Add Homonym: Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus

On a few very rare occasions, I’ve tasted foods so unutterably strange that my only reaction has been irrepressible laughter, an almost biochemical, nervous reflex as much as an appreciation of whatever undeniable humor I may have found in the thing itself. Reading Raymond Roussel’s 1914 novel Locus Solus, I experienced a similar effect; the sheer imaginative complexity of the book’s conceits sometimes produced such a degree of overstimulation that I could respond only with reflexive laughter.

My formal introduction to Roussel’s work came last year when I read his Impressions of Africa. In the first half of that book, a series of bizarre rituals, contraptions, and performances, unfolding in the central square of a mythical African republic, adds up to a dazzlingly poetic work that stretches reality into absurd, amusing, and occasionally macabre shapes. The second half of the book then gives intricate back-stories for each of these fabrications, each with an equally mystifying, glorious inventiveness.

Locus Solus largely provides more of the same, but the elaborations of some of Roussel’s conceits often attain an intricacy to which those in Impressions of Africa can merely aspire. Roussel constructs his “novel” upon a plot so thin and utilitarian that he could have stuck it up with thumbtacks: as the unidentified first person narrator explains, a group of friends has been invited by the renowned scientist Martial Canterel to Locus Solus, his estate just outside Paris. Other than that we never learn who’s in the group, how many they are, or why they’re there. Rather, Locus Solus leapfrogs such practical matters and plunges immediately into the wondrously and grotesquely bizarre. Before the group even reaches the villa on the property, they encounter an earthen statue of “a naked, smiling child,” standing in a niche upon a pedestal that presents a triptych composed of incomprehensibly odd, subtly-tinted reliefs melding baffling imagery with the occasional free-floating word. Canterel engages in a lengthy and outlandish set of entwined tales, stretching over centuries and from Timbuktu to sea caves off Bretagne, to explain the curious figure’s history. The group then follows Canterel to a broad, flat promenade where the scientist demonstrates a fantastical machine powered entirely by sun and wind. Directed by extraordinarily precise computational algorithms predicting the speed and direction of the slightest of breezes over a ten-day period, the machine executes a mosaic on the ground by placing human teeth, in all their varieties of discoloration, into a pattern illustrating a scene from a Scandinavian folkloric legend. Next comes a creation first glimpsed from a distance, a “monstrous jewel, two metres high by three wide, curved into the form of an ellipse [which gives] out, under the full radiance of the sun, an almost unbearable lustre, flashing in all directions” and emitting “vague strains of music.” Within this diamond, filled with a shimmering clear liquid, various scenes reveal themselves: the music emanates from the flowing blonde hair of a smiling young woman standing within the diamond, apparently able to breathe easily in the hyper-oxygenated liquid; an angry Atlas repeatedly drops and kicks at his globe; a figure of Voltaire is seen experiencing a moment of doubt about his atheism as he spies a young girl deep in prayer; the “internal remains” of the face of Danton, reduced to a thin skein of fibers, mouths unheard words in response to an unseen stimulus; a “pink and entirely hairless” Siamese cat (Khóng Dêk Lèn - surely one of the most memorable cats in literature) gaily swims about while a whimsical interpretation of Apollo and his chariot of fire, composed of a team of colored seahorses pulling, via some mysterious magnetic attraction, a round mass luminous like the sun, engages in a (sea)horse race. The glowing mass, it turns out, is Sauternes, which in contact with this aqua-micans coalesces and takes on an extraordinary glow (a genially exaggerated version of the chemical magic that occurs when water is added to pastis, for instance; this Sauternes in aqua-micans is a cocktail I’d certainly like to try). Next, the group passes slowly along a long transparent wall behind which elaborate tableaux vivants are being enacted – or rather, tableaux morts, since in each scene a reanimated corpse relives the most crucial moment of his or her life, thanks to Canterel’s ingenious invention of the chemical substances vitalium, resurrectine, and erythrite. Relatives flock to Locus Solus in hopes of gaining, through these recreations, an understanding of the loss of their loved ones.

These are but a few of the strange marvels of Locus Solus; as in Impressions of Africa, one story begets another, and it’s easy to lose track of where the first story began. Roussel nests tales within tales, concatenations that seem capable of leading one along infinitely (and tediously at times), like the reflections in facing mirrors, but he regularly sticks in a tack to reorient his narrative to the group visit to Locus Solus. His inventions – prose conceptions of creations that would put most contemporary conceptual art to shame - again bridge science and art, with a strong emphasis on writing, music, drama and painting as well as hybrid biological and mechanical mechanisms (“Only an animal, at once living and uncomprehending, would be able to give the required degree of unexpectedness to the performance”). Any artist, tinkering inventor or bright, open-minded bioengineer should be inspired.

The propagation of these inventive, poetic scenes lies in Roussel’s “procès.” Beginning with one set of words linked by the preposition “à,” Roussel would pair it with another set of similarly linked homonyms of those words. An example given by Roussel in his book on his own methodology, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, is “mou à raille” (mou – a wimpy, soft person : raille – like “the raillery heaped upon a lazy student by his comrades”) paired with “mou à rail” (mou – a culinary dish made of calves lungs : rail – a railroad line). The operation of these odd pairings, something akin to the mutations resulting from frameshifting of DNA, generates the nonsensical associations Roussel then takes and amplifies into his intricate constructions. The above example shows up in Impressions of Africa in the form of a cart that runs upon a track made of calves’ lungs. (The tremendous creative and humorous potential of this kind of homonymy is evident in an accessible, charming work employing something similar to Roussel’s method, Luis d’Antin van Rooten’s Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames, in which French homophones are used to create absurdist versions of the English lines that make up Mother Goose Rhymes – or, for another example, in this irreverent version of the Soviet national anthem).  

But Roussel’s process is only an initial, generative tool to help fabricate his creations, and hardly explains the prodigious imagination on display in his work. He then performs a further textual operation, similar to the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse (wherein a drawing made by one person on half of a folded sheet is completed by another on the other half, with the second able to see only minimal, connecting traces of the first’s design) by again inventing for each his conceits an explanation at least as fantastic as what it sets out to explain. In Locus Solus, Roussel collapses these concepts and their explanations into discrete chapters, each consecrated to one of Canterel’s contrivances as the group moves about the estate. In one such back-story, the mirror-like fingernails that play a critical role in the sudden collapse into insanity of a woman seen in one of the tableaux morts are explained in detail as a fashionable cosmetic treatment in which the nails are first removed, made transparent, provided a reflective tinned backing like the metal substrate on old mirrors, then replaced on the fingers (I’m surprised that I’ve yet to encounter this particular body manipulation on the streets of San Francisco).

Considering the games with homonyms at the heart of Roussel’s process, one might wonder if reading him in English entails a greater than ordinary loss in translation. But even educated French readers would be unlikely to divine the linguistic origins of Roussel’s ideas solely from his texts, and these uncommon concepts almost certainly taste as exhilaratingly strange in English as they do in French. What may come through of Roussel’s homonym games, though, is a palpable sense of drifting through an infinitely curved universe of words, a dream-like echo space in which language generates and regenerates itself. It’s mesmerizing, for the most part. And did I mention that “a cheerful dinner” is promised to the guests at the end? I feel almost cheated in not getting to sit down in the villa of Locus Solus to enjoy that meal.   

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.

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[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.