Michel Foucault - Raymond Roussel (Ombre Corte, It, 2001) § Raymond Roussel (Gallimard, Fr, 1963) § Death and the Labyrinth (Continuum, Uk, 2006)

Michel Foucault

Raymond Roussel Introduzione e cura di Massimiliano Guareschi Il libro Fra i libri di Michel Foucault, il Raymond Roussel occupa una posizione assai particolare, sospesa nel limbo di una clandestinità discreta e impercettibile. Pubblicato nel 1963, lo stesso anno di Nascita della clinica, può essere considerato una sorta di opera segreta, della cui invisibilità si è fatto garante non il clamore dell’inedito ma il mimetismo nell’infinita disponibilità dell’edito, del tradotto, "dell’incatalogo". Un destino strano, per un’opera di un autore "di successo". Strano ma non imprevisto. Come scrive lo stesso Foucault: "Il mio rapporto con il libro su Roussel e Roussel è qualcosa di veramente personale, che mi ha lasciato ottimi ricordi. é un libro a parte nella mia opera. Mi fa piacere che nessuno abbia mai cercato di spiegare che il libro su Roussel era stato scritto in quanto avevo scritto un libro sulla follia e in seguito ne avrei scritto uno sulla storia della sessualità. Nessuno ha mai fatto attenzione a questo libro, e ne sono lieto. é la mia stanza segreta, una storia d’amore durata alcune estati. Nessuno ne ha saputo nulla". Read more on Ombre Corte website

Michel Foucault RAYMOND ROUSSEL [1963], 216 pages, 118 x 185 mm. 
Collection Le Chemin, Gallimard -.
le même ouvrage . Présentation de Pierre Macherey, 256 pages sous couv. ill., 108 x 178 mm. Collection Folio essais (No 205) (1992), Gallimard -


Résumé
L'ombre de Raymond Roussel n'a cessé de grandir. Son ombre et son énigme. Cet homme absolument secret, soigné plusieurs fois par Janet pour sa « psychasthénie », a couvert d'un langage tendu, mat et inlassablement méticuleux, un espace où notre littérature n'a pas fini de se déployer.
L'essai de Michel Foucault est la première tentative pour analyser l'ensemble de cette œuvre. Breton, et d'autres, ont pensé que Roussel était un initié : n'a-t-il pas, au moment de se suicider, révélé quelques secrets de ses étranges machineries verbales  ? Mais peut-être le seul métal qu'il forgeait était-il le langage lui-même. Une lecture patiente de l'œuvre retrouve partout les mêmes formes : le jeu du double et du même, de la différence et de l'identité, du temps qui se répète et s'abolit, du mot qui glisse sur lui-même et dit autre chose que ce qu'il dit. L'œuvre de Roussel serait le premier inventaire, en forme de littérature, des pouvoirs dédoublants du langage. Un Traité de Rhétorique appliqué à la pure matière verbale : « Glossaire, j'y serre mes gloses », comme dit Michel Leiris, le plus grand des admirateurs de Roussel.


Read more on Gallimard website

Death and the Labyrinth

by Michel Foucault

translated by Charles Ruas

edited by James Faubion

Continuum Books, Uk, 2006

"Death and the Labyrinth" is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes: an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault by Charles Ruas, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet, John Ashbery.


"One of the important things about the Roussel book, however, is that it shows that approach to literature in full flight. And reading it is a pleasure, but a pleasure that is not unmixed with pain. Foucault's own enjoyment, not only of the texts of Roussel, but of the process of producing his analyses of those texts, is contagious. And if that makes us go back and read some of Roussel's work, then the book has served an important function... given Foucault's own fondness for subjugated knowledges and forgotten histories, we would be well justified in uncovering this secret love of an anguished and obsessive young philosopher." --Timothy O'Leary, Foucault Studies, February 2009--Timothy O Leary


Read more on Continuum website

Translating Raymond Roussel by Mark Ford and Mark Polizzotti @ Bomb Magazine, Issue 118, December 2011

                                        Portrait of Raymond Roussel. Images Courtesy of the Bibliotèque nationale de France.


Translating Raymond Roussel 
by Mark Ford and Mark Polizzotti 
Bomb Magazine, Issue 118, December 2011

The linguistic contortions in Roussel’s work have influenced artists and writers from Duchamp to Foucault to Ashbery. Two recent translators of Roussel discuss his outlandish creations. Trevor Winkfield introduces the conversation.

Like an experienced still-life painter, the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) could make use of anything that came to hand. From his shoemaker’s name and address, Helstern, 5, place Vendome, he extracted, by phonetic distortion, “Helice tourne zinc plat se rend (devient) dome” (Propeller turns zinc, flat goes [becomes] dome), which supplied him with all the elements he needed to design one of the fantastic apparatus in his novel Impressions of Africa. Who could not fall in love with such a linguistic contortionist? Well, many people, actually. Despite having given inspiration to some of the most influential artists of the 20th century (Breton, Duchamp, Dalí, Foucault, Leiris, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, Giacometti, Ashbery, and numerous others), Roussel has always remained something of an acquired taste, almost a cult, resurfacing every decade or so to startle and delight a new generation of researchers. And by researchers I mean those readers who want more from literature than Shakespeare and Hemingway, the fortunate ones who realize that something fascinating is lurking behind the canon.

The sneaking suspicion that something was lurking behind the placid surface of Roussel’s prose was only confirmed with the posthumous publication of his bean-spiller How I Wrote Certain of My Books, an expository text which revealed a few (but only a few) of the many ingenious constraining techniques Roussel used to ignite his writings. The techniques had many variations, but the basic method was to begin a story with one phrase: “Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard” (The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table), and to complete the story with an almost identical phrase having a totally different meaning: “Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard” (The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer). Roussel’s enviable task was then to reconcile the two separate concepts via a connecting narrative.

Within his stories, novels, poems, and plays, similar linguistic distortions were used to supply individual episodes. Thus, the name of an apparatus called Phonotypia gave him “fausse note tibia” (wrong note tibia), hence the Breton Lelgoualch who played tunes on a flute fashioned from his amputated tibia bone. A bizarre deduction indeed, especially when we realize that we ourselves could have teased out an entirely different set of meanings from Phonotypia.

Though the sparks may have been quotidian, the world that Roussel constructed from them is one that belongs entirely to the imagination. Nothing real intrudes; it all derives from his head. Like a fairy tale, but a believable one.

Writers may be attracted by Roussel’s literary procedures, but he has a totally different appeal to visual artists. Not only do artists and their products play prominent roles in many of his works, but visually his texts are chockablock with detailed descriptions of objects, tableaux, and machinery. Salvador Dalí, reviewing Roussel’s penultimate poem New Impressions of Africa (over which Roussel labored for five years) in 1933, claimed, “This, of all the books of our time, really is the most ‘ungraspably poetic,’ and consequently the one which contains most for the future.” A seemingly exhaustive listing of objects almost overwhelms the poem’s four cantos, including a comparison of things similar in appearance but differing in size: “for that which the sole / Of a hobnailed boot has imprinted in droppings, / A solitaire board without pegs. ”

A smutty comparison that must have greatly appealed to Dalí’s perverse humor and slanted ideas of geometry. And appealed to many other artists, too. I can vouch for that.

Having myself laboriously slaved over a translation of Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books (and, in the process, having found unexpected methods of painting and arranging narratives on canvas), I can only marvel at the way Ford and Polizzotti foolhardily tackled, and succeeded in following, Roussel’s African footsteps, at the same time revealing his complex writing techniques in action. (...)
Trevor Winkfield


Mark Ford: (...) I’m afraid we’ll sorely weary our readers if we go into precise details about this particular invention—suffice it to say changes in temperature drastically affect a certain metal, Bexium, discovered by Bex, and he uses this metal and its responsiveness to hot and cold to create a kind of one-man orchestra. And this is all part of a gala staged by a set of Europeans—the self-styled “Incomparables”—who have been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and are whiling away the time until ransom money arrives to pay off their captors. What a great film one could make of Impressions of Africa, don’t you think, with digital technology! The stage version of it, alas, for all the money he lavished on it, could hardly have offered a visual analogue to the marvels it presents. The photos of this production suggest that it really wasn’t that amazing, and, of course, it was hooted at and derided by nearly all who saw it—all except for the Surrealists, and it was the show which kickstarted Duchamp’s lifelong love of Roussel. Roussel himself appeared on stage as a sailor, and there is a great picture of him, arms folded, looking rather pleased with himself, despite all the brouhaha.(...)

Read the full article & more on Bomb magazine