Raymond Roussel (
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, January 20, 1877 -
PalermoPalermo is a historic city in Southern Italy, the capital of the autonomous region Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its rich history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...
, July 14, 1933) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, novelist,
playwrightA playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors...
,
musicianA musician is a person who performs or writes music. Musicians can be classified by their roles in creating or performing music:* An instrumentalist plays a musical instrument.* A singer uses his or her voice as an instrument....
, and
chessChess is a board game played between two players. The current form of the game emerged in Southern Europe during the second half of the 15th century after evolving from a similar, much older game of Indian origin...
enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within
20th century French literatureFrench literature of the twentieth century is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in French from 1895 to 1990. For literature made after 1990, see the article Contemporary French literature. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the...
, including the Surrealists,
OulipoOulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
, and the authors of the
nouveau romanThe nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
.
Roussel was the third and last child in his family, with a brother Georges and sister Germaine. In 1893, at age 15, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire for
pianoThe piano is a musical instrument which is played by means of a keyboard. Widely used in Western music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
.
Raymond Roussel (
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, January 20, 1877 -
PalermoPalermo is a historic city in Southern Italy, the capital of the autonomous region Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its rich history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...
, July 14, 1933) was a
FrenchFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
poetA poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, novelist,
playwrightA playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors...
,
musicianA musician is a person who performs or writes music. Musicians can be classified by their roles in creating or performing music:* An instrumentalist plays a musical instrument.* A singer uses his or her voice as an instrument....
, and
chessChess is a board game played between two players. The current form of the game emerged in Southern Europe during the second half of the 15th century after evolving from a similar, much older game of Indian origin...
enthusiast. Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within
20th century French literatureFrench literature of the twentieth century is, for the purpose of this article, literature written in French from 1895 to 1990. For literature made after 1990, see the article Contemporary French literature. Many of the developments in French literature in this period parallel changes in the...
, including the Surrealists,
OulipoOulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
, and the authors of the
nouveau romanThe nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
.
Biography
Roussel was the third and last child in his family, with a brother Georges and sister Germaine. In 1893, at age 15, he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire for
pianoThe piano is a musical instrument which is played by means of a keyboard. Widely used in Western music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music, and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
. A year later, he inherited a substantial fortune from his deceased father and began to write poetry to accompany his musical compositions. At age 17, he wrote
Mon Âme, a long poem published three years later in
Le GauloisLe Gaulois was a French daily newspaper, founded in 1868 by Edmond Tarbe and Henri de Pene. After a printing stoppage, it was revived by Arthur Meyer in 1882 with notable collaborators Paul Bourget, Abel Hermant, and Ernest Daudet...
. By 1896, he had commenced editing his long poem
La Doublure when he suffered a mental crisis. After the poem was published on June 10 1897 and was completely unsuccessful, Roussel began to see the psychiatrist
Pierre JanetPierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory....
. In subsequent years, his inherited fortune allowed him to publish his own works and mount luxurious productions of his plays. He wrote and published some of his most important work between 1900 and 1914, and then from 1920 to 1921 traveled around the world. He continued to write for the next decade, but when his fortune finally gave out, he made his way to a hotel in
PalermoPalermo is a historic city in Southern Italy, the capital of the autonomous region Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its rich history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...
, where he died of a
barbiturateBarbiturates are drugs that act as central nervous system depressants, and, by virtue of this, they produce a wide spectrum of effects, from mild sedation to total anesthesia. They are also effective as anxiolytics, hypnotics and as anticonvulsants. They have addiction potential, both physical and...
overdose in 1933. He is buried in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Roussel's most famous works are
Impressions of Africa and
Locus Solus, both written according to formal constraints based on homonymic
punsPuns may refer to:*Partido de Unión Nacional Saharaui, the Sahrawi political party* Pun, figure of speech...
. Roussel kept this compositional method a secret until the publication of his posthumous text,
How I Wrote Certain of My Books, where he describes it as follows: "I chose two similar words. For example
billiards and
pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus." For example,
Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard/The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table… must somehow reach the phrase,
…les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard/letters [written by] a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.
John AshberyJohn Ashbery is an American poet. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets...
summarizes
Locus Solus thus in his introduction to
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
's
Death and the Labyrinth: "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of
DantonGeorges Jacques Danton was a leading figure in the early stages of the French Revolution and the first President of the Committee of Public Safety. Danton's role in the onset of the Revolution has been disputed; many historians describe him as "the chief force in theoverthrow of the monarchy and...
, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine,' a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a single sentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep. From time to time, a footnote refers to a further poem containing its own depths of brackets.
Criticism and legacy
Perhaps not surprisingly, Roussel was unpopular during his lifetime and critical reception of his works was almost unanimously negative. Nevertheless, he was admired by the Surrealist group and other
avant-gardeAvant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English, to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
writers, particularly
Michel LeirisJulien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer.-Biography:...
and
Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
. He began to be rediscovered in the late 1950s, by the
OulipoOulipo is a loose gathering of French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais...
and
Alain Robbe-GrilletAlain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
. His most direct influence in the
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
speaking world was on the New York School of poets;
John AshberyJohn Ashbery is an American poet. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry and is recognized as one of America's most important, though still controversial, poets...
,
Harry MathewsHarry Mathews is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.-Life:Born in New York City to an upper middle class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton School in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University in 1947...
,
James SchuylerJames Marcus Schuyler was a major American poet in the late 20th century. He was a central figure in the New York School and is often associated with fellow New York School of poets, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest.- Life and death :James Marcus Schuyler is the son of...
, and
Kenneth KochKenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
briefly edited a magazine called
Locus Solus after his novel. French theorist
Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, sociologist and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and also taught at the University of California, Berkeley.Foucault is best known for his critical studies of...
's only book-length work of literary criticism is on Roussel.
Selected works
- 1897 Mon âme, a poem - published on 12 July 1897 in Le Gaulois
Le Gaulois was a French daily newspaper, founded in 1868 by Edmond Tarbe and Henri de Pene. After a printing stoppage, it was revived by Arthur Meyer in 1882 with notable collaborators Paul Bourget, Abel Hermant, and Ernest Daudet...
(revision of 1894 work)
- 1897 La Doublure, a novel in verse
- 1900 La Seine, a novel in verse
- 1904 La vue, Le concert and La source, poems
- 1910 Impressions d’Afrique (Impressions of Africa), a novel, later turned into a play
- 1914 Locus Solus
Locus Solus is a 1914 French novel by Raymond Roussel.-Plot summary:John Ashbery summarizes Locus Solus thus in his introduction to Michel Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth: "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country...
, a novel
- 1925 L'étoile au front, a play
- 1926 La Poussière de soleil, a play
- 1932 Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (New Impressions of Africa), a poem of four cantos with 59 drawings
- 1935 Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of my Books, 1995, ISBN 1-878972-14-6), translated by Trevor Winkfield, contains a cross-section of his major writings, including Roussel's essay on how he composed his books, the first chapter of each of Impressions d’Afrique and Locus Solus, the fifth act of a play, the third canto of New Impressions of Africa and all 59 of its drawings, and the outline for a novel Roussel apparently never wrote.
- 1935 Parmi les noirs (Among the Blacks), a story first published in Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres, has been republished (Among the Blacks: Two Works (1988, ISBN 0-939691-02-7) with an essay by Ron Padgett.