Is Roussel for Real?

As I walked back to my car from the class this week I was so immersed in a perplexing analysis of our classroom conversations that I arrived in the parking garage with absolutely no idea how I got there. Thus it is with Raymond Roussel - he seemed to be on a complex journey in thought with little evident awareness of how to get to his desired final destination.

Young Roussel's narcissistic obsessions with his unrealistic goal to join the illustrious ranks of wildly popular authors like Victor Hugo and Jules Verne were almost tragically comic. It seems he had no idea why he couldn't break free of the derision he faced in society as a self-published author of esoteric opus. He clung fiercely to his craft as he knew it, oblivious to the fact that it lacked the essential literary device of plot. He really believed he “would illuminate the entire universe” and “enjoy greater glory than Victor Hugo or Napoleon.”

His obsessive attention to detail in his work and in his life is haunting. His daily writing regimen was characterized by the same rigorous focus on minutia that characterized his work, “Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light. I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world.” Roussel lived a coddled childhood, paid a little too much attention to his mother, and was thrown into a dangerous state of depression when his first work, La Doublure, published in 1897, wasn't met with adoring, cheering crowds in the street.

Yet his work is as irresistible as a well-stocked wunderkammern, brimming with delights thrown together in what seems to be completely random fashion, waiting for an exploration of every glimmering detail. The nuances of his creations, from glistening magical waters in diamonds filled with divas and hairless cats, to Scandinavian fairy tales crafted in rotten teeth by elaborate machines, draw a reader into realms of sublime paradox. Dead children recite poetry while resurrected artists sculpt clowns with botanical wax, roosters cough up names in blood and glowworms make music on tarot cards. The imaginative detail is both repulsive and provocative, and leaves the reader wandering in a mental labyrinth of illusion.

It is perhaps this same labyrinth that trapped Roussel, determined to craft his characters and settings in utter detachment from reality, “The work must contain nothing real,” he wrote, “no observations on the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary combinations.” Perhaps he had a premonition of his shortened life when he delineated the secrets of his craft in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," leaving his legacy for others to unravel in his manipulations of letters and language to concoct the basis of his works.

The tragedy of his unpopularity in life is compounded by his posthumous discovery by an adoring literary public, including Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton. His work continues to fascinate readers nearly a century after his death, and yet he died bewildered by his lack of popularity. 

Was he insane? Probably. But it was a remarkably fruitful insanity, leaving the author bewildered as to why the public adoration never came, and the rest of us to savor the fruits of his labor, lest we live our literary lives without ever having, as Idiom author Tynane Kogame put it,"eaten a pomegranate: never having pulled apart the brittle skin, peeled back the bitter membrane, bit into each seed for a tiny squirt of juice, ending up with a red-stained shirt."

Roussel indeed leaves a red-stained shirt of indelible imagery, long after the journey through his work has ended.



Gregory, Alice, "New Impressions. Raymond Roussel and the upside of Crazy." Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/243340

Kogane, Tynan, "Self-made Enigma: Raymond Roussel," Idiom, http://idiommag.com/2012/02/self-made-enigma-raymond-roussel/