Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  Some have been converted forever.

  Those who have once experienced the visions and the fascinating passivity cannot forget.

  Mescaline is not however indispensable. Without it I have several times been able to have visions. The brain is able, and must be able, to reproduce everything which it has experienced. If one tells a patient that a phial of distilled water is morphine, it will make him sleep profoundly. My placebo is attentiveness, and the memory of a certain return which I know intimately: direction: sinking. That infinity is just to sink, to sink, to sink deeper and deeper. Then the vision returns.

  That world is another consciousness.

  * * *

  But where then is art, where is what distinguishes one person from another? Everything which you yourself thought was canceled, excluded, is not, not at any rate in the way you thought. The roots of art are deep, and the person who, in his ecstasy, thought himself obliterated remains deeply remarkable. And yet, much as the phenomena of that world differ, they also resemble one another. The most easily recognizable are the drawings of those who have seen, whose inner eye has been taken over, commanded by the hypnotic spectacle. The drawings of mediums, of certain hallucinated persons, of some faith healers (though it is only afterward that they began to practice), drawings of Sunday painters (of the Sunday of the new revelation), of visionaries preaching a gospel of peace.

  Temples of monotonous contemplation, with ornaments and columns endlessly repeated by the novices of the perpetual … Temples of indigent infinity, revealed incessantly, without progress, in a senile, mechanical serenity, devoid of life (of this life) or the eruptions and grimaces of the great Terrifier with his unheard-of rhythms. Each one unknowingly adds his uneasiness, his banality; simple, uneducated people contribute their poor riches. A strange world, that other one, where each sees in a different way, where only the mad multiplication, the accumulation, the repetition have been perceived by everyone.

  As for myself, I have usually (not always) seen the rhythms, the counterrhythms. Much remains for me to do. I need other materials and another technique (especially for the colors). I had first of all to record the rhythms accurately, and the process of infinitization through the infinitesimal … I am just beginning.

  Henri Michaux (London: Robert Fraser Gallery, 1963), exhibition catalogue of drawings and gouaches by Henri Michaux, February 26–March 23, 1963.

  MICHEL LEIRIS

  (1901–1990)

  CONCEPTION AND REALITY IN THE WORK OF RAYMOND ROUSSEL

  On December 16, 1922 (a few days before the premiere of Locus Solus, which took place in a tumult, before an almost entirely hostile public), Raymond Roussel sent me the following note:

  Thank you, my dear Michel, for your interesting and curious letter.

  I see that, like me, you prefer the domain of Conception to that of Reality.

  The interest which you are kind enough to show in my work is a proof to me that in you I meet again with the affection your father lavished on me, and I am deeply touched.

  Yours affectionately.

  In the fragment of Dr. Pierre Janet’s work which Roussel reprints in Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (“The Psychological Characteristics of Ecstasy,” pp. 175–83) we find this remark concerning “Martial,” that is to say Raymond Roussel, whom the famous psychiatrist treated for several years and described under this name (borrowed from the principal character in Locus Solus, the inventor Martial Canterel): “Martial has a 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: These are already the ideas of an extrahuman world.” In another part of the same work (De l’angoisse à l’extase, vol. II, p. 515), Dr. Pierre Janet notes again: “‘If there was anything real in those descriptions,’ said Martial, ‘it would be ugly.’”

  Finally, toward the end of the prefatory text to Comment j’ai écrit, Roussel notes (after paying homage to the writer whom he considered his master, that is, Jules Verne): “I have traveled a great deal. Notably in 1920–21, I traveled around the world by way of India, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific archipelagoes, China, Japan, and America … I already knew the principal countries of Europe, Egypt, and all of North Africa, and later I visited Constantinople, Asia Minor, and Persia. Now, from all these voyages I never took a single thing for my books. It seemed to me that the circumstance deserves mention; since it proves so well how imagination counts for everything in my work.”

  Thus, from a letter in which he alludes fleetingly to his aesthetic ideals, from confidences recorded in the medical notes of Dr. Pierre Janet, and, further, from this statement in a text intended to be published only posthumously, as befits a literary testament, it emerges that Roussel relied consistently on the imagination, and that for him there was a clear antithesis between the invented world which is that of “conception” and the given world—the human world in which we live our daily lives and which we cover in our travels—which is that of “reality.”

  As for reality, it is certain that Roussel—conscious nevertheless of having received a lion’s share of it in the form of his immense fortune—expected nothing good to come of it.

  Physical pain disturbed him, and my mother has told me how one day Roussel questioned her for a long time about the pains of giving birth, amazed that she had allowed it to be repeated since she had told him it was a very painful affair; in view of the period and Roussel’s customary reserve, the subject must have meant a great deal to him for him to feel that he could discuss it thus with a woman still relatively young and little accustomed to mentioning such questions. Mme Charlotte Dufrêne, who was his closest friend and to whom the posthumous work Comment j’ai écrit is dedicated, told me in another connection that he had asked her never to speak to him of her fear of the dentist (nor of that she had of serpents) because he was afraid that she might, through contagion, infect him with her fears. Mme Dufrêne also declared to me that he was unable to bear the sight of tears.

  Marcel Jean and Arpad Mezei (Genèse de la pensée moderne, p. 192) have noted that, in his works, Roussel seems to picture only objects sheltered from dust, and Pierre Schneider (“La Fenêtre ou piège à Roussel,” Les Cahiers du Sud, nos. 306–307) defines his art as “a poetry of high noon, in which objects cast no shadow around them,” this in symbolic fashion since, in fact, night and shadow are far from absent in Roussel’s work, just as scatology, or the bringing into play of disgusting elements among others, plays a role in it also. These remarks on certain general traits of his work seem to be confirmed in his life, as well, by that kind of dirt phobia which Mme Charlotte Dufrêne—to whom I am indebted for much of my information—noticed in Raymond Roussel: Before the first World War, it was his rule to wear his detachable collars only once (since he had a horror of laundered articles), his shirts a few times only; a suit, an overcoat, suspenders fifteen times; a necktie three times; and when he was clothed entirely in new clothes, he used to say: “I am walking on eggs—everything is new today.”

  Daily contact with a reality which to him seemed strewn with pitfalls obliged Roussel to take a number of precautions. During a certain period of his life when he suffered anguish whenever he happened to be in a tunnel, and was anxious to know at all times where he was, he avoided traveling at night; the idea that the act of eating is harmful to one’s “serenity” also led him, during one period, to fast for days on end, after which he would break his fast by going to Rumpelmeyer’s and devouring a vast quantity of cakes (corresponding to his taste for childish foods: marshmallows, milk, bread pudding, racahout); certain places to which he was attached by particularly happy childhood memories were taboo for him: Aix-les-Bains, Luchon, Saint-Moritz, and the Hotel Beaurivage at Ouchy; also, afraid of being injured or causing injury in conversations, he used to say that in order to avoid all dangerous talk with people, he proceeded by asking them questions.

  In his investigation of the case of M
artial, Dr. Pierre Janet mentions a phobia of disparagement and reproduces (De l’angoisse à l’extase, vol. II, p. 146 ff.) this declaration which shows how painful for Roussel must have been the almost total incomprehension which, for his part, he met with: “It’s horrible that people don’t respect acquired glory; a single detractor is stronger in my eyes than three million admirers; I must have unanimity for my mind to be at rest.” Roussel, according to the same author, was prey to a kind of “phobia of cheapening, linked to what he called ‘the loss of the inaccessible’”: Over and above any puritanical point of view, he disapproved, for instance, of bare breasts being displayed in the music halls (as a cheapening of what, in order to keep its charm, should remain a “forbidden fruit”), and he deplored mechanical progress which devalued travel by bringing it within everyone’s range: “One only gambles when one is sure of breaking the bank; the happiness of others makes one suffer.” Finally, Roussel’s misoneism (ibid., p. 230) had as a corollary his cult of precedents: “Everything that is new disturbs me,” he would say, and so profound was his horror of change that, according to Charlotte Dufrêne, it would happen that having once performed a certain act, he would perform it again because the precedent thus formed had the force of an obligation.

  From this strategy, which he was forced to use in dealing with reality so as to adapt himself to it as best he could, resulted what Roussel himself called his “rule-omania” (ibid., p. 200), that is, a need to arrange everything according to rules devoid of any ethical character, rules in their pure state, just as the rules to which he conformed in his writing seem exempt from any actual aesthetic intention. “His life was constructed like his books,” Dr. Janet told me in the course of a conversation I had with him, several months after the death of the man from whom the celebrated psychiatrist had received many confidences, but whom he considered (in his own words) as a “poor, sick little fellow,” completely failing to recognize his genius.

  In the course of a trip he made through Persia in the year 1346 of the Hegira (according to the date on a postcard sent from Isfahan), Roussel sent Charlotte Dufrêne from Baghdad a postcard on which could be seen, moving along a wall apparently made of baked mud, three donkeys with packs led by a man in a white tunic and turban, with, on the left, a few trees including some palm trees: “Here I am in Baghdad in the land of the Thousand and One Nights and Ali Baba, which reminds me of Lecocq; the people wear costumes more extraordinary than those of the chorus at the Gaîté.” Roussel seems to have paid no attention whatever to the reality of Baghdad; all that counted for him was the city of his imagination: scarcely even that of the folktales of the Thousand and One Nights—rather, the one he had glimpsed at the Gaîté-Lyrique theater, when he saw Lecocq’s operetta based on the tale of Ali Baba.

  Literarily, it seems that Roussel always proceeds as though it were necessary for there to be the maximum number of screens between nature and himself, so that one might in this case compare him with great aesthetes like Baudelaire and Wilde, for whom art was categorically opposed to nature; but, with Roussel, everything unspools as though one should retain of art only its inventiveness, that is, the share of pure conception by which art distinguishes itself from nature. In all his work, one notes that the plot (the structure of the work or its point of departure) is of an artificial, not a natural character; as Pierre Schneider has pointed out (op. cit.), the poem “Mon me” which subsequently became “L’me de Victor Hugo,” written by Roussel at the age of seventeen and published in the Gaulois of July 12, 1897, a poem built on the line “My soul is a strange factory,” is nothing more than the development of a banal metaphor of the type “My soul is an Infanta in her court dress…” and has as its subject poetic creation itself likened to the stratagems of a creating god; the novel in verse La Doublure—during the writing of which Roussel experienced that sensation of “universal glory” he described to Pierre Janet—is the story of an actor and consists primarily of descriptions of the maskers and floats at the Carnival in Nice; the three poems “La Vue,” “La Source,” and “Le Concert” describe, not actual spectacles, but three pictures: a photograph set in a penholder, the label on a bottle of mineral water, a vignette in the letterhead of a sheet of stationery; far from referring to the Africa of travelers, Impressions d’Afrique hinges on a fête of a theatrical character given on the occasion of a coronation; Locus Solus is the account of a walk through a park full of bizarre inventions; in the play L’Étoile au front, a collection of curios forms the pretext for a string of anecdotes, and in La Poussière de soleils it is a question of a chain of enigmas which lead to the discovery of a treasure; Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is nothing more than meditations on four tourist attractions of modern Egypt; finally, of the texts collected in Comment j’ai écrit, some are given as illustrations of the eminently artificial method of creation explained in the prologue, the others refer to the Carnival at Nice, with the exception of the six Documents pour servir de canevas, which are of the story-within-a-story type so abundantly represented in Roussel’s work and which—like the composition with more or less indefinitely prolonged parentheses peculiar to Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique—seems to have served in the most literal way his need to multiply the screens.

  In the preamble to Comment j’ai écrit, Roussel sets forth the completely arbitrary process which he used for writing his prose works, including the plays; he tried nothing similar for the writings in verse, perhaps because the separation, the distance, the departure from reality was provided by the very fact of expressing himself in verse, without its thus being necessary to resort to additional artifice. “This process is, in short, related to rhyme. In both cases, there is unforeseen creation due to phonic combinations.” And reading these lines of Roussel, one thinks of what Racan wrote in his Life of Malherbe: “The reason he gave for the necessity of rhyming widely differing words rather than the customary ones was that one happened on more beautiful verses by bringing the former together, rather than by rhyming those whose meaning was almost similar; and he made a point of seeking out rare and sterile rhymes, believing as he did that they engendered new ideas, not to mention the fact that it was a mark of the great poet to attempt difficult rhymes which had never been rhymed before.” In reality, it seems that Roussel’s assertion is merely a theoretical justification, and that (except perhaps in regard to “Mon me,” the first and most “inspired” of his poems, and which he regarded as his fundamental work), rhyme never played for him the role of catalyst the way puns did, for, in examining the texture of his verse works, one does not see how rhyme could have served him as a propelling force; one would say, on the contrary, that he put into verse works which might well have been written in prose.

  However that may be, the following is the process, in its various forms, which provided Roussel with the elements he used in his prose tales:

  1. First, two phrases, identical except for one word, with a play on the double meanings of other substantives in both phrases. “Once the two phrases had been found,” Roussel indicates, “it was a question of writing a story which could begin with the first and end with the second.”

  Example: Les vers (“The lines of verse”) de la doublure (“of the understudy”) dans la pièce (“in the play”) du Forban Talon Rouge (“of Red-Heel the Buccaneer”) and Les vers (“The worms”) de la doublure (“in the lining”) de la pièce (“of the patch”) du fort pantalon rouge (“of the heavy red trousers”)—which forms the basis of the story “Chiquenaude,” published in 1900, the first work the author considered satisfactory after the profound nervous depression that followed the failure of the novel La Doublure.

  2. A word with two meanings joined to another word with two meanings by the preposition à, “with” (which becomes the instrument of association of two absolutely dissimilar elements, just as the conjunction “as” is used to associate two more or less similar elements in the classical metaphor by analogy).

  Example: Palmier (a kind of cake, or a palm tree) à re
stauration (a restaurant where cakes are served or the restoration of a dynasty on a throne), a pair of words which, in Impressions d’Afrique, produces the palm tree of the Square of Trophies consecrated to the restoration of the Talou dynasty.

  3. A random phrase “from which I drew images by distorting it, a little as though it were a matter of deriving them from the drawings of a rebus.”

  Example: Hellstern, 5 Place Vendôme, the address of Roussel’s shoemaker, deformed into hélice tourne zinc plat se rend dôme (“propeller turns zinc flat goes dome”) which furnished the elements of an apparatus manipulated by the emperor Talou’s eldest son (ibid.).

  In the works of Raymond Roussel elaborated according to this method, literary creation thus includes a first stage which consists in establishing a sentence or expression with a double meaning, or else in “dislocating” a phrase which already exists; the elements to be confronted with each other and brought into play are thus engendered by these fortuitous formal aspects. After the intermediate stage which is constituted by a logical plot joining these elements together, no matter how disparate they may be, comes the formulation of these relationships on as realistic a level as possible, in a text written with the utmost rigor, with no other attempt at style than the strictest application of the conventional rules, with concision and the absence of repetitions of terms coming at the head of the list of objectives pursued. This concern for extreme rigor in the production of works of which the least one can say is that they are far removed indeed from any kind of naturalism is reminiscent of an epigram of Juan Gris, the most rationalistic and at the same time one of the greatest of the Cubist painters: “One must be inexact but precise.” The deferential obedience to the rules of correct language such as they are taught in a lycée confirms in another connection the accuracy of a remark by Marcel Duchamp, who, speaking to me of Roussel and his special erudition, said that he was a “secondary” the way that others are “elementary.”