Several Circles and Black Lines, one of Wassily Kandinsky's two-sided paintings
Raymond Roussel’s 1910 work, Impressions of Africa, has
popped up so frequently on the periphery of my awareness that before reading it
this summer I had already formed a view of it as singular, dense, “crazy” (as
one acquaintance described it) and above all, intimidating. Singular it may be,
but in other respects the book I’d constructed in my head was not at all the
one I found in my hands.
Impressions of Africa is a surprising, strange hybrid,
straddling novel, poem, and even travelogue, with obvious appeal to the
Surrealists yet a concentration of crisp, concrete images that puts it close to
modernist poetry. In fact, the book’s narrative shape - at least in its first
half - might have been replaced with a poetic list of discrete concepts and
images. There’s little in the way of plot and almost nothing in the way of
interiority or psychology. Roussel provides a setting – the vast central square
of the coastal village of Ejur in the mythological country of Ponukele in
equatorial West Africa – but it serves essentially as a vast stage set for a
seemingly unending series of rituals and performances, ranging from delightfully
absurd to appallingly cruel, in connection with the coronation of the country’s
new emperor, Talou VII. An unnamed European observer, one of many Europeans inexplicably
observing and participating in these events, serves as narrator, and his
recitation is as straightforward and detached as a spreadsheet, registering little
in the way of emotion, reaction or opinion.
Descriptions of these events go into exacting detail. This
somehow manages not to be boring, in part because so many of the performances
involve sequential steps and entertaining complications so much like Rube
Goldberg contraptions that the end purpose, however pointless, has nothing over
one’s fascination with the operation itself. If at times the narrator conveys these
involved accounts as unaffectedly as an instruction manual for an appliance, they
carry a similar fascination as with the awkward, blithely translated language
of some such manuals: whatever practical information one might glean becomes
secondary to the pleasure one obtains from the mesmerizing foreignness of the
writing.
I once heard Impressions of Africa described as
“hallucinatory.” This does not seem quite right. Though some of Roussel’s
performative rituals tend towards surrealistic, purely human productions - for
instance, a contralto whose tongue, divided into different sections, allows him
to sing all four parts of the “Frere Jacques” round by himself - others involve
schematic, mathematical devices and designs of delirious complexity, marked by
a combination of playfulness and an almost obsessive precision that calls to
mind the determinate, biomorphic shapes of Wassily Kandinsky, the machine-like
paintings of Roberto Matta or the playfully delicate, decisive lines of Paul
Klee’s “The Twittering Machine.” Roussel’s imagination in creating some of
these machines and demonstrations is prodigious; in one scene, he takes several
pages to describe a complex loom operated by numerous paddles that dip into a
river’s current and weave rich tableaux out of miraculously thin thread,
resulting in a scrolling visual narrative of Ponukele history and culture. Another
prefigures automatic painting by involving a multi-armed machine connected to a
photosensitive plate that, in response to light (and turning photography on its
head), causes the machine to execute a painting. Other acts appear primarily involved
with demonstrating physical phenomena (amplification, multiplication, friction,
gravity, volume displacement, for example) or biological processes (a good
number of animals, and not the usual circus variety, feature in the stunts).
Still others push beyond the bounds of credulity: a soft-boiled egg is peeled perfectly
by a marksman’s shots; a cart containing a whalebone statue of a man with a
spear thrust into his chest rolls on rails made of calves’ livers; a giant
earthworm, its peristaltic undulations successively blocking and unblocking holes
in the long glass vessel in which it lies in water, plays gypsy czárdás by producing drops that fall
upon the strings of a zither; there is a spinning pinwheel of tentacles, the
suction cups of which hold live, mewling, and apparently not very happy cats. I
have only begun. A significant number of these performances involve music. In
addition to the earthworm virtuoso and the aforementioned solo “Frere Jacques,”
the coronation features numerous other musical instruments, song recitals, and
curious tone-producing phenomena, including one in which a father’s voice
bounces off the bare chests of his six sons who have positioned themselves in a
meticulously determined geometric arrangement.
However enthralling such conceits may be, three hundred
pages of them might tax even the most patient reader; thus, nearly half way
through the book, at the conclusion of a day and a half of coronation, Impressions
of Africa suddenly switches gears. If the first half of the novel presents
a baffling chaos of inscrutable ceremonies and mystery concerning the Europeans’
presence in Ejur or what’s behind their role in these curious rituals, the
second half brings a controlled explanation. Roussel gives us an annotated list
of characters followed by background information to illuminate all that one has
witnessed. Some of this narrative helps fill in the plot – or rather, provides
one - revealing that the Europeans, shipwrecked off of Ponukele, await the
arrival of ransom from Europe to gain their freedom from Talou VII. The reason
for their performances and a detailed explication of each one follows. But this
exposition, like looking through the backside of a two-way mirror or having a
magician reveal his or her tricks, serves as something akin to a caption for an
image, providing meaning, altering our interpretation of what we have witnessed,
but retaining an uncertain, unstable quality. For a moment we’re seduced into a
rational explanation for the dazzling, magical and affronting events that have
unfolded before us. But Roussel’s backstories, constructed of anecdotes,
invented folklore, elaborate digressions and tales nested within other tales, form
a narrative as complex, imaginative and mystifying as the intricate designs of the
performances themselves, leaving us even more puzzled.
The novel’s two-part structure comes across as something like
one of those early Surrealist games such as “The Exquisite Corpse” or an
Oulipian experiment in which the task is first to imagine a bizarre ritual in an
exotic land then come up with a more bizarre story to explain it. Were it not
for the entrancingly disorienting effect of incomprehension in reading the
first part, one might even read these backstories first (one can imagine Impressions
of Africa published tête-bêche, like one of
those Ace Doubles mysteries that feature two novels bound together, each upside
down from the other).
It’s tempting to reduce Impressions of Africa to such
a simple, game-like formula, but there’s a lot more going on in this curious
narrative than the inventiveness of its conceits and its apparently infinitely
cyclic, Mobius strip structure. Translator Mark Polizzotti notes in his
introduction that even Roussel’s methods were of a cunning imaginative
complexity, at times built around intricate puns and word play. Though this
fascination with language is evident throughout Impressions of Africa
(texts appear everywhere, starting with the pediment of the stage on which the
words “The Incomparables Club” appear), Polizzotti has not attempted to
reproduce Roussel’s more esoteric linguistic games, noting that few if any French
readers even noticed his clever tricks until Roussel published a book on his own
methods.
Moreover, it’s nearly impossible to be reductionist about
the sheer magnitude of Roussel’s themes or his book’s visionary, seed bank
anticipation of many future developments in literature and art. The scale of
what Impressions of Africa contains in terms of its irrigation of
subsequent literary currents, concepts, and writers spanning the last century boggles
the mind. One recognizes in his conceits ideas expressed years later in
movements such as Surrealism, Dadaism and Futurism, and decades later by schools
and movements such as the Oulipo, the Situationists, Fluxus, performance art, experimental
theater, conceptual art, even contemporary imagistic poetry and digital art.
Few subsequent experimental art forms don’t contain at least some grain sowed
by Roussel’s inventions; even a contemporary provocateur like Damien Hirst looks
tame compared to what Roussel can conjure (not merely a preserved animal in a
glass tank, but a living one capable of playing the zither). The conceit in
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” of a sentence being literally written into
the convict’s flesh is scooped several years earlier by Roussel. The metafictional
multiplication of texts of post-modernism also appears here, most notably in a Borgesian
passage in which Shakepeare’s original manuscript of Romeo and Juliet is
discovered in a hidden receptacle in an old library. Upon close examination,
it’s found to differ slightly from the known version, with stage directions and
effects that would make a production nearly impossible.[i]
Excitement over the discovery is soon supplanted, though, by the usual sensationalism
of the crime blotter, just one of many examples of Roussel’s commentary on the cultural
uses and abuses of art as well as its commercial aspects. In another scene he describes
a miniature model of the Paris stock market set up in Ejur’s square to allow
trading and speculation in each of the coronation performances (with stock
orders required to be submitted in Alexandrine form). Even today, artists aware
of the ground Roussel paved for them are acknowledging their debt. A clue to
understanding the striking inventiveness of Argentine writer César Aira is a
coy acknowledgement of Roussel in Aira’s novel El Llanto (The Tears)[ii]
in a scene where a poet-publicist is charged with the challenging task of
coming up with a “new image” for a popular film star and initially considers
“reworkings of Raymond Roussel.”
But the real magic of Roussel’s work comes from the ways in
which Impressions of Africa spins off suggestions and resonances well beyond
its inventiveness. There’s something deeply unsettling in his catalog of
rituals, unfolding in the square of a non-existent village in a non-existent
country in an indeterminate time in an “Africa” of the imagination. Roussel
seems to have taken conceptions of the exotic - both those of his own
imagination and borrowings from popular misconceptions of Africa - and made of
them their own country. “Africa” here is not so much a real continent as it is
a repository for imagination and projection. It’s fascinating to read Roussel’s
representations of the interactions of the Europeans and mythical Africans, the
interplay of cultural assumptions, power, misapprehension, mimicry, wonder, and
incomprehensibility (with some performances characterized as “completely
inaccessible to European ears”). Impressions of Africa might make for an
intriguing text for an anthropology or ethnology professor to use as a way of
initiating discussion about interpretation, exoticism, and the function of the
observer. Roussel also touches on politics as theater (and vice versa), the
performative aspects of the affairs of state, and art as a transformative
force: while the performances are instigated by the Europeans largely to
alleviate boredom, they also serve to enchant emperor Talou VII and elicit from
him, Scheherazade-style, a more generous, forgiving attitude towards his
captives.
Perhaps what is most surprising about Impressions of
Africa is its essential innocence. Having approached it after many years of
hearing about it obliquely, expecting a daunting and impenetrable work, I
instead found a captivating and darkly whimsical, sui generis novel with a sense of childlike, infinite wonder.
Polizzotti notes that among Roussel’s key influences were his frequent visits
to the theater when he was young and a fascination with Jules Verne. Verne’s
vision of limitless possibility, of other worlds beneath the sea or beyond the
clouds, exists in spades in Impressions of Africa. But Roussel one-ups
Verne by recognizing that unexplored frontiers include those of the
imagination, and that in the discovery of new worlds, art may be among the
bravest of adventures.
