Errata and Marginalia 014: Roussel

Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, translated by Rupert Copeland Cuningham (New York: New Directions, 2017), originally published 1914.

It is at first glance a dangerous proposition to attempt to spot errors in one of the works that helped birth to the world the movements of Surrealism and Dadaism. After all, how is one to say what is intended and what is not in a 251-page "novel" that features a pile-driver made of human teeth, the reanimated flesh of Danton's head, a character named "Princess Hello," and other oddities? On second glance, however, one realizes that it is immensely easy to spot such errors, because Locus Solus is in fact a perfectly logical and straightforward work. 

As we follow the inventor Canterel around his opulent estate, we are presented one after another with a series of patent absurdities. Yet, as we pause to contemplate each one, Canterel explains to us the precise mechanism of their operation—in excruciating detail—as well as the story of how they came to be. These narrations often take the form of Romantic or melodramatic vignettes, involving bandit lords, rescues from subterranean dungeons, ancient prophecies fulfilled, and the like—generally quite effective on their own terms, and well-executed, if not entirely in earnest. 

The Price of a Stocking-Frame

I allowed myself my first cash transaction today since this pandemic began. While buying a soda at an auto supply store, I decided after a moment's hesitation that I would not bother to put the handful of dollars involved on my credit card. Instead, I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty that had been sitting there untouched since early March.

Seeing it in my hand, I realized the bill was freighted with a ghastly symbolism it would not have possessed for me just two weeks ago. A twenty dollar bill. As with any other bill that finds its way into my wallet, I had no first-hand knowledge of this one's provenance. It had just been churned out of some ATM in a 7-11 months before. Who knew if it was a legitimate bill or not.

For the Union Dead

There is a sadness in the fact that, amidst the protests against police violence in Boston Common last night, the rear side of the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was tagged with graffiti. It is of course impossible to shed tears over mute stone being vandalized, when the protests are about the infinitely graver offense of taking human lives. Still, though, the symbolism is potent and heart-wrenching: this spray paint ended up on the city's most well-known monument to Black union soldiers, in the midst of protests condemning systemic anti-Black racism.

One way to read this incident might be as an insult to the memory of the soldiers and their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, who are depicted on the other side of the statue. Another, however, might be to see it as a tribute to what they fought for. The graffiti is a commentary not on the men who are memorialized in that statue, perhaps, but on the city that officially commemorates them, that pays lip-service to what their lives stood for, yet which maintains conditions throughout the Boston area of segregation and dispossession of Black communities.