Raymond Roussel

Once upon a time, I read and enjoyed a number of biographies of writers. Some, like Dostoyevsky and Malraux, had strange, incredible lives that sort of resembled their novels. Tolstoy got particularly interesting as a character after he stopped writing great books. Nowadays, it seems that whenever I pick up a writer's biography I find it dull and pointless and can't read it all the way through. I don't know if I've changed and become less tolerant of the genre, or if I just haven't come across a good one in a while. I imagine it is a bit of both. I've never understood the tendency a lot of biographers have of starting with irrelevant family histories. It seems to me that what can be gathered about childhoods rarely gives much insight. I don't care who they slept with, or dined with. With prolific writers, if everything they wrote is discussed, it is usually necessarily in an incredibly superficial manner. The book on Flaubert that I discussed a few weeks ago was sort of a biography, but it was precisely what a writer's biography ought to be and rarely is - in examining Flaubert's juvenile writings, the author, Cullers, looked at them as a series of experiments, a stumbling toward a specific style by finding ways of dealing with specific difficulties. There was something a little bit artificial in how much emphasis was put on the free indirect style as the final solution to an overriding concern, but it was put forth convincingly, and the whole book was about Flaubert's books and not about his personality or the banal details of his private life.
Perhaps none of this is worth saying, but it's the first thing that comes to mind in trying to talk about the book I finished reading yesterday, a biography of Raymond Roussel. The author, Francois Caradec, is an oulipo writer, as is the translater, Ian Monk (I got the book in English), which led me to expect something a bit more unconventional. Still, in this case, the style fit the subject. There was something obsessive about the archival work that went into writing the book, and the minute details that were included are appropriate to a writer whose books obsessively describe things like carnival parades at unbelievably exhaustive length. There was also an overall project and a clear narrative, in a way you don't find in many lives. If both oulipo writers and Roussel are fond of games, procedures and puzzles, Roussel himself is a kind of puzzle - the author spends a lot of time talking about the things he doesn't know and can't explain. Roussle is both mysterious, and naively predictable.
I don't know if you know anything about Roussel. I might have spoken to you about him in the past. What's most well known about him is the procedure he used writing some of his books which he described in his posthumous work "how I wrote certain of my books", which he always planned to have published after his death. He would spend a lot of time finding words with double meanings or similar sounds and string them together in nearly identical sentences with wildly different meanings. The most famous pair are "les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/ les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard", the first sentence meaning "the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table", and the second, "the letters written by the white man about the hordes of the old pillager". An entire book is structured around a link between scenes evoked by the two sentences, although the sentences themselves don't actually appear in the book. That book has countless other scenes that are structured by similar accidents of language - in other words, Roussel didn't start with characters or a plot, he started with puzzles that he set himself; how can I connect these two things? He made his challenges as intricate and complicated as possible. He wrote whole novels in verse, and though he was trained as a musician, the verse novels don't read like real poetry. There's some sort of basic rhythm or melody lacking, which is to say the rhymes and twelve syllable lines seem to be there purely as an additional restraint he had to write around. His work isn't normally described the way I'm describing it. He's usually presented as a complete madman (and I would like to talk somewhere about the question of sanity, largely because he's hard to classify as sane or mad. He isn't delusional or given to fits, or anything of the sort, but there is a sort of disconnect between him and the world that's larger and more evident than with most people. It made him impossible to know or get close to, as was observed by many people who tried, and it is interesting precisely because it brings to light the area where the sane/insane dichotomy breaks down. This probably sounds banal, but the relationship between misfits and mental illness fascinates me, and I can explain why - at least partly). Anyway, Roussel's books really are bizarre, but their strangeness leads people who are aware of this procedure he occasionally used to ignore the fact that working within strict constraints is not particularly eccentric, even if Roussel is an extreme case and gives himself a somewhat unusual set of constraints. You can, of course, see why he was eventually picked up by the same writers group that was responsible for a whole novel that doesn't use the letter 'e' a single time (I don't know whether Perec himself was a big Roussel fan). That this particular famous procedure wasn't all that extraordinary becomes that much clearer if you look at some of the stuff that Mallarme wrote - for instance the poem beginning "ses purs ongles..." meaning "her pure fingernails...", he first three syllables of which sound identical to "c'est pur son", meaning "it is pure sound", basically declaring that the poem is sound devoid of meaning (I'll talk elsewhere about Mallarme and the fact that his poems never really are devoid of meaning, even when they take absence of meaning as a theme). You can also think of Mallarme's famous poem in -yx, which takes one of the most obscure difficult sounds to make rhymes with as the central rhyme, just for the sake of the challenge this poses. Perhaps this is all to obvious to be worth bringing up (I could start talking about dodecaphonic music or a hundred other things), but there does often seem to be a general desire to see Roussel as an archetypical madman.
As I said before, it isn't entirely wrong to see Roussel as an extreme eccentric. His books are incredibly weird, they have basically no narrative development most of the time. He has a whole book which is a scientist bringing visitors around his laboratory to witness the chemical he has made which causes dead people to play out a certain moment from their past lives, and you see scene after scene after scene of disconnected single moments. He has talking heads and lights made of veal. The surrealists were among the first ones to pick up on his writings and praise him, but Roussel thought the surrealists were all a bit vague, and he kept wanting mainstream popularity. His heroes were Jules Verne and Edmond Rostand. There something both touching and upsetting about how desperately he wanted to be praised by the general public and how baffled he was that he didn't receive it. He constantly wanted medals and honors of any sort and for anything. He submitted patent applications, and wanted to have a chess move named after him. He was incredibly rich, and had to pay to have all his books published. Not only did he pay for extremely expensive editions on Japanese vellum, but he imagined that if his novels were made into plays, he might get more attention, so he rented out theaters, paid outrageous amounts of money for well-known actors and musicians and stage designers, not to mention special effects, and put on these elaborate, spectacular performances that got universally panned (though eventually he started putting on shows by invitation only and party because of his surrealist supporters he was able to drum up good-sized groups of partisans to drown out the hecklers and critics).
Andre Breton more or less admitted he had no idea what was going on in Roussel and sort of joined in the rest of the surrealist group in supporting him simply out of solidarity. I could go into detail about who genuinely love him (Desnos, Eluard - and among the somewhat older non-surrealists, Gide and Robert de Montesquiou - whose an interesting figure), but the one supporter who is of interest is Michel Leiris, who I'm going to be working on a lot this summer, for whom Roussel was a friend of the family when he was growing up and who was extremely attached to him both as a person and as an artist. I get the sense that Roussel was probably his most important influence. Later this summer I have to read the book he wrote on Roussel, and the book that Foucault wrote on Roussel (Roussel is the only author Foucault wrote a book about).
I imagine I was going to spend more time in this post talking about Roussel's love of games and charades, his obsessive mimicry, his fascvination with parades and carnivals, and how all of that effected his writings... the whole building up a scene around a set of sounds meant to evoke a similar set of sounds has a clear similarity to parlor games, where the audience has to guess what you are acting out.The childish wonder Roussel brought to those things, goes along with his love of adventure tales and scientific inventions (plus when he saw a dog that could smoke a pipe he instantly offered the owner an outrageous sum to buy it - he would give his incredibly difficult novels to children and be very interested in what they thought), but there are always all sorts of side issues, and without actually giving full fun anecdotes, I find myself dropping names and facts, which I started the entry by deploring, so I'll stop here, and hope I do better next time I post about something by or about Roussel.