The Gurdjieff Work and Literary Cultural Production (original) (raw)

The Contribution of Minority Religions to Society, CESNUR Conference, Universite Bordeaux Montaigne, 12-15 June 2024.

Recent scholarship of New Religious Movements (NRMs) has emphasised that charismatic leadership is a co-creation of the leader and his/ her followers, with both sources projecting desirable qualities into the emotional space of the intimate community that is developing around the religious, spiritual, or esoteric teacher. The increased importance of seekers who “convert” themselves, often through reading practices (books and websites) and YouTube lectures, podcasts, and other new media has also garnered attention. This paper addresses one area of esoteric/ spiritual cultural production that the Fourth Way has engaged with; fictional portraits of the guru for seekers wanting to encounter him postmortem. I have published on Peter Brook’s film of Meetings With Remarkable Men (1979), a paradigmatic example, Alma de Groen’s play, The Rivers of China (1988), and the hagiographic impressions given by pupil memoirs. Yet, there are other sources that support my argument, including fictions by outsiders (J. B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement [1930], Peter Neagoe’s The Saint of Montparnasse [1965], and Stuart Holroyd’s play The Prophet [1950s], and fictions by Work members (C. Daly King’s The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant [2003] and Richard Heron Ward’s A Gallery of Mirrors: Memories of Childhood, Boyhood, and Early Youth [1956]). Gurdjieff has also been depicted in a musical (John Maxwell Taylor’s Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Legend of Gurdjieff [2002]), critical comic novels (Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet [1974] and Zaza Burchuladze’s The Inflatable Angel [2018]), and poems and short stories (by Keith Althaus and Joy Williams, among others). This presentation considers the impact of fictions on public perceptions of Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way, and the extent that they can be seen as an evangelistic tool, that has the capacity to attract a broader audience than anticipated.