Collected French Translations: Prose

by Ashbery, John

  It should be noted that this abstention from any strictly stylistic effects led Roussel to an extraordinary transparency of style.

  In Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, the detachment from the real which Roussel seems to have aimed at is obtained in quite another way: the dislocation of the phrase by means of parentheses introducing a practically infinite series of “false bottoms,” breaking up, parceling out, disarticulating the thread of the meaning until one loses it. In his analysis of the second canto of Nouvelles Impressions, a work destined to become a classic among Rousselian studies, Jean Ferry justly writes that “even more than the famous Japanese box whose cubes fit exactly one into the other down to the tiniest of them all, the composition evokes two or three large concentric spheres, between whose surfaces, unequally distant, might float other spheres themselves having several layers,” an image taken up in a recent article by Renato Mucci, for whom there is no Rousselian work in which the end and the beginning do not join each other as is the case in those poems whose single sentence is cut up by multiple parentheses to which footnotes have been grafted, each of these works appearing as a differentiated unity which, throughout the series of elements peculiar to it, takes on a value of concrete universality in turning back upon itself.

  Not only does the process employed by Roussel for the composition of his prose works have the immense interest of adding up to a deliberate promotion of language to the rank of creative agent, instead of settling for using it as an agent of execution, but it seems that subjugation to a specious and arbitrary law (obliging a concentration on the difficult resolution of a problem whose given facts are as independent as possible of each other) has as a consequence a distraction whose liberating power appears much more efficacious than the abandon, pure and simple, implied by the use of a process like automatic writing. Aiming at an almost total detachment from everything that is nature, feeling, and humanity, and working laboriously over materials apparently so gratuitous that they were not suspect to him, Roussel arrived by this paradoxical method at the creation of authentic myths, in which his affectivity is reflected in a more or less direct or symbolic way, as is shown by the frequency of certain themes which constitute the leitmotifs of his work and of which the omnipotence of science, the close relation between microcosm and macrocosm, ecstasy, Eden, the treasure to be discovered or the riddle to be solved, artificial survival and postmortem states, masks and costumes, as well as many themes which could be interpreted as stemming from fetishism or sadomasochism, constitute examples (here enumerated without any attempt at a methodical inventory). It is not an exaggeration to say that the establishing of a thematic index of Roussel’s work might allow one to discover a psychological content equivalent to those of most of the great Western mythologies; this, because the products of Roussel’s imagination are, in a way, quintessential commonplaces: Disconcerting and singular as it may be for the public, he drew from the same sources of popular imagination and childish imagination; and, in addition, his culture was essentially popular and childish (melodramas, serials, operettas, vaudeville, fairy tales, stories in pictures, etc.), as are his processes (stories within stories, verbal formulas used as the structure for a tale, and down to his method of creation by dramatized puns—the literary equivalent of the mechanism used in certain social pastimes: charades, for example). No doubt the almost unanimous incomprehension that Roussel unfortunately encountered resulted less from an inability to attain universality than from this bizarre combination of the “simple as ABC” with the quintessential.

  Using childish and popular forms to express his own profundity, Roussel reaches down into a common storehouse, and it is thus not surprising that the personal myths he elaborated are liable to converge (as Michel Carrouges maintains) on certain great occult sequences in Western thought; so that it is, to say the least, superfluous to explain (as does André Breton in his preface to Jean Ferry) why the scenario of La Poussière de soleils can seem to be based on the traditional evolution of the alchemists’ search for the Philosopher’s Stone by suggesting that Roussel might have been an adept of hermetic philosophy. In view of the rules of secrecy which the initiates observe (a rule to which Roussel as an initiate would have been by definition subjected, confining himself, in accordance with the custom, to revealing it in an occult way), such a hypothesis escapes refutation and one can only argue, in order to reject it, the absence of any profession of faith of this kind, in his conversation as well as in his writings; still, the fact remains that in spite of certain aspects of Roussel’s work (the important role played by techniques of divination, the frequent use of legendary and marvelous elements), this work utterly lacking in effects of shading has an essentially positivist coloring and that nothing we know of this writer of genius—not even the phrase in which he was illumined by a sensation of “universal glory”—inclines one to attribute to him aspirations of a mystical nature.

  When Roussel had a kind of skylight built into his mother’s coffin so as to be able to observe her face to the last moment, and when he imagined the refrigerator in Locus Solus in which corpses, thanks to scientific processes, relive the crowning incident of their lives, he was recording, no doubt, his refusal to accept death, but recording it as an unbeliever for whom nothing exists after our corporeal existence is finished. Evidence of a deep attachment to his own physical person is provided both by his taste for elegant clothing (an elegance which, in its sobriety, was literally all-important for him) and by the troublesome treatment which he underwent, even during his trip to Persia, when he began to be obsessed by the fear that his hair was getting white. If, when conversing with the late Eugène Vallée (the chief typesetter of the Lemerre printing house who worked on the composition of all his books and who, like almost all those who had any contact with Roussel, spoke of him as the simplest and most charming of beings), he frequently indulged in estimates of the probable time that each of them still had to live, it was to statistical data that he referred for these calculations and, deep as his obsession was, it was a scientific point of view that he adopted. Such a scientific approach allied to a passionate desire to expand, not on a mystical but on the material level, the limits which are imposed on man, is found again in his admiration for Camille Flammarion (to the point where he had a tiny transparent box in the shape of a star specially constructed to conserve a little cake of the same shape brought home from a lunch at which, on July 29, 1923, he was a guest of the illustrious astronomer at the Observatory of Juvisy), in his identification with the inventor Martial Canterel, in his interest in Einstein’s theory of relativity, and in his certitude—which he confided to his friend Charlotte Dufrêne—that a day would come when men would discover a means of travel by reascending the course of time. As for the pleasure he took in visiting crèches at Christmastime and altars on Good Friday, and in attending High Mass at Easter, this is probably nothing more than the expression of his fondness for folklore and, perhaps, that of his attachment to a childhood of which he wrote that he had a “delightful memory.” Similarly, the edifying and marvelous tales which abound in his work are always presented between ethnographic or historiographic quotation marks. Finally, that very sensation of “universal glory” which he declares having experienced while writing La Doublure (and which he was anxious to know whether certain well-known writers had experienced also) is not a spiritual state but something felt physically, an intoxication, a “euphoria” (which he sought in drugs after having sought it momentarily in alcohol, after becoming certain of not finding it while writing), a satisfaction which seems quite close to that “serenity” in whose name he paid his chess instructor’s debts: Thus, if it is in card games he found serenity …

  It seems in short that if Roussel declared that he preferred “the domain of Conception to that of Reality,” the world which he thus contrasted with that of everyday life had no belief in the supernatural at its base. In Comment j’ai écrit, Roussel prides himself on being a logician, and one must admit that his essential a
mbition of a man pursuing “euphoria” in the almost demigodlike exercise of his intellect was to be the champion of the imagination: a Victor Hugo, a Jules Verne, a phenomenal chess player, an Oedipus solving riddles (leading one to wonder whether the riddles which perhaps still remain to be deciphered in his work are not perhaps of the same order as those he solved with enormous pride at the Théâtre du Petit Monde, which he used to attend with his friend Charlotte Dufrêne, taking along a little girl of their acquaintance to serve as a pretext). His effort tends toward the creation of a fictive world, entirely fabricated, having nothing in common with reality, as he succeeds in creating truth by the force of his genius alone, with no recourse to some further reality. Logically, this supremely negative effort—to cut the bonds which might be able to attach his conceptual world to reality—was to lead Raymond Roussel, who was no idealist, to the definitive disengagement which is voluntary death. This seems to be what he had always dimly felt, as is borne out by this addition “from earliest youth” to a poem by Victor Hugo (Comment j’ai écrit, p. 38):

  Comment, disaient-ils

  Nous sentant des ailes

  Quitter ces corps vils?

  —Mourez, disaient-elles.

  How, they asked,

  Feeling that we have wings

  Shall we leave these vile bodies?

  Die, they replied.

  In 1932 Raymond Roussel had stopped writing. He had taken up chess and was drugging himself with soporifics (barbiturates).

  On April 16 he gave the printer the main part of his “secret and posthumous” work dedicated to Charlotte Dufrêne.

  At that time he had ceased to live in his sister’s private mansion in the rue Quentin-Bauchart, and had taken up residence at 75 rue Pigalle in a residential hotel frequented by homosexuals and drug addicts, that is, by people who shared the exclusive taste he had always had, and his more recent passion for drugs.

  On December 24 he attended Midnight Mass at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette with his companions.

  Returning from the African tropics toward the beginning of 1933, I went to call on Roussel, who had been one of the patrons of the scientific mission of which I was a member. He received me, as he had since he had given up his house at Neuilly, at the home of Charlotte Dufrêne in the rue Pierre-Charron. Clad in an extremely dark gray, if not completely black, suit, he was wearing the decoration of the Legion of Honor (this, at least, of his ambitions had been fulfilled, although he had been unable to have his photograph in an album of celebrities published by Mariani Wine, or have a street named after him). He had shaved his mustache; still handsome and elegant, but somewhat heavier and slumping a bit, he seemed to be speaking from very far away. He had not seen me for some two years and asked me successively for news of a large number of my relatives. A melancholy reflection (with a smile) on life: “It goes by faster and faster!” After I said goodbye to him, he accompanied me into the anteroom and we stood talking for a long time (according to his habit—was it shyness? fear of seeming to show me out?—of keeping people with him long after saying goodbye). During the same visit, when I asked him whether he had been writing, he replied: “It’s so difficult!”

  On May 30, 1933, before leaving for Sicily, he made detailed arrangements for a posthumous volume, in a series of four notes written at the Lemerre printing house.

  In Palermo he took up residence at the Grande Albergo e delle Palme, room 226, communicating with number 227 (occupied by Charlotte Dufrêne, his “housekeeper”) at the corner of Via Mariano Stabile and Via Riccardo Wagner, the quietest part of the building, in which Richard Wagner had lived on the first floor while writing Parsifal, and where Francesco Crispi, the statesman, had also lived, as is mentioned in two plaques.

  Roussel used to say that, except during childhood, he had never had an hour of happiness and described his anguish as a kind of suffocation, a gasping for breath. But in Palermo he found complete “euphoria”; he was no longer preoccupied with his “glory” which had not been recognized, nor with his writing; he said that he would give the whole world for a moment of euphoria. “Cut, cut, but give me my drug!” he said one day when he was deprived of drugs, meaning that the amputation of his two arms and legs would have been preferable to such a deprivation.

  According to Charlotte Dufrêne, Roussel when drugged had a taste for death, which before had frightened him.

  One morning around seven o’clock, he was found bleeding in his bath; he had opened his veins with a razor, and he burst out laughing, saying, “How easy it is to open one’s veins … It’s nothing at all.” Later, when the drug had worn off, he wondered how he could have done this.

  Several days after arriving in Palermo he had begged Charlotte Dufrêne to return to Paris to dismiss his servants (whom he had amply remunerated) and asked her also to liquidate his apartment, so as to be rid of everything he still possessed in Paris, his intention being to travel and not to return for a long time.

  He was at this time so weak that he could scarcely eat. He slept on a mattress placed on the floor, afraid of falling out of bed while under the influence of drugs. The reason he gave for not wanting to eat was that it disturbed his “serenity.”

  One day he had Charlotte Dufrêne write to his manservant, asking him to send a case with a certain number, and he said that this case contained a revolver which he wanted sent to him because as a foreigner he could not (or so he thought) buy one in Palermo. He told his friend that unfortunately he would not have the courage to press the trigger, and that perhaps she would do it for him. As she tried to thrust aside this idea, he attempted to make her give in by bringing out his checkbook and asked her how much she wished; after each refusal he raised the sum. In the end the letter was not sent.

  At Mme Dufrêne’s insistence, Roussel finally decided to go to Kreuzlingen in Switzerland to be cured. On the morning of July 13 he had a telegraph sent to this effect. In the evening he told his companion that she could go to sleep in peace, as he was feeling well that day and had taken no soporifics. For several days the connecting door had been shut at night, whereas before it had remained open.

  On the morning of the fourteenth, not hearing any noise, Mme Dufrêne knocked on the door between the two rooms. Obtaining no answer, she called a servant. The latter entered by the door from the corridor, which was unlocked. Mme Dufrêne and the servant found Roussel stretched out on his mattress which he had pushed or dragged as far as the connecting door (representing a superhuman effort in view of his weakened condition). His face was calm, restful, and turned toward that door.

  In order to bring the body back from Palermo it was necessary to embalm it.

  In the theatrical adaption of the novel Locus Solus, one of the chief attractions of the spectacle was the “Ballet of Glory”: the suicide of a misunderstood poet, whom one subsequently sees enter into immortality—an immortality which is, of course, by no means that of the other world but the purely civic immortality of the world of statues, monuments, and street names. One cannot refrain from emphasizing that it was at the foot of a communicating door—that which led to the room of his friend and confidante—that Roussel had insisted on dying (unless it was that before his privation he had wanted to experience to the utmost the euphoria that the soporifics gave him). Whatever may have been his immediate motive and the reason for which he had chosen such a position—was it to be close to the door or to barricade it?—he died by his own hand on the very threshold of that communication which he had recognized as impossible, at least during his life, and with his eyes turned toward the place occupied by the only person, apparently, who had shared a little, but only a little, in his intimacy.

  1954

  Atlas Anthology 4 (1987). First published in Art and Literature 2 (Summer 1964).

  SALVADOR DALÍ

  (1904–1989)

  THE INCENDIARY FIREMEN

  Our era has seen the publication of a staggering number of books dealing with contemporary art. Almost none have been devoted to those heroic p
ainters called the pompiers.1 For a period so utterly dominated by information of all kinds, this is a unique phenomenon. We have a fantastic choice of albums of color plates on the work of Picasso, Utrillo, or Dufy, but you will look in vain for anything on Bouguereau, Meissonier, or Detaille. And yet who today can continue to affirm without blushing that Dufy is a more important artist than Meissonier?

  The pompier painters, especially the glorious Meissonier and Detaille, found in their own time nothing less than the “structure” of the most important subject in the history of civilization: the history of our time itself, at its most complex, dense, tragic, ineluctable, climactic. Detaille in particular discovered in the structure of the most important subject (I repeat: the historical subject) what is most rigorous, hierarchical, physical, biological, nuclear, cellular, atomic; i.e.: “the infrastructure, the military structure and superstructure, the most explosive of all that exist.” To the point where Detaille, despite all the accepted notions (which are the result of contemporary aesthetic myopia), will soon be ranked as the supreme painter of the living structures of the future, just as Cézanne will be known as the supreme painter of the withered structures of the past.