Raymond Roussel (1877-1933)
Locus Solus (1914)
translated into English by Rupert Copeland Cunningham (1970)

Roll 15: 1361 = Raymond Roussel
1362 = Locus Solus

This was a surprise and a delight the likes of which I doubt will be repeated anywhere else in this enormous list.

Before I read it, I read some online reviews. They all said how wonderful it was, that it was a marvelous feat of imagination. But when they offered quick previews of the wackiness in store – e.g. telling me to look forward to reading about “… 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 Danton…” – I was left a bit apprehensive. The images in question seemed no more charming than any other bits of random nonsense, and I didn’t relish the idea of plugging through hundreds of pages of deep surrealism.

But I loved this book. It was indeed wonderful, and yes, a marvelous feat of imagination. The problem is that, having experienced this cavalcade of the fantastic, one imagines that just naming these crazy things will surely give others a taste of the fun. But it doesn’t at all. Yes, I’m strongly tempted now to rattle off some of the craziness – because boy is it crazy! – but I’m going to try to resist because it would miss the point entirely. You really have to read it for yourself.

Unfortunately you probably won’t be able to, because the English translation is out of print and extremely rare and the French original is, unfortunatement, in French. None of the public libraries had a copy (!), nor did any used bookstore, and I couldn’t even buy one online for anything like a reasonable price ($120 and up on abebooks!). The copy I read, seen above, was borrowed for me from Firestone Library at Princeton University. I would love to own a copy of the text, but the actual edition, rare though it is, is of no particular aesthetic interest, so I’m not about to spend the big bucks.

This book is all but unobtainable, despite being not only in Harold Bloom’s canon but also in the considerably more populist 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (it’s number 257). It is RRRRRripe for the reprinting. NYRB Classics, are you listening? Actually, I think I’ll write to them for real.*

Anyway.

When I was a kid my sense of humor put great emphasis on craziness. In part this was because I didn’t actually understand very much of the comedy I encountered. Didn’t understand it, but still “thought it was funny.” I responded to the ambiance and rhythm of humor without necessarily being able to parse the content, and since I seemed to be having the same reaction as adults – namely, enjoying it – it seemed apparent to me that my spotty understanding was in fact sufficient and complete. I think I truly believed that much of adult entertainment culture consisted of a barrage of near-nonsense, delivered with panache. That was what adults enjoyed. The more brazen the nonsense, the funnier. And I found that a very congenial standard.

Of course, fondness for craziness is common to all kids, to some degree, and entertainment for kids bears that out. The books and movies in which silly really was the name of the game probably only reinforced my impression that adult comedy operated the same way.

The fascination of craziness, the meaning of no-meaning, is a particular kind of giddiness that I can still savor, but now it tends to be diluted by knowledge. Locus Solus got me back in touch with the essence of craziness – pure, unqualified, Porky in Wackyland-grade craziness. It functions almost as an inquiry into craziness: what does it mean for something to be crazy? And conversely, what does it mean for something to make sense? If you can explain something rationally, does it cease to be irrational?

Okay, here’s what the book is. A genius scientist is giving a tour of his fantastic estate, showcasing his various “experiments” and “inventions.” These consist of intensely surreal tableaux, described slowly and carefully. Such as, yes, a floating automated device building a mosaic out of a huge supply of variously discolored human teeth. There’s more to that scene, but, like I said, just telling you about it misses the point. Because: after each scene has been lovingly laid out in all its jarring irrationality, our host sets about explaining it. The explanation meticulously addresses absolutely every absurdity and creates a history and a context that justifies it and justifies their juxtaposition. Roussel writes story after story – highly inventive and amusing stories, but essentially as conventional as possible – until what once seemed an hopelessly dense clump of nonsense has been entirely defused. Or has it? It’s still all nonsense. But now it’s explained nonsense.

Each chapter repeats the process with a new tableau. Like a good performer, Roussel knows to up the ante a little bit each time. As each chapter wrapped up, I would think, “okay, I get it now,” and then upon reading the next chapter would find myself laughing and shaking my head in amazement – “boy, and I thought that was crazy – now this is crazy!” The number of individual absurd details rises in each new tableau, so that in the later ones they accumulate in drifts, like heavy snow. As the craziness kept piling up higher, I would feel the pressure rising too. “Come on! how is he possibly going to be able explain his way out of this one?”… and then, like Houdini, he would! I wanted to applaud.

It’s like a delightful combination of watching an escape artist and listening to your dad improvise a bedtime story.

The explanatory stories are what make the book truly great. But even the setups, the mere descriptions, are fascinating. Unlike the actual Surrealists, who were in it for the shock of unfamiliarity, Roussel does everything he can to underplay the weirdness. His descriptions are as scientific and un-dreamlike as possible. He frequently points out quaintly that various things “surprised” the spectators or “seemed miraculous.” Here’s a snippet to give a taste.

…the sibyl took a pack of tarot cards from a tall, narrow box of old leather, whose lid was missing–and placed one of them flat, its back in contact with the table. Before long a tinkling music issued from the card, though there was no abnormal thickening to suggest the presence of any internal mechanism. The tune, an incoherent adagio which seemed to be due to the capricious improvisation of living creatures, progressed indolently and was of an extremely bizarre nature, though free of any errors of harmony.

A second card which took its place beside the first produced a livelier air. Others laid one after another on the table all played their separate pieces with pure, metallic notes. Each was like an independent orchestra which once laid down sooner or later launched into its symphony, languid or lively, sad or joyful, whose almost hesitant unpredictability betrayed the personal touch of living beings.

The ear was never offended by any infringement of the rules of harmony, but only confused by the multiplicity of these various ensembles, which were too soft anyway for their simultaneity to constitute an unpleasant din.

The evident localization of the sounds forced one’s mind to admit that, contrary to all likelihood, there was a miraculously thin musical device imprisoned within each tarot card.

That’s only one of many many many details in a very elaborate scene. The narrator is not complicit in the craziness, nor does he find it unnerving. He is, simply, a reasonable fellow, and he happened to see some tarot cards that played weird music. No need to get upset, because surely there is some explanation. And of course there is.

Having read up a very little bit on Roussel, I can let you know that the way he wrote was by generating the nonsense through wordplay, mostly phrase homonyms – sort of a Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames kind of thing – and then working from the output. Which is certainly interesting, but beside the point. In his essay on his process, he admits that he can’t remember specifically how he came up with most of what’s in Locus Solus. The book itself really is the point.

I’m not sure what this book “says” or “means.” It’s been nearly a year and I’ve been thinking about it frequently, but it resists any simple analysis. The great beauty of the book, in fact, is that it is not expressive of anything; it has no interior. That’s not to say that it doesn’t “mean” anything – it is rich with potential meaning, even as it pulls the rug out from under all meaning. Both the form and the content are concerned with the interface between the mechanical and the human, between the automated and the chaotic. Things we are shown turn out to be simulacra, even when that seems impossible. Repeatedly, things that seem reactive and human are revealed to be blind automata, and the appearance of normality revealed to be dependent on pre-planning of unthinkable, infinite precision. Actually, this makes me think that maybe Roussel’s method isn’t irrelevant after all: his text, too, is a product of unfeeling mechanical techniques, rendered into flesh and blood.

Is Roussel poking fun at science, or is he celebrating it? I think neither but probably closer to the latter. He is grasping the essential strangeness at the heart of rationalism, the dizzying notion that our lives, our loves, our fairy tales, all are just vast assemblages of cold data. A notion so essentially weird to contemplate, in fact, that it doesn’t feel “rational” at all. This is the hall of mirrors in which the book takes place. I thought it was spectacular.

I want to note that with this entry I am now UP TO DATE with my Western Canon reading. How can that be, when I read Locus Solus almost a year ago? It can be because the next spin of the wheel turned up something truly long, an entire corpus, which cried out to be broken up with other reading. I have heeded those cries and taken several extended hiatuses from the main assignment, which lingers on even at this late date. No regrets there, especially since it’s afforded me the opportunity to catch up with myself. Hooray!

* There was no need. Many months have passed since I wrote the first part of this entry, and I have since learned that a UK reprint is imminent. Good!**

** More months yet have passed since I wrote the preceding footnote – these entries build up very slowly, like sediment – and I have now in fact bought a copy of that reprint. It was oddly expensive, here in the States, but I had no qualms. So now what I said above is simply no longer true. The book is not at all out of print and it’s quite straightforward to obtain a copy. Whew.