Raymond Roussel (French:[ʁɛmɔ̃ʁusɛl]; 20 January 1877 – 14 July 1933) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, musician, andchess enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within20th century French literature, including theSurrealists,Oulipo, and the authors of thenouveau roman.
Roussel was born in Paris, the third and last child in his family, with a brother named Georges and a sister named Germaine. In 1893, at age 15, he was admitted to theParis Conservatoire for piano. A year later, he inherited a substantial fortune from his deceased father and began to write poetry to accompany his musical compositions. At age 17, he wroteMon Âme, a long poem published three years later inLe Gaulois. By 1896, he had commenced editing his long poemLa Doublure when he suffered a mental crisis. After the poem was published on 10 June 1897 and was completely unsuccessful, Roussel began to see the psychiatristPierre Janet. In subsequent years, his inherited fortune allowed him to publish his own works and mount luxurious productions of his plays. He wrote and published some of his most important work between 1900 and 1914, and then from 1920 to 1921 traveled around the world. He continued to write for the next decade, but when his fortune finally gave out, he made his way to a hotel inPalermo, where he died of abarbiturate overdose in 1933, aged 56. He is buried inPère-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Roussel's most famous works areNew Impressions of Africa andLocus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymicpuns. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text,How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For examplebillard (billiard) andpillard (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. Although Roussel does state in his posthumous bookHow I Wrote Certain of My Novels that "It goes without saying that this method was nowhere employed in my other worksLa Doublure, La Vue andNouvelles Impressions d'Afrique"; and here could be added the two playsL'étoile au front andLa Poussière de soleil.
John Ashbery summarizedLocus Solus thus in his introduction toMichel Foucault'sDeath and the Labyrinth: "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head ofDanton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curioustableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine,' a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a single sentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep. From time to time, a footnote refers to a further poem containing its own depths of brackets.This impressive nest of brackets carries an assertion — or a recommendation ? — buried by Roussel within a 644 alexandrine poem. InA study on Raymond Roussel,[1]Jean Ferry suggested the notion of a hidden message and transcribed the succession of brackets of Cantos II into the alphabet invented by the painterSamuel Morse : considering each bracket as a dot and the included text as a dash. But due to the missing spaces which separate letters the ensemble of dots and dashes as well as a concealed message remained an hypothesis... until it was deciphered byJean-Max Albert (another painter), revealing (at least partially) the rousselienne formula, which can't be fortuitous : « RELIVE YOUR DREAMS AWAKE » ( Revis tes rêves en éveil).[2][3]
Perhaps not surprisingly, Roussel was unpopular during his life and critical reception of his works was almost unanimously negative. Nevertheless, he was admired by theSurrealist group and otheravant-garde writers, particularlyMichel Leiris,André Breton, andMarcel Duchamp.
He began to be rediscovered in the late 1950s by theOulipo andAlain Robbe-Grillet. His most direct influence in the Anglophonic world was on the New York School of poets;John Ashbery,Harry Mathews,James Schuyler andKenneth Koch briefly edited a magazine calledLocus Solus after his novel. French theoristMichel Foucault's only book-length work of literary criticism is on Roussel.
French philosopherGilles Deleuze uses Raymond Roussel's works as one of many examples ofrepetition in his 1968 workDifference and Repetition.
A comprehensive exhibition of Roussel's achievements entitled "Locus Solus" was exhibited within the Fundação de Serralves inPorto opening on 24 March 2012. Special attention was granted to his personal connections withMan Ray,Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp, who observed that Roussel was "he who pointed the way". Indeed, Duchamp claims in his writingsThe Trouble with Great Art that “it was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my large glass The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”.
References toNew Impressions of Africa are central to the science-fiction novelThe Embedding byIan Watson (winner of thePrix Apollo in 1975). Roussel (or a version of him) is a major character in the novelThe Vorrh byB. Catling.
In 2016,The Raymond Roussel Society was founded in New York byJohn Ashbery,Michel Butor, Joan Bofill-Amargós,Miquel Barceló,Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.
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