For only someone with a God delusion could think up what Roussel did—or, rather, what his procédé thought up: mosaics depicting Scandinavian morality tales rendered in rotten teeth, a theater of reanimated corpses impelled to endlessly act out the most significant events of their lives, a disappearing girl carrying a cornucopia filled with an infinite supply of gold coins, a sniper who can shave an egg down to its unmarred yolk in exactly 24 shots. Perhaps Roussel’s religious mania didn’t manifest itself in his imagery so much as in his devotion to a strategy he thought sacred. Roussel’s world is strange because it is so specific, and his imaginative audacity reminds me of nothing so much as anime. Like Hayao Miyazaki movies—in which buses look like cats, amphibious girls have mouths full of salubrious saliva, monsters vomit up bathhouse employees, and decapitated spirit heads cure leprosy—Roussel’s works are littered with inconceivable amalgams. But at least in anime, there are protagonists with motives, however simplistic—they avenge family members, fall in love with characters that look like themselves, and seek adventure in parallel worlds. Roussel’s characters, if they can even be called that, express almost nothing a reader could identify as emotions. Bearing witness to the products of Roussel’s imagination isn’t nearly so unnerving as the moment that comes—quite late, it seems—when you are finally struck by the severe lack of human feeling. Janet outlines what he understands to be some of Roussel’s aesthetic principles: “The work must contain nothing real,” he deduces, “no observations on the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary combinations.”
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:47:01 +0000
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