Conversational Reading

Nice to see this piece on Raymond Roussel over at the Poetry Foundation (and Chad’s enthusiastic response to it). Both Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa were re-released last year by quality presses in fine new translations, but the books were largely ignored.

In his lifetime, the French poet, playwright, and novelist never did find a mainstream audience, or any audience really. He remained buoyant, though, paying Lemerre—the then-stylish French publishing house known for its pale yellow covers—to print his books. And Roussel always worked with devilish focus: New Impressions of Africa, his illustrated poly-parenthetical alexandrine in four cantos, took him seventeen years to write (15 hours per line, by his calculation). But almost 100 years later, Roussel’s labor is still paying off. New editions of his books come out with relative frequency. In June of last year, Mark Polizzotti’s much-awaited new version of Impressions of Africa was finally published by the Dalkey Archive Press. In a Harper’s Magazine review, Ben Marcus referred to Polizzotti as Roussel’s “immaculate translator.”

Roussel’s posthumous reception is almost as predictable as the critical neglect he experienced when alive. That he was seized upon by the Surrealists as a patron saint is no surprise—his tacking sentences accumulate like iterations of an exquisite corpse. Marcel Duchamp adapted his plays, and the poet/ethnographer Michel Leiris cites Roussel’s puns and unhinged logic as his most major inspirations. Word games were the foundational principle of Roussel’s compositions, and they are an obvious precedent to the Oulipo (an acronym for what translates into English as “workshop of potential literature”), whose members ascribed to mathematical theories of writing and produced a body of work brimming with palindromes, lipograms, and acrostics. Locus Solus was the subject of Michel Foucault’s only extended work of literary criticism, in which he writes that Roussel “forces the reader to learn a secret that he had not recognized and to feel trapped in an anonymous, amorphous, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, never really demonstrable type of secret.” John Ashbery, not only one of our most acclaimed contemporary poets but a heralded translator of French, gives Roussel as the reason he studied the language in the first place. . . .

Saw this in a bookstore not too long ago and would have bought it, except I’d already bought five books that day. Reviewed at the New Statesman.

But in an age of specialisation it is easy to defend versatility to the point of fetishism. A great deal of journalism is ill-served by being reprinted in anthologies neither portable nor navigable. And although we may wish to have four or five such books to represent not the range of Macdonald’s strengths but the glory of his output, a cohesive collection is preferable to a comprehensive selection.

It was Macdonald’s preference for “High Culture” over “Masscult”, asserted in essays and embodied in film reviews, that prompted Kael to what he called, in a friendly letter, her “implacable harassment”. But it was in fact “Midcult”, or “petty-bourgeois” culture, that preoccupied Macdonald. To distinguish them, he writes that Midcult “has the essential qualities of Masscult – the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity – but it decently covers them with a cultural fig leaf”. Most of the essays take aim, in Macdonald’s own implacably harassing manner, at projects that in some way reduce “serious art and thought” to a “democratic-philistine pabulum . . . manufactured for a hypothetical ‘common man’”.

If “Masscult and Midcult” establishes his allegiances by identifying his antipathies, then “The Triumph of the Fact”, a dazzling piece of historical argument, outlines Macdonald’s way of thinking by deprecating an opposite approach.

In March the Dalkey Archive will be publishing the second of Suicide-author Edouard Leve’s four novels to be translated: Autoportrait. The cover is rather awesome.

Just wound up an interview with AP translator and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.

The latest book in the Walser renaissance has just been published: Berlin Stories, translated by Susan Bernofsky, published by NYRB Classics.

The NYRB blog offers a story from the book, in its entirety (it’s short).

More on Walser from The Quarterly Conversation:

The Microscripts Interview with Susan Bernofsky The Tanners The Assistant

We’ll have a review of the Berlin Stories in an upcoming issue.

William Gaddis edition:

I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.

(March 1972 letter to Jean [?] Howes)

I’ve about reached the end of the line on questions about what I did or didn’t read of Joyce’s 30 years ago. All I read of Ulysses was Molly Bloom at the end which was being circulated for salacious rather than literary merits; No . . . continue reading, and add your comments