Introduction to Roussel

Let me begin with a test for you. Read the first twenty pages of Roussel’s Impressions of Africa. Now, are you confused? annoyed? desiring some justification for this strange succession of images? This was a favorite of Barthes, Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, all sorts of intellectual and literary heavyweights of the twentieth century. Are you thinking: How is that possible? Then this post is for you. Is it just weird enough for you? Are you enjoying yourself? In the first dance, when the dancers burp as loud as they can, are you thinking: “Yes, this is just what I need”? Then you don’t need this introduction.

Perhaps this sort of observation cannot be made in a general way, but Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, at least to a certain reader (at least to me), is almost hostile to being read. Let me spoil one fact about it: You will not find out until page 130 of this edition what the hell is going on. A good question—with fairly good answers, I want to stress—is just why anyone reads this weird book.

Sometimes a book needs an introduction. I think Impressions needs an introduction, and for a few reasons. One facet of interest—which is the primary interest of this “Contre-voyages” series—is how Impressions fits into the broader history of travel writing; I think, with a qualification, that it can be read more or less straightforwardly in that way. But the qualification is that it is (again, this is just a subjective judgment) a tough read.

It’s a tough read, in my experience, the way a poem like this would be a tough read:

There are four cups on five plates
There are six plates
Some cups have spoons
There are seven spoons

Like this poem, Impressions has the aura of a problem, a problem with a key of some sort. And, like this poem, Impressions seems illegible without it. So, while it’s hard to quantify this, or have any faith in it as the universal experience of any possible reader, Impressions isn’t just a tough read; it’s also the sort of book where you feel like you’re not in on a joke. And, it turns out, there is a joke.

I want to introduce Impressions of Africa in this post by addressing two areas of context: two waves of the reception of Roussel, and the relationship between Impressions and its putative genre, the travelogue. In discussing the second wave of Roussel-reception, I’ll tell you what the joke is. The point is, I think this context makes Impressions much more readable.

Roussel-reception

Today Roussel is widely read and appreciated by all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. This was not always the case. In his lifetime, for example, he was virtually completely ignored. Two things had to happen in order for Roussel to become the widely read and appreciated author he has become posthumously, and those two things are surrealism and structuralism. But their interests in Roussel were of entirely opposite characters.

Surrealists were fans of Roussel’s work because, in their view, it exemplified the sort of unconscious exploration that they prized in art. To their way of seeing it, Roussel’s work was a manifestation of the unconscious. The purposeless machines, the pointless narratives, the discontinuities—all fruits of the boiling-over of a mind uninhibited by the constraints of reason; a mind exploding with the dreamy froth of imagination and impulse.

Surrealism, in a way, involves a fairly traditional view of art according to which the purpose of art is for the artist to give expression to their mind (or to some ‘idea’). Surrealism just happens to have, say, a set of non-traditional ideas about what dimension or register of the mind art ought to give expression to, namely the unconscious. Note, incidentally, you could take the surrealists’ perspective and simply read Impressions as weird—and, if that works for you, have at it; there’s your introduction: The book is a weird one; weird things happen in it; Impressions surfaces the weird insides of our weird minds.

Structuralism, by contrast, involves a more general rejection of the underlying supposition. Rather than seeing art as the expression of this or that dimension of the artist’s mind, structuralists see art as an interplay of social codes, norms, tropes, genres—in short, structures. Thus, structuralists’ reception of Roussel had nothing to do with—because they would not have had anything to do with—the expression of this or that dimension of the mind.

But to get why structuralists looked at Roussel the way they did, we need to make a quick trip back to Roussel.

The trick (the joke we’re not in on)

Roussel wrote a work, narrowly circulated by his mother after his death, entitled and describing How I Wrote Certain of My Books. How he wrote certain of his books was to solve a sort of puzzle. Take two sentences that sound similar, say for example the following:

The two cans are sold.
The toucans are old.

Roussel’s puzzle is to construct a narrative that begins with the first and ends with the second. Say it goes like this: There’s a market in town where they sell odds and ends. One guy sells cans. He sells a pair of cans to an elderly woman, but realizes the engagement ring he got for his wife is in one of them, and he goes to the elderly woman’s house to get it back. She refuses. He goes back every day with ever more elaborate items to exchange for the cans, but she always says no. This goes on for years. Meanwhile the merchant’s relationship falls apart, but he still pursues the cans, now for reasons he can’t articulate. The woman has two birds on her porch, and as the elderly woman seems to remain, improbably, the same age, the birds get older, just as the man does. Finally the woman says yes when the man offers her his life for the cans—and now there are three birds on the porch.

It’s a bit wooden, but it carries the basic idea. The basic idea isn’t just the cutesy homophonic trick but the idea that linguistic expressions generate worlds. In the procedure as Roussel describes it, he searches for words associated with the words in each homophonic expression, and from these linguistic associations he concocts the narrative endpoints. The important point here is that the narrative then is just a consequence of lexical exploration. Meaning is an effect of structure, not an authorial intention or poetic ‘image’ or ‘idea’. The meaning of the text is not to be found by looking ‘through’ it to the author’s vision.

(Incidentally, because it is easy to be turned off or on, wrongly, by fancy versions of these ideas, all one has to do to get the basic idea of structuralism is think about genre fiction or, say, popular film and TV. In each of those cases authors explicitly begin with a structure and set of tropes and then generate the narrative out of that.)

Whatever there is to say about Foucault’s project more generally, his reading of Roussel in Death and the Labyrinth is basically structuralist, and for the obvious reason that Roussel read through his own How I Wrote is structuralist avant la lettre: a writer whose works proceed from linguistic operations rather than some sort of artistic vision.

Now, let me pose a question that I have no intention of answering, but a question that will summon up every possible idea one could have about truth, knowledge, books, meaning, and so on: Were the surrealists wrong? I don’t know that they were, I don’t know that they weren’t.

What I do know is that these two groups of readers—the surrealists for the unconscious weirdness; the structuralists for the hyper-rationalist structure—found something in Roussel they didn’t find elsewhere, and that’s one pair of reasons why people are reading Roussel still. It is, admittedly and perhaps fascinatingly, a completely contradictory pair, but there it is.

Impressions and travel literature

With all that in the foreground, you could be forgiven for keeping out of mind (or letting fall out of your mind) the opposition that makes Impressions such an immensely original and fascinating text: the nineteenth-century travel narrative. Chateaubriand and Loti regaled readers with descriptions of far-off, exotic locales, and of the wild-eyed “savages” who dwelled there. Sometimes the colonial, imperial overtone comes right to the surface. Here’s a relatively off-the-cuff example: In his description of Jerusalem, after defending the justice of the Crusades, Chateaubriand describes the plan and weaknesses of Jerusalem’s defensive works, as if to future crusaders (in pt. IV of his Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem).

Travel writing involves, in a particularly acute way, a simple but vexing question about language and knowledge, namely: How does something become understood? How can we make sense of something totally out of the loop of our instruments for making sense of the world? How do we pass from ignorance to understanding, supposing somewhere along the way, between those two poles, we are equipped somehow, magically, with knowledge sufficient to tell ourselves: ‘Yes, now we know’? Our means for relaying the truly foreign are impoverished, and there are reasons to suspect we remain always on this side of the gap between that world and ours.

Travel writing is an elaborate stage for these issues, and so often a blundering failure—and understandably, since human cultures are exceedingly complex things, and foreign ones therefore potentially foreign in exceedingly many dimensions. Traditions and customs are described in wholly inappropriate and foreign ways; historical events and figures are fabricated; miscomprehension reigns. To be a little cute about it: The traveler, in some critical ways, never manages to leave home. The exotic locale doubles as a scene for rehearsing some prejudice or another. What the traveler witnesses isn’t so much a world through a distorted lens as it is light through a turning kaleidoscope: The colorful, dancing geometry isn’t a world; it’s an illusion of the tube, and of the hand that turns it.

An immediately strange fact about Impressions of Africa may thus be seen as a sort of comment on this tradition. The strange fact is that Impressions opens with an elaborate ceremony accompanied by a series of performances—this goes on, without entirely obvious rhyme or reason, for, as I mentioned, 130 pages. But the bulk of the performers are Europeans. The European members of the audience are thus watching other Europeans—as if (exactly as if) they only ever see more Europe wherever they go, more Europe everywhere, more home. Now, it happens, as we learn later, that they are being held captive by an African king—but then we also learn that the king holding them captive is a part-European (that is, part-Spanish) descendant. Impressions is a European ouroboros of fascination and exotification, a snake in awe of the strange projections it puts before itself—which, however, is exactly what the travel narrative tradition is, too.

With all that as background, Impressions may be read, quite simply, as a satire of the travelogue. It’s not lost on me that this probably involves doing to Impressions what Impressions depicts (on my reading of it) in the travelogue: seeing in it just what I suppose it to be. But for other reasons I’ll describe in a later post I think there is a constitutive sense in which Impressions is a mirror of meaning, so interpretive ‘violence’ is perhaps inevitable.

To Roussel

The three-tiered background describes a series of approaches:

• We could read Impressions as a satire of the travelogue
• We could read Impressions as just plain weird
• We could read Impressions as an exercise in wordplay

All three approaches have their justification and value. Impressions is, indeed, a strange and multifarious animal.

Texts

First of all:

• Roussel’s Impressions of Africa

And then the book in which Roussel divulges the key:

• Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books

In case you’re interested:

• Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth, his book on Roussel

But Death and the Labyrinth will teach you less about Roussel than it will about the interest of structuralism in Roussel.