How I Wrote Certain of My Books

by Raymond Roussel, John Ashbery (Introduction), Trevor Winkfield (Editor)

«Michel Leiris compartía con Robert Desnos el deseo de intervenir sobre la materia misma del lenguaje. Le pedimos varias veces su colaboración, pero por desgracia, no obtuvimos respuesta alguna. Con el tiempo comprendimos que estaba comprometido en una obra totalmente individual que no admitía escape exterior alguno. Aún ahora pocos han comprendido el significado y el alcance de su trabajo. De todos modos, nuestra admiración por él no disminuyó : con el mimo entusiasmo que, a principios de 1924, acogimos su obra, L´étoile au front , en 1926, aclamamos también Poussières de soleil .»                                                                                                                                                                             André Breton   «En 1911, asistí con Picabia y Apollinaire en el Teatro Antoine a la representación de Impressions d´Afrique de Raymond Roussel . ¡Fue formidable ! En escena, había un maniquí y una serpiente que se movían muy poco, todo muy loco, muy insólito. No recuerdo mucho el texto. Lo que más me sorprendió fue el espectáculo en sí. Después leí el texto y asocié las dos cosas. . .  Ese hombre fue un revolucionario, al nivel de un Rimbaud. Rompió con todo. Ya no se trataba de simbolismo, ni siquiera el de Mallarmé, cosas que Roussel ignoraba totalmente. ¡Qué personaje sorprendente ! Vivía encerrado en sí mismo, en su roulotte , con las persianas bajadas. Le vi una vez en la «Régence», donde jugaba al ajedrez. Iba vestido de negro, muy «señorito». No me interesó conocerlo, había leído su obra y me bastaba para opinar. Lo que sí me importaba era su actitud, cómo había hecho todo aquello, por qué razones. ¡Tuvo una vida extraordinaria ! Y, al final, ese suicidio. . . »                                                                                                                       Marcel Duchamp

Genres: France, Fiction, Poetry, Literature, French Literature, Writing, Literary Fiction

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Poet, storyteller, playwright and French essayist, born in Paris in 1877 and died in Palermo (Italy) in 1933. Author of a singular literary production of striking originality and dazzling imaginative force, applied with real obsessive fixation experiments applied to descriptive techniques and came to deploy a sort of automatic writing that made him one of the most brilliant of the surrealist movement.

Reviews

[Oriana · Rating 2 out of 5]

before: I was recently shamed into admitting that, though I champion the fantastic Exact Change Press loudly and often, I have actually only read two of their books. I've got an even dozen on my shelf, though, and I am resolving to stop believing that I'm not smart enough for them and actually try. I've always been especially intrigued by this title, so this is the one I picked for my first foray.

A long time ago, someone very important introduced me to Exact Change. (He radically shifted my entire literary landscape, actually, introducing me to many other wonders, including my True Literary Love, Cortázar.) As it happens, I was going to visit him & his wife at an art book fair today, and when I cracked this book on the subway ride over -- a book, mind you, that I've owned for probably six years and never opened -- I found a wonderfully sweet, drunken inscription from him to me on the title page. How great is that?

***

after: I have given myself permission to abandon this book.

Raymond Roussel is widely considered to be a hands-down mind-blowing genius. (Maybe widely is the wrong word, because he's fairly obscure, but you know what I mean.) He is also considered to be kind of insane, one of those turn-of-the-century decadents (or something like that), who was born wealthy and never had to work or do anything, who devoted himself tirelessly to his craft (at the expense of his health and society), who was unappreciated (and often mocked) in his lifetime, and who was posthumously determined to be madly brilliant. The kind of guy whom scholars write scholarly circle-jerk treatises about. The kind of guy who did everything with crazed precision, who made all sorts of new rules by which literature could be understood or written, even though academics are still trying to figure out just what those rules exactly were.

What I'm trying to say is that this book was fucking boring.

I was really surprised and disappointed by this. I'm not one to shy away from a "difficult" read; I'm a lover of Pynchon and DFW and Cortázar, I have a whole shelf for "companion" books, I'm going to read Finnegan's Wake one day. I've got no problem with complicated symbolism, twisted allusions, densely leveled double and triple meanings. I love that shit, actually. But this was something altogether else.

This was actually the perfect overview book, it turns out, because it's kind of like a Roussel sampler, with a huge long intro / bio, and then selections from all of his works. The intro / bio was terrific; it told me all I needed to know about Roussel's society and time and place and surroundings, allowing me to get a sense of his place within the literary spectrum, and learn a whole lot about his life.

Then we moved on to his writings. Here is what Roussel does: he describes. That's kind of it. One of the pieces, from Impressions of Africa, is a fifteen-page description of central square, painstakingly detailed. It has a stage with some dude playing drums at one end, some kind of statue with panels on the other; there's some other shit on the sides. Fifteen pages. That's the whole piece.

Then there's a play, which is so steeped in patois and inside jokes about 19th-century politics and weird non sequiturs that it is virtually incomprehensible.

There are dozens of pages of drawings he commissioned to illustrate one of his other works, with the explicit instructions (a sentence or two) that he gave the illustrator, and much is made in the intro to that section about how the illustrator didn't know anything about the context in which his illustrations would be used.

The title essay is a probably brilliant but basically impenetrable list of words Roussel used to inspire his utterly wacky-seeming ideas -- he took words or phrases that had double meanings (or could be subtly tweaked for same) and then combined the double meanings into a new third meaning. Ex: "1st Moullet (calf) á gras (fat); 2nd mollet (soft-boiled egg) á gras (Gras rifle); hence Balbet's shooting exercise." Yeah. That goes on for twenty pages.

Listen (if anyone is still there listening): Maybe this book is, indeed, too smart for me. But you know what? I don't give a fuck. It is too weird, too unemotional, too unsatisfying, and too fucking dry for me to waste any more time on. I now have enough of a sense of what he's about that I don't ever have to read him again.

Anyone want my copy of Impressions of Africa? I don't think I'll be needing it anymore.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who claims to give a hoot about language, erudition, the Oulipo, stylistic pyrotechnics, imaginative excess or works by authors who deserve to be lifted high from the lowly position of a footnote should be ashamed of themselves if they haven't yet read Raymond Roussel. I am calling you out.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raymond Roussel is one of the great figures in world literature - or should I say 'outside' literature. Basically a very lunatic who self-published is novels for instance "Impressions of Africa" that is so wonderfully nutty it of course failed in the comercial literary market of its time (1920's). Did that stop him? No, what he did was adopted a huge Broadway budget theater presentation or adaption of his novel. Did that fail? Of course! But like the Velvet Underground where it was said that they sold only a few hundred records - each buyer or listener started their own band, which became famous.

The Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp were in the audience and what they saw influenced them greatly. But ironically Roussel had no interest in the avant-garde, only established literary success - and that never happened.

So here we have an odd little book on his writing techniques as well as an early version of a graphic novel. Sort of essential work!

[Autoclette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really this is more of a primer on Roussel containing mostly excerpts (generally first chapters) from various works. This however, is by no means a negative critique, as it was exactly what I was looking for in that sense. Fascinating, and a must for fans of Surrealist literature, or Oulipo. Both of these movements championed and employed his pioneering techniques.

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much like Fernando Pessoa, the most captivating thing about Raymond Roussel is his tragic biography, much of which is discussed, here and there, in this collection. Otherwise, he is an extremely unique writer, his methods of generating content from nothing, avoiding reality wholesale, are fascinating but tedious--an incredibly slow writer, a pointalist.

There are some lovely passages, but I think he is a writer best read in the original French; he is too tricky, too French for English. Much of the homonymical play is lost, here having to be explained and over explained again.

There are crystals, royal magic, savage ceremonies, lockets, carvings, clothing, lists. He has a kind of Peter Greenaway list-making preoccupation. Visual description is tops.

I don't like where he ends up politically; it's boyish. There are just to many regents and aristocrats here.

The illustrations are pretty amazing. Their captions are perhap his best [and unintentional] poems.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until I finally, resolutely abandoned Roussel's methods, I was unable to write so much as a thank you card without great difficulty. Now the hard part is mailing the card.

[Elizabeth Metzger · Rating 3 out of 5]

This man does not exist. One of these days I will prove that he is an oulipian constraint.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curiosa obrita de Roussel cuyo prólogo de Foucault es más extenso que el propio texto prologado. El escritor francés explica algunos de sus procedimientos de asociación de palabras, sonidos e ideas con los que compuso sus obras. Uno se pregunta si realmente Roussel es traducible al español y parece que más bien no. Lo mejor del libro es el informe psicológico final que describe los estados de éxtasis que sufrió el escritor en su juventud mientras escribía su primera obra y la depresión posterior que sobrevino. Está claro que Roussel era un excéntrico bastante singular.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

But I like puns.

[Sofia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just read the books in question.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two things: first, I wish I had read Impressions of Africa before I read this; second, it is clear the pairs of homonyms Roussel used to construct it could only be lost in translation. So there is something missing from the story in English, and that's something to keep in mind when approaching Roussel's work; the structural word play can't be experienced, but as a tool to create his content, its jarring effects are on full display.

Roussel used different methods to write other works, as illustrated in example chapters from his best known titles, which follow the title essay, and include Impressions of Africa, Locus Solus, one of his plays, The Dust of Suns, and the long poem considered his masterpiece, New Impressions of Africa.

The last work included is an unfinished novel called Documents To Serve As An Outline, which in my opinion is the gem of this book. The recursion of stories told in the fewest words possible, one leading to the next in these manic, propulsive sentences which are easy to get lost in as they nest deeper upon themselves, such as:

In 1905, the newly promoted colonel of the 56th Infantry Regiment decided to revive a certain anniversary which had unjustly fallen into neglect.

For as long as anyone could remember, each senior officer of the regiment had honorifically kept in his possession a medal depicting St. George, the patron saint of soldiers.

One of these, Armand Vage, acting on an anonymous tip, had one day discovered his wife in flagrante delicto—and had performed so well with a truncheon that a serious wound, the result of a sound thrashing, had made him a widower, easily acquitted by the court.

Vage's only relative was an older sister, an avaricious spinster from whom he inherited among other things a piece of cardboard pierced with two holes, which could only have been a cipher-stencil for locating a buried treasure.

The deceased, a great reader, had selected pages with the aid of scissors, glue and sheets of cardboard, the latter of the same dimensions as the stencil, indicating that one should look there.

Disregarding the instances in which the two holes encircled nothing of interest, Vage, seeking illumination, meditated on these gists of pages:

1. The conspiracy of Ardecists—who have gathered together at a banquet to choose a ringleader, either Balu or Dircet. On the menu is chicken with a new sauce that needs naming. "Poulet à la Flourdas," proposes Balu, who goes on to laud the antique virtues of his hero:

Flourdas discovers that his father is the leader if a band if forgers who, to cover their traces, operate on an island. Inflexible, Flourdas' conscience turns him informer, resulting in the setting up of a police trap leading to mass arrests—and the suicide of his father, who has time to leap from a window.

Dircet, as rival, raises captious objections concerning the case: is one to admire Flourdas for his strength or condemn him as a parricide? "Poulet à la Flourdas," shout the assembled conspirators, who, realizing the worth of an energetic man, choose Balu as their leader.

2. Lodet's fable of the Two Neighbors. Sangal, an enthusiastic gourmet who likes only rich dishes, boasts that he can recite a thousand notable menus. His neighbor Dess, a model of sobriety, takes pleasure only in the constant embellishment of his garden. As a result of his excesses, Sangal dies prematurely after long suffering. Dess, on the contrary, serenely attains an age so advanced that he is able to observe the superannuation of certain tulips whose hybridization he had witnessed.

And so on.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Don't read this collection first. Just go in fresh with his novels.**

This might seem like the late-life essay where Roussel the sorcerer as Rostand called him reveals his tricks. Disclosing his "method" doesn't at all bring Roussel back to earth with the boys to laugh over a beer and a cigarette. It's impossible to make Roussel ordinary. His method in anyone else's hands would not have produced novels like Impressions of Africa or plays like The Dust Of Suns. If the method weren't so precise and inarguable I would almost suspect Roussel had created it retroactively. No, it's definitely there, but it's not a matter of unlocking a simple code to nod your head over line by line with a new, enlightened re-reading of his work. The beauty and magic of his books are not for one moment diminished by knowledge of the method. I can't also say that the method necessarily enhances them, either.

To fatten out the volume there are excerpts from Roussel's novels and a section from his long poem New Impressions of Africa, as well the complete illustrations that accompanied it. It's been over two decades since I read "Documents To Serve As An Outline" but the "impression" remaining for that work contradicts all I said above, as it does seem like a skeletal code lacking in fireworks.

[Alexandre Alphonse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Explicar una vez más el famoso procedimiento de Roussel es tiempo perdido; por clara que sea la explicación, volverá a quedar un malentendido. Roussel es la torre de Babel de sus intérpretes y estudiosos. De algún modo, se las arregló para hacer que todos hablen idiomas distintos. Cada artículo que se escribe sobre él podría llevar por título: «Los errores más frecuentes que se cometen al hablar de Roussel». El precio que se paga por creer haberlo entendido es creer que el otro, cualquier otro, lo entendió mal. Esto sí es explicable, parcialmente al menos: un escritor único, que no entra en
 ninguna de las categorías en las que se clasifican los demás escritores,
 sigue siendo único en la recepción,
 es decir, vuelve único al lector, que
 se siente separado de todos los
 demás lectores por el abismo del
 error.
(César Aira)

https://www.elboomeran.com/upload/fic...

[juan cruz Vallefin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Por si no fuera suficiente la imaginería que despliega Roussel para contarnos cómo escribió sus libros más celebrados si no célebres, la honestidad y humildad con la cual describe sus procedimientos son un artefacto rousseliano en sí, que además deja entrever aspectos de una psicología obsesiva con las enumeraciones exhaustivas, la lengua de los pájaros revelada a través de la poesía, los metagramas, homofonías y aliteraciones, así como los sufrimientos de una vida dedicada al parto mental, como los grandes inventores fracasados.

Una pequeña obra maestra no solo de los manifiestos y la crítica literaria, sino de la literatura.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

The madman explicates his madness. Somehow drives the riddle of his mind even deeper into darkness.

The text which gives the title to this volume is only about a quarter (or less) of the book. The rest are excerpts of some of his major works (Impressions of Africa, Locus Solus, etc.) and a few related minor works (Instructions for 59 Drawings and Documents to Serve as an Outline, for instance).

[Unai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Itzulpen zaileko liburua. Adibideen atala astun egin zait. (Nørdica libros-en edizioa irakurri dut).

[JG Muller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fort bien écrit. On lit le tout avec la sensation qu'un sens caché se tapit derrière ces phrases ciselées et ces contes et histoires. Amusant.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent prose poet with remarkable narrative strategies that enlarge the practice, and point to the future through both language, and his compulsive imaginative narrative.

[Iniville · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tough go but inspiring.