The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford. Foreword by John Ashbery
James Sallis

Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. Foreword by John Ashbery. Cornell Univ. Press, 2000. 312 pp. $29.95.

The famous procédé of Raymond Roussel, with its deformation of first line to last (“Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard” [letters of the alphabet in white chalk on the billiard table] becoming, for instance, “les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard” [letters posted by a white man concerning the hordes of the old plunderer]), finally engenders not binocular vision, as its creator probably intended, but instead an ongoing double vision. These stories, poems, and novels never become familiar to us; try as we might, we can never bring them into focus. The same might be said of their originator. Fabulously wealthy, fabulously productive, on a long downward glide and virtually forgotten, he skitters about the surface of modern literature, taken ashore in turn by such unlikely bands of sailors as the surrealists and art-as-artifice champions Oulipo. To grapple with art as Roussel did requires at once a great arrogance and great belief in the enterprise. What can one say, after all, of a man who writes a sixty-page description, in exacting verse, of the beach scene on a pen-holder? Until recently there’s been little enough information on Roussel in any language, and almost none in English. Slowly, by way of John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Atlas Press, and others, the work itself has become available. Now Cornell University Press and Mark Ford offer this marvelous compendium: part homage, part biography, part bones and spine upon which the corpus will be reconstructed. Roussel, a lifelong worshipper of Jules Verne and Pierre Loti, with considerable innocence and charm seems to have been utterly oblivious to the simple fact that what he wrote was not, could never be, commercial. He expected fame all his life and never got it—granting us all a grand bequest. [James Sallis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford. Foreword by John Ashbery James Sallis Mark Ford. Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams. Foreword by John Ashbery. Cornell Univ. Press, 2000. 312 pp. $29.95. The famous procédé of Raymond Roussel, with its deformation of first line to last (“Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard” [letters of the alphabet in white chalk on the billiard table] becoming, for instance, “les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard” [letters posted by a white man concerning the hordes of the old plunderer]), finally engenders not binocular vision, as its creator probably intended, but instead an ongoing double vision. These stories, poems, and novels never become familiar to us; try as we might, we can never bring them into focus. The same might be said of their originator. Fabulously wealthy, fabulously productive, on a long downward glide and virtually forgotten, he skitters about the surface of modern literature, taken ashore in turn by such unlikely bands of sailors as the surrealists and art-as-artifice champions Oulipo. To grapple with art as Roussel did requires at once a great arrogance and great belief in the enterprise. What can one say, after all, of a man who writes a sixty-page description, in exacting verse, of the beach scene on a pen-holder? Until recently there’s been little enough information on Roussel in any language, and almost none in English. Slowly, by way of John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, Atlas Press, and others, the work itself has become available. Now Cornell University Press and Mark Ford offer this marvelous compendium: part homage, part biography, part bones and spine upon which the corpus will be reconstructed. Roussel, a lifelong worshipper of Jules Verne and Pierre Loti, with considerable innocence and charm seems to have been utterly oblivious to the simple fact that what he wrote was not, could never be, commercial. He expected fame all his life and never got it—granting us all a grand bequest. [James Sallis]

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