Context
Reading Raymond Roussel
Trevor Winkfield
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 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.
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.
