Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, Translated by Rupert Copeland Cuningham (Oneworld Classics, 2008)«Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike anything in the literature of the twentieth century.
Cantarel, a scholarly scientist, whose enormous wealth imposes no limits upon his prolific ingenuity, is taking a group of visitors on a tour of Locus Solus, his secluded estate near Paris. One by one he introduces, demonstrates and expounds the discoveries and inventions of his fertile, encyclopaedic mind. An African mud-sculpture representing a naked child; a road-mender's tool which, when activated by the weather, creates a mosaic of human teeth; a vast aquarium in which humans can breathe and in which a depilated cat is seen stimulating the partially decomposed head of Danton to fresh flights of oratory. By each item in Cantarel's exhibition there hangs a tale - a tale such as only that esteemed genius Roussel could tell. As the inventions become more elaborate, the richness and brilliance of the author's stories grow to match them; the flow of his imagination becomes a flood and the reader is swept along in a torrent of wonder and hilarity.»
«An imagination which joins the mathematician’s delirium to the poet’s logic – this, among other marvels, is what one discovers in the novels of Raymond Roussel.» - Raymond Queneau
An excerpt from 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.»
«For some readers, Raymond Roussel resembles nobody so much as the admired party guest towards whom one is propelled by overly enthusiastic hosts who breathlessly assure one, "You’ll have so much in common." But confronted with the said guest, one finds that though one might have everything in common with him, one has nothing to say.
This confrontation can be all the more unsettling if one’s smitten hosts include Marcel Proust, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Alberto Giacometti, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, and John Ashbery, to a man great admirers of the influential French scribe. Though citing a writer’s prestigious fans is a cheap way of drawing attention to him ("He’s nothing but a writer’s writer’s writer’s acquired taste," as one partygoer sneered at me), it’s due to these important admirers that Roussel’s status has changed subtly but dramatically over the past decades from marginal curiosity to central figure, one of those writers we have to go through rather than walk around. We’re now on the crest of another Roussel revival, an event occurring every generation or so. The apparent failure of these revivals to establish Roussel as an academic Major Writer is not the point of the venture. For as Roussel himself noted in another context, each revival finds "more and more people gathering to my cause." Think Mallarmé as opposed to Balzac.
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). The most obvious examples of his expository secrets can be found early in his career, before he learnt to cover his tracks. The story Among the Blacks, written during Roussel’s years of "prospecting" (as he termed his youth) begins and ends with two almost identical phrases: Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer). Acting as a delicious sandwich between these apparently irreconcilable rhyming bookends comes a parlor game set in a country home. A question in writing is posed to someone who is then shut up in the adjoining room; after ten minutes one is released to give a response to the question in the form of a riddle whose flavor is perfectly captured by Ron Padgett’s hilariously deadpan translation
First, there was a man’s face, split in half, the right side of which was utterly fiendish and ugly. This was followed by an eyeball, from which hung an L. Then came a skeleton key that was inserting itself into a 2. After this there was a stack of currency in bills; the Greek letter for alpha; the words "The Chrononhotonthologos Man"; a cat, the incomplete group of words "——-—- your rocker!"; a table setting that included a prominent frankfurter and a jar; and last, four zebras singing in unison, "We don’t want to ‘zzzz!" After a moment of reflection, I had the complete sentence and I related it in detail while having the others follow on the drawing: HYDE L EYE KE TWO DOugh A CAREY CAT YOU’RE OFF MUSTARD ZEBRAS. And I repeated fluently, I’d like to do a caricature of Mister Debarras.
One finds this mixture of the "simple as ABC with the quintessential" (to quote Michel Leiris’s memorable definition) as either childish or brilliantly inventive. A Rousselian finds both attitudes acceptable.
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 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.
And yet his characters—some of the most inventive in all twentieth–century literature—are elevated above the robot level with a few deft strokes of characterization. Take the unforgettable episode concerning the painting adventures of sexy Louise Montalescot (one of whose many singularities derives from a phonetic distortion of aiguillettes (slices) á canard (duck) into aiguillettes (shoulder braid of a uniform) á canard (false notes in music), thus supplying Roussel with her musical shoulder braid). Over the span of several pages we discover that she is a botanical explorer travelling with a younger brother, "the object of her warmest affection"; she has charm and allure, is both beautiful and captivating; she possesses "splendid fair hair, which she allowed to fall in natural curls below the small forage cap worn jauntily over one ear." She’s adopted male attire for the tropics, specifically an officer’s uniform. Blessed with a serious demeanour, she yet preaches free love. None of these details is dwelt upon (in many ways they’re as cursory as stage directions), but bit by bit throughout the narrative they are offered as clues to our protagonist’s persona: they leave us with an impression rather than a portrait, but it’s enough to make us care about the characters and about what they’re going to do next. And what Louise Montalescot does next is create a painting machine, a photo-mechanical contraption whose functioning is facilitated by the use of a rare tropical oil. Set in motion, it produces an unbelievably accurate and artistically satisfying facsimile of the garden arranged before it. No wonder Duchamp and Picabia, among numerous visual artists, extol this particular episode as one of the seminal turning points in their own lives. The whole book has a similar visual impact, like an illuminated manuscript patiently unscrolled by a professorial hand.
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.
Roussel’s world, as portrayed in the two novels, is almost soundproof and virtually devoid of dialogue, with only the whirr of an aerostat or the presumed clatter from the blades of a hydraulic wheel to interrupt the mime. One suspects that almost as an act of revenge Roussel felt compelled to follow his two novels with two plays, The Star on the Forehead in 1925, followed two years later by Dust of Suns. These are plays in which people can’t stop talking... or is that babbling? Whatever it is, it’s more than mere verbiage they spout. Their speeches act as the plot’s propellent. Anecdotes are batted back and forth between characters like shuttlecocks, cleverly disguising the fact that a single narrator could conceivably deliver them as a monologue. Hilarious and deeply involving though both may be, these remain plays better read on the page than endured on the stage.
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.» - Trevor Winkfield
Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Edited by Trevor Winkfield, Introduction by John Ashbery. Exact Change; Revised edition, 2005.«Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), next-door neighbor of Marcel Proust, can be described without exaggeration as the most eccentric writer of the twentieth century. His unearthly style based on elaborate linguistic riddles and puns fascinated the Surrealists, above all Duchamp, but also writers as diverse as Gide, Robbe-Grillet, and Foucault (author of a book-length study of Roussel). The title essay of this collection is the key to Roussel’s method, and it is accompanied by selections from all his major works of fiction, drama, and poetry, translated by his New York School admirers John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and Trevor Winkfield. Ashbery writes that Roussel’s work is "like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace… we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret."»
«You need to know the work of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) to make sense not only of many contemporary French writers but also contemporary American novelists like Harry Mathews and Gilbert Sorrentino and poets like John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.
Roussel's writings themselves are exotic and quirky. In his lifetime they attracted Dadaists and Surrealists - though Roussel was unaware of their aesthetics-and there's a superficial resemblance between some of them and the novels of Ronald Firbank written at the same time, but they more closely resemble the works of his followers, like Mathews's early novels, Kenneth Koch's novel The Red Robins and his narrative poems, and Sorrentino's recent novels. In France, the nouveaux romanciers adapted his tendency to give long, detailed descriptions of inanimate objects and to allow the imaginative manipulation of language to generate form and content, a practice later followed by the OuLiPo school. For his influence alone Roussel deserves to be read, and this nicely designed anthology is the perfect introduction to his work.» - Steven Moore
«How I Wrote Certain of My Books collects a variety of Roussel's work, including the (in)famous explanatory text that gives the collection its title.
First comes an introduction by John Ashbery - indeed, the introduction by John Ashbery, the piece that he wrote in 1961 and first published in Portfolio and ARTnews Annual in 1962. and has been flogging ever since. Is it the most recycled and oft-used contemporary essay currently floating around ? Perhaps not, but sometimes it sure seems that way. (Reading Michel Foucault's study of Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, we find there... the same piece serving as an introduction.)
The title piece in the collection is a document that was published only after Roussel's death, a literary testament revealing some of what Roussel did in many of his works. His "very special method" mainly involves taking words that sound similar, or that have two different meanings, and building up a literary work based on this. Ashbery discusses it, as does Mark Ford in his excellent Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams and as do Michel Foucault and many other Roussel-commentators. Still, Roussel's own explanation is quite detailed and clearly put and gives readers a good idea of what was involved - and provides many examples.
As with practically everything about Roussel's writing, something is lost in translation. Specifically, the double-meanings can only be explained with reference to the French original, which are fortunately all included. The non-French speaking reader might not find all this quite so exciting, but Roussel's method and results are perversely fascinating even as presented here, translated and all.
How I Wrote Certain of My Books is the seminal Rousselian text - but since it has been so discussed and dissected in the secondary literature (see Ford and Foucault and the rest) isn't all that new. It's still worthwhile, and a nice thing to have access to - but there's as much value in this collection in the other pieces found here. They're largely merely excerpts, regrettably, - tiny pieces of Roussel's often massive.
There's John Ashbery's translation of the first chapter of Impressions of Africa - barely ten pages that give only a taste of Roussel's odd prose work. The twenty pages from Locus Solus translated by Harry Mathews already offer more temptation: the Jules Verne-influenced world introduced here seems to hold considerable promise.
Then comes - again translated by Mathews - the fifth act of one of Roussel's dramatic extravaganzas, The Dust of Suns, café scenes with typical Rousselian dialogue - banal, mysterious, somehow grand.
Then follows a small slice of perhaps the most impressive Roussel-text, New Impressions of Africa, with Kenneth Koch's translation of Canto III. Ashbery warned of the "hiccoughing parenthetical passages" to be found there, and even this excerpt offers examples of the technique - shell upon shell, like a set of Russian wood-dolls (except that Roussel of course offers considerably more surprise under each layer - and less connexion between them). In daunting verse, it's all very different from the earlier prose - Impressions of Africa. But the brief excerpt gives only an... impression of the work as a whole.
The longest section is that of Documents to Serve as an Outline, translated by Ashbery. A variety of pieces... one hesitates to call them stories, though they are, they give a good idea of Roussel's imagination (if one can call it that) and narrative tone and approach. It remains fascinating. Laughable, often, yet fascinating.
How I Wrote Certain of My Books is an excellent introduction to the works of Roussel. There's too little, of course - it only offers barely more than a taste - but from Ashbery's introduction through various notes and annotations there is a rich supporting apparatus that allows even the Roussel neophyte to... appreciate what the master (or fool, if you prefer) was doing. Fascinating stuff.» - The Complete Review
Raymond Roussel, New Impressions of Africa, Trans. by Ian Monk (Atlas Press, 2003)"Raymond Roussel: poet, novelist, neurasthenic, dandy, drug addict, probable suicide, above all an eccentric whose immense riches allowed him to indulge his most outrageous whims, but who spent most of his life secreted in his darkened study producing works whose strangeness remains unsurpassed.
And: “New Impressions of Africa is probably this strange writer’s strangest work” according to the translator of this first English edition of Roussel’s final creative work. It’s a poem, but a poem unlike any published before or since. Its structure resembles hypertext, endless successions of afterthoughts separated by ever growing clumps of brackets which plunge the reader into a labyrinth at once banal and vertiginous. It took him 12 years to compose, or as he himself calculated, approximately 19,110 hours. The book was illustrated by an artist Roussel commissioned through a private-detective agency so as not to have to show him the text he was illustrating. The pictures are trapped inside uncut pages, and one of them depicts a man peering into the uncut pages of a book.
This is Roussel’s masterpiece. It prompted Raymond Queneau to declare that Roussel “combined a poet’s logic with the mathematician’s delirium”. Marcel Duchamp called him “a great poet” and freely acknowledged his influence, Salvador Dali loved the pictures!
A beautiful edition that reproduces the format of the original with its special uncut pages, it includes the French text opposite the English, and Roussel’s instructions to the despondent Zo. The translation is by Ian Monk with the assistance of Harry Mathews, both members of the Oulipo, a (mainly French) group of writers and mathematicians.
Ian Monk won the 2003 Scott-Moncrieff Prize for literary translation from French."
Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa. Trans. by Mark Polizzotti, Dalkey Archive Press, 2011.
In a mythical African land, some shipwrecked and uniquely talented passengers stage a grand gala to entertain themselves and their captor, the great chieftain Talou. In performance after bizarre performance—starring, among others, a zither-playing worm, a marksman who can peel an egg at fifty yards, a railway car that rolls on calves' lungs, and fabulous machines that paint, weave, and compose music—Raymond Roussel demonstrates why it is that André Breton termed him "the greatest mesmerizer of modern times." But even more remarkable than the mind-bending events Roussel details—as well as their outlandish, touching, or tawdry backstories—is the principle behind the novel's genesis, a complex system of puns and double-entendres that anticipated (and helped inspire) such movements as Surrealism and Oulipo. Newly translated and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, this edition of Impressions of Africa vividly restores the humor, linguistic legerdemain, and conceptual wonder of Raymond Roussel's magnum opus.
A divine lyrical kingdom of waking life impressionism. An ecstatic slingshot that flails us forward into an exotic world entranced by mythical imagination; plump with dimensional words that unfurl before us like pop-up labyrinths of surrealist exaltation. An equation of mesmeric pulse; a compound tablet of organic splendor. One of the most stimulating blasts of imaginative lyricism in print. An enlightened W.S. Burroughs with the heart of Roald Dahl. - BiblioMagico
It’s fairly easy to summarize Roussel’s Impressions of Africa: ca. 1900, some French people set sail for South America, but a storm ruins their ship and blows them toward Africa, where after they drift ashore they’re captured by an African kind who decides to hold them for ransom, sending a messenger to France stating that if he doesn’t receive the ransom, the survivors will all be killed. While everyone’s waiting for a response (which is never really in doubt—the ransom will be paid and everyone will return to France) the African king decides to hold a coronation ceremony, and to make it interesting he invites everyone to present some spectacle, deciding that whoever presents the best spectacle will win some prize. The spectacles are performed, the cat battle wins, the coronation wraps up, and finally the ransom arrives from France and everyone returns home. None of this plot stuff happens, however, until the second half of the book. The first half, chapter after chapter, is entirely given over to describing in intricate and context-less details the individual spectacles. Characters are named as if we know them already and without any explanation; some characters are executed beautifully though we have no idea of their crimes. If you want explanations or reasons for any of the spectacular objects or events or performances described throughout the first half of the book, it would be very difficult to get through; but the spectacles themselves are so interesting, so elaborately and minutely described and so wonderful and fantastic that if you give yourself over to these descriptions the book is very fun. If this first part of the book relies on the reader accepting that the spectacles are interesting in and of themselves, though, the second half provides all the back story, presumably satisfying the resistant reader who wants to know what all these things mean.
The thing is, the second half of the book is actually where the book becomes intolerably boring. Contrary to one of Jameson’s comments about Roussel—“his unimaginably detailed and minute description of objects—an absolutely infinite process without principle or thematic interest of any kind—forces the reader to work laboriously through one sentence after another, world without end” (Postmodernism 73)—I found the real labor of the book to be in trying to make it through the second half, where the endless descriptions give way to chapter after chapter explaining the shipwreck and the various other histories that led each character to appear in the coronation, along with (usually) their individual discoveries of the objects or spectacles which have already been described to us. What we find is that where we might expect such back stories to fill in emotional resonances behind some of the scenes, instead the only parts of the second half of the book that rise to the same level of interestingness as the first are the moments when these back stories branch off into their own elaborate descriptions of completely irrelevant objects or events. It is precisely in those parts of the stories that should ostensibly provide meaning for the earlier spectacles the book becomes intolerably boring.
I mention Jameson because I happened to be slogging through the second half of Impressions of Africa just when I was also reading Jameson’s postmodernism book, and because one easy reading of Roussel would be that his narrative techniques radicalize the surface—an essentially postmodern move, according to Jameson—I was curious to note that Jameson makes several offhand comments about Roussel. Unsurprisingly, Jameson does appear to view Roussel as a sort of modernist seed of postmodernism, thought it’s Jameson’s location of the difficulty of Roussel in his endless descriptions that got me really thinking. Because what potentially makes these descriptions difficult—and what conversely makes them so fun to read—seems not to do with anything inherently boring or difficult about the, but rather with a reader’s potential willingness to disregard narrative’s normal creation of desire for the meaning behind events.
I think a typical Jamesonian reading of the radicalization of surface in Roussel would link it to the way surfaceness in postmodernism is supposed to tear discourse from its historical boundedness, contributing to the peculiar late capitalist difficulty of mapping our situational within material history. Roussel would either then prefigure or perhaps inaugurate the postmodern invitation to enjoy this unboundedness—enjoy the surface in all its lack of meaning or material determination. A more sympathetic reading, and the one I most often considered while reading Impressions of Africa, is that this is a critique (for better or worse) of the form of meaning-making by consultation of historical narrative—whatever is explained by our awareness of the material conditions that bring about a beautiful or interesting surface, the explanation fails to exhaust the meaning of that surface. But, then, I’m not sure it’s actually a critique. After all, every last one of the wonders of the first half of the book is wholly and adequately explained to the reader in the second half. What really happens is not that Roussel critiques the possibility of explaining the meaning behind these spectacles so much as he deflates the potential for these explanations to be interesting. In fact, part of what’s so boring about these explanations is how totally and simply they account for every aspect of the elaborate spectacles.
Part of Sianne Ngai’s account of the interesting as an aesthetic category has to do with the way declaring something interesting is always in some sense asking after why it is interesting, a call for justification that it is interesting. In this way, “the aesthetic of the interesting thus has the capacity to produce knowledge” in a way that is unique among aesthetic categories (815). Impressions of Africa seems very much to play with the way the interesting works on this level. What is either exhilarating or frustrating about the first half of the book is the way it confounds our desire to have these spectacles explained to us (a desire partially created by the fact that they’re presented to us as part of a larger narrative we at first get almost nothing of). By confounding this desire, the reader is invited to suspect that their question “why is this interesting?” is the twin question of “what does this mean?” or “what is the cause of this?” so that explanation and justification of interestingness become conflated. The latter of those questions is then answered to an almost exaggerated level of certainty, while because of the absence of the interesting that we find in this explanation the former begins to take on more importance even as the reader increasingly realizes the impossibility of satisfactorily answering it. To the extent that the interesting really does raise questions of justification or promise some production of knowledge in the pursuit of those questions, what is troubling and exciting about Roussel here is that he makes us aware that conventional narrative guides us to expect this knowledge will be looked for in a certain way, and forces us to confront that we have little idea as to really what sort of knowledge we should expect interestingness to lead us to.
This is complicated, though, by our awareness after the publication of How I Wrote Certain of My Books that Roussel’s composition method prefigures much of contemporary procedural and conceptual poetics. The question then might be to what extent this awareness satisfies the search for justification and/or the production of knowledge inherent in first finding Roussel’s work interesting. Is it that the material conditions of composition are what is interesting and therefore meaningful and Roussel’s little play at exhausting explanation is really just a ruse? - Marcus Oralis
Imagine an extravagant pageant during which a marksman shoots off the top of a soft-boiled egg, cats compete in a game of Prisoner’s Base, and a uniquely talented worm plays the zither—all presented as commonplace occurrences by an unnamed narrator. In 1910, French writer Raymond Roussel self-published Impressions of Africa (Impressions d’Afrique), a carnivalesque travelogue that features the passengers of the Lynceus, a vessel shipwrecked by a hurricane in the fictional land of Ponukele on a journey from Marseilles to Buenos Aires. To entertain themselves while waiting for a release ransom to be paid to the local drag-clad Emperor Talou, the crew of serendipitously skilled performers (including a historian, a ballerina, a fencing champion, a pyrotechnic, and an ichthyologist, among others), known collectively as the “Incomparables,” stage a gala. Readers should be prepared for an Africa unlike any they would likely visit in reality. Although Roussel travelled extensively (he cited India, Australia, Asia, America, and Tahiti), he claimed that “from all these travels I never took anything for my books. It seems to me that this is worth mentioning, since it clearly shows just how much imagination accounts for everything in my works.” A devotee of both Jules Verne and Victor Hugo, Roussel rather used the idea of Africa—a place to him as fanciful and unimaginable as possible—as a setting and an organizing device for his most imaginative of tales.
Born in Paris in 1877, Roussel was a neighbor and contemporary of Proust (with whom he corresponded). A spirited eccentric, his antics included traveling around Europe in a whimsical roulotte, or mobile home, and never wearing the same collar twice. He was a wealthy, unrestrained, and avidly self-promoting dandy with visions of grandeur for his perpetually failing literary career. He never quite recovered from the flop of his first novel, La Doublure (1897), eventually growing addicted to barbiturates and later committing suicide in Palermo in 1933.
In a posthumously published document in 1935, Roussel explains the complex process through which he generated Impressions in hopes of rescuing his writing from obscurity. Translated into English (by Trevor Winkfield in 1975) as “How I Wrote Certain of My Books,” the essay explains a Rousselian technique of “invention based on the pairing of two words taken in different senses.” Its genesis was Roussel’s story, “Among the Blacks.” He infamously substituted “pillard” for “billard” in the following phrase, “Les letters du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard,” changing its meaning from “The white cushions of the old billiard table” to “The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer.” Roussel was fascinated by the metagram—how switching one letter could so fundamentally change the meaning of the line and the kinds of unanticipated stories that might emerge when the two lines become the basis for a narrative. The resulting series of stories painstakingly detailed within stories—Roussel infamously agonized over each word—would later influence writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Perec, but they won few readers over during Roussel’s lifetime. Roussel’s permutations affect structure, as well; Impressions opens with a sequence of delightfully madcap performances, but only about halfway through the novel does the reader discover the circumstances that have produced them.
Translating such writing is an especially arduous enterprise, but Mark Polizzotti—publisher and editor in chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and translator-extraordinaire of more than thirty books, including those by Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, Gustave Flaubert, Maurice Roche, and Didier von Cauwelaert—is an ideal candidate for conducting the experiments of the writer he calls “the consummate verbal prestidigitator”; Polizzotti’s own novel S: Semaines de Suzanne, published in English in 1999,was a collaboration with several others including Harry Mathews, whose own formal experiments have been influenced by those of Roussel. Although John Ashbery translated a selection of Roussel’s novel in 1962, the only full, published English translation until now has been that by Lindy Foord and Rayner Heppenstall (1966), also a notable accomplishment. Yet it is Roussel’s consuming attention to detail that Polizzotti claims is the focus of his version. Polizzotti’s offering is shorter, simpler, more restrained, more efficient than those that have come before, capturing even more effectively the novel’s eerie, curious ability to treat the impossible as banal.
However fantastical, no European novel about Africa is truly apolitical, and Impressions of Africa contains its own racist particulars: Talou’s face of “savage energy,” his daughter’s “crossed eyes . . . veiled by opaque leukoma,” a twelve-year-old violently stabbing a rodent with a stylus, etc. Polizzotti claims in his introduction that “the Africa of these Impressions is not, to be sure, the Africa of geopolitical fact, but neither is it entirely a product of Roussel’s fancy.” As Polizzotti goes on to remind us, “European . . . expansion throughout the Dark Continent … helped foster the widespread Western notion of Africa as that alien place where weird practices, unspeakable horrors, and unheard-of flora and fauna lurked at every bend in the jungle path.” That Africa is Roussel’s choice location for such an exotic tale is certainly a side effect of colonialism, but it also serves as a commentary on European attitudes. Talou, after all, “boasted of having European blood in his veins,” raising the question of whether or not his subversive intimidation is strictly African or a result of European contact. The surreality of the worlds Roussel invents just might be strange enough to surprise readers into real critical perspectives on global relations.
Until recently, Roussel has had a limited but cultish English-language audience, but Polizzotti’s offering coincides with a new translation of Roussel’s long poem, New Impressions of Africa, by Mark Ford, who also authored the only lengthy biography of Roussel in English, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000). (Before that the most significant attempt at the same was Heppenstall’s 1966 study.) Polizzotti’s remarkable achievement is a welcome addition to this small but growing body of work on Roussel and serves as a reminder of an author and a novel too often neglected, and far too brilliant to be missed. - Stefanie Sobelle
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