Roussel: hier, aujourdhui. Colloque de Cerisy du 9 au 16 juin 2012 ed. by Pierre Bazantay, Christelle Reggiani et Hermes Salceda (review)

Unlike the sun he once believed he bore within himself, and whose rays, on publication of his verse novel La Doublure on 10 June 1897, he hoped would penetrate to the furthest corners of the world, few stars, it seems, have waxed and waned in such spectacular fashion over time as that of Raymond Roussel. Known initially to a vanishingly small happy few, then promoted first of all by the Surrealists in the 1920s (by Breton and Vitrac, Aragon and Desnos, and Michel Leiris, a family friend), and subsequently rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Oulipo, and the Tel Quel group, his fortunes dipped again as the attractions of formalist wordplay gave way to renewed engagement with the ethico-political, although not before, in 1989, in a sudden reversal not untypical of his own writings for the stage, a whole trunk of unpublished material, comprising manuscripts, drafts, and other documents, was found stored with the Société Bedel, where it had lain undisturbed following Roussel’s apparent suicide in murky circumstances in Palermo in 1933. Since donated to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Roussel’s papers have not only prompted a new, critical edition of his work (of which nine volumes have so far appeared), but also fresh interest in the complex intricacies of his writing, to which this collection of papers deriving from a 2012 Cerisy colloquium, the second to be devoted to the writer (the first dates from 1991), provides ample testimony. Containing in its subtitle an explicit reference to the famous nouveau roman Cerisy colloquium of 1972, this new volume similarly aims both to take stock of Roussel’s achievement and to suggest future avenues for research. The collection opens with papers from three veteran commentators that readers of Roussel know well: Michel Arrivé, who offers a suggestive account of the convergent interests of Roussel and Saussure; Sjef Houppermans, who devotes a characteristically ingenious and resourceful analysis to Roussel’s use of Bescherelle’s famous dictionary; and Jean Ricardou, who, in inimitable manner, proposes an incisive reworking of the lessons of Roussel’s theoretical self-understanding for contemporary writing. Other contributions consider Roussel’s use of the alexandrine (his newly discovered Les Noces now merits mention as the longest verse narrative in the whole of French literature), his distinctive handling of narrative form, and the relationship between that notorious generative wordplaying procédé (for which Roussel is still best known) and the final text of works such as Impressions d’Afrique (1910), Locus Solus (1913), and the Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique (1932). There is particular, welcome emphasis on Roussel’s writings for the stage, while alongside sustained attention paid to the formal properties of Roussel’s writing and his engagingly idiosyncratic position both at the centre and on the margins of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century literary culture, there is room too for historical and psychoanalytically inspired analyses of Roussel’s œuvre. Slowly but surely, as the decades pass, it seems Roussel may finally be restored to the literary glory for which, with a mixture of naivety and uncompromising fervour, he so touchingly yearned.