Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), an Idiot Savant Without Idiocy

The literary oeuvre of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) delivers artificiality in excelsis. Roussel, who derived none of his striking creations from experience, wrote unimpeded by introspection or sentiment, unhampered by moral reflection or facile realism. A systematic approach to craft aided and tempered his fecundity, but his reverent peers?the surrealist poets?never seemed to grasp this. While the Freud-sloshed avant-garde haphazardly trolled their mental evanescence, Roussel alone?cocooned by wealth, bourgeois taste and neurasthenia?understood that the ideal delirium should be intensely organized. This conviction sired a freakish pageant of marvels, unique to the literature of his time and destined for a singular nook in the hall of perversities.

Roussel specialized in detailed descriptions of peculiar artifacts?like the celebrated statue made from whalebone corset parts poised on railroad links made from calf's lungs in the novel Impressions d'Afrique (1910)?and hyper-discursive narratives or conceits that envelop an initial point like onion skins, like the dizzyingly concentric parenthetical digressions (inside digressions (inside digressions (etc.))) found in the long poem Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique (1932). In Locus Solus, his central masterpiece, Roussel orchestrated both features within a deliberately episodic structure: a single afternoon's exposition of an array of fantastic objects on the estate of the inventor Canterel, who provides a thorough history for each curio. Here we perceive Roussel's basic paradigm: an image or idea generating supplemental material, which, though seemingly infinite in scope, will always resolve itself with the original subject.

This format is shaped by Roussel's method of composition?his procédé, as outlined in his essay "Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres" (published posthumously at his request). The procédé, an elaborate word game that exploited the homonymic nature of French words, determined the content of Roussel's texts. Example: he changed the phrase Demoiselle à prétendant into demoiselle (pavement-laying device) à reître en dents (soldier of fortune in teeth). From this he derived, for Locus Solus, a balloon-powered paving apparatus that makes a mosaic (depicting a scene from the tale of Aag, a German soldier) out of extracted teeth.

Matching his inventive prowess with his determination to integrate the procédé-generated elements, Roussel created legions of memorable images, like Lelgoualch, a one-legged Breton who plays a flute made from his own tibia (Impressions d'Afrique); a seaweed that retains images via photosynthesis and projects them when in bloom; and Bertha, the revoltingly translucent "half-human, half-vegetal" offspring of a super-fertile Texan woman impregnated with pollen (both Locus Solus). All are presented not as fantastic trifles, but in clear, immaculate and erudite prose. Never once does this prose drop its deadpan tone or acknowledge its subject's fundamental absurdity.

Mark Ford's new study, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, is a skillful and thorough introduction to Roussel?not only to enjoying his work but also to understanding the procédé. Ford had access to many of Roussel's manuscripts, including his early, unfinished epic poems. In these he found literally thousands of pages of obsessive description and endless digressions from the main plots. Ford calls this prolixity "compulsive," and that's not overstating it: Act II of the 7000-line La Seine contains nearly 400 named characters, all spewing banal small talk. Ford's book demonstrates that Roussel developed his techniques as an attempt to somehow control his manic verbosity. With the procédé, Roussel believed he had found a suitable vehicle to manifest what he called la gloire: the self-evident glory of his that would, in time, eclipse Victor Hugo and Napoleon.

The public, however, had other ideas about Roussel's work when it first came out, and critics were either hostile or confused. His first editions barely sold any copies; in fact, he had to pay his publishing house to print and distribute them. More of his immense wealth was squandered on lavish theatrical adaptations of his novels and original plays. None of this could persuade the bourgeois multitude (whose tastes he shared, and whose adulation he coveted) of Roussel's gloire. Only the contemporary avant-garde?the surrealists, whose work he professed not to understand?were enthusiastic, enough so to show up in gangs at his plays and loudly defend them from hecklers.

Nonetheless, the gulf between Roussel's writing and the surrealists' is tremendous, and one wonders how the movement might have evolved had he disclosed his procédé a decade earlier. Though deeply in awe of Roussel's achievements, the surrealists approached literature antithetically, via the "mediumistic" immediacy of automatic writing. André Breton distrusted revision as would a lazy schoolboy, equating "rationalistic refinement" with "the old house of correction." Likewise, the gifted Robert Desnos, though an adroit punster and Roussel's most vocal advocate, was partial to off-the-cuff epiphanies and undervarnished hypnagogia.

Despite the fresh impetus of Freud, the automatic poets' angle was not new. There had long existed a muddled, sub-Romantic notion that literary imagination and methodical strategies don't mesh. The idea would reach its nadir in the gushings of the Beats, with Ginsberg's aim to "confess out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought." Yet to repudiate technique in the manipulation of language is to ignore that language is itself a technique. Creative writing needn't be provisional effusion, but it is by definition constructed and artificial. The author of Locus Solus, though labeled naif by critics and admirers, understood this profoundly.

Roussel was not spontaneous; he was fastidious. In the rigid structures of his procédé we find a vastly superior vehicle for delineating the grotesque, for making the irrational concrete, than Breton's "pure psychic automatism." Roussel's poetic fabrications possess a weight and tangibility that ephemeral dream-gleanings cannot match. They are at times poignant in a manner that, recalling symbolist evasion tactics, emerges unaided by pathos. Consider the subject of the fifth chapter of Locus Solus, Lucius Egroizard, who was driven insane by the sight of drunken brigands trampling his infant daughter to death: Not only does Egroizard compulsively sculpt lightweight gold figurines that repeat the brigands' lethal jig in midair, but the very hairs on his nearly bald head periodically detach themselves to mimic the dance. Egroizard experiments with an array of strange objects, until he constructs a Goldbergian contraption that produces a sound identical to his daughter's voice (Ford's translation):

"It's you, my Gillette ? They haven't killed you ? You're here ? next to me ? Speak, my darling." And between these broken phrases, the fragment of the word, which he constantly reproduced, returned again and again, like a response.

Speaking in hushed tones, Canterel led us quietly away, so as to allow this salutary crisis to run its course in peace.

This precisely rationalized lunacy, presented in a stark, positivist light, overshadows the fervent but fleeting metaphors found even in stronger surrealist poems like Desnos' "De La Rose De Marbre À La Rose De Fer."

Despite his singularity, historians and biographers tend to compare Roussel as a character to Proust (both were homosexual, wealthy, hermetic, neurasthenic and self-published) and as an artist to Henri "le Douanier" Rousseau, whose undersophisticated technique was lauded as modern by Apollinaire and Picasso. Roussel does present a nice inversion of Proust, as he itemized imaginary content to recapture the emotion of la gloire, while Proust reproduced emotional states themselves (through a fictional filter) to recapture lost time.

But while his naivete might recall Rousseau, Roussel's artistic accomplishments did match his goals. Rousseau aspired to old-school academic painting; he wanted to be another Gérôme or Ingres. What fascinated his admirers was the stylistic by-product of his failure to achieve this. Roussel, who referred to his own genius as "powerfully tempered by classicism," was a master of his chosen form, writing poetry in precise alexandrines and prose in "irreproachable" French. He knew what he was doing; he simply did not understand all of its implications. This is true of all great artists to varying extents. It appears that he viewed his Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique not as an innovation in structure, but as the ingenious equivalent of a "crossword puzzle," as Ford reasonably presumes. So Roussel may qualify as an "outsider" artist, but he was one of the highest order?an idiot savant without idiocy. Paradoxically, it would seem that one undisputed area of Roussel's naivete?his hubristic self-confidence?was a literary advantage. "To leave these [manuscript] papers lying about would have sent out rays of light as far as China," he declared to his clueless psychiatrist. Ford also recounts the article Roussel ran in three papers plugging Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique, supplying for an illustration "a picture of himself painted by Madeleine Lemaire when he was about four, as if readers were to discern the predestined powers of the adult artist in the features of the child."

In this case, Roussel was clearly deluded. But this strange arrogance protected his work's delicious impassivity. As a writer, Roussel did not labor to astonish his readers: despite repeated failures, he ceaselessly assumed that, given enough promulgation, the public would instantly recognize la gloire in his relentlessly equivocal work. His creative energies were instead allocated to perfecting, without regard for sensationalism, his uniquely affectless mechanisms. Cloying sublimity-crescendos would only dilute the harsh, elegiac quality of his best passages.

Many of surrealism's visual artists had a keener interest in craft than their literary peers, and it's notable that Roussel's influence was better digested by the likes of Max Ernst (whose work Roussel purchased) and Marcel Duchamp, whose seminal Large Glass (1912-'23) was directly influenced by a performance of the dramatized Impressions d'Afrique. ("There was nothing spontaneous about it," Duchamp would later remark about the Large Glass, suggesting that he had assimilated Roussel's meticulous and fully conscious approach.)

The first significant Rousselian impact on literature would come a good two decades after his death. The 1950s saw the emergence of the nouveau romanciers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, et al.), the Oulipans (Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews, et al.), and the "New York" School of Poets?especially John Ashbery?all of whom esteemed Roussel not so much for his synthetic menagerie but for his methods and the precise neutrality of his voice. For Ashbery, Roussel "tried to raise the word to a new power." Robbe-Grillet admired the "demented acuity" of Roussel's detailed, pretext-less narratives. These writers might have baffled Roussel even more than the surrealists, but their sophisticated concerns demonstrate the range and extent of this obscure artist's influence on modern literature.

Still, the emphasis on language has periodically raised doubts about Roussel's ability to survive translation. Naturally, the metatheses of the procédé must be explained to be understood in any non-French edition of Roussel. But they aren't obvious puns in French, either, and Mark Ford has pointed out that Roussel's contemporaries were not aware of the wordplay that went into them: "[Playwright] Roger Vitrac was perhaps on the trail, as was [critic] Jean Ferry, but when Roussel revealed it, it was a complete revelation to all his readers?such as there were."

If one element in Roussel resists translation, it is the exotic flatness, the exact yet manic timbre of the prose itself. His painstaking effort to use the fewest words possible yields an ultra-compressed linguistic structure, thus counterpoising his endlessly diffuse subjects. The result: a mechanical yet fiendishly vibrant monotone, suggestive of a precocious insect spinning narratives in place of webs. Especially in his final works, Roussel's singly pitched, inexhaustible voice recalls Alfred Jarry's Père Ubu persona at its most alien. This polished and inspired drone eludes even the best English translations.

Yet Roussel demands our interest outside of the syntactic texture, the puns and the lexical mutations. His objective of complete artificiality was legendary: he boasted to have drawn none of his creations from real life (having spanned the globe in a custom-made motorized caravan, but rarely leaving its curtained interior). His pursuit of unreality extended from mere description of things to the very governing principles of his hermetic worlds. There is nothing "transcendental" in Roussel?the author's creative procedures are the final revelation.

"Unnervingly," Ford notes, "Roussel's writing makes no distinction between miraculous feats and hideous torments: each episode, amazing or appalling, fulfills a pre-existing linguistic conundrum and is accordingly radiant with its own perfect success." Character, values, subjectivity, feeling?such conventional requisites are only ancillary tools for Roussel. When present, they exist solely as cogs in the ideational clockwork, functioning strictly along the procédé's stipulations.

Ultimately, this conveys not constraint but laudably disturbing liberation. Roussel's systems ensure endless possibilities, like a precision-cut lens for viewing infinity. Anything can happen, but his scrupulous controls preclude juvenile escapism. What Roussel has given us is an absolute art, derived from a supra-moral schematic: a bottomless grotto crammed with crystalline reveries, each superbly modeled, though demented; each exquisitely cold but for the fever of fierce invention.