LITERATURE RENÉ DAUMAL by BORIS BERGMANN it’s as true today as ever: the avant-garde invents the future. french para-surrealist writer and enfant terrible rené daumal continues to influence generations of artists with his unfinished cult novel mount analogue. Everything always starts in the Ardennes. Poetic lands in spite of themselves. As if the boredom and sadness of the place favored the blossoming of poets. René Daumal was born in Boulzicourt, a dreary village between Reims and Charleville, in 1908. Precociously bright, already a compulsive reader, and self-taught, he was sent to middle school in Charleville-Mézières, following in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud, whom, of course, he came to admire. Then on to high school in Reims, the main city of the region. There, Daumal met allies that he called “phères.” A band of young men obsessed with knowledge, who would go to any lengths to obtain it. Who would go…