William s Allen Speculative Prose

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MLN, Volume 129, Number 4, September 2014 (French Issue), pp.

955-992 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/mln.2014.0083

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A Semblance of Life: RaymondRoussels Speculative Prose

William S. Allen

Raymond Roussels Impressions dAfriquefirst appeared in 1909, but asa major work of the modernist tradition it is hardly known and evenless well understood in the Anglophone world. I will introduce the text

here and explicate its theoretical implications, for in its proceduralapproach to fiction it operates on a level of formalism that, along withthe flatness of Roussels prose and the bizarre adventures he describes,has contributed to the lack of interest shown by English readers. Butthis lack of interest overlooks the nature of the experimentation inRoussels work and the consequences this unveils, as it leads to a nar-rative that conveys a powerful sense of autonomy, a text that appearsto bear a life of its own with the concomitant implications this has forthe materiality of its language, a textual approach perhaps unfamiliar

to English readers but no less significant as a critical form of mod-ernist thinking and writing. After having examined Roussels work indepth I will then take up the central part of his writing procedure, thetransformation of sentences, and show how this creates a surprisinganalogue to the notion of the speculative sentence that Hegel devel-oped in his Phenomenology. But the significance of this association liesin the fact that the formal experiments of Roussels writings delivera way of thinking about the relation of language and materiality thatdoes not rationalize it into a system of thought. Instead, the syntactical

relations of Roussels writings bear mimetic relations to the world ofthings, in a manner akin to the language-like quality of the artworkdiscussed by Theodor W. Adorno but that is here transferred into

MLN129 (2014): 955992 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press


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language, which enables them to articulate the prosaic forms of theworld as a mode of speculative material knowledge.

It is very revealing that while Roussels writings have promptedserious and sustained analysis in France since the early work of JeanFerry and Michel Foucault in the 1950s and 1960s, there has beenno similar interest among Anglophone scholars. In fact, apart fromtranslations of works by Foucault and Franois Caradec, there hasbeen no extended work on Roussel in English aside from Mark Fordsbiography in 2000. When the range of perspectives that French writershave brought to bear on his works is taken into account this omis-sion becomes even more remarkable, for Roussel has been claimedby writers on Surrealism, modernism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, andlinguistics as being of central importance. Furthermore, in termsof literary experimentation Roussel is an acknowledged forebear ofthe most substantial developments in post-war French literature: theOulipo, the nouveau roman, and Tel Quel, as well as the writings ofFoucault himself, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out in his study of thethinker. Thus Roussel appears to be the minence griseof late twentieth-century French literature and literary theory, yet there have been no

major studies of Roussel in English.1

When compared to writers like Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, Rousselsworks seem too frivolous or esoteric to be taken seriously. It cannotbe denied that Roussels works are light and are intended to be, sincehe had no desire to write works of literary or philosophical weightand had no comprehension of, let alone kinship with, the more wellknown figures of modernist writing. But nevertheless he has beenproclaimed as such a figure by writers as different as John Ashberyand Alain Robbe-Grillet and this is in accord with his belief that he

had discovered a uniquely important mode of literary creativity. Thisprocd (a literary device or procedure) has perhaps added to the lackof interest of Anglophone scholars, who are generally disinclinedtowards formal approaches to prose fiction, especially ones that seemto be ludic, as it may appear that Roussel is just a mechanic who hascome across an intriguing method, but one that ultimately lacks anycritical substance; hence the readings that have emerged are largely

1Aside from the book by Ford, the only significant studies in English are those by

Chambers, Hill, and Lovitt, but the translations in Raymond Roussel, ed. Brotchie, andCaradecs biography have substantially enhanced the material available to English audi-ences. By contrast, the extent of work available in French is compelling; see, in additionto the other works mentioned below, Adamson, Amiot, Durham, Houppermans, Kerbel-lec, and the conference proceedings from Crisy in 1991, Raymond Roussel, eds. Bazantayand Besnier, and 2012, Roussel, hier, aujourdhui, eds. Bazantay, Reggiani, and Salceda.


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restricted to explications of hisprocdthat treat it as little more thana curio. It is this point that I will address here, for while Roussel is

not a writer of the order of Kafka or Proust, what he has done is ofsingular importance because it is so unusual: in attempting to writeaccording to what seems like an algorithmic procedure he has not onlyproduced some extraordinary literary works but, more significantly, hehas also brought out the relation between literature and language, inits materiality and reality, by treating literary language as somethingthat can be produced by a serial technique. This is to treat literaturein a way that divorces it from inspiration and in doing so exposes itsimmanent poetics, that is, a poeticsdrawn from language itself, ratherthan one that is imposed on it by thought. Here lies the metaphysicalsignificance of Roussels writings, which only Foucault and Deleuzehave recognized: that he has uncovered a vitality that is immanent tothe materiality of language itself.

In order to investigate the implications of this discovery I will firstintroduce Roussels literary procedure. There is perhaps no betterplace to start than the summary given by Foucault of a short storyentitled Chiquenaude(Flick of the finger) that Roussel published in

1900:One evening, a farcical play is put on; but it is already no longer thepremiere (reproduction of a reproduction). The spectator who is goingto narrate it has composed a poem that one of the characters must reciteseveral times on stage. But the celebrated actor who has taken the role hasfallen ill: an understudy replaces him. Thus the play starts with the versesof the understudy in the play of Red-Heel the Pirate [les vers de la doubluredans la pice du Forban talon rouge]. This twice-copied Mephisto comes onstage and recites the poem in question: a proud ballad in which he boasts

of being protected from all blows by his marvelous scarlet clothing thatno sword in the world can pierce. Taken with a beautiful girl, one eveninghe substitutes himselfa new doublingfor her lover, a highwayman andan incorrigible swashbuckler. The bandits fairy godmother (his cleverdouble) uncovers the devils plan in the reflection of a magic mirror (thatunmasks the double by repeating him); she gets hold of the enchantedclothing and sews into its lining some moth-eaten material of the samecolor (a torn lining). When the bandit returns to challenge the devil to aduel (confronting his double played by an understudy), his rapier has notrouble passing through the cloth, once invulnerable but now split and

separated from its power by the liningmore exactly by the worms inthe lining of the material of the strong red trousers [les vers de la doubluredans la pice du fort pantalon rouge].2

2 Foucault, Raymond Roussel, 3738; trans. Ruas as Death and the Labyrinth, 2728.Hereafter cited as RR.


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The play thus begins and ends with the same phrase subtly trans-formed, and the story is merely the texture that joins the two together,

and so despite the baffling series of reversals and duplications thattake place there is a sense in which nothing happens. Instead, thereis only the concatenation of a set of images that seemingly returnto themselves without remainder, as if the genie of the story afterbeing released from its lamp finally returns and is once more sealedimmaculately inside it. This is far from being Roussels most developed

work but its significance lies in the fact that it is the first to employhisprocd, which will in his later novels and plays become thoroughlytransformed.

In these later works Roussel takes theprocda step further by mak-ing the explanations for each of the narrative twists into narrativesthemselves, which are then woven into the main story. This has adisorientating effect on our reading, as the explications are equallyperplexing and only seem to call for further explications, which leadsto confusion over what is meant to be explanatory in the narrative and

what is to be explained. Highlighting this uncertainty, the first editionof Impressions dAfriqueincluded a note from Roussel to advise those

readers not initiated into the art of the author to start with chapterten, proceed to the end and then return to the beginning. In doingso, one is presented with the narrative chronologically and therebygiven the explanations that will supposedly unravel the descriptionsin the first half of the book.3This novel was Roussels first large-scale

work to use theprocdand it emerged out of an unpublished shortstory called Parmi les Noirs, which was structured around the transi-tion from its opening sentence, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandesdu vieux billard (the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard

table), to its reflection, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieuxpillard (the white mans letters on the bands of the old plunderer).

Although the latter sentence describes some of the features of Impres-sions dAfrique, its terms have largely been abandoned, and the firstsentence has disappeared entirely, which means that in the transitionfrom short story to novel the clues to the procdhave been lost. So,

while the earlier text follows the same logic as Chiquenaude, where aparticular sentence opens and closes the narrative by means of theslight displacement that it carries, this mechanism has become con-

cealed within the novel in the formof the stories it relates. But this

3For background details on the genesis and publication of Impressions dAfriqueseeFord 95105, and Caradec 95101.


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additional layer of explanatory concealment would not be revealedfor another twenty-five years, when Roussel finally explained it inComment jai crit certains de mes Livres. Up until then the novel simplypresented its narrative alongside a rationale that only duplicated it

with a further series of stories.But there is more to these stories than their mechanics for, despite

the conventional forms in which they appear, Roussels texts follow alogic of persistent absence. Chiquenaudeemphasizes this logic by wayof the series of deferrals and displacements that mediate the narrativeof an actor who is only an understudy, playing a part in which he onlyrepeats lines about success while impersonating someone else withinthe play, only to be discovered and to lose himself when the truth ofhis appearance is replaced with a fake lining. Thus, although thereis a methodological conversion that takes place in the transformationfrom short story to novel, in which the procdbecomes concealed,this not only arises out of the experience of the richness of linguisticassociations but also out of their withdrawal, which is to indicate thatthe experience of writing is double: that there was an experience of(literary) fulfillment is only evidenced by the fact that there wasan

experience. Its evidence lies in the mark that it leaves behind and itis this infinitesimal trace (Marcel Duchamp would call it inframince)that arises in the transition from billard to pillard, or Forban talon to

fort pantalon, which means that despite initial appearances theprocddoes not immaculately return to itself like the genie to the bottle butleaves a remainder, a subtle displacement. It is this shift that is thetrace of the experience, as it indicates that there is no absolute returnbut rather a transition, an experience, if only of the most minimalkind, and this is the experience of writing, as it is only out of this

experience that there is writing.Theprocdused in Chiquenaudewas only the first stage for Roussel,

since by starting with a word bearing two distinct meanings he couldthen go on to construct sentences where each subsequent word wouldextend the duplicity of reference by bearing further double meanings.In this way he could move away from the transparent schema thatstructured his early works to a more buried network of associations,as the expanding series of references within each sentence wouldprovide the space for a narrative to develop without theprocdhaving

to be indicated. So, while the genesis of Impressions dAfriqueconsistsin a rapprochement between the word billardand the word pillard,this relation only takes place by way of the ever-expanding series ofambiguous associations that each word reveals. For example, billard


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led to queue (cue/train), which might bear a chiffre (monogram/numeral); equally reprises could refer to the darning in the bandes

(cushions) of the old billiard table or the melodic repetitions of asong; and the colle(glue) sticking the paper to the base of the chalk(blanc) was also a slang word for detention. These terms could thenbe combined into phrases by use of the preposition , which meantthat the queue chiffrewas both the monogrammed billiard cue, andthe numeral sewn onto the train of the bandits gown; the bandes reprisescould be either the repaired cushions of the billiard table, orthe repetitions in the song sung by the old plunderers bands.4It isas if beneath the ordinary scenario of an old billiard table a new andstrange world has been revealed as each word now appears like a doorthat opens onto ambiguity. Occasionally these phrases can be found

within the text, thereby partly illuminating its mechanics, but oftenthe chains of associations are too hidden or too long so that we areonly presented with the cipher and very little hope of fathoming itand so, although Roussel does provide some clues by giving numerousexamples of these lexical matrices in Comment jai crit, much of whatgoes on remains unexplicated.

Consequently, it is possible to think of the text as operating like aloom weaving together the fabric of the narrative out of the threadsof the words ambiguities. Viewed from one side, the fabric revealsone story; viewed from the other, a different story is uncovered, butthe fabric is necessarily the same: one single stream of words, yieldingunder a slight deviation of perspective to two utterly different narra-tives (much like the allegorical puzzle pictures that Walter Benjamin

was so fond of).5In fact, such an image is used in Impressions dAfrique,

4

Roussel, Comment jai crit certains de mes Livres, Comment jai crit certains demes Livres, 1314; trans. Winkfield as How I Wrote Certain of My Books, How I WroteCertain of My Books and Other Writings, 56. Hereafter cited as CJE.

5This becomes a significant association in itself, as Benjamin finds a lineage ofnon-linguistic encryption in the rebus or Dingbild that passes from Renaissance em-blems and baroque allegories to Surrealist picture-puzzles and seemingly exposes thelanguage of natural-history itself. For in such allegories, due to their artificiality andarbitrariness (just as in Roussels writings): Writing and sound confront each otherin a highly-tensed polarity. Their relation establishes a dialectic (such that) the gulfbetween signifying written images and intoxicating spoken language tears apart thesolid massif of verbal meaning and forces the gaze into the depths of language, TheOrigin of German Tragic Drama, 201. The significance of this point lies in the way that

the mood has changed in modernism from the mysticism and melancholy of the ba-roque Trauerspielto the secular naivety of Rousselsprocd, which laboriously reveals theauthentic myths and quintessential commonplaces of everyday existence, as Leiristermed them in Conception and Reality in the Work of Raymond Roussel, trans.Ashbery in Raymond Roussel, ed. Brotchie, 7980, and which thereby lack the necessityand unity of Benjamins mythology of language. See note 14 below for the disruptiveeffects of such inscriptions on reading.


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as the engineer Bedu has constructed a loom that is operated bypaddles like a watermill, such that the passage of water through the

paddles controls the movements of its spindles, which weave a largemulti-colored cloth embroidered with an image of Noahs Ark.6Thusan autonomous machine (loom/procd) reveals by way of the currents(river/language) an image of harmony (Ark/loom) also resting onthe movement of the waters. Such self-referentiality is difficult tofathom but what this indicates is the impossibility of determining ahierarchy between the different narrative levels. We might see oneimage and feel that we can perceive another buried beneath it, but therelation of depth is not given, for even if the images seem to refer totheprocd, this in turn simply refers back to the images it generates.Once the existence of this linguistic machinery has become apparentit becomes difficult to say whether its train of associations is operatingprimarily at the level of words or of things, for there is a sense, drivenby languages referential function, that this concatenating logic isactually picking out the internal rhymes of objects and that languageis simply a more mobile and ambiguous reflection of this. After all,

why would billard and pillard be near homonyms unless there was

some ontological necessity to their affinity, unless there was actuallysome relation between their referents? This is the logic that appearsto drive the machinery of Roussels works. While it is necessary to be

wary about such Cratylist readings (which Foucault ultimately fallsprey to, however much he inverts it, since he tends to see the worldin terms of language), it is also the case that the way that Roussels

writings reflect on their own origin in theprocdis also the way thattheir relation to the world of things is indirectly demonstrated, for itindicates how language is notjust a system of reference but bears the

marks of its sonorous material generation, and thereby shows itselfto be a thing. Hence there is no secret, encrypted meaning, for thedesignations of these words simply convey their material contingency.

This lack of a distinction between the designed and chance elementsof the text helps illuminate the nature of the procd, for although Ihave been describing its operations as mechanical it is not comprisedof separable parts that are only causally, extraneously linked, but nor isit fully organic, since it does not generate any kind of coherent body.Rather, it fits the designation of being an artwork, insofar as it appears

to have arisen naturally even though it is artificial, that is, it seems

6Roussel, Impressions dAfrique, 10915; trans. Polizzotti as Impressions of Africa, 7682.Hereafter cited as IA.


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to bear a purposiveness without actually having any purpose. For thebasis of the procd lies in the affinities it uncovers between certain

words and phrases, which Roussel treats as conveying a necessary andimmanent relation despite their contingency, such that its operationcomes simply from examining how the necessity of this contingentaffinity might manifest itself, and the forms in which it does so thenbecome the forms of his writings. Affinity is thus construed as a prob-lem or idea that can only be understood by putting it to work and itis in this way that it becomes the engine or heart (or even the genius)of the process, so that the procdcan be seen as a machine (in theabstract, non-mechanical sense) insofar it is the means by which whatis at issue in affinity can be realized. For as long as language is viewedas consisting of discrete parts that are only extraneously connectedthrough the imposition of a syntactic order, then affinity can only be

viewed as accidental and insignificant, but if language is seen insteadas bearing its own immanent material order as a thing in the worldlike any other, then affinity becomes an issue whose necessity has tobe examined. This is not to slip into linguistic animism since affinityis no less contingent than it is necessary; thus, its significance lies in

what it conveys about the nature of the relation it expresses, ratherthan in any meaning stated.This is not the end of Roussels procd, which he felt it was his

duty to reveal, since I have the feeling that writers of the futuremay perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully (CJE 11/3). The thirdstage, following on from the use of near-identical sentences to frame anarrative and the subsequent doubling of phrases through a sequenceof variations, was to move on to a process in which a phrase couldbe transformed if it was parsed differently. As was seen in the move

fromForban talon rougetofort pantalon rouge, the meaning of a phrasecan be manipulated by slight changes to its vocalization, which thenenabled Roussel to draw the material for his writings from all man-ner of found sources. For example, an advertisement for a machinecalled a Phonotypia yields fausse note tibia (wrong note tibia,

whence Lelgoualchs flute in Impressions dAfrique); the first line of afolksong, Jai du bon tabac dans ma tabatire, becomes jade tubeonde aubade en mat a basse tierce (jade tube water aubade in mattethird bass, whence the first scene shown on Fogars cinematic reed,

in Impressions dAfrique); and a phrase from the Book of Daniel, ManeThecal Phares, becomes manette aisselle phare (handle armpitspotlight, whence the mechanism by which Fogar initiates his cinema)


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(CJE 2021/1213, 23/15).7Each phrase exposes a matrix from whichthe narrative then arises with the task of drawing together each of the

elements mentioned. It is easy to see how the Surrealists might takethis evolved version of the procd(as Roussel termed it) for someform of alchemy that turns base linguistic materials into the gold ofpoetry, thus implicitly revealing that such poetic truths lie buried

within the objects around us. But Roussel is much less concernedwith the nature of this revelation, as his offhand remarks about thearbitrary nature of these transformations indicate: any one of thesephrases could be read in any number of alternate ways, leading to

very differently parsed meanings.And, from Duchamp and Robert Desnos to the workings of the

Oulipo, it is this part of Roussels procd that has undergone themost extensive elaborations, but the fact that these transformationsappear to be simply ludic suggests that we should not approachRoussels works with a philosophical view of language.8However, this

would require forgetting that theprocdalso involves a rigorous andmethodical experimentation in which language is distorted to uncoverits immanent poetics, and for writers like Michel Leiris, Georges

Perec, or Jacques Roubaud, this malleability of language is the key

7It may seem remarkable that the mechanism that drives Fogars performance arisesfrom a mutation of the words written on the wall at Belshazzars feast, but the suggestive-ness of this association is undermined by the fact that his film also draws on the words ofa popular folksong. However, it needs to be recalled that the words seen by Belshazzarare also explicitly referred to near the end of the final canto of the Nouvelles ImpressionsdAfrique. Is it perhaps because these words are a code, or that they are a manifestationof autonomous writing, or that they carry a judgment relating to calculation, that theyprovide a recurrent focus for Roussel? It would seem to be for these reasons that das

Menetekel is a repeated point of reference for Adorno, see, Negative Dialectics, 186, 360;and Aesthetic Theory, 217, 222 (hereafter cited as AT).

8In fact, Duchamp went so far as to say that, It was fundamentally Roussel who wasresponsible for my Large Glass, La Marie mise nu par ses clibataires, mme. It was hisImpressions dAfriquethat indicated to me the outlines of the approach to adopt. Theconnection here would seem to lie in the nature of the inventive process and the man-ner in which it presents itself, but it is insightful to compare it to the note that accom-panied the first appearance ofFountain: Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands madethe fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article oflife, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and pointof viewcreated a new thought for that object (Tomkins 91, 185). Of course,Duchamp would not have been aware of the actual mechanics of Roussels writings whenhe wrote these words in 1917, but the similarity in the sense of poetic reinvention ofthe everyday is striking. However, the admission that the work of the artist is to makea new thought for the object indicates the conceptual, non-retinal, nature of art forDuchamp, while the possibility of such a conceptual-aesthetic distinction in relationto language is precisely what is at issue in Roussels writings.


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to a mnemotechnics, to a personal language-memory.9But there issomething more mysterious at work in Roussel, for within a work likeImpressions dAfriquewe are simply presented with the end products ofthis manipulation of language; the chains of re-imagining that led toit and the sources from which it may have been derived are mostlylost, and indeed might not have been suspected without the revela-tions of his final work. But the process of dismantling phrases andreconstructing them at a remove under a different order of soundsuncovers, as I will show, something like a curious form of vitality

within language, a non-human, non-organic life that seems to mimicthe movements of the life we are familiar with but from a far remove,such that it has become transformed into something quite distantand unrecognizable, but which is nevertheless formally still a reflec-tion of the life that we know. This bizarrely reconstituted existence

would seem to be no more than a fantastic mockery of life, were itnot for the rigorously executed lines of extrapolation that link it atevery point with the world and the inescapable facticity that attachesitself to this recapitulation by virtue of the chance that innervates it.

Although the distance referred to here is internal to language, as it

is the space between one reading and another, the one lying latentwithin the other as its invisible lining, this is a language reconceivedas every bit as materially ambiguous as the things that surround us.

I. The Gala of the Incomparables

To give a more extended example of how the procdworks I will citewhat Foucault called Roussels only classical passage (RR 55/42).This occurs in the first chapter of Impressions dAfriqueas the narra-

tor describes some statues placed along one edge of the Place desTrophes:

The first evoked a man mortally wounded by a weapon sunk into his heart.Instinctively the two hands were drawn towards the wound, while the legsgave way under the weight of a body thrown backwards and close to col-lapse. The statue was black and seemed, at first glance, to be made froma single block; but the gaze, little by little, discovered a mass of groovestraced in every direction and generally forming many parallel groups. Thework, in reality, was found to be composed solely from innumerable corset

9The autobiographical dimensions of the procdsuggests another interpretation ofRoussels writings, geared towards its fictioning of subjectivity through the constructionof iterated associations. Readings of this notion can be found in Hill, Macherey, AProduction of Subjectivity, Wills 25085, and Ashbery 4568.


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whalebones cut and bent to follow the needs of the modeling. Flat-headednails, whose points must have undoubtedly curved inwards, joined each of

these supple strips that were skillfully juxtaposed without ever leaving theslightest crack. The face itself, with all the details of its sad and anguishedexpression, was made of sections carefully adjusted to reproduce faithfullythe form of the nose, the lips, the arched eyebrows and the eyeballs. Thehandle of the weapon plunged into the heart of the dying man gave animpression of the great difficulty overcome, thanks to the elegance of thehilt, in which could be found the traces of two or three whalebones cutinto short rounded fragments like rings. The muscular body, the clenchedarms, the sinewy legs half-bent, all seemed to quiver or suffer, following thestriking contours perfectly given by the invariable dark strips.

The feet of the statue rested on a very simple vehicle, whose low plat-form and four wheels were made with other black whalebones ingeniouslycombined. Two narrow rails, made of a crude, reddish and gelatinoussubstance, which was nothing other than calves lights, aligned themselvesacross a surface of blackened wood and gave, by their style if not by theircolor, the exact illusion of a stretch of railway track; it is on these that werefitted, without crushing them, the four immobile wheels.

The floor, made suitable for vehicles, formed the upper part of a com-pletely black wooden pedestal, whose main side showed a white inscription

carrying these words: The Death of the Helot Saridakis. Underneath,again in snowy characters, could be seen this figure, half-Greek half-French,accompanied by a slender bracket:

This is the description of the statue that we read first; no explana-tion or background is offered, and consequently, we can do no morethan wonder at its enigmatic appearance. Something is certainly at

work in the development of such an intricate construction but for thetime being, we can only wait and hope that an explanation will beforthcoming (IA 3436/78). In the next chapter this hope is seem-ingly answered as the statues sculptor, Norbert Montalescot, on theorders of Emperor Talou, calls out to his imprisoned sister Louise,

who releases a magpie from her cell. The magpie swoops down toland in front of the statue whereupon it thrusts its beak into a small

opening cut into the side of the pedestal, releasing an internal springsuch that the platform tips to one side, causing the statue to movealong the narrow rails under the force of its own weight until it comesup against the edge of the pedestal. At this point the magpie then

jumps over to the far side of the pedestal and, thrusting its beak into


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another small opening, initiates a movement in the reverse direction.This is then repeated a number of times, watched with wonder by the

Emperor who, we are told, conceived the idea for the work himself(IA 4950/1921).

After this brief and un-illuminating demonstration the statue isforgotten and it is not until almost the end of the book that we findan explanation for this scenario, for as Roussels precautionary noteindicated, the second half of the book provides the background for

what is described in the first half, but considering that most readerswill still read the book from the beginning it is not until we reachchapter twenty-one that we are given the meaning of this display.But the explanation offers very little beyond a basic account of thestatues genesis: Talou, having imprisoned Louise Montalescot, fol-lowing earlier machinations, agrees that she can be released if herbrother can construct

a life-sized statue, gripping in subject and sufficiently light to roll withoutdamaging them on two crude rails made of the same insubstantial matterso well prepared by the ships cook the night before. In addition, withoutspeaking this time of any special weight, the Emperor required three more

or less articulated sculptural works, whose mechanism the clever magpiealone must put in motion, with the aid of its beak or its claws.

Searching through the stock salvaged from the shipwreck Louisecomes across several packages of black corset whalebones, and forthe subject matter she quickly opts for an anecdote supposedly drawnfrom Thucydides about the education of Spartan slaves.10 Thus allthe elements have been gathered together as they have been found:a dish of calves lungs, a trained magpie, the light and flexible mate-rial of whalebone, and a gripping subject (IA 29294/25960). Butthis explanation does no more than list the constituent parts of themodel, which now appears to be nothing more than the conjunction ofthese apparently randomly chosen elements that have somehow beenorganized into a single and seamlessly ordered tableau. Everything isexplained and yet nothing is understood, but the need or possibilityfor understanding is perhaps redundant: the statue is just what it is.

However, twenty-five years later Roussel gave another layer of expla-nation by using this statue as an example of the third stage of the

procdthrough its combination of three phrases; baleine lot, duel

10I say supposedly as Roussel would appear to have invented this story (much likethe lost scenes of Romeo and Juliet, or Handels Vesperoratorio), which only emphasizesits peculiar symbolism.


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accolade, mou raille. The first, baleine lot(whale, islet), becomes undera slight change to its pronunciation, baleine ilote(baleen, helot); duel accolade(duel, reconciling embrace) becomes duel accolade (thedual form in Greek grammar, typographical bracket); and mou raille(weak person, raillery) becomes mou rail(lungs of a slaughtered ani-mal, railway line). Thus, as Roussel states, each latter group of wordsgave me the statue of the helot, made in corset whalebones, rollingon rails of calves lights and carrying on its base an inscription relatingto the dual form of a Greek verb (CJE 1415/7). Again, everythingis explained and yet still nothing is understood, except that now wefind that the enigma seemingly has its roots in the manipulation ofthree innocuous phrases, again apparently chosen at random, butpainstakingly ordered into a single image, and as Roussel writes furtheron with unusual directness this is essentially a poetic procd (CJE23/16). There is something surprising about this admission, whichmore than his other explanations seems to remove the veil of enigmafrom his writings and show that they are only, but essentially, poetic,as if everything that had been offered were suddenly to dissolve inthe face of a language that is simply poetic in itself. For what Roussel

appears to be suggesting is that there is apoiesis that arises out of theinherent associations between words but which remains hidden untilthese words are brought together, at which point the procd takeshold with very little extra effort: conjuring the form of the tableauout of the buried links that immanently join one word to another.But in uncovering its banal constituents the sense of virtuosity to the

writing threatens to disappear, as it seems that there is nothing morehere than the inner machinations of language that have been subtlychanneled into revealing themselves, for what we are presented with

is strictly meaningless; it is without use, value, or purpose.But this is only to look at the formal aspect of the procd. The tale

from Thucydides, which Louise Montalescot chose because of itsmoving character, tells of how a wealthy Spartan called Ktenas choseto educate his slaves and did not hesitate to punish them severelyshould they fail to learn. A particular slave by the name of Saridakis

was especially lazy and Ktenas, finally frustrated by the students lackof engagement, set him a challenge to learn the forms of the verb eimiin three days or face death. Saridakis tried for three days to commit

the verb to memory and when he returned to the class he proceededwith his recitation but only got as far as the dual of the singularimperfect before he stumbled and Ktenas dagger found its target(IA 29495/26061). There is a sense in which this cautionary tale


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lies behind many if not all of the tableaux that appear in ImpressionsdAfrique, for behind their bizarre and dazzling appearances each

one embodies a drive towards a skill attempted under challengingcircumstances. Each scenario captures the final spectacular form ofa long process of laborious and delicate construction, and once it hasrun its course each performer quickly leaves the stage. The level of

virtuosity involved is often extreme and seems hardly compensatedby the brief moment of glory that is captured, but this is counteredby the fact that, in writing a work that is no more than a catalogue ofsuch virtuosities, Roussel is able to persistently if covertly reflect onthe construction of the work itself: Impressions dAfriqueis a guided tourof its own inner mechanisms, barely disguised as one poetic machineafter another. Even before we learn of the lexical manipulations thatdirected his constructions there is enough in the novel to lead us totreat it as self-referential, as the descriptions of the marvels that areencountered slip easily into descriptions of the text itself.

Ultimately, the tableaux do not reveal very much, since all they dois refer one set of mechanisms to another, but in doing so they aremoving, they leave an impression, and this is just as much an impres-

sion of pathos as it is of wonder. And because Roussel is drawing outthe movements of the poeticprocditself, there appears to be no end,since there is always another movement that can be begun, anotherfeat that can be attempted, and another failure that is possible. Thesun may always shine in the symbol of the Club des Incomparables,but for its performers this glory is never permanent or certain; theyare not joyous or exuberant artistes but instead earnest and humble.Consequently, there is little sense of casual play in Roussel, but thisdoes not lead to tedium, as the endless expanse of invention gives

rise to a strangely stoical wonder: there is no depth of meaning, notranscendent purpose, and yet there are marvels, but these only arisefrom the rigorous pursuit of a procd that can never end. The veryfirst of the machines to appear in the novel carries this uncertaindepth and initiates the dislocation that is to follow; the prisoner Naris condemned to recite his crimes while operating a loom that weavesmaterial drawn from the husks of a certain fruit:

Pinching a fragment of these delicate shells between two fingers and slowlydrawing his hand towards him, the young man created an extendable stringsimilar to the gossamer threads that, in the season of renewal, drape thewoods; these imperceptible filaments he used to compose a subtle andcomplex fairy-work, for his hands worked with unequalled agility, cross-ing, knotting, tangling the dream-ligaments in every way, which blended


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gracefully together. The phrases that he silently recited helped to regulatehis dangerous and precise scheme; the slightest mistake could have caused

irreparable damage to the whole work, and, without the automatic aide-mmoire supplied with certain formulae memorized word-for-word, Narcould never have reached his goal. (IA 31/4)

What is being described here would seem to make more senseas an account of the book itself than of the punishment inflictedupon a prisoner, but if that is so, at what level are we to read it? Theuneasiness that arises in reading Roussel comes from this sense ofdislocation, since at each point it is unclear which level the narra-

tive is operating on: for, if it is developing an account of itself, thenit appears to do so with endless variation, but if it is developing anaccount of something else then why is it always returning to the same?By constantly but indirectly referring to itself the writing appears tooperate in two spheres at the same time, rendering its narrative bothtransparent and opaque, and as the difference between the two isunmarked the transition between them is imperceptible, so that read-ing moves indistinguishably between the legible and the illegible andthus we lose contact with what we think we know about what we are

reading. But even though the narrative seems to be inside out withmore attention paid to its workings than to its work, as its workingsareits work, knowing this does not reveal anything further but drawsus back more powerfully to the obscure and insubstantial story, as ifthis could yield more understanding. Yet the narrative in its navesimplicity just carries on: cycling through scenario after scenario intheir serial parataxis.

The story takes place mostly on the Place des Trophes, a perfectsquare situated in the very heart of the city of Ejur, the capital of

Talous empire, which seemingly encompasses all of Africa as the mapadorning his royal robe suggests. This abstract space is described bya figure among the crowds that line the Place des Trophes, but the

voice of this narrator lacks almost any identification, and his only rolewould appear to be as the witness and amanuensis of the remarkableseries of events. Considering that he does not perform any feat of skillhimself his membership of the Club des Incomparables would seemin doubt, unless it is the very narrative itself that he has memorizedand related (in leslettres du blanc). So, although outside the narrative

proper, his role is exposed by his sole act of participation when, inhelping Carmichael (the detained white man: blanc colle) memorizea song (about the bands of the old plunderer: bandes reprises), healso succeeds in bringing the narrative full circle:


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Spurred on by the fear of another failure, he began carefully recitinghis strange lesson humming the tune in a low voice, while I followed each

line syllable by syllable, ready to pick up the slightest mistake or to prompthim with any forgotten fragment.

The crowd, abandoning the Place des Trophes, had slowly dispersedthrough Ejur, and, barely distracted by my purely mechanical task, I couldnot help thinking, in the great silence of the morning, about the manyadventures that had filled my life in the past three months. (IA 163/129)

Roussel seems to alert us to the authorship of the work here,although in doing so he masks it as a purely mechanical task, butthis scene has another aspect that reorients the notion of authorship.For the fear of failure and the obsession with avoiding the slightestmistake mark the yearning for perfectibility with an ever-present dan-ger. This reversal of fortune under which each performance labors issignificant because it is the same reversal that each performance seeksto respond to and, potentially, to channel. The various tableaux thatRoussel describes are not designed to control or prevent chance butto organize it without reducing it, which effectively means to doubleit, to enable one current of each scenario to channel the other: the

stream of phrases and the extendable filaments combine to allow Narto run his loom, but they are also the repetition (as punishment) ofthe traps and snares he had set earlier. Each element of the narrativecurves back upon itself to provide its direction, so it is not possible todiscern which aspect is guiding and which is guided, which is insideand which is outside, which recto and which verso, but in finding thisambivalence in our reading we also discover how the text has arisenthrough its own immanent poetics. The turning from one side to theother is a separation or dissemination that drives the narrative, but it

is also a fold or reflection, meaning that the identity of each opera-tion of theprocdis constituted by a movement that is both a splittingapart and a joining together of phrases through the disparity of their

visual and vocal dimensions and it is this combined movement thatthe narrative persistently follows.

The key to the operations of the procd is precisely this: that theaffinities uncovered between certain words and phrases are not col-lected together arbitrarily but consistently organized so that theyreflect their own genesis. As Foucault noted, Roussel inverts the

conventional approach of making two words say the same thing (theunity of paraphrase), by making the same words say different things(the dissemination of ambiguity) (RR 25/18). But in the organizationof the narrative these separated meanings are then gathered in such


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a way that they recapitulate the moment of their separation, not sothat this brings about a reunification, but only to allow the momentary

recognition of affinity that will allow for its repeated separation. Thisis Roussels genius. For example, mou railleis altered to yield mou rail, but then the construction of the figure of Saridakis returns thelatter to the former (as the rails of calves lungs support the figure of a

weak person subjected to raillery) so it is both but not simultaneously;instead the figure ceaselessly recapitulates the transformation of its keyphrases, which on a broader scale is the basis of its emergence fromthe procdas such. This example works quite directly, but in othercases the recapitulation operates across the figure as a whole. Thus,it is very telling that although considerable time is spent describingthe appearance, manufacture, and operation of these machines, oncethis is done there is very little else to say. The responses that the audi-ence or the narrator may have are of little concern; whether it is areaction of wonder, shock, or disbelief, Roussel seems to feel that inhis descriptions of the machines all that is necessary has been said. Itis not as if these reactions are unimportant, but rather that they areunnecessary, for the wonder of the pieces is self-evident, autonomous,

so any response is redundant. It is for this reason that commenta-tors struggle to respond to Roussels writings without recycling hismodels, seemingly in the belief that doing so might lead to greaterunderstanding, but finding instead that these marvels appear only tocall for their recitation. If so, then this indicates the peculiar literarystatus of Roussels works, as they do not seem to ask for, or to need,any kind of response, except their reiteration. Despite the labor andskill devoted to these machines they have no aim or role: so, decliningmillions and even billions, he had wisely been content with this giant

solitaire, which, together with the cylinders, highlighted his inventionwithout pursuing any practical goal (IA 76/45).

So, although it is true that these works serve no purpose, they arenot to be seen as simply ludic or aesthetic, for there is a sober artistrythat underlies their operations. The inventor of the giant solitairehas discovered a material that unerringly detects precious stones ormetals and has filled several cylinders with this substance so that theyappear like nothing as much as huge pencils that, whenever they areuncapped dart immediately towards the nearest source of riches. But

the inventor is content to demonstrate this with a very large solitaire-type board and, we are told, this is a wise choice. These discoveriesare their own reward; they are not to be diminished by being putto use for some other purpose, and maintaining this resistance to


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use requires as much attention as the construction of the work inthe first place, hence the seriousness of the task that each inventor

bears. The transparency of the analogy between these pencils andRoussels procd would seem to make its concealment redundant,so it is all the more remarkable that it arose out of the homophonictransformation of the caption from a cartoon: patience antichambreministrielle (patience entiche ambre mine hystrique) (CJE 2122/14).Thus the proximity between the two devices (pencil and procd), orthe two faces of the same device, suggests that the procd tends toconverge on itself wherever it starts, and this would seem to be theonly aim that could be adduced for it. But this does not lead to aridsolipsism for the self that language converges on is never the same,so Roussels discovery seems to be nothing less than ontological: thenature and existence of language as a differentiation of the same, for

what theprocdconcerns is the nature of identity; the meaning ofthe same as affinity.11

This sense of differentiation offers a clue to the strange substancesthat form the heart of many of the devices and enable them to operate,since it reveals how each performance inhabits language, not just as

that in which its existence is situated but also as the very mode of itsexistence, howit is, such that it involves an examination and explora-tion of its own existence as it is differentiated in the world of things.Only as such is there any sense to its identity, which is precisely notidentical to itself, for it has no self to anchor its interrogation. Withthis in mind we can gain a better perspective on some of the repeti-tions and reversals that structure the work through the sequence ofits tableaux, for in doing so they highlight the nature of its identityas a work. For instance, Ludovic, the man with many voices, finds his

performance reversed by the Alcott family, who project one voice frommany men; Louise Montalescot, who has a musical instrument joinedto her body, is reversed by Lelgoualch, who makes a musical instru-

11The ontological reading of Roussels writings originates with Foucault but it isDeleuze who has explored its implications most fully, e.g., Foucault, 9899, 11012.Although inspired by Foucaults essay, Deleuzes interest in Roussel recurs across hismajor works (principally Diffrence et rptition), and in doing so he brings out thebroader ontological significance of Roussels writings without falling into the trap ofessentializing its linguistic structures, as Foucault does. See also Macherey, The Object

of Literature, 21128, whose excellent account is marred only by a voluntarism thatarises when he claims that Roussels language is a way of mastering and controllingdeath. While there is certainly no sense of anguish in Roussels writings there is theoverwhelming and blinding experience of being undone by the irreducible maneuversof language, in which death lies concealed, which as an ordeal renders impossible anysense of mastery or control.


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ment from a piece removed from his body; Talou, while dressed as awoman, is prompted in his singing by Carmichael who later, while also

singing in a womans voice, is in turn prompted by Talou. In doingso, the identity of each individual performance is achieved throughitsiteration, as if its distinctiveness with its strange rhythm and tonality,

was composed of a single, quite short motif, reproduced indefinitelywith a constant change of words (IA 102/70).

But the composition of the whole cannot be completed, as the per-fect coordination of its parts is not possible, for while the reversibilityinherent in each of the parts provokes the iteration of the procd,these can only be complemented by further parts that only unveilfurther iterations. While music (as an analogue for the procd) iscentral to the narrative, the harmony that is sought is undone by thefact that the variations of lexical meanings carry no underlying orderor structure and thus remain at the level of serial iteration. Hence,

while each performer finds a resonance by having their piece shownwith others, this does not produce an ensemble but rather a collec-tion of isolated and independent miniature tableaux in which eachpersists only through the operation of their ownprocd(IA 119/86).

It is this motif of solitude that in being reproduced from tableau totableau, machine to machine, anchors the points of repetition andreversal, rather than the differing images and themes, which are alwaysunique to the individual performers. Is it because of this that Saridakisfails exactly when he has to express the dual form of the perfective ofto be? It is on the difference between you (two) were and they(two) were that he comes fatally unstuck, which means that it is nota question of the singular or the first person, but rather the possibilityof a pre-existing ontological plurality in the second or third person

that spells the helots end (IA 36n). Is this distinction also the basisfor understanding the series of doomed romances, contrasting withthe joy of personal transformation?

An impression is singular and temporary, but because it is affectingit leaves a mark of its passing. Hence, regardless of the brilliance of thedisplay, it will disappear, but despite this it will nevertheless remain;intangible and irretrievable perhaps, but still irrevocable. As the reverseof an imprint, or the remains of an erasure, the depth of its residuereflects the scale of its appearance, from which it is yet separated by

an equally unbridgeable gulf. And as an impression it will record whathas passed away in an encoded form that is entirely unique; specificnot only to what has happened but also to how it was experienced,meaning that its singularity will find a double aspect as it resonates in


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the disconnected series of memories. The development of this themeculminates in a sequence of stories that offer hallucinatory mises enabymes, which in doing so also act as a bridge to the second part ofthe novel where the recapitulation of each narrative attempts to bringabout a restoration of the parts that have become dissociated. Thus,for example, we find the fragrant plants of Darriand inducing illusionsthat bring Sil-kor back to his senses; the recovery of the lost scenesof Romeo and Julietin the form of carefully sculpted billows of smoke;and, most dramatically, the self-induced trance into which Fogar slips,during which he produces green blood clots that animate a groupof aquatic organisms. Not only do these scenes blur the distinctionsbetween reality and illusion, but they also arise out of a confusion ofthe natural and the artistic, the found and the created, and this bringsout a further aspect to the iterated sequences, for in their doublingthese tales develop a peculiar life-like autonomy.

Within these stories one layer of mystery is laid over another (likean artwork it confounds our ability to explain clearly both what it isandhow it is, in their ontological relation), seemingly with no otherfocus than that of burying the meanings that recur from one to the

other. But this process, where a sequence recapitulates itself withinits own movements, is not fully harmonious but gives rise to a residuethat disrupts its equilibrium and animates a further layer of mystery,such that theprocdpersists by way of this life-like self-differentiation.Discovering that the procdis like life shows how language exists inparallel, distinct from but intertwined with the organic, and so dou-bling and echoing it to the extent that it becomes hard to tell theliving from the life-like.

II. The Place des Trophes

Around four oclock, that 25th June, so the narrative begins, andmuch of the story will be set on this and the following day in 1904(although there is substantial historical background in the latter halfof the book), but why is there this intrusion of a specific but imprecisetime, stamping the narrative in its very first words? For aprocd that isessentially poetic and a narrative that aspires to be wholly imaginary,the inclusion of an actual historical moment seems counter-intuitive. It

is equally odd when we consider the strange sense of time that marksthe narrative despite this concrete opening, for while each demonstra-tion exists in a certain stretch of time as its performance unfolds, theyare each re-enactments of moments snatched from time and idealized


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to a point of being endlessly repeatable. But what is repeated is anexperience that has been lost, and in being commemorated it can

only recur in a revivified half-life. It is thus that each act is markedwith the transitory nature of its occasion, for there is a combinationof mourning and survival, singularity and repetition, memory andforgetting that takes place in each of these performances. For theircomplexity and risk creates the sense of a life concentrated into itsmost critical moments, points at which chance or fate may take ahand and the course of events could change dramatically and thefact that these tableaux often tell stories of tragedy and death doesnot diminish the glory of the moments that have been retrieved fromthis doom. As these lives have in these individual moments revealedthemselves to be other than they might have been, they have toucheda potential differing, which although it may lead to a decline alsoleaves the moment of this alteration apart, and it is thus that theirseparation is edifying. Although these performances isolate points at

which an irrevocable turning takes place, they also, by virtue of this,expose these moments as potential opportunities when events couldhave occurred otherwise. It is thus that they are events of irreducible

potential (despite the apparent order that seems to arise from them)and therefore parallel the mechanism of theprocdwhile also revealingthat it is characterized byits ability to provoke these mises en abymes.Since, if there is this irreducible potential within these moments, thenthat is also a potential to repeat its own potency, to replicate itselffrom within, and this is the key to its poiesisbut also its tragedy, as itis always on the point of separating from itself.

Nevertheless, Impressions dAfriqueseems to operate as an anti-Bildungs-roman, for although it focuses on the acquisition and demonstration

of certain skills the artistes do not change or learn anything throughtheir ordeals, nor is there any real possibility of them failing at thesetasks, and at the end their return from their exotic adventures doesnot signal any greater integration into society or any sense of personalfulfillment. Rather, if there is any sense of Bildungat work it comesfrom the fact that the novel embodies a procd that is itself essen-tially poetic in that it has a Bildungstrieb: a drive to produce devicesor performances whose sole purpose is to demonstrate their capacityto be poetic. But the potential for this poetic tropism to become a

more general Bildungis cut short by the fact that the devices do notbring any fulfillment to the artistes but only to themselves, for theyexist only to pursue their own autonomy rather than to enable theiroperators to become themselves more fully. Moreover, any sense of


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becoming is undermined by the disrupted temporality or anachronyof the demonstrations as none of them progress or evolve, just as

they lack originality as they are only engaged in reproductions. Thus,although each production restages its own poetic generativity, this lacksdevelopment and so, alongside its autonomy, it only becomes moreremoved from the artiste it might have enhanced. As a result, eachdevice confronts its inventor with their mortal redundancy; hencethe seriousness with which the novel proceeds, its nave gravity, for itis as if, beneath each laborious and careful experiment, there is anawareness that these endeavors yield only one result.

For the Gala of the Incomparables is conducted under the constantshadow of death; despite the unblinking light of success that shines onalmost all the performers their efforts cannot be detached from theseries of deaths that inaugurates them, as the Gala has its double in aseries of extraordinary tortures that seem to emulate the artistry of thefeats of skill and thereby gives the Place des Trophes the ambiguityof its name. As Annie Le Brun has suggested, it is as if Roussel wasseeking to establish an equivalence between a spectacle of killing anda killing of spectacle, since the executions of Talous enemies involve

literal death sentences: the bodies of each having their judgmentsviolently inscribed on them, effectively unraveling the procd as itexhausts or short circuits itself in being made visible. The execu-tions incorporate images that reproduce their tales, thus bringingthe entire sequence of stories to an end, just as the procd,in beingmade to appear in the form of these explicit narrative explanations,is exhausted.12This is the reverse of the poetic Bildungof theprocdand yet also its culmination, as the procdcan only succeed throughits execution, which means that it cannot fully actualize itself without

self-annihilation (undoing the possibility of a reunion of its parts), butif it does not attempt this its pieces remain apart, thereby confrontingus with mortal imperfection.

So, although each performance lacks any sense of development,it nevertheless contains its history in itself by virtue of the fact thatit is nothing but a reproduction of its own origin, which means thatalthough it is only a repetition it is nevertheless a repetition of nov-elty. This means that insofar as each piece is a reappearance it onlypresents itself by over-writing the endless series of variations that could

have arisen in its place, the infinite disjunction of identity that wasdiscussed by Deleuze in relation to Pierre Klossowskis narratives.13

12Le Brun 20203.13Deleuze, Klossowski or Bodies-Language, trans. Lester, The Logic of Sense, 296.


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For each tableau operates as the reader of a series of permutations,actualizing what would otherwise be an impossible experience by map-

ping all the sequences of the procd(which underlies the seeminglyimprobable execution of Djizm and the release of the bewitched ofLake Ontario). Since beneath each sentence lies an unending seriesof alternatives, each of which could in a moment take the place of thefirst and obliterate the others, each piece is given then as apart du feu,a firebreak, that which is given back to prevent the consummation ofthe whole in the execution of all its possibilities. This hidden reserveis brought out particularly clearly by the way that the descriptions ofthe intensely visual works in Impressions dAfriqueare accompanied bya verbal complement, reflecting the way that theprocdexploits thetension between the look of a word and its sound. This combinationof the visual and the verbal does not gather the two into a unity butonly exposes the excess of what has been left aside: the other formula-tions in word or image that are not presented. This experience is what

we are drawn into when we encounter something like the statue ofSaridakis, which in its strangeness and simple beauty, its arbitrarinessand unavoidable facticity, illuminates the enigmatic nature of appear-

ance. For its increased level of detail lines our sense of wonder withunease over what has not appeared but which has left an intangibletrace of its absence.

The statue of the helot stands on a small wheeled platform, whichis in turn placed on tracks made of calves lungs set into the uppersurface of a pedestal of blackened wood. On the front of the pedestalan inscription in white offers an explanation along with the strangeGreek and French symbol below it. The figure of the young man isfrozen in the act of dying; his body falling backwards as his hands

clutch at the dagger plunged into his chest, and despite the innumer-able pieces of whalebone used for its construction, at first glance itappears to be a single block of dark material. At the prompting of amagpie the upper surface of the pedestal is made to tilt such that theplatform carrying the statue rolls gently from one side of the pedestalto the other and back again. This is the extent of the description andits effect remains as startling as it is perplexing, something that theinscription on the pedestal only increases, and yet the statue is there,as much as its description can suggest. Although the story behind the

helots death is later given this does little to diminish the enigma ofwhat we are presented with, especially considering the emphasis onthe forms of a particular Greek verb. Instead, the more attention givento the statue, the more detail or explanation provided, the strangerand more distant it becomes, for it no longer seems to be the simple


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depiction of a story but rather the appearance of certain compellingbut contingent elements, which in coming together only draws our

gaze beyond it to what lies in the background and remains unpre-sented, other equally arbitrary but unconfigured images. In doing sothe image as a whole bears us along two axes: that of a sudden deathfrozen in the moment of its arrival, and the mysterious white letterscast against this black background. Like the statue itself, the gaze ofour reading is drawn along these two tracks towards their invisiblehorizon without being able to discern their meaning or relation, suchthat we are made to wonder what this is an image of, and how weare to fathom the distance between its presence and this far horizon.

Much later we are told that the source of this image is to be foundin the transformation of three phrases, but this does not give us licenseto deduce that it is an image of languages subterranean echoes, whichif they are anything are unpresentable, nor does this take account ofthe image as it is presented to us, as a figure caught and fixed in anegative of white on black: the word as mortal rupture. For in drawingour attention to the fatal materiality of language as it is momentarilytrapped in the tableau of a dying man, the image becomes a site for

exposing us to the interior distance of language, the material expansethat it opens onto from here, leaving its presence unstable as it can-not be circumscribed. Without the inscription, the image would nothave such an effect, since it is by placing the legend next to the figurethat it is doubled and the image decentered, so that while it may stilldepict it also dissembles. Like the words that the procdacts upon, itis not clear if this is an image to be viewed or read, for we are not justbefore an image but an image with its own written directions, suchthat it manifests itself through this self-distancing. For in encountering

this image we turn from the figure to the inscription and back again,unsure as to which is meant to provide the explanation when eachis as encrypted as the other. While this may grant it an autonomy, in

which it asserts itself by recapitulating itself, this does not lead to aunity in which it is identical to itself, but rather hollows it out with itsinsistent non-identity, its self-occlusion and self-evasion.14

14It is at this point that we might begin to approach Roussels work by way of Lyotardsunderstanding of the unavoidable mutual disruption of the discursive and the figural,since by this simple placing of the inscription, we pass from linguistic space, that ofreading, where one hears, to visual space, that of painting, where one looks. The eye nolonger listens, it desires [ . . . ] The inscription is a kind of non-writing; the space inwhich it moves is that of an object, not a text, Discours, figure, 267; trans. Discourse,Figure, 26364. The significance of Lyotards work comes from the fact that he findsthis disparity to be a mark of the disunity of language, as opposed to the dialecticaland phenomenological dualism that Foucault finds in Roussel.


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This brings us to what is perhaps the most significant lexical momentin Roussels writings: his use of the preposition in such phrases asqueue chiffre, baleine lot, and so on. The significance of this prepo-sition is many-layered, for can mean to, with, or at, bringinga very different sense to the phrases that it articulates. For example,queue chiffrecould be train with numeral, while baleine lotcouldbe whale to island, and although these phrases do not appear in thenarrative they are the elements from which it arises, and this carriesimportant consequences. It can be seen that the different senses of bear different kinds of relations, both temporal and ontological, for

what is uncovered though its usage is a change in emphasis wherethe relata are diminished in favor of the relation, since the relataare contingent and interchangeable while the relation is consistentif equivocal. This particular aspect is emphasized when is read asto, for it brings about a movement from one tothe other that is notfixed at either end and so can just as easily proceed as return; thephrase is notfroma tob, but is simply a tob (and on or back again).This is a movement in which the phrase passes from one reading toanother, as if a parenthesis were to suddenly unfold at its heart and

just as suddenly close again, indicating this relation (or that).15

Thuswhile the phrase carries meaning, it also bears the possibility of asudden alteration, not a gradual change but a switch from one pointto another, which, as we have seen from the novel itself, carries the

weight of the poetic machines in their temporal switches betweenpast and present. Consequently, the preposition indicates somethingof the ontological status of the text since it suggests that its surface isporous, as it suddenly exposes further levels within itself that generateits uncertain depth.

But the preposition can also be read as with or at, suggestinga conjunction rather than a transition, which carries a very differenttemporal-ontological relation, for now it is a question of a withb. Therelataare thus held together by the relation at the same time, but thissets up a problem, for what is the relation between these two readingsof the preposition? Is there a transition or a conjunction between them?This is the uncertainty captured in Roussels key phrases, which signalsthat we are not able to decide their reading as one orthe other butsomehow as both transitional andconjunctive, which has the effect of

allowing us to read the transition as conjoined, and the conjunctionas a transition, thereby undermining the appearance of depth, as the

15See especially, Ferry, Chambers, and Busine.


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movement from one to the other (is held alongside each), just as theircombination (is in the same movement marked as an alteration). It is

this parenthetical ontology that later leads to the Nouvelles ImpressionsdAfrique, for by way of these parentheses the text is both here andthere (and the movement from here tothere), both together and yetnot together, each parenthesis opening a quasi-transcendental pocketin the text that is both here and there, and now and then (and yetnot, as it is also the movement between them in its constant openingand closing). The two sides of are thus joined together, but theirrelation is one of sudden alteration; there is no gradual shading fromone side into the other but the rupture of the one being displacedby the other; a tenuous reversal joins them rather than any synthesis.

So while the parenthesis arises because of a flaw in language, whichfails to clearly bind meaning and relation, its opening neverthelessleads to a further flaw even if it closes successfully, since there is nopossibility of returning to the prior state. Rather, the parenthesespersist as an ever-present lining that can at any moment rupture themovement of language, for as a lining it has the possibility of touchingdisastrously upon that which it is lining, causing a breach or commu-

nication from one side to the other in a literalrefraction of meaning.There is an irreducible distance between the inside and the outsideof the parenthesis, as the move from one side of the phrase to theother cannot be measured or mediated, and so while there may bea repetition that occurs from one level of the text to the next thereis also an absolute separation between them, leaving any echoes atan unbridgeable distance and thus distorted and made strange. Sothere is an irreversible shattering to these semantic ruptures that isboth brilliant and fatal, for they are ruptures ofmeaning, in both the

subjective and objective senses, and in all the arbitrariness of theirover-writing. While the iterations of theprocdnever cease, they onlygo in one direction, as they can never return and restore any earlierunity, if there had been any; instead there is only divergence, depar-ture, loss. Such forms, like fireworks, as Adorno writes, are exemplaryof the nature of artworks as such, of what he calls the apparition ofart, in that they are empirical appearances, liberated from the burdenof the empirical as one of duration, signs from heaven and whollyproduced, a mysterious warning (Menetekel), a writing that flashes

up and fades away, which does not let itself be read for its meaning(AT 81). A spark that ignites the word as it passes from one side of its

visual-vocal axis to the other, but just as quickly burning out, leavingno more than a negative impression, as intangible as it is ineffaceable.


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Thus the impressions we get of Africa are of a frieze of lexicaltableaux, as if printed out in a series of prepositions (like the illustra-

tions for the Nouvelles Impressions), thereby catching an operation inthe act of its operating so that it appears as an embodied hieroglyph,encoding a meaning that is less significant than its impression. Eachscene is then the simulacrum of a meaning, as it bears nothing morethan the semblance of meaning borne solely by the preposition thatupholds it and in which its conjugation is the basis of an unadulterated

poiesis, one that knows no development or decay but only reiteration.While this might seem to be a play of randomness, there is instead onlythe application of a very rigorousprocdand so, while the Surrealistsmay have praised Roussel, his writings nevertheless run counter tothe spirit of Surrealism for by way of their machinery they suspendboth meaning and its absence. What has been exposed in its placeis not the sheer play of chance but rather the inescapable repetitionof formation, the chance that is the fact of language as such. In themovements of this language there is a strange half-life, neither livingnor dead, but crossed by the disruption of both as meaning is at oncedestroyed and recreated in its endless contingency.

Thus the language of Roussels novels would seem to enter a spaceforeign to both being and non-being, thereby revealing the gap (whichneither is nor is not) that separates and articulates them. It wouldseem possible to say this is the space of language itself, were sucha phrase meaningful, since it is the space that in articulating being isalso the shadow of its undoing, for by repeating what issuch that itis, language also separates being from itself: being andnon-beingby way of language. The ontological resonances of Roussels writingsappear profound, but we should be wary of what such a thought

implies, what it would mean to read Roussel philosophically, for ittakes no account of the beauty and simplicity of a writing that seeks todo no more than follow a poeticprocd. If anything can be said aboutRoussels writing it is in reference to its lack of depth and the brilliantimages that cycle across its endless surface, for this glassy innocenceseems to resist the grasp of theory as it has no goal; without meaningor purpose it knows no end other than to pursue its non-identicalself. Furthermore, in their unveiling of the absence that subtendsformation, Roussels writings hold neither hope nor anguish. There

is only a subtle poignancy relating to the inevitability of repetition,since each scenario, however audacious or fantastic, only leads backto itself, such that an amor fatiperpetually struggles to present itself.


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But if there is no proximity between Roussels writings and philoso-phy, because their innovations actively inhibit coherent theorization

and conceptual examination, then they are also no closer to literature,for is there anything less literary than this autonomous machinery ofpoetics? Or is that a misapprehension, is it rather that there is onlyanautonomous machinery of poetics when we talk of literature? What,then, is literature if there is Roussel? The text that we are presented

with seems to incline towards an ideal literary state, for by operat-ing as an automatic aide-mmoire supplied with certain formulaememorized word-for-word it becomes autonomous. But the autonomyuncovered by Roussel leads to an authorial uncertainty that is strangerthan any notion of the death of the author, as the procd rendersthis relation profoundly ambiguous. As a result, the text seems tooccupy a virtual state that opens up, beyond the writing that we canperceive, innumerable hidden lines that recede without end. But inreading this lexical archive its virtual tales do not become actualized,rather the reverse, for it would seem that it is the act of reading thatis made virtual, as it is exposed to forgetting and ambiguity and thusits perpetual incompletion. And, as the next section will show, this

changed sense of reading has an effect on the nature of thinking, forin indicating the impossibility of extricating itself from the materialityand variability of its medium, thought comes up against the limits ofits ability to construe its relation to objects in a conceptual form andfinds instead the extent to which the material affinities of languagepermeate thinking with their own speculative logic.

III. Speculative Sentences

Although it should be clearer now why Roussels works are of philo-sophical interest, in order to recognize the specific nature of theirimpact I will examine one further issue of his writing. As we have seen,Rousselsprocdoperates by taking everyday phrases and transformingthem via a method that is essentially poetic and this procd, oncelearned, can be used by anyone to create works in which imagina-tion is everything (CJE 27/20). So, rather than seeing his works asstraightforward if bizarre adventures, they can also be read as experi-mental manuals of literary creativity, which is how they have been

responded to by the Oulipo. In fact, reading his novels straightfor-wardly is unsatisfactory because of their literary limits, their lack ofconventional narrative artistry, and so it is only by taking account oftheir construction that their significance becomes apparent. But the


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presence of theprocdis not immediately evident, so reading Rousselis not like reading an instruction manual, as theprocdonly appears

figuratively, by the way that it contorts the actions described withinthe narrative as well as the narrative strategy, such that its appearancehas to be uncovered and decoded even by those who are aware of itsmechanisms. (It is notable that the difficulty of grasping the relationbetween the procdand the narrative is resolved in the work of theOulipo by delineating the different types of constraint and emphasiz-ing the fact that a text should in some way discuss the constraint it isusing, as can be seen in Perecs La Disparition, for example.)

In that case, what does the presence of theprocdmean for reading?In essence it operates by changing linguistic phrases such that theyreveal alternative meanings and, by applying this approach to a seriesof phrases, it is then possible to develop a narrative by attempting tolink these original phrases to their variant meanings. In this way thenarrative figuratively carries out an analogous procd of its own indrawing out these linkages, and this is how the procdis carried outto its fullest extent. In a sense this is the entirety of what the procdmeans, for both readers and writers.

The difficulty comes with the attempt to understand the nature ofthese linkages, for if they are connections, then what is it in the nar-rative that is being connected and what is the relation between theconnections and the connected? And if they are transitions, then doesthis signify an innovation or degradation? What has been left behindand what has been achieved? It is easy to see how theprocdleads toreflections about the ontological status of the texts language and thento essentialize or psychoanalyze the nature of the relation betweenthe different sides of the connections or transitions, but this should

not distract us from the relation that theprocdopens up within thematerial itself and that is tacitly recapitulated in its reading. Theprocddoes not stand outside the text as an abstract set of instructions, forit is only insofar as it is executed, which means that it operates withinthe text as its means of development to the extent that there is noth-ing more to it than its execution. Moreover, this execution does nottake place of its own accord, as it depends on the reader for it to becarried out, since it is only in being so carried out that the procdcomes to its fuller meaning as that which actualizes variant meanings

in the text without defining their relation.We are introduced to a one-legged musician by the name of Lel-

goualch, who has learnt to play the tibia from his amputated leg likea flute and entertains the audience at the Gala with a range of folk


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tunes from his native Brittany. Many years later Roussel explainedthis appearance by referring to an advertisement for a record player

called a Phonotypia, whose name he had transformed intofausse notetibia (false note tibia) (CJE 21/13). If we are to understand thisrelation, then we need to look at how Roussel has transformed the

word Phonotypia into the phrasefausse note tibia. That is, aside fromthe relation between the name and the actual record player, Rousselhas reconceived the word through its transformation, so in what waycan we say that Phonotypia isfausse note tibia? Without Roussels laterexplanation no hint of the Phonotypia would have been apparent,and even with it the appearance of Lelgoualch seems just as arbitrary,especially when it is discovered that despite its provenance the tibiaproduces sounds that are far from false. On its own, the descriptionfrom Impressions dAfriqueamounts to very little, but coupled with Rous-sels later explanation (which explains nothing) it becomes fascinatingbecauseof the transformation by which the two phrases are linked. Itsuggests that, beneath the basic fact of homonymy, another (mimetic)relation lies concealed from which the narrative is drawn, for fromthis perspective it is possible to see how a randomly selected word

from everyday language can be changed into a fantastic scenario and,conversely, how such a fantastic scenario can find its basis (howevercontingently) in a word drawn from the material of everyday life.So there is a possibility of reading Phonotypia is fausse note tibia asa speculative sentence, albeit of the most secular, non-idealist kind,in that what we might understand as the essence of the sentencessubject is expressed by its transformation into the predicate, whichthus itself becomes a subject, unsettling the basis from which wemight determine a relation of predication, since each expresses the

essence of the other. Although this perspective is not apparent froma reading of Impressions dAfriquealone, the relation that the procdactivates between the two levels of Roussels writing amounts to aprofound inquiry into the nature of linguistic identity, in which itbecomes possible to say that Phonotypia isfausse note tibia. While thisshows how mimetic affinity needs to be understood speculatively, as athought of materiality, and vice versa, grounding the speculative in thequotidian, it also indicates the mimetic basis for linguistic autonomy.

But surely this is to confuse two very different sentences? Roussels

example is simply a pun, two words or phrases that sound similarbut have very different meanings, whereas for Hegel the speculativesentence (Satz) has a very specific metaphysical sense. For example,

when he writes God is being, Hegel is claiming that the copula in


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this sentence has a radically different sense from that which is foundin sentences like Canada is large. The latter sentence has a copula

that bears a relation of predication in which the object determinesthe subject, while in the former sentence the copula bears a rela-tion of identity as both its terms are concepts, such that each is tobe understood asthe other. The subject in the sentence Canada islarge is characterized by its predicate, but it nevertheless pre-existsthis determination and can be alternatively characterized; hencethe subject is separate from its predicates and supports them pas-sively, even though without them it remains undetermined. Withinthe former (speculative) sentence there is no equivalent separationbetween its terms so that one could be said to be the subject of theother, for instead of the subject being determined by its predicate,the second term in a speculative sentence indicates the essence of thefirst. While the sentence Canada is large involves a particular anda universal, in sentences like God is being there are two universalsthat the copula relates through a movement of identity, as each is theexpression of the essence of the other. As such, the term that lies inthe position of the predicate itself becomes the subject, so that the

ordinary movement of predication from passive, pre-existing subjectto characterization is halted and suffers a counter-thrust (Gegensto),as Hegel writes, for when the predicate itself is a subject it casts therelation between the two into a mutually-determining dialectic in

which thought is forced into reconsidering the place of the subject,finding it first here and then there, and thus reconceiving the statusof the object and its relation to it:

Thinking, instead of making progress in the transition from subject topredicate, feels itself even more inhibited, as the subject is lost, and is

thrown back on to the thought of the subject because it misses it; or, asthe predicate itself has been expressed as a subject, as thebeing, the esse

William s Allen Speculative Prose

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