Sunday, September 15, 2013

Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa: An Incomparables Club of One



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.





[i] It’s revealing that Roussel attempted to produce Impressions of Africa on the stage. The play flopped, but I can’t help envying those fortunate enough to have witnessed the attempt.
[ii] To date untranslated into English, but available in French.



23 comments:

  1. 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.

    Is this also a proto-nouveau roman then?

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    1. Miguel - From what I understand it's probably the proto-nouveau roman, at least among French practitioners. But I found it a great deal more interesting than the few nouveaux romans I've attempted to read.

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  2. I suppose it must be close to impenetrable if you go after the linguistic side, the free association word games or whatever they are - it has been while since I read about the "system."

    But as a work of free-range surrealism, Roussel's book sounds like a blast.

    Have you read Locus Solus by any chance? I want to read that one, too.

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    1. Free range, cage free, organic surrealism - more than a decade before the word was coined. Locus Solus is in the queue, but I may wait a bit to read it as I'm still not down from Impressions of Africa.

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  3. Thanks for this essay--an intelligent response to a fascinating writer. I read Impressions, Locus Solus, & an Atlas anthology that included several plays, all in a fit of excitement 10 or 15 years ago. For me there was something very different from surrealism, or the nouveau roman, or Aira. There's a constant tension between the wild freedom & the hermetic constraint of Roussel's imagination. The narrative is at once vivid and mechanical, & each aspect makes the other strange & amazing. I also remember laughing as I read it.

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    1. Thanks very much for your comment. Roussel really is fascinating; I can not get Impressions out of my head. You note an aspect I wish I had highlighted - the humor in the book . I too laughed a lot, more often than not the kind of titillated, irrepressible laughter that comes from having my funny-bone both tickled and over-stiimulated.

      Regarding Roussel's descendants, what first struck me in reading Impressions was how much of it seemed both blindingly unfamiliar and eerily familiar, offering numerous conceits handled (usually less interestingly) in works by those who came after him. True, he is unquestionably different from those who followed. He flies at such a height, however, that It feels, somehow, more of a strain for me to say that the other way around.

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    2. I read the old Heppenstall translation. Did you compare the translations, before deciding which to read? Any observations?

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    3. I didn't. I'd had no real plan to read Roussel until I picked it up on impulse one day in the bookstore, so reading Pollizotti's translation wasn't a conscious choice. I did poke around in the original French afterwards. It seemed daunting given the pairing of its rich vocabulary with my limited vocabulary, but it was certainly exquisite French. I may nonetheless try Locus Solus in French, or perhaps one of the untranslated works.

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    4. You inspired me to spend an hour dipping into Locus Solus. I think you will love it. There are also 2 Atlas anthologies. One has plays & poems by RR; the other has critical responses from RR's contemporaries, as well as essays by Breton, Roger Vitrac, Soupault, Leiris, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, a long piece by Leonardo Sciascia on the circumstances of RR's death, a wonderfully bizarre piece by Jean Ricardou, & other things--I recommend both anthologies though I think they're hard to find. "Nouvelle Impressions" is the one that has held me at bay. But maybe one day!

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    5. Thanks. Locus Solus is on order. I'm going to try to track down the Atlas anthologies, as I'm especially curious to read the Leonardo Sciascia piece written after Roussel's death in Palermo. I've just started Mark Ford's Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams, and just 20 pages into feel I ought to revise what I wrote above. The linguistic games, which I'd assumed were invisible icing on an already tasty cake, actually seem the very basis of Roussel's curious composing methods. He wanted the methods to be well-hidden, and for the most part they are (and it's not necessary to know the methods to appreciate the work), but wow - he discovered a genuine tool for exploding the creative possibilities in language.

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  4. This sounds very appealing. I am drawn to such out of the box unusual storytelling.

    As you allude to, the degree that Roussel anticipates other art forms and movements makes this sound essential in terms of understanding twentieth century aesthetics.


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    1. As Anonymous pointed out above, Roussel is quite different from some of the descendants I'd mentioned. There seems to be little in the way of direct imitation; it's simply the scope of Roussel's imagination is so broad that one finds things in him that one can identify being used by those who come later. The Fluxus movement, for example, would probably have despised Roussel's complexities, but their reliance on materials lying about at hand is there in Roussel. The Surrealists might have admired the absurd juxtapositions in Roussel, but (I suspect) would have had less patience with his attempts to explain them or with the formality of his methods. But yes, "essential" seems a good word: credit for so many 20th century aesthetic conceits where credit is due.

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  6. This erudite review both attracts and scares me. It's a book I will love to read but feels intimidated by it already. The only book which came to mind as I read this was Ben Okri's Famished Road, even then it was with respect to the existence of other worlds and I believe, speculatively though, that Okri's might - just might - pale in comparison.

    Thanks for this review. I truly enjoyed them - the write and he book written about.

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  7. Nana - Thanks, and be not afraid! As Polizzotti suggests in his introduction, Roussel - for all his complicated games - is in some respects just a kid at play. As long as you can bear not having clear answers to mysteries and wonders, you should be fine reading Roussel. And as Anonymous points out above, some of Impressions of Africa will likely make you laugh.

    I have not read Okri, but have seen that book around for years; I should give it a try.

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  8. I wasn't aware of the Aira or the Sciascia connections to this book, Scott, but those certainly help increase the appeal of the exotic yet somehow familiar strangeness you lay out above. Ironically, I had a dream the other day that was so weird that it reminded me of an Aira novel--and in my dream, I thought, "I bet that's where Aira gets some of his more out there ideas." Had completely convinced myself of this during my sleep! Of course, now I wonder if I'll have dreams about Roussel if I ever get around to reading Impressions of Africa.

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    1. Richard - I haven't read the Sciascia piece yet; he apparently wrote it in response to Roussel having ended his life in Sicily. I don't think Aira and Roussel are exactly two peas in a strange pod, but what struck me about Aira after reading Roussel was the similar, almost mechanical generation of one inventive conceit after another. It made me wonder if Aira uses any similarly covert linguistic tools to generate some of his ideas.

      Funny you mention dreams, as I did indeed have a Roussel dream shortly after finishing Impressions of Africa. It was a pretty wild, but frankly, no comparison to the book itself.

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  9. What fun to see someone discover Roussel! I hope you'll go on to at least "Locus Solus" and the plays. The long poems are wonderful, but I doubt translation would do them justice.

    The "process" should probably be seen as a means, rather than an end, but a very effective means. And influential too, since it showed that an artificial method could produce extraordinary results -- in the right hands, of course...

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    1. Doug - Fun for the discoverer too. I have Locus Solus and a library copy of the New Impressions. My library also has a copy of La Doublure in French; I may give it a whirl.

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    2. If you read "La Doublure," be prepared for a very long, obsessive description of the carnival in Nice. It takes over the poem, and is kind of glorious, but it is long...

      By the way, the theatrical versions of "Impressions" and "Locus" were lost for many years. They were recently rediscovered, and were published only last year. I've only read excerpts, myself...

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  10. As you likely know M. Foucault's 1st book was on RR
    [DEATH & THE LABYRINTH in English] and a great meditation on the master & language it is! I am a longtime RR enthusiast and appreciate any newcomers to that incomparable club. Your appreciation of Impressions wins my opposite of opprobrium, now onto your discovery of Locus Solus! [ps sunsign-ificantly RR was an Aquarian---the Outsider-Rebel....Burroughs, Cassady, Koons, Joyce, Mailer, Yoko...]

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    1. Though the title Death and the Labyrinth is familiar to me, I did not know that it concerns Raymond Roussel. Many thanks for alerting me to that - as well as for your kind comment.

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