A Semblance of Life: Raymond Roussel’s Speculative Prose

Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique first appeared in 1909, but as a major work of the modernist tradition it is hardly known and even less well understood in the Anglophone world. I will introduce the text here and explicate its theoretical implications, for in its procedural approach to fiction it operates on a level of formalism that, along with the flatness of Roussel’s prose and the bizarre adventures he describes, has contributed to the lack of interest shown by English readers. But this lack of interest overlooks the nature of the experimentation in Roussel’s work and the consequences this unveils, as it leads to a narrative that conveys a powerful sense of autonomy, a text that appears to bear a life of its own with the concomitant implications this has for the materiality of its language, a textual approach perhaps unfamiliar to English readers but no less significant as a critical form of modernist thinking and writing. After having examined Roussel’s work in depth I will then take up the central part of his writing procedure, the transformation of sentences, and show how this creates a surprising analogue to the notion of the speculative sentence that Hegel developed in his Phenomenology. But the significance of this association lies in the fact that the formal experiments of Roussel’s writings deliver a way of thinking about the relation of language and materiality that does not rationalize it into a system of thought. Instead, the syntactical relations of Roussel’s writings bear mimetic relations to the world of things, in a manner akin to the language-like quality of the artwork discussed by Theodor W. Adorno but that is here transferred into language, which enables them to articulate the prosaic forms of the world as a mode of speculative material knowledge.

It is very revealing that while Roussel’s writings have prompted serious and sustained analysis in France since the early work of Jean Ferry and Michel Foucault in the 1950s and 1960s, there has been no similar interest among Anglophone scholars. In fact, apart from translations of works by Foucault and François Caradec, there has been no extended work on Roussel in English aside from Mark Ford’s biography in 2000. When the range of perspectives that French writers have brought to bear on his works is taken into account this omission becomes even more remarkable, for Roussel has been claimed by writers on Surrealism, modernism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and linguistics as being of central importance. Furthermore, in terms of literary experimentation Roussel is an acknowledged forebear of the most substantial developments in post-war French literature: the Oulipo, the nouveau roman, and Tel Quel, as well as the writings of Foucault himself, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out in his study of the thinker. Thus Roussel appears to be the éminence grise of 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, Roussel’s works seem too frivolous or esoteric to be taken seriously. It cannot be denied that Roussel’s works are light and are intended to be, since he had no desire to write works of literary or philosophical weight and had no comprehension of, let alone kinship with, the more well known figures of modernist writing. But nevertheless he has been proclaimed as such a figure by writers as different as John Ashbery and Alain Robbe-Grillet and this is in accord with his belief that he had discovered a uniquely important mode of literary creativity. This procédé (a literary device or procedure) has perhaps added to the lack of interest of Anglophone scholars, who are generally disinclined towards formal approaches to prose fiction, especially ones that seem to be ludic, as it may appear that Roussel is just a mechanic who has come across an intriguing method, but one that ultimately lacks any critical substance; hence the readings that have emerged are largely restricted to explications of his procédé that treat it...