Locus Solus

Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel . From October 26, 2011 to February 27, 2012

João Fernandes, director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Oporto and curator of this exhibition: Raymond Roussel lived during a very interesting time, when a huge industrial bourgeois had developed in such a way that an economy of leisure was created. Roussel was the son of a very wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, but he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps. Roussel was a mythomaniac, someone who searched for myths in the world in an attempt to become a myth himself.

When he wrote his first book, Roussel thought that people would recognise him as a star when he went out. He was very disappointed when he saw that nobody recognised him. This exhibition is based not only on Roussel’s writing, but also on the influence that he has had on other artists.

I came to know about Roussel because of his famous relationship with Duchamp, which was not really a relationship, because they never met. Duchamp only saw Roussel playing chess once in a café.

He had seen his work a few years earlier in a play, when Roussel staged Impressions of Africa. This theatrical version of Impressions of Africa, which Roussel used to reach the mass theatre audiences of his day, gave Duchamp the idea for The Large Glass. In Impressions of Africa, Duchamp discovered a mechanism that developed something unusual, a very strange consequence of a type of logic that seemed to be formed by the lack of logic. It was like a machine that didn’t work, or that worked in a way that contradicted its operation.

It was only after Roussel’s death, because of a posthumous text called How I Wrote Certain of My Books, that people learned that some of Roussel’s works were written based on the structure of homophones, similar words, where by changing just one sound, he changed the meaning of the word.
From these imperfect homophones, Roussel invented a phrase, and from these phrases he invented a story or a narrative. Roussel developed a complete cosmology, which is in Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus, taking the structural qualities of language as a starting point. In that way, he started to form part of a group that was beginning to discover the structure of language. It was also a time when linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and specialists in semiotics in the Soviet Union – the Russian formalists like Trubetskoy – were exploring homophones, and Roman Jakobson was working with the poetic function of language. Roussel aligned with Jakobson in that the poetic function put the focus on the message for its own sake, on the presentation and the sounds. This context also served as the setting for the journey through words that Roussel would make.

The literary images in a text can become visual images. This creates a sensitivity to the rhythmic, formal dimension of language, which was not explicit then and began to be developed during his lifetime.

Roussel was the first structuralist, which is why Foucault became interested in him later. He was the first author who used a structuralist system as the engine for textual dynamics. He did this very consciously, not just intuitively. For a writer, form is a type of intuition, but for Roussel, it was his working programme.