Locus Solus

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Locus Solus ( French : Locus Solus ) is the second novel by the French writer Raymond Roussel , which was published in early 1914 by the Paris publisher Alphonse Lemerre . The text had previously been preprinted as a serial in the literary magazine Gaulois du Dimanche .

This kaleidoscope of apocryphal events is reminiscent of the decameron in its episodic structure .

overview

At the beginning of April the 44-year-old bachelor master Martial Canterel leads a group of confidants through his estate Locus Solus in the Paris suburb of Montmorency. The tour of the park begins on a Thursday in front of Canterels Villa. At seven stations, the scholar and inventor introduces visitors, including the anonymous first-person narrator who is friends with the host, to his creations and attractions. The wealthy individualist Canterel researches all year round in his property solely for the sake of scientific knowledge. That is why Locus Solus means “space of an individual”. After mentally walking through this space, Robbe-Grillet sums up: "... we are in a flat and discontinuous world in which every thing only refers to itself."

content

1

Canterel explains the questioners among the guests a plastic trilogy - a symbolic child statue in front of three rectangular high reliefs. Ibn Batuta is said to have admired this image of a smiling, naked child in Timbuktu . Canterel tells the figuration the Breton legend of Kourmelen - King of Kerlagouëzo - and his daughter Princess Hello.

2

As the first of several of his inventions, Canterel presents the Demoiselle, a device for paving the street. This ram - a flying machine - was actually designed according to the exact specifications of the inventor for forecasting the weather up to ten days in advance. In his search for a new application for this unsuccessful weather prophet, Canterel's eyes had fallen on a pile of pulled human teeth. Another of the many creations - happily completed thanks to "tremendous calculations" by the inventor - had freed a number of Parisians hurrying up from their rumbling molars completely painlessly. Now the demoiselle, this flying tool, is paving the Locus-Solus-Hof with a mosaic of the same pile of teeth in front of the amazed visitors' eyes. The Flugramme copies an oil painting with a sufficient enlargement factor . The decorative pattern represents a scene from the Frithiofs saga by Esaias Tegnér . The story of the soldier Aag and Mrs. Christel. Around 1650, on behalf of his master, the Norwegian Duke Gjörtz, Aag was supposed to steal the beautiful woman - if possible unnoticed by her husband Baron Skjelderup. The commando operation fails. Aag is walled up as a punishment on the orders of the angry husband. But Christel frees the potential kidnapper and forgives him. Aag, kneeling in front of the rescuer, repents and thanks.

3

The giant diamond, Canterel's next creation along the way on the “peaceful tour” through the Locus Solus Park, turns out to be a simple water container. But the Aquamicans , that water in the basin, is not that simple . A “confusing mermaid” - her name is Faustine - dances in it. The “graceful, slim young woman in a flesh-colored jersey” can breathe effortlessly beneath the surface of oxygen-saturated water - Roussel speaks of “very intense oxidation ”. Aquamicans is by no means easy to control. After all too sudden oxidation it changes its physical state. Faustine sings over "at least three octaves" while dancing.

Canterel's great-great-grandfather Philibert bequeathed his great-great-grandson Danton's head from the bad year 1794. The descendant has almost overcome Danton's death; the brain matter is electrically revived, electrified, transformed into a "living battery". At least Danton's lips want to form “a lot of words” in Aquamican's liquid diamond mentioned above. Unfortunately, Roussel does not reveal the wording.

4th

Danton has been dead far too long. Canterel is cooling eight fresh corpses in a huge, high glass cage measuring 10 by 40 meters. Their closest relatives have to dress warmly if they want to experience the very last mechanical movements of their expensive deceased. The intense research of the master makes it possible. First, the faded poet Gérard Lauwerys artificially gets up again. His wife Clotilde, their son Florent and Gérard had been kidnapped by Calabrian bandits while the latter was alive while passing through Aspromonte . Clotilde had been released, but was nowhere close to raising the immense ransom for her two. Gérard had been mistaken for a Croesus by the robbers. The father succeeded in freeing his son by a trick.

The stories about the second to seventh preparations follow immediately, and finally, eighth, Canterel's invention has a use. The resuscitated corpse of the young suicide Charles Cortier leads the inquiring Canterel through the last mechanical movements mentioned above to a document that contains the confession of Charles' father Jules. The old man confesses a lust murder on paper. A person who has accidentally sentenced to life is then immediately rehabilitated.

5

While so far only explained or demonstrated, something like action is finally emerging. Malvina, a singer from the guided group of visitors, helps Lucius Egroizard, a mentally ill patient of Canterels, to overcome his severe mental disorder by singing.

6, 7

The fortune teller Félicité and the fortune teller Noël appear in front of Canterel and his guests. Alchemy and astrology are still taken seriously. A rock is blown up. A “great metal” is transformed. The dancer Faustine is given a horoscope .

The first-person narrator concludes: "Then Canterel announced that we were now aware of all the secrets of his park, and took the way back to the villa, where we soon had a cheerful meal."

Self-testimony

The text "How I wrote some of my books" was published on the instructions of Roussel after his death. Towards the end of the confession he writes: "... I come back to the painful feeling I always felt when I saw that my works encountered an almost general hostile incomprehension." Michel Foucault , in Threshold and Key with Roussel in search of meaning, put into perspective, “How I wrote some of my books” could only contain “a partial truth”. One has to search “further and in deeper corridors”.

reception

Dissertation Volmer in 1995:

Roussel, “in search of new forms” with this novel, cannot simply be attributed to the forerunners of the Nouveau Roman . While Robbe-Grillet is disenchanted with the level structure , Michel Butor discovers “meaningful structures”.

The language makes a heterogeneous, assembled impression, is structured in a polysemous manner and uses puns, the results of which are used by the narrator carelessly in varied meanings. For example, Fräulein ( Demoiselle ) becomes a flying ram. According to Roussel, meaning cannot be fixed, but strives for variability. For example, the last two chapters of the novel are thought acrobatics in the treatment of divination. In addition, the narrator's preference for the rarer word is noticeable - for example parallelepiped .

The reader has to get used to the double structure of the chapters. The tiresome, dry, meticulous description - mostly of a machine that cannot be understood in the last detail - is followed as an explanation by one or more stories from bygone times.

The seven presentations on the tour through the park call to mind the seven wonders of the world . The master's first name Martial is reminiscent of the Roman poet. In addition to the seven, the four dominates in the novel. The action month is the fourth of the year and Canterel is 44 years old. The four is a mantic number: there are four cardinal points, four seasons and for the alchemist there are four elements. With the title Locus Solus , Roussel heralds the grotesque absurdity. While Solis Lacus - a Mars topos - seems farther fetched, Logicus Solus should be favored as an attempt to explain the title of the novel. Because Canterel's sophisticated machinery is an invention of words, but it is primarily based on logical connections.

Further literature can be found, for example, in Saint-Réal (February 17, 1922), François Mauriac (December 23, 1922), Pierre Bazantay and Patrick Besnier (1983 and Amsterdam 1993), Ghislain Bourque (Paris 1976), John Ashbery (1964) , Walter Helmut Fritz (Frankfurter Hefte 23 (1968), pp. 513-514), Eberhard Horst ( Go a word further. Essays on literature. Düsseldorf 1983, pp. 162-167), Michèle Noailly (October 1988), Marcel Spada (1970) and Thomas Sylvestre (1983).

Adaptation

Pierre Frondaie (1884–1948) wrote a play, the text of which was published in Paris in 1972. The performance was then indeed scandalous, but Roussel earned the admiration of some surrealists . One of the admirers called the author a Dadaist . Roussel didn't know what that was.

German-language literature

expenditure

  • Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus. From the French by Cajetan Freund . With a foreword by Olivier de Magny . Hermann Luchterhand, Neuwied 1968. 468 pages, without ISBN (Original: Jean-Jacques Pauvert , Editeur, Paris 1965).
  • Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus. From the French by Cajetan Freund. With a foreword by Olivier de Magny Suhrkamp (st 559), Frankfurt am Main 1977 (1st edition), 1983 (2nd edition) and 1989 (5th thousand), ISBN 3-518-01559-1 .
  • Raymond Roussel: Locus Solus. In the print version from 1914 and supplemented by episodes from the original version published for the first time. Deciphered, commented on and translated from French by Stefan Zweifel . The other library, Berlin 2012. ISBN 978-3-8477-0329-7

Secondary literature

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Olivier de Magny calls Roussel's inventions “exact madness machines” (preface to the edition used, p. 19, 6. Zvo).
  2. ↑ Roussel named Logicus Solus as one of his interpretations of the title of the novel (Finter, p. 223, 14. Zvo).
  3. ↑ Edition used.
  4. ↑ Stefan Doubt only revised the present translation by Cajetan Freund.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volmer, p. 133, 4. Zvo
  2. ↑ Volmer, p. 137, 8. Zvu
  3. ↑ Volmer, p. 138 middle
  4. ↑ French Montmorency
  5. ↑ Finter, p. 223, 9. Zvo
  6. ↑ Robbe-Grillet in Riddles and Transparency by Raymond Roussel , translated by Helmut Scheffel by Grössel, pp. 102-108
  7. ↑ Robbe-Grillet bei Grössel, p. 108, 10. Zvo
  8. ↑ Volmer, p. 148, 2. Zvo
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 465, 4th Zvu
  10. ↑ Grössel, pp. 78–97
  11. ^ Roussel, translated from the French by Grössel, p. 96, 10. Zvo
  12. ^ Foucault, translated by Walter Seitter in Grössel, pp. 122–130.
  13. ↑ Foucault at Grössel, p. 127, 3. Zvo
  14. ↑ Volmer, p. 31, 6. Zvo
  15. ↑ Volmer, p. 36
  16. ↑ Volmer, p. 146 middle
  17. ↑ Volmer, p. 136 above
  18. ↑ Volmer, p. 243, 12. Zvo
  19. ↑ see also the preface of the edition used, p. 11 below
  20. ↑ Volmer, p. 148, 8. Zvo
  21. ↑ Volmer, p. 126, 4th Zvu
  22. ↑ Volmer, p. 131 above
  23. ↑ Volmer, p. 133 below and p. 134, 3. Zvo
  24. ↑ Volmer, pages 245-263
  25. ↑ Volmer, p. 246, last entry
  26. ↑ Volmer, p. 246, 6th entry vu
  27. ↑ Volmer, pp. 214-242
  28. ↑ Olivier de Magny in the preface to the edition used, p. 13 below