KNOWN—TO SOME—AS the Houdini of French literature, Raymond Roussel might also be its Peter Pan. The consummate verbal prestidigitator (André Breton dubbed him “the greatest mesmerizer of modern times”) carried in his bag of tricks enough material for at least ten times his actual output, and devised the sort of technological novelties that invite comparison both with his idol Jules Verne and with another of the twentieth century’s underrated oddballs, Nikola Tesla. In terms of compositional mechanics, his celebrated procédé (method), though its full implications remain largely unexplored, has resurfaced in the writings of the Surrealists, the New Novelists, the Oulipo, and the New York School. But in many ways, Roussel was also the boy who never grew up. In page after page, the reader of his novels finds himself seated before a seemingly endless spectacle, staged, it would appear, for Roussel’s benefit alone. And as with many children of privilege—which Roussel was in spades—any discomfort or damage suffered by the performer takes a distant backseat to the demanding tot’s enjoyment.
On the surface, in fact, Impressions of Africa, with its titular whiff of exoticism and H. Rider Haggard derring-do, would seem to appeal largely to an adolescent’s sense of thrill. On the Ides of March, somewhere at the dawn of the twentieth century, European passengers bound for Argentina survive a shipwreck and wash up on the shores of a fictive African nation. There they are taken captive by the vainglorious local potentate and held for several months, until sufficient ransom can arrive from Europe. So far we have the makings of a relatively standard adventure tale set in a far-off latitude where curious things can, and often do, occur. But these are no ordinary passengers, and this is no pastiche of King Solomon’s Mines (though Roussel, a fan of popular fiction, might well have read the book, judging by the similarity of the sovereign names Twala and Talou). In place of the intrepid Allan Quatermain, Roussel introduces a singularly gifted collection of castaways, ranging from circus freaks to inventors to scholars to theatrical prodigies, each, as luck would have it, a nonpareil in his or her specialty.
Indeed, very quickly the ostensible plot of African exile falls away, yielding to the author’s real interest: a series of minutely described performances given by these castaways, as part of a gala they have devised to while away the time until deliverance. Theater—or, more precisely, theatrical effect, the sense of marvel produced by magical and well-disguised artifice—proves the most formidable protagonist of Impressions of Africa, and the novel’s various characters merely its instruments. The human plight of these characters, the suspense surrounding their release from captivity, ultimately takes on far less importance than the question of whether their performance will come off without a hitch—and even that suspense is muted, for the true motor here is not whether the gimmick will work, but rather that it works and how it works. One can easily imagine Roussel, an avid theatergoer in real life, gaping with juvenile glee at the kaleidoscopic succession of wonders he has devised for his own amusement, each one following the last in a seamless and flawless procession, forming a world that is itself (as one critic put it) “a theater in which people go to the theater.”
The matter of performance is no idle conceit. Obsessed with fame, Roussel spent his adult life haunted by the alluring, and ultimately elusive, specter of public adulation. He described for his doctor, the renowned psychiatrist Pierre Janet, the sensation of glorious bliss he had experienced at the age of nineteen while writing his first long poem, La Doublure:
I was the equal of Dante and of Shakespeare, I was feeling what Victor Hugo had felt when he was seventy, what Napoleon had felt in 1811 and what Tannhäuser had felt whilee musing on Venusberg: I experienced la gloire…Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light; I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world. To leave these papers lying about would have sent out rays of light as far as China, and the desperate crowd would have flung themselves upon my house.
Needless to say, when La Doublure was finally published—at the author’s expense, as its minute descriptions made it virtually unsalable, even for poetry—it occasioned no such desperate flings, and Roussel sank into a depression from which he never fully recovered. “Its lack of success shattered me,” he wrote years later. “I felt as though I had plummeted to earth from the prodigious summits of glory.”
He nonetheless continued to write, in an unceasing bid for public acclaim. First he composed several more, equally hermetic, epics in verse; then, deciding that fiction was a surer road to bestseller-dom, the two novels that form his literary apex, Impressions of Africa (published—again at his expense, as ultimately were all his works—in 1910) and Locus Solus (1914). Finding the response to these books still rather lukewarm, Roussel set his sights on the theater as a more reliable audience magnet. He hired playwrights to adapt his two novels for the stage, financing the productions with dogged persistence, spendthrift profligacy, and the obliviousness to ridicule of a Florence Foster Jenkins; but his preference for long, abstruse monologues over discernible action put the shows beyond the pale of audience tolerance, and they fizzled after only a few performances. Undaunted, Roussel then turned to composing original stage works, starting with The Star on the Forehead (1925)—its title a transparent metaphor for genius that figures in several of his writings, Impressions of Africa among them—followed by The Dust of Suns in 1927. Like their predecessors, both were costly flops.
Roussel saw one last work into print in his lifetime, the book-length poem New Impressions of Africa (1932)—a work so demanding, with its myriad extended similes, lengthy footnotes, and multiple layers of embedded parenthetical clauses, that not even its author can have expected much success for it. After this, as Roussel’s biographer Mark Ford notes, he “started to experiment with other possible means of recovering the euphoria of la gloire,” including alcohol and barbiturates. He also traveled in grand style, despite the vast depletion of his fortune largely due to his hefty self-publication bills.
In June 1933 Roussel and Charlotte Dufrène, his confidante, traveling companion, and “beard,” checked into the Grande Albergo e delle Palme in Palermo, where he spent most of the day either cloistered in his rooms or being chauffeured randomly about the city; evenings were devoted to drug-induced transports. He suffered a first overdose two weeks after arriving, recovered, then was found in his bathroom two weeks after that, having clumsily opened his veins with a straight razor. From this too he recuperated, but soon after he tried unsuccessfully to bribe both Dufrène and the hotel valet into killing him. Finally, on the evening of July 13, he swallowed a handful of barbiturates and went to bed, while the sky outside his hotel window exploded in an ecstasy of fireworks and people flooded the streets—the combined results of a local festival and Mussolinian pomp that, as Mark Ford wrote, might well “have reminded him of the flames, the noise, and the turbulent crowds” of his dreams of glory.
Roussel died that night still seeking the “solace” of “a little posthumous recognition.” In the decades following, his work was embraced by successive generations of French and American avant-gardists, and he attained, if not the household-name status he so envied in the likes of Verne and Victor Hugo, at least a solid reputation as one of the twentieth century’s most original and influential littérateurs—a “writer’s writer,” to use the kiss-of-death phrase. Authors ranging from Edmond Rostand to André Gide, Alain Robbe-Grillet to John Ashbery, Italo Calvino to Georges Perec, Michel Foucault to Michel Leiris have dipped into the source he revealed; Dalí and Gia-cometti took visual cues from his works, while Duchamp acknowledged that Impressions of Africa “was fundamentally responsible” for the Large Glass. Yet, as Robbe-Grillet and others have pointed out, there remains an inexhaustible core of mystery in Roussel’s work, an opaqueness within its own transparency, that holds us at a spectator’s safe distance even as it keeps our gazes riveted, our minds constantly working at a puzzle we can barely conceive.
The Africa of these Impressions is not, to be sure, the Africa of geopolitical fact, but neither is it entirely a product of Roussel’s fancy. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an acceleration of European colonialist expansion throughout the Dark Continent, and reports in the press and travelers’ tales, alongside the lurid imagery of popular adventure novels, helped foster the widespread Western notion of Africa as that alien place where weird practices, unspeakable horrors, and unheard-of flora and fauna lurked at every bend in the jungle path. The backdrop of Roussel’s Ponukele in fact contains many of the by-then-standard attributes available in most basic accounts from his day, including many cribbed from his beloved Verne; as with the boulevard plays he adored, there is a stagy, conventional quality to the descriptions and sentiments that betrays the author’s literary, rather than first-hand, experiences of the setting—and of life.
For all that, he manages to avoid many of his day’s most prevalent stereotypes about race. And while Impressions does contain such markers of casual bigotry as frequent use of the word “Negro” (which I’ve retained, as true to the time and spirit in which the novel was written), or a certain bemusement at the Africans’ demonstration of such “white” attributes as scientific curiosity, not to mention the requisite cannibals and human sacrifices, by and large both Ponukeleans and Europeans stand as fully fleshed characters, replete with the basic human virtues and failings—including a peculiarly Rousselian gung-ho adventurousness and willingness to oblige even the most extreme demands. As the original manuscripts tell us, this was both intentional and laboriously achieved: over various revisions, Roussel progressively smoothed out what was initially a much coarser and caricatured portrayal into something approaching a kind of verisimilitude. (In Louise Montalescot, moreover, he creates a much more independent, capable, and admirable female character than could be found in most “realist” fiction of the time.)
Roussel famously boasted that, although he had “traveled a great deal” (he listed “India, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific archipelagos, China, Japan and America…Europe, Egypt and all of North Africa…Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Persia”), he “never took anything for [his] books” from these experiences. Rather than seeking to broaden the mind or discover new horizons, he often chose his destinations for their literary appeal: a trip to Tahiti, for instance, was determined by his admiration for the popular novelist Pierre Loti, who had set one of his best-known books there, while Baghdad was for him “the country of 1001 nights and Ali-Baba, which reminds me of [the operetta composer] Lecocq.” The writer Michel Leiris, whose father was Roussel’s financial adviser, later posited that “the outside world never broke through into the universe [Roussel] carried within him…In all the countries he visited, he saw only what he had put there in advance, elements which corresponded absolutely with that universe that was peculiar to him.” Though he had visited Egypt in 1906, and even kept a diary (“Went to see the Valley of the Kings—Cold lunch—sun—heat”), there is no indication that any of his observations, such as they were, found their way into the book he would soon undertake: like Phileas Fogg, he had little interest in the surrounding countryside or populations. Later in life he took to voyaging in a specially built caravan (roulotte), a kind of proto-RV with only a few curtained windows behind which Roussel wrote in peace while the foreign landscapes paraded by unheeded; photos of the vehicle suggest nothing so much as a huge hearse.
Pierre Janet, in his 1926 study De l’angoisse à l’extase, which contains detailed notes on his sessions with Roussel (alias “Martial”), noted his patient’s “very interesting conception of literary beauty. The work must contain nothing real, no observations on the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary combinations.” Reading Impressions of Africa, one sees how far the author has drifted from the trade routes of reality in his descriptions of such “native” phenomena as moles that secrete an irresistible adhesive drool, or underwater sponges that spin like pinwheels under duress, or a giant zither-playing earthworm, or huge plants that (unlike their author) absorb and then project rigorously faithful images of their surroundings. Not to mention sci-fi inventions like a mechanical orchestra that runs on hot and cold fluids, grapes that contain entire miniature tableaux within their flesh, or metals so magnetic they could pull something halfway around the world. (As with any such inventions, what was once far-fetched eventually becomes commonplace: the automated loom to which Roussel lovingly devotes pages of explanation has been industry standard for some time; Louise Montalescot’s “great experiment” sounds remarkably like the modern laser printer; and the battery-operated portable fan that Bex invents for young Fogar can now be bought for pocket change at the local hardware store. One wonders what Roussel would have made of such contemporary gewgaws as the iPad and streaming video.)
But the true originality of Impressions of Africa, as of most of Roussel’s major works, lies not in its attempts to out-Verne Verne, but in an invention that its author kept scrupulously hidden from sight. For in virtually every case, the episodes, conceits, and details from which Roussel fashions his characters and their actions were determined not by authorial whimsy but by a highly regulated process in which language itself is the sole motor and guide. The genesis of Impressions of Africa lies in a short story written some ten years before, “Among the Blacks,” in which the opening and closing sentences are virtually identical. Only one letter has changed in the passage from first to last, but on that small variant hangs the entire tale. As Roussel explained it:
I chose two almost identical words…For example, billard [billiard table] and pillard [plunderer]. To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases…
1. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard…[The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table]
2. Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard… [The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]
In the first, “lettres” was taken in the sense of lettering, “blanc” in the sense of a cube of chalk, and “bandes” as in cushions.
In the second, “lettres” was taken in the sense of missives, “blanc” as in white man, and “bandes” as in hordes.
The two phrases found, it was a case of writing a story which could begin with the first and end with the latter.
In Impressions of Africa, the game expands to include not merely one altered sentence but a vast proliferation, in which moment after moment hinges on similarly complex puns. The examples are too numerous to detail here, but to lift the curtain on just a few:
The Luenn’chetuz, the ritual dance performed by Talou’s wives that results in copious belching, was generated by a dual interpretation of the phrase théorie à renvois: both a treatise with annotations (renvois)—in this case, Talou’s proclamation of his own sovereignty—and a procession (théorie) involving burps (renvois).
Revers à marguerite (lapel with a daisy in the buttonhole) becomes revers (military defeat) à Marguerite (the French name for Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust), hence the rival king Yaour’s downfall while wearing Gretchen’s dress.
Toupie à coup de fouet (a spinning top set in motion by a yank of the string) leads to the episode in which the old frump (toupie) Olga Chervonenkov is paralyzed by a muscle spasm (coup de fouet) while attempting a pirouette.
The talking horse Romulus, a true platinum standard (étalon à platine) among equines, is also an étalon (stallion) à platine (with a tongue, in slang).
Maison à espagnolettes (house with window latches) yields the maison (as in dynasty) of the descendants of Suann, founded when the patriarch simultaneously married the two Espagnolettes, or young Spanish twins. (Deux amours de Suann? Given the frequent comparisons made between Roussel and Proust and the two men’s acquaintanceship, we can only wonder.)
None of this was apparent to the book’s few French readers, any more than it would be to their English counterparts today. Roussel the master magician kept his tricks well concealed, and only stepped out from behind the curtain to tip his sleight of hand in a posthumously published manual-cum-apologia pro vita sua titled How I Wrote Certain of My Books. With a mix of unvarnished literary altruism (“It seems to me that it is my duty to reveal this method, since I have the feeling that future writers may perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully”), his lifelong hunger for recognition, and an almost infantile inability to withhold a really good secret, Roussel trots out example after example of his derivations like an unusually clingy merchant intent on hawking his wares.
At the same time, the process by which Roussel gave away his creative method mirrors the dual movement already encoded in Impressions of Africa: first the magic, then the revelation of its workings. At the novel’s halfway point, the author loops back to zero and starts his tale all over again, this time providing the missing back stories and justifications for the many curiosities we’ve just witnessed. Some editions even included an insert suggesting that “those who are not initiated into the art of Raymond Roussel” might wish to read the second half first. This would of course be to miss the point, for the first rule of magic is to keep your audience tantalized: dazzle before denouement.
The novelist Harry Mathews once remarked that Roussel’s language taught him how “writing could provide me with the means of so radically outwitting myself that I could bring my hidden experiences, my unadmitted self into view.” Hiding, concealment, non-admission are sewn into the fabric of Impressions of Africa—not just the behind-the-curtain mechanics of Roussel’s compositional generator, but likely something deeper as well: an incursion, despite himself, of the author’s personal reality into the “complete illusion of reality” he sought to achieve. It’s no secret today that Roussel’s proclivities ran to younger working-class males, but during his lifetime—and for decades afterward—it was cause for scandal and blackmail, and a source of mortification to his socially prominent family. We should therefore not be surprised at the role that secrecy and subterfuge play in the various plotlines of Impressions of Africa, nor, perhaps, in the fact that no adult sexual relationship in the book ends happily, and that they often have the dispassionate hue of a business transaction.
Indeed, virtually the only true love to be found here is that involving children—either the kind of substitute parent-child bond enjoyed by Velbar and Sirdah or, more often, between young quasi-siblings like Seil-kor and Nina or Meisdehl and Kalj. The painter and writer Trevor Winkfield notes that Roussel’s own love for his sister “was one of the most formative influences of his life,” and in that love seems to lie not only the kernel of the many idyllic brother-sister relationships in his work but an unhealed wound of nostalgia for the lost paradise of childhood itself. “Of my childhood I have preserved a delightful memory,” he confided in How I Wrote. “I can claim to have known at that time many years of perfect bliss.” So much so that he later said he’d felt no happiness since then, and that the memory of that former happiness was a source of torment. Just as Seil-kor after Nina’s untimely death rejects the places they had loved together, so, according to Leiris, Roussel refused to set foot in “certain towns which evoked particularly happy memories of his childhood…for fear of spoiling his memories.”
Instead, a spirit both childlike and childish infuses Impressions of Africa: marvelously, when it manifests as a constant openness to wonder, an ability to blur the lines of reality and fantasy without a grown-up’s sense of restraint; naïvely, in its conception of a benign world in which the heroes all aim to please (I am constantly amazed at how eagerly characters accede to the most outrageous requests “without having to be asked twice”), and in which the cardinal threat is boredom; selfishly, when it treats the actors in the grand gala as mere instruments of juvenile pleasure, taking it for granted that each performance will run smoothly and that nothing will break the spell; horrifyingly, when it indulges in the kind of pull-off-the-wings cruelty evidenced in the tortures and gruesome deaths of the four convicts, a dark blood-spatter on the immaculate waves of Roussel’s shifting, dazzling, treacherous, absorbing, blinding, engulfing African sands.
Every translation has its peculiar difficulties, and Impressions of Africa, with its special “method,” might seem more arduous than most. John Ashbery once noted that even though Roussel’s generative wordplay is buried well below the surface, its “presence imparts an undefinable, hypnotic quality to the text,” to which he felt no translation could do justice; whether I’ve managed to convey at least a measure of this quality I leave to the reader’s judgment. A further challenge lay in the compactness of the prose. Roussel prided himself on concision—“I forced myself to write each story with as few words as possible,” he told Leiris—and much of my effort has gone into fashioning similarly compressed English. In other respects, the pitfalls of rendering this book proved not unlike those offered by any literary text: how to capture the author’s signature style, in this case a peculiar mix of fluidity and flatness, invention and banality? how to preserve his turn-of-the-century phrasings and attitudes in a language that will speak to contemporary readers?
Then there are the author’s various idiosyncrasies and lapses, such as his frequent use of the word “certain” (a veritable tic), some continuity issues (captions that appear both above and below the image; prison bars that change from thick to narrow), and plot points that beg herculean suspensions of disbelief (did Louise and her brother really lug that sack of machine parts across half a continent? would the cannibals have let the captured Velbar keep his rifle? would his watercolor sketches still be so pristine after eighteen years in the jungle?—and how fortunate that he thought to bring along his art supplies while fleeing for his life!). Chalk it up to the quirks of genius.
Readers wishing further insights into Roussel’s life, work, and creative method are encouraged to explore Mark Ford’s illuminating study, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (2000), from which I’ve borrowed a number of biographical pointers. In the domain of English-language commentary, John Ashbery’s essays “Re-establishing Raymond Roussel” (1962) and “In Darkest Language” (1967) remain the gold standard some fifty years after the fact, though they have since been seconded by essential writings from Harry Mathews and Trevor Winkfield. And of course, Roussel’s own How I Wrote Certain of My Books (trans. Winkfield) is a must. The present translation of Impressions of Africa is based on the 2005 Flammarion edition, edited and annotated by Tiphaine Samoyault, which also provided some source material for this introduction. To all of the above, my gratitude.