At the beginning of the third row, “The Bravo’s Rebellion” introduced a very blond Zouave who, refusing to execute an order of Lécurou, answered with the single word “No!” inscribed underneath the watercolor.
“The Culprit’s Death,” underlined by the command “Aim!” showed a firing squad aiming, under the sergeant major’s orders, at the heart of the golden-haired Zouave.
In “The Usurious Loan,” the woman in the cloak reappeared holding out several banknotes to Flore, who, seated at a desk, seemed to be signing an acknowledgment of a debt.
The final row began with “The Police in the Gambling Den.” Here a wide balcony from which Flore was leaping into space allowed one to see through a certain open window a large gaming table surrounded by punters terrified by the inopportune arrival of several personages dressed in black.
The next-to-last picture, entitled “The Morgue,” showed, head-on, the corpse of a woman lying on a slab behind a glass partition; behind, a silver chatelaine hung in a conspicuous place was weighted down by a precious watch.
Finally, “The Fatal Affront” ended the series with a nocturnal landscape; in the shadows one could see the dark Zouave administering a slap to Sergeant Major Lécurou while, in the distance, standing out against a forest of masts, a kind of placard illuminated by a powerful streetlamp displayed three words: “Port of Bougie.” Behind me, forming a pendant to the altar, a dark rectangular shed of very small dimensions had as a façade a light grating of slender wooden bars painted black; four native prisoners, two men and two women, paced silently inside this exiguous prison; above the grating the word “Depot” was inscribed in reddish letters.
Beside me a large group of passengers from the Lynceus stood awaiting the appearance of the promised parade.
How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings, ed. Trevor Winkfield (Cambridge, Mass.: Exact Change, 1995). First published in Portfolio and ARTnews Annual 6 (Autumn 1962).
DOCUMENTS TO SERVE AS AN OUTLINE
Note by John Ashbery
In an essay published in 1962 in the French review L’Arc, reprinted below, I discussed the opening chapter “In Havana” which had been suppressed, at Roussel’s request, from the posthumous printed version of Documents to Serve as an Outline, and my reasons for overriding Roussel’s wishes in this regard. I wrote among other things that “it appears obvious that it was not doubts about the quality of the work that prompted Roussel to write the note quoted above, but a simple desire for symmetry: Shorn of their introduction, the six ‘documents’ form an easily publishable whole.”
Today, thirty years later, I am not so sure. It is impossible to know what Roussel would have understood by terms such as “quality” and “symmetry,” and I should have realized this. The fact that he considered two early efforts, the poem L’me de Victor Hugo (originally entitled Mon me) and the novel in verse La Doublure as the apogee of his work, after which it was all downhill, is proof enough either of his own unreliable judgment vis-à-vis his own writing or of the impossibility of fathoming what his aesthetic criteria were. Most readers of Roussel would, I think, consider them minor if not downright tedious efforts, especially L’me de Victor Hugo, and agree that his writing career begins immediately afterward, with the long poem La Vue. Thus any aesthetic judgment of his work ought to come with the warning that it probably contradicts or at least has no bearing on the author’s intentions.
Another problem I have in assessing the Documents is precisely their title, which was assigned to them by Roussel in his note to the printer regarding posthumous publication, and might well have been different, of course, if he had lived to complete the book. But why “documents” and why “outline”? “In Havana” apprises us that the documents were to be assembled as evidence by the thirty members of a club whose raison d’être was to prove the superiority of Europe over America (only six of the planned thirty were printed). Yet it is difficult to see in what way they fulfill their purpose, or any purpose. They are merely tales within tales, from which a didactic lesson seems totally absent. There is no mention of North America or Americans (except for the brief appearance of the Arctic explorer T … in “In Havana,” who has nothing to do with the club’s stated goal). It is true that most of the tales have a European setting, though some do not. Some take place in imaginary countries (“Eisnark” or “Belotina”) while almost all of the fourth document is nominally set in Honduras and is chiefly concerned with narrating the plot of a drama by the great (and fictitious) Honduran poet Angelo Essermos—surely an example of Central American superiority, one would have thought; elsewhere a Mexican novel plays an important role. Could this seeming discrepancy between the Documents’ stated theme and their actual content have been cause for Roussel’s decision to excise the first chapter? Doubtless we’ll never know (though it will be interesting to see if the recently discovered hoard of Roussel’s papers presently being catalogued at the Bibliothèque Nationale includes any which have a bearing on the Documents).
As for canevas, which I have faute de mieux translated as “outline,” it too seems a misleading if not mystifying appellation. Harrap’s dictionary gives other possible translations: “groundwork, sketch, skeleton (of drawing, novel, etc.).” The original meaning is canvas in the sense of an embroidery canvas—something to be finished. Harrap’s cites the phrase “broder le canevas, to embroider the story, to add artistic verisimilitude to a bald and unconvincing narrative.” Yet the Documents in no way resemble sketches; they are in fact the most drastic examples of Roussel’s constant urge to pare his writing down to its barest essentials (brevity being his chief, if not only, aesthetic criterion)—something hardly possible in a first or early draft. In Roussel l’ingénu Michel Leiris writes: “As for style, the only qualities Roussel seems to have sought for, beyond the strictest grammatical correctness, are the maximum of exactitude and concision. I remember causing him a lively pleasure by chance, in praising the extraordinary brevity (to the point where, spoken on stage, the text was very difficult to follow) of each of the anecdotes whose linkage constitutes L’Étoile au front: ‘I forced myself to write each story with the fewest possible words’ was Roussel’s approximate reply.”
Perhaps, however, there were other ways in which the Documents, despite their radical bouillon-cube condensation (and this is perhaps as good a place as any to apologize for inevitable shortcomings in my translation, which doubtless employs more words than Roussel would have liked in some cases and in others makes his succinctness sound more eccentric than it is in the original). One possibility is suggested by Leiris in a 1987 addendum to his earlier essay “Autour des Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.” He speaks of an earlier version of Chant 1 of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique deposited with Leiris’s father (Roussel’s business manager) on March 6, 1917, which began and ended “exactly like the version printed in the book, but comprising a quite limited number of insertions, so that the reader doesn’t find himself entangled in a labyrinth. This text, in flawless alexandrines, presents itself not as a simple first draft but as a considerably shorter though seemingly finished version of the definitive text, making the latter seem the extraordinarily dense result of a kind of phenomenal padding whose aim is above all to demonstrate the power of an imagination.” Thus, what appears to us as the stylistic perfection of the Documents (from Roussel’s point of view, at least) may be misleading: Quantity could have been as important as quality, and the relatively brief tales may have been meant to be “padded” to staggering proportions, resulting in a tome of enormous length, since the book if completed on the scale of the Documents as they were published would already have been some three hundred pages long. Perhaps that’s what was haunting Roussel during his apparently last encounter with Leiris, in Mme Dufrène’s apartment at the beginning of 1933, when Leiris found him looking “slumped, and as though speaking from a great distance.” On Leiris’s asking him whether he was still writing, Roussel replied: “C’est tellement difficile!”
The difficul
ty may well have been increased for him by the fact that he was intentionally forging a vast cryptogram. In the manuscript of the Documents, which I examined at the home of some relatives of Roussel, all dates are left blank, and proper names are indicated only by a first initial. This is also the case with the galley proof of “In Havana.” In his note concerning the eventual publication of the Documents, Roussel requests that someone at the publishing firm fill in the dates and proper names; Michel Leiris tells us that he customarily asked this of his publisher, but invariably changed the names himself. A recently discovered manuscript of Locus Solus, sold at auction last year, contains many such changes; for instance, the name of the principal character, Martial Canterel, was arrived at only after eight or nine other names (with different initials) had been rejected. These however were normal French names; many of those in the Documents are sheer invention. It seems unlikely that an employee at Lemerre would have arrived at names like Ornigec, Tercus de Lal, Bahol de Jic, Dramieuse, Dess, and Gléoc. Fanciful names abound in Impressions d’Afrique; there, of course, they can be accounted for by the “exotic” locale; moreover, the European characters have conventional names. In the Documents, even French characters have outlandish names, suggesting that Roussel himself supplied them, for purposes of his own. Some of the characters however are actual historical figures: Jesus and Mary Magdalene appear twice, and personages from French history such as Barras, Carrier, Desaix, and even Napoleon have cameo roles in narratives that are of course dependent to some extent on historical circumstance. (Unfortunately I can’t remember whether or not these names were also left blank in the manuscript I saw.)
Thus we are obliged to read these Chinese-box tales with the understanding that we are not being told all; that behind their polished surface an encrypted secret probably exists. I am reminded of the metaphor Henry James used in The Golden Bowl for the hidden relationship between the Prince and Charlotte as it appeared to Maggie Verver: that of an elaborate pagoda with no visible entrance. In Roussel’s case this persistent feeling of not knowing precisely what he is up to paradoxically adds to the potent spell of the writing. The stories are intriguing in themselves, the strangely crystallized language a joy to savor, and at the same time a kind of “stereo” effect enhances the experience. We are following him on one level and almost but not entirely missing him on another, a place where secrets remain secret—the “Republic of Dreams” of which Louis Aragon declared him president.
Introduction to “In Havana,”* by John Ashbery
The text which follows is apparently the first unpublished work of Raymond Roussel to be discovered up to now.1 It was intended to be the first chapter of Roussel’s last, unfinished novel, which was published minus this opening chapter in his posthumous collection, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, under the title Documents to Serve as an Outline. In addition to its purely literary attractiveness, the fragment presents a number of peculiarities.
The first is that it survived at all. The published Documents were preceded by a note from Roussel dated January 15, 1932:
If I die before having completed this work and in case someone wishes to publish it even in its unfinished state, I desire that the beginning be suppressed, and that it begin with the First Document, which follows, and that the initials be replaced by names which will fill in the blanks, and that it be given a general title: Documents to Serve as an Outline.
Nonetheless the publisher Lemerre had begun by printing the beginning Roussel later wanted to suppress: The proofs for most of it are extant, and for the last few lines, a handwritten note which has turned up among papers of Roussel discovered since his death. The fact that at the time he wrote the note in January 1932 he had finished only six of the thirty Documents which were to make up the novel leads one to believe that at his death in July 1933 he had still not made a definitive decision to keep or suppress the first chapter: Perhaps he had it printed so early on in order to give himself time to reflect on the matter.
For several reasons I have decided not to observe Roussel’s stated desire that the chapter not be published. First and most important, it seems to me that any text by Roussel deserves to be known. In addition it appears obvious that it was not doubts about the quality of the work that prompted Roussel to write the note quoted above, but a simple desire for symmetry: Shorn of their introduction, the six “documents” form an easily publishable whole.
The personality of the writer furnishes an additional justification: It is well known that he was haunted by the idea of posthumous glory. “This glory will shine on all my works without exception; it will reflect on all the events of my life; people will look up the details of my childhood and admire the way I played prisoner’s base,” he confided to Dr. Pierre Janet, who treated him. Since the glory to come was the great consolation of his unhappy life, we might conclude that the publication of this text would not have displeased him.
The first chapter sheds new light on the Documents it was meant to precede and which are, in my opinion, one of Roussel’s most remarkable works.2 We now see that the novel was to take place in Cuba, but that it was interrupted almost at the beginning by a series of digressions (as in Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus). Each of the chapters is made up in turn of dozens of very short narratives, adroitly dovetailed, which form the actual fabric of the novel. Each document, we can now see, is an illustration of the superiority of Europe over America and is the result of patient research by a member of the club of which M … is the female president.
However, the mysterious aspects of the work, those surrounding the coded meanings in which it seems so rich, those resulting from Roussel’s method of composition and the very nature of his writing (of which he left only a brief explanation in his essay “How I Wrote Some of My Books”), cannot be explained merely by his known techniques of composition. On the single galley proof which comprises the text, proper names are left blank and replaced by initials, while dates are omitted.3 No doubt this will provide those who believe Roussel’s work to be one vast and theoretically decipherable riddle with a persuasive argument. The presence of the initials and the absence of any name or date strongly suggest the use of a code. This hypothesis is all the more plausible given Roussel’s well-known passion for mystery and mystifications, cryptograms, ciphers, and other tools of secrecy.
Thus, to start with commonplace phrases, deform them, obtain phrases that are very close phonetically and use the latter as elements of a narrative, is to use a code. Moreover, references to ciphers and clues abound in his work: The “grille” or cipher stencil that figures in the story of the Zouave in Impressions of Africa reappears in the Fifth Document, where the soldier Armand Vage inherits from a wealthy sister “a piece of cardboard pierced with two holes, which could only be a stencil meant to lead to the discovery of a treasure.” (More of him later.)
As regards style, the text has the same radical concision and peculiar transparency of the Documents. After the acrobatics of New Impressions of Africa, with its interlaced parenthetical passages inserted willy-nilly in the procrustean bed of the alexandrine, Roussel’s prose reaffirms its rigor, even more marked here than in Locus Solus. He submits his sentences to processes of condensation that result in amazing verbal crystallizations. Furthermore he imposes a new discipline on himself by forcing each of the episodes of his book to fulfill a narrative function: A…’s “measure of authority” serves the same story-spinning purpose in this preparatory chapter as does the superiority of Europe in the Documents themselves. Incidentally the procedure recalls the “lists of examples” in New Impressions of Africa.
In the course of these few pages we come upon a number of motifs and words dear to Roussel. Among the former are the passionate friendship of two siblings (recalling Séil-Kor and Nina in Impressions of Africa, Fermoir and Tige in “The Coils of the Great Serpent,” and perhaps Roussel’s deep affection for his own sister when they were children); the theme of twins (the “Espagnolettes” of Impressions of Africa) of unequ
al growth (the rubber tree and the palm in the same book); the catin (harlot, strumpet) who appears in New Impressions and throughout Roussel’s work) with a past described as houleux (turbulent, checkered): Jean Ferry correctly cites the latter as one of Roussel’s favorite adjectives. Moreover the setting of the book, Havana, Cuba, hints at a coarse play on words. Concerning the scatological element in New Impressions, Ferry wrote in his book-length essay on the poem: “I shall limit myself to pointing out Roussel’s extraordinary prudery with regard to this sort of subject matter in his earlier works. I should very much like to know, once others have studied and resolved the problem, what sluices burst in him on this occasion, causing these malodorous streams to run together.” But it seems to me that these references had already appeared, in hidden form, in previous works. Among the objects ornamenting the Square of Trophies in Impressions of Africa is a small privylike building whose gently sloping roof is made of feuillets (“leaves” but also “sheets of toilet paper”) taken from the book The Fair Maid of Perth (the French pronunciation of Perth is the same as that of pertes, a type of vaginal discharge); several portraits of the Electors of Brandenbourg (“Brandebourg,” the localized version of the place-name, might be a pun on bran de bourg: “shit of the town”); and a watercolor depicting the “immoral” Flore training her lorgnette (the phrase is “braquer sa lorgnette,” transformable into a spoonerism, lorgner sa braguette: “ogle his codpiece”) on an actor performing on a stage. One could cite other examples that seem to suggest that the solemn façade of Roussel’s prose style is in fact riddled with puns, spoonerisms, and other jeux de mots which are often of an obscene nature.4
But “Cuba”; the “Club” with its thirty members, each charged with the mission of “providing the handsomest stone for the edifice”; as well as the fact that, of a total of thirty Documents, only six were completed, bring us once again to that “cube” that occurs throughout Roussel’s work, and whose possible meaning is suggested by André Breton in his preface to Ferry’s “Essay on Raymond Roussel.” “The cube … represents one of Roussel’s chief preoccupations and one of the main clues in his play [The Dust of Suns], and is also one of the capital stages in the production of the philosopher’s stone … Fulcanelli, in his work on alchemy, reproduces the image of a cubical stone secured by ropes that is part of a bas-relief decoration of the St. Martin fountain, a few steps from the theater where The Dust of Suns was performed.” And a similar stone makes a striking appearance in the Fifth Document: “On his twenty-first try, struck by the words ‘cube’ and ‘mesmerize’ [méduser], perfectly framed by the two holes in the stencil, Armand Vage abstained from further meditative reading: ‘A cube would mesmerize him.’ Having lifted a remarkably cubical mossy stone at the edge of a brook that ran through his sister’s garden, he discovered a substantial hoard.”5
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 9
