Rerun: Some of the skinny on Raymond Roussel (orig. 03/07/07)

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Chapter One: How I Wrote Certain of My Books

'Raymond Roussel was born into an immensely wealthy Parisian family in 1877 (he died a suicide in 1933), the money surrounding him acting as a cocoon between himself and reality. The quotidian is notable by its absence from his work: this is not a literature with much appeal for anyone in search of a social conscience. But if one is magnetized by works of the imagination derived almost solely from linguistics, Roussel represents some kind of summation. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, the posthumously published testament in which Roussel delineates many--but by no means all--of his writing techniques, is, as they say, essential reading. As a vade mecum it doesn't necessarily make the books easier to penetrate, but it does provide some clue as to what lies beneath them (though no matter how knowledgeable these clues make us, as readers, feel, no amount of shouting "Open Sesame!" at the threshold of the books entices them to reveal all their secrets).' -- Trevor Winkfield, Context



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Excerpt:Locus Solus (Chapter I)

On that Thursday in early April, my learned friend the professor Martial Canterel had invited me, with several other close friends of his, to visit the huge park surrounding his beautiful villa at Montmorency.

Locus Solus, as the property is named, is a quiet refuge where Canterel enjoys in perfect intellectual peace the pursuit of his diverse and fertile labors. He is in this lonely place sufficiently safe from the tur-bulence of Paris, and yet can reach the capital in a quarter of an hour whenever his research demands a session in some particular library, or when the time comes for him to make, at a prodigiously packed lecture, some sensational announcement to the scientific world.

Canterel spends nearly the entire year at Locus Solus, surrounded by disciples who, full of passionate admiration for his unending discoveries, support him zealously in the completion of his life’s work. The villa contains a number of rooms opulently converted into model laboratories, which are run by numerous assistants; and the professor devotes his whole life to science, having from the start leveled all the practical obstacles met in the course of his strenuous application to the various goals he sets, through his vast, uncommitted bachelor’s fortune.

Three o’clock had just struck. It was warm, and the sun sparkled in a nearly flawless sky. Canterel had received us not far from his villa, in the open, under old trees whose shade enveloped a comfortable arrangement of various wicker chairs.

After the arrival of the last guest, the professor started walking, leading our group, which followed him obediently. Tall and dark, his countenance frank, his features regular, with a slight moustache and keen eyes that shined with extraordinary intel-ligence, Canterel hardly looked his forty-four years. A warm persuasive voice lent great charm to his engaging elocution, whose seductiveness and clarity made him a champion in discourse.

For a while we had been advancing along a lane whose slope rose steeply.

Halfway up, at the path’s edge, we perceived, upright in a rather deep stone niche, a curiously aged statue, which seemed to be composed of blackish, dry, hardened earth, representing, not unpleasantly, a smiling naked boy. The arms were stretched outwards in a gesture of offering, both hands opening towards the ceiling of the niche. In the right hand, where once it had taken root, rose a small dead plant in the last stages of decay.

Going on absent-mindedly, Canterel was obliged to answer our unanimous question.

"This is the santonica Federal seen by ibn Batuta in the heart of Timbuctoo," he said, pointing to the statue; whose origin he then revealed.



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Chapter Two: Impressions of Africa

'Such raiding of the nursery to conjure up adult myths produced Roussel's first indisputable masterpiece, the novel Impressions of Africa, published in 1910 at the author's expense (as were all his books) under the prestigious Lemerre imprint. It begins like a boy's adventure story: a group of shipwrecked passengers are captured and held for ransom by an African king, Talou VII. To while away their time and keep their captors entertained, each captive is allotted a theatrical task or test of mechanical ingenuity based on his inherent skills, to be performed at a gala before their release. But in a reversal of the plot of his early short story 'Among the Blacks' and in defiance of all the rules of detective fiction, Roussel first explains and then describes his mysteries, somewhat like the playwright who, in the opening scene, tells us who the murderer is and then spends the rest of the play explaining why he did it. Suspense is thus dispensed with at the opening of the adventure. But it remains one of his greatest triumphs as a storyteller that after all the mysteries have been unravelled and explained away, they become even more mysterious--hence his appeal to modernists and ourselves. A further aspect of his appeal resides in his manipulation of people. Not exactly as a puppet master, but one who shuffles his characters around to serve the same purpose as words, strictly to unfold the story. No one could be less interested in psychology than Roussel. The surface of things is paramount, characters being defined by their rituals and attributes, not their personalities. Their belongings as a result can be more animistic than their owners.' -- T.W., Context



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Roussel on his compositional method for IOA: "I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus. For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table… must somehow reach the phrase, …les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer."



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Chapter Three: Locus Solus

'This notion of lives episodically unfolding "before our very eyes" is carried even further in Roussel's second and final novel, Locus Solus, first published on the eve of World War I (his sole comment on that conflagration--"I've never seen so many men!"--being a mordant example of his blinkered humor) and for many of us his greatest, most perfect narrative construction. Set in the spacious grounds of Locus Solus, the "solitary place" inhabited by Martial Canterel, a wealthy scientific genius living on the outskirts of Paris, the novel's form, even more so than that of Impressions, relies for its model on the travelogue. Here our guide actually is a professor, one who escorts his guests through his landscape of marvels. A partial tabulation of what his guests are asked to admire would include a curious, antique sculpture molded from dry earth of a naked child holding forth a wizened flower; an aerial paving beetle-cum-weather forecaster which builds a mosaic made from rotten teeth, guided thither and yon by the wind (whose movements Canterel has predicted days in advance). Further on, we come across a gigantic faceted aquarium containing a curious medley of objects and creatures, including a depilated cat who, aided by a pointed metal horn, galvanizes the floating remains of Danton's head into speech; a dancer with musical tresses; and a troupe of bottle-imps performing scenes from folklore and history as they rise and fall through the oxygenated water. The central marvel, however, involves what amounts to a glass-enclosed graveyard where eight corpses are reanimated (thanks to Canterel's preparations of vitalium and resurrectine) in order to relive the capital moments of their lives, attended by their ecstatically grieving (but still living) relatives.

'This précis barely skims the surface of the novel's layout, which, like that of Impressions, is delineated by descriptions, which in turn expand and engender other descriptions, followed by explanations of those descriptions. And such is the concision of Roussel's language that itemizing all the episodes and their ramifications would entail a tabulation almost as detailed as the books themselves, ending up with something very much like Lewis Carroll's lugubrious map, the one that's so detailed it's on a scale of one mile to one mile, thus completely covering the landscape it is intended to elucidate.' -- T.W., Context



The novel Locus Solus can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg here


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Manuscript page from Locus Solus




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Two of Roussel's graphs/drawings related to Locus Solus







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Chapter Four: New Impressions of Africa

'Roussel's penultimate opus, New Impressions of Africa, is not, as its name seems to imply, a continuation of the earlier novel. Rather it is one of the most complex poems in the French language, four cantos based loosely on four Egyptian tourist sites. Not only is the text complex, it looks impenetrable. The layout proclaims "No Trespassing" to the casual reader, with its thicket of brackets within brackets within brackets and attendant footnotes as austere and foreboding as any Rosetta Stone. But once inside it reveals itself as even more impenetrable! For instance, the opening of the third canto (ostensibly extolling the virtues of a column on the outskirts of Damietta which, when licked, cures jaundice) is brought to a halt after only five lines by the mention of hope, leading to a parenthesis dealing with an American uncle whose nephews have hopes of inheritance. But that touching scene is not completed for five or six pages, the word "American" having provoked a double-parenthesis dealing with "that land still young, still unexhausted" whose dog's cold nose triggers a trio of brackets and a brief revery on an ailing pup. Which in turn triggers a bracketed aside within four parentheses, then another within five. After barely one hundred lines, even the most astute and intrepid explorer is all at sea and gasping for air. This avalanche of interruptions is akin to that produced by a group of partygoers, with one conversationalist being interrupted barely after he's begun talking; meantime his interrupter is in turn cut short by the person across the table whose memory has just been jolted, so she in turn relates an anecdote, which reminds her neighbor of a funny story . . . and so on and so forth. This simplistic exegesis of the technique is, I hope, sufficient to show that it's not for readers cursed with a one track mind. But to those who persevere, this Everest of High Modernism donates rich comfort: like all truly great works of art, it is inexhaustible in its rewards. The density of the language--its pared-down compression--is such that each line could be ascribed a physical weight as well as length. As Roussel himself said of an earlier version of this poem, abandoned after countless revisions, an entire lifetime would have been insufficient to complete the polishing. Likewise (and I know whereof I speak) an entire lifetime is insufficient to fully disentangle (and understand--my italics) its myriad branches. The same, of course, may be said of Roussel's entire oeuvre.' -- T.W., Context



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Read the introduction by translator Andrew Hugill





Excerpt:

Canto I
Damietta
The House in Which Saint Louis Was Imprisoned

Serious reflection, weighing it up, brings the certain
Realisation that there, behind that door,
The Saint-King was imprisoned for three months! ...Louis IXth!
But how can it be that this seems tangible and new
In this place strewn about with crumbling marvels
Than which there are none older under the sun!
Evoking, as if it were yesterday:
That name whose bearer, though crushed, is so proud of
That he knows by heart, faultlessly,
- Roots, trunks, boughs, connecting branches -
His family tree; the cathedrals eroded by time;
Likewise the proud menhir, the first cromlech
The dolmen beneath which the soil is always dry.


Canto II
The Battle-Field of The Pyramids

This battlefield conjures up nothing but the memory of him
At the time of the overcoat - that full-length greatcoat -
And the little hat - from which we can deduce
Intimidating rays of power emanating in all directions -
Grey overcoat, black hat (the image of which irresistibly evokes
The era when Kings were brought low
And which historians cannot leave alone;)
Worn by him up to the point when, on his craggy rock,
It no longer exaggerated his silhouette,
A fact which causes one to forget for a moment, lost in meditation,
Egypt, its sun, its evenings, its sky.



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Credits, further:



Meet Trevor Winkfield,
Roussel scholar, artist, writer


* Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture
* Raymond Roussel Resource (in French)




Francois Caradec Raymond Roussel (Atlas Press)
'The bizarre life of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) had the makings of a Jules Verne novel, rivalling only his writings in outlandishness. His specially-constructed motorized caravan, his travels through Africa behind closed shutters, and his mysterious death in a Palermo hotel are among the numerous details of his extraordinary life. First published in France in 1972, Caradec's biography remains the definitive unraveling of the Rousselian enigma.' -- Amazon
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Mark Ford Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Cornell University Press, 2000)
'Mark Ford's biography is a welcome introduction to both the man and the work. Ford offers both biography and a critical study of Roussel's unusual literary undertakings. Roussel's life and work were equally bizarre. They make for fascinating material, and Ford makes the most of them. Ford also has some fun with Roussel's efforts for the stage (put on at his own expense), spectacles that enjoyed some vogue mainly because of the strong and vociferous reactions by the audience ("There followed a scrum, as in rugby," Robert Desnos' wife Youki reports about the audience at one of the performances).' -- Complete-review.com
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Michel Foucault Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (introduction by John Ashbery, Continuum, 1963)
'Death and the Labyrinth was Foucault's first book, and the one focussed most specifically on literature. In it Foucault offers a thorough study of Roussel's work, paying particular attention to Roussel's special method, as outlined in his posthumous text, How I Wrote Certain of my Books. A bonus is translator Charles Ruas' interview with Foucault, shortly before his death. It offers some background about Foucault's interest in and understanding of Roussel -- and about Foucault himself.' -- Complete-review.com
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Homages


Tribute to Raymond Roussel


Tosh Talks


Locus Solus. Impresiones de Raymond Roussel


Olivier Greif 'Second Hommage à Raymond Roussel op37' (1971)


'La Vue' de Raymond Roussel


R. Roussel -Dokumenty mające służyć za kanwę (fragment)


Michel Foucault - Raymond Roussel Ecrivain - 1962


Literature Book Review: New Impressions of Africa




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p.s. Hey. As previously stated, I'm off to Lille this morning for an overnighter, and the p.s. will return on Friday. I will address any comments left here in the meantime then. For today, please enjoy this old but, I think, maybe still up-to-the-minute post about the very great Raymond Roussel. The blog will see you again sans me -- barring a hello -- tomorrow.