Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel (1896)

Roussel's travel vehicle

Raymond Roussel (born January 20, 1877 in Paris , † July 14, 1933 in Palermo ) was a French writer and chess theorist who significantly influenced numerous modern literary tendencies such as Surrealism , Pataphysics , Oulipo and the Nouveau Roman , as well as the visual arts .

Life

Raymond Roussel came from a very wealthy middle-class family and, in his own opinion, had a very happy childhood. At his mother's request, he first studied music at the conservatory in his hometown, but then devoted himself to poetry. At the age of seventeen, in an ecstatic creative frenzy , he wrote his first work La Doublure in Alexandrian verse , which, like all his books, he had his future regular publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, publish on June 10, 1897 at his own expense. The failure of this work plunged him into a serious psychological crisis. Nevertheless, only a few days later he passed his conservatory examination with distinction and was declared fit for military service. In November 1898 he began his two-year military service and visited his great role model Jules Verne in Amiens the following year . At the same time, he was working on short narratives that he wrote using a construction process that would form the starting point for his later works. In 1900 he published the short story Chiquenaude . In 1904 his verse stories La Vue , Le Concert and La Source appeared . The latter, for example, is dedicated to the meticulous description of the label on a mineral water bottle. In his work Impressions d'Afrique , published in 1910, Roussel described a completely imaginary Africa. Locus Solus , his second great novel, was published in book form in early 1914. With the outbreak of the First World War, Roussel was mobilized and, due to his age, moved into the car service. In 1918 he was awarded the Médaille commémorative française and the Médaille de la Victoire .

In the years 1920 to 1921 he undertook a world tour, among other things in the footsteps of Pierre Loti , but always emphasized the separation between this journey and his poetic work. Michel Leiris financed an expedition to Africa. In 1924 he published his drama L'Étoile au front , the performance of which led to tumult in the audience, but Roussel secured the attention of the surrealists. His drama La Poussière du soleil , performed two years later, also fell through with the general public. In a trailer specially designed for him, he took a trip to Italy, where he was given this by Mussolini and Pius XI. marveled at. After the publication of the narrative Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique , on which he had worked since 1915, Roussel stopped his writing in 1932 and devoted himself exclusively and manically to the game of chess. His longtime psychiatrist was Pierre Janet , who described Roussel's case history under the patient pseudonym Martial in the two-volume study De l'angoisse à l'exstase from 1926. Roussel committed suicide on July 14, 1933 in Palermo in the Grand Hôtel et des Palmes .

Roussel's literary work is based on a writing technique he developed himself, which is based on wordplay and sound associations. Roussel explains this technique in his 1935 book Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres ( how I wrote some of my books ). In this respect, Roussel is regarded as the forerunner of the “ écriture automatique ” of the surrealists .

In the early 1930s Roussel developed Roussel's reading machine as a reading aid for his nested texts.

effect

Throughout his life, Roussel sought a fame that was denied him. While he believed that he was writing literary works for the bourgeois and academic audience of his time in the style of his role models Edmond Rostand , Jules Verne or Pierre Loti, he had a lasting fascination with members of the Parisian avant-garde, especially through the scandalous theatrical performances of his works.

In 1912, for example, Guillaume Apollinaire , Francis Picabia , his wife Gabrielle and Marcel Duchamp attended one of the first performances of Impressions d'Afrique at the Théâtre Antoine. Duchamp in particular has never tired of emphasizing the influence of Roussel, who "showed him the way", in conversations and interviews: "The reason I admired him was that he produced something that I had never seen before."

Roussel received one of the first critical appraisals from the study Un auteur difficile by Robert de Montesquiou, the model for Huysmans' Des Esseintes and Proust's Baron de Charlus, which was first published in the journal Gils Blas .

The Surrealists, among them Philippe Soupault , Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , Roger Vitrac , Salvador Dalí and Michel Leiris, whose father was the financial advisor to the Roussel family, devoted enthusiastic articles to Roussel, although he was aloof from them, but they in his will as addressees of his posthumously published work Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres .

In 1932, the chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower paid detailed tribute to the formula Raymond Roussel , a combination discovered by Roussel within three months for the mate with knight and bishop.

In 1940 André Breton included Roussel in his anthology of black humor .

In 1963, Roussel's works were reissued by the publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert. In the same year, Michel Foucault's book Raymond Roussel appeared , which was to remain his only literary monograph, as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet's essay Énigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel , in which this Roussel is one of the forerunners of the Nouveau Roman .

The members of Oulipo were able to celebrate Roussel as one of their predecessors due to his writing work with self-imposed formal constraints. His works also made a significant impact on some of the New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Harry Mathews .

In the bachelor machines exhibition organized by Harald Szeemann for the Kunsthalle Bern in 1975 , Roussel was assigned an important place among the creators of a modern machine myth alongside Alfred Jarry , Franz Kafka , Picabia and Duchamp.

In 1989 the furniture- moving company Bredel gave the Bibliothèque nationale de France nine moving boxes owned by Raymond Roussel. In addition to numerous letters, drafts and photographs, they also contained the previously unknown works La Seine , Les Noces and L'allée aux lucioles , which led to the plan for a new complete edition.

In 2012 the Museu Serralves in Porto and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organized the exhibition Locus Solus: Impressions de Raymond Roussel , which highlighted Roussel's importance for the visual arts of the twentieth century. Parts of the exhibition were shown in the following year under the title Nouvelles Impressions de Raymond Roussel in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and under the title Raymond Roussel: The President of The Republic of Dreams in the Galerie Daniel Buchholz Berlin.

proof

1. ↑ “I have fond memories of my childhood. I can say that at that time I experienced several years of perfect happiness. "(Raymond Roussel:" How I wrote some of my books ", in: Hanns Grössel [Ed.]: Raymond Roussel. A documentation , Munich: text + kritik, 1977, p. 91.)
2. ↑ “When La Doublure was published on June 10, 1897, I was shocked by its failure of terrible violence. I felt as if I had been thrown to the ground by a tremendous peak of fame. The shock went so far that it caused a kind of skin disease in me [...]. Above all, this shock gave rise to a terrible nervous disease from which I suffered for a very long time. "(Ibid., P. 92.)
3. ↑ Roussel said of Jules Verne: “My admiration for him is limitless. […] I was lucky enough to be received by him in Amiens, where I was doing my military service, and to be able to shake the hand that wrote so many immortal works. "(Ibid., P. 90.)
4. ↑ “I got back to work, but in a more sensible way than during my major overexertion crisis. Several years passed with exploration work. None of my works satisfied me, except for Chiquenaude , which I published around 1900. "(ibid., P. 92.)
5. ↑ “I've traveled a lot. […] I have never drawn anything for my books from all these trips. It seemed to me that it deserved to be communicated, as it proves that with me the power of imagination is everything. ”(Ibid., P. 91)
6. ↑ Michel Leiris described this expedition undertaken under the direction of Marcel Griaule in his diary L'Afrique fantôme , published in 1934 ( Phantom Africa. Diary of an expedition from Dakar to Djibouti 1931–1933 , Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980 and 1984.)
7. ↑ Marcel Duchamp: Interviews and Statements , collected, translated and annotated by Serge Stauffer, Stuttgart: Cantz, 1992, p. 38 u. P. 181.
8. ↑ Ibid., P. 38. See also p. 79 and 80.
9. ^ Reprinted in: Robert de Montesquiou: Élus et Appelés , Paris: Émiles-Paul Frères, 1921, pp. 187–224.
10. ↑ Raymond Roussel had this combination and three articles by Tartakowers dedicated to him printed in Comment j'ai écrits certains de mes livres .
11. ^ Alain Robbe-Grillet: “Énigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel”, in: Pour un Nouveau Roman , Paris: Minuit, 1963, pp. 87-95.
12. ↑ See the catalog of the same name for the exhibition: Hans Ulrich Reck, Harald Szeemann [Hrsg.]: Junggesellenmaschinen . Extended new edition, Vienna - New York: Springer, 1999.
13. ↑ See: François Piron [Ed.]: Locus Solus. Impressions de Raymond Roussel , Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2013.

Works (selection)

• The sight (excerpts from La Vue ). Translated by Stefan Ripplinger . In: copybook. Journal for Literature 91 (2018).
• The avenue of fireflies. Flio . Zero sharp, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-945421-02-4 .
• Chiquenaude and other texts from early youth . Zero sharp, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-945421-00-0 .
• 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 .
• Locus Solus . 2nd edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1983, ISBN 3-518-01559-1 (translated by Cajetan Freund).
• The predestined. 2 plays; "The star on the forehead" and "Sun dust" ("L'étoile au front" and "La poussière du soleil"). Hanser, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-446-12492-6 (translated by Klaus Völker and Jürg Laederach , edited by Klaus Völker).
• Impressions from Africa ("Impressions d'Afrique"). Matthes and Seitz, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-88221-213-6 (translated by Cajetan Freund).
• Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique . Verlag Text and Criticism, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-88377-017-5 (French / German; translated by Hanns Grössel).
  • New impressions from Africa , with 59 drawings by H.-A. Zo. Zero sharp Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-945421-03-1 .
• In Havana. A fragment of a novel . Syndicate / EVA, Frankfurt / M. 1984, ISBN 3-434-46031-4 (edited / translated by Hanns Grössel).

literature

• John Ashbery: "The Bachelor-Machines of Raymond Roussel", in: Other Traditions , Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2000.
• Maurice Blanchot : “Le problemème de Wittgenstein, Flaubert, Roussel”, in: L'Entretien infini , Gallimard, Paris 1969, pp. 487-497.
• François Caradec: Vie de Raymond Roussel , Pauvert, Paris 1972.
• Michel Carrouges: Les Machines célibataires , Arcanes, Paris 1952.
• Jean Ferry: Une étude sur Raymond Roussel , Arcanes, Paris 1953.
• Jens Malte Fischer : Locus Solus . Hiding and revealing with Raymond Roussel, in: Rein A. Zondergeld [Ed.]: Phaïcon 4. Almanach der Fantastischen Literatur. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag (st 636), Frankfurt 1980, pp. 78-105.
• Mark Ford: Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams , Cornell University Press, New York 2001.
• Michel Foucault: Raymond Roussel , Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp 1989. ISBN 3-518-11559-6
• Hanns Grössel : Raymond Roussel. A documentation , Edition text + kritik, Munich 1977, ISBN 3-921402-35-2
• Michel Leiris: Roussel & Co. , Fata Morgana - Fayard, Paris 1998.
• Robert de Montesquiou: “Un Auteur difficile”, in: Élus et Appelés , Émiles-Paul Frères, Paris 1921, pp. 187–224.
• François Piron [ed.]: Locus Solus. Impressions de Raymond Roussel , Les presses du réel, Dijon 2013.
• Hans Ulrich Reck, Harald Szeemann [Ed.]: Bachelor machines . Extended new edition, Springer, Vienna - New York, 1999.
• Alain Robbe-Grillet: "Énigmes et transparence chez Raymond Roussel", in: Pour un Nouveau Roman , Minuit, Paris 1963, pp. 87-95.
• Uwe Ruprecht : No.224. Raymond Roussel's death while traveling , in: Hotelzimmer. Secret place of stories, Dortmund 1996, ISBN 3-929983-05-2
• Leonardo Sciascia : The Death of Raymond Roussel , Tartin Editions, Salzburg 2002, ISBN 3-902163-05-4
• Andreas Wolfsteiner: “'… a new human being, half robot and half four dimensional.' Duchamp, Roussel, Maschine “, in: Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, Jan Lazardzig [eds.]: Theatrum Machinarium , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2008, pp. 391–403.

Web links

Commons : Raymond Roussel  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Literature by and about Raymond Roussel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photographic documentation about Raymond Roussel on the edge of the earth
• Hans Grössel on Raymond Roussel and his writing method
• Roussel's Étoile cosmique at Sotheby's