetic intuition could provide an experiential rather than merely speculative approach to metaphysical unity.

The book impressed Breton and Aragon, who invited Renéville to contribute to La Révolution surréaliste. Roberts argues that Renéville's knowledge of the relationship between modern poetry and occult traditions was at that time more developed than that of the Bretonian Surrealists. His interpretation of Rimbaud was attractive to them because it joined poetic intuition, revolt and the overcoming of rational consciousness, although its synthesis with Hindu mysticism differed from the direction Breton later took.

Renéville returned to Rimbaud repeatedly. He reviewed editions of the poet's correspondence and later co-edited Rimbaud's complete works with Jules Mouquet for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Relations with Surrealism

Affinities and differences

Renéville and the Grand Jeu did not stand wholly outside Surrealism. The two groups shared writers, contributors and intellectual interests. Both regarded poetry as a means of changing life, rejected positivist rationalism, admired Rimbaud and investigated dream, automatism, madness and altered consciousness.

The Grand Jeu nevertheless remained an independent organisation. Its members spoke openly of metaphysics, mysticism, initiation and higher states of consciousness, and Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte gave Hindu non-dualism and the writings of René Guénon a central place in their programme. Breton's group generally treated analogous material in the languages of poetry, desire, psychic life and an immanent surreality.

A confrontation at the Bar du Château in Montparnasse on 11 March 1929 made the rivalry public. Breton criticised the Grand Jeu's religious vocabulary and political conduct and attempted to recruit some of its members individually. The meeting was not a formal expulsion, since the Grand Jeu had never belonged to Breton's organisation.

Renéville continued to read and write about Surrealism after the confrontation. His relationship with Breton was marked by genuine intellectual interest as well as disagreement rather than by a complete rupture.

Automatism and mental illness

In February 1932 Renéville published “Dernier état de la poésie surréaliste” (“The Latest State of Surrealist Poetry”) in the Nouvelle Revue Française. Among the works he examined was L'Immaculée Conception by Breton and Paul Éluard, especially its “simulations” of different forms of mental illness.

Words, images and analogy

The essays “La Parole” and “Les Images” developed Renéville's account of poetic language. Words were not merely conventional labels applied to an already complete external reality. In poetry they could recover relationships obscured by habitual speech and discursive reason.

The poetic image similarly did not function only as ornament or comparison. It could join realities ordinarily held apart and disclose analogies between the individual and the world, the visible and invisible, and the immediate image and what Renéville regarded as its metaphysical source.

His approach placed poetry within the Grand Jeu's wider “philosophy of participation”. This challenged fixed distinctions between subject and object, part and whole, and individual and collective consciousness. Renéville's writings sought to show how poetic language could restore a form of participation without simply reproducing the beliefs of an earlier religious culture.

The later collection Univers de la parole brought together essays on Nerval, Rimbaud, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Mallarmé, Saint-Pol-Roux, Alfred Jarry, O. V. de L. Milosz, Léon-Paul Fargue, Henri Michaux and Éluard. Despite the diversity of its subjects, the volume returned repeatedly to the claim that poetic language provided knowledge unavailable to abstract concepts alone.

Poetry and occultism

In the essay “La Poésie et l'occultisme”, probably written around 1930 and published posthumously, Renéville argued that Western rationalism had displaced older participatory forms of knowledge. Elements of these modes had survived, in his account, within myth, oral traditions, mystical literature, hermetic symbols and occult disciplines.

He did not treat occultism simply as a body of supernatural propositions whose literal truth poetry was required to certify. Its importance lay partly in the analogical and symbolic structures it had preserved. Poetic intuition and occult thought could therefore be compared as survivals or renewals of a mode of consciousness that preceded the modern separation of observer and object.

Renéville's sources included Western esoteric writers, Christian mystics, Romantic and Symbolist poets and Asian traditions. His comparison was generally syncretic rather than an argument that every poet had been directly initiated into a single occult organisation.

Asian religious traditions

Renéville's engagement with Asian thought was unusual within the wider French Surrealist milieu. He reviewed the French translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1934 and remarked upon what he saw as parallels between its procedures and psychoanalysis. He also reviewed the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and Jacques Bacot's biography of the Tibetan teacher Marpa.

Renéville also preserved the memory of Daumal after the latter's death in 1944. He wrote the preface to the first edition of Daumal's unfinished novel Le Mont Analogue, published in 1952, and produced the memoir later issued as Souvenir de René Daumal.

In 1947 Renéville founded and directed Les Cahiers d'Hermès. The first issue, published in April, was devoted to French literature and tradition. The review was short-lived, but continued his attempt to bring literature, mystical traditions and esoteric scholarship into a common critical forum.

Post-war reflections on Breton

Renéville continued to follow Breton's development after the Second World War. In “Le Renouveau surréaliste”, published in La Nef in July 1946, he considered the new direction represented by Breton's Arcane 17.

Around 1948 he wrote the unpublished essay “Situation d'André Breton”. Renéville praised Breton's growing recognition of the connections between poetic discovery and the symbolic logic preserved by occultism. He nevertheless observed that Arcane 17 approached several concerns for which the Grand Jeu had been condemned in the late 1920s.

Renéville interpreted the development as a partial vindication of the Grand Jeu's early work on poetry and occult thought. His argument did not mean that Breton had adopted its synthesis of Hindu metaphysics, Western poetry and Traditionalist thought. Breton continued to employ occult material chiefly in relation to poetry, myth, love and revolution rather than accepting a comprehensive traditional doctrine.

Death, archives and reception

Renéville died in the 13th arrondissement of Paris on 23 August 1962, aged 59.

Selected works

Poetry

De l'adieu à l'oubli, illustrations by Edmond Rocher (Éditions du Jardin de la France, 1923) Pour elle (privately printed, 1925) Les Ténèbres peintes, introduction by Philippe Soupault and illustrations by Serge de Feularde (Radot, 1926) La Nuit, l'esprit (Gallimard, 1946)

Literary criticism and essays

Rimbaud le voyant (Au Sans Pareil, 1929) “L'élaboration d'une méthode: à propos de la Lettre du voyant”, in Le Grand Jeu, no. 2 (1929) “La Parole”, in Le Grand Jeu, no. 3 (1930) “Les Images”, prepared for the unpublished fourth issue of Le Grand Jeu (1932) “Dernier état de la poésie surréaliste”, in the Nouvelle Revue Française (1932) “Le surréalisme et la poésie”, in the Nouvelle Revue Française (1933) “Le Sens de la nuit”, in the Nouvelle Revue Française (1936) L'Expérience poétique (Gallimard, 1938) Univers de la parole (Gallimard, 1944) “Le Renouveau surréaliste”, in La Nef (1946)

Editorial work

Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres complètes, edited with Jules Mouquet, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard, 1946) Les Cahiers d'Hermès, founder and editor (1947) Preface to René Daumal, Le Mont Analogue (Gallimard, 1952)

Posthumous editions

Sciences maudites et poètes maudits, edited, introduced and annotated by Patrick Krémer (Le Bois d'Orion, 1997), Souvenir de René Daumal (La Maison des amis des livres, 1997),

Modern editions

Rimbaud le voyant, complete annotated edition prepared by Patrick Krémer (Le Grand Souffle, 2004) L'Expérience poétique ou le Feu secret du langage (Le Grand Souffle, 2004),