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.
In this work of such immense and breath-taking imagination, then, there is in fact nothing left to the reader's imagination. It is as if the author has taken it all. In any case, we are told everything we could wish to know, and more.
When an imprisoned character dreams of an incident, for instance, in which another character was rescued by the very person he had persecuted, and then wakes up and is promptly rescued by the very person he in turn had persecuted, Roussel does not force us to lift the interpretive pinky finger it would require to grasp the connection between the two nested stories. "Both were cases," Roussel over-explains, "of basely persecuted innocence coming, in the hour of victory, to rescue the very instrument of its ills and perils."
This character is rescued, by the way, through an underground passage leading through a lake that is partially drained. Rest assured that Roussel will satisfy our curiosity to know the precise means by which this water level is raised and lowered, using entirely pre-modern technologies.
Is all of this a joke? Deadpan wit? Science fiction? Fantasy? Perhaps it is none of these things; perhaps, indeed, it is nothing but itself. This, certainly, is what Alain Robbe-Grillet found in this perfectly idiosyncratic novel. Seeing it as the ideal precursor to his theories of the "new novel," Robbe-Grillet addressed himself directly to those readers who condemned Roussel's book for being "opaque." What they were really complaining about, says Robbe-Grillet, is that the book is perfectly transparent. It explains itself fully; and it is not seeking to "say anything" outside of what it says in itself.
This makes Locus Solus a fine representative of one of Robbe-Grillet's critical-theoretic apothegms (offered in his For a New Novel, Howards trans.). In summing up the point that the artist is not trying to do or say anything, outside of creating the work in question, Robbe-Grillet writes: "What [the novelist] is trying to do is merely this book itself."
It is the same art-critical moral that Francis Bacon once sought to inculcate, in a conversation recorded by Dan Farson. Recounting an anecdote about the dancer Pavlova, Bacon recalls that someone once asked her what she meant by dancing The Dying Swan. "Well, if I could tell you," she allegedly said (via Bacon via Farson), "I wouldn't dance it."
The novelist character Richard Tull makes a similar observation in Martin Amis's The Information. Asked by a literary journalist to explain what he was trying to "say" in the course of the convoluted, "difficult" novel that he has just delivered to the public, Tull replies: "It’s saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn’t put it any other way."
If he could have said it in less space, he would have written a shorter book. So it is with all art. As Robbe-Grillet notes, an all-sufficing "explanation" of a novel—a précis of what it "has to say"—would simultaneously "exhaust" the novel itself and render it superfluous. Pavlova wouldn't need to dance if the dance could be put into words, Bacon wouldn't need to paint, and Roussel wouldn't need to create Locus Solus, if it signified anything outside of itself.
And in such a perfect, logical, entirely self-contained novel, it is easy to spot the errors that found their way into the English-language edition. I note the following typos for the convenience of future editors:
p. 12 "entered the narrow corridor torch, in hand" [sic, misplaced comma]
p. 65 "twitches form the nerves that had once worked [...]" [sic, should be "from" in context]
p. 89 "After following canterel" [sic, "Canterel" is a proper name in the story]
p. 119 "When the state was adorned [...]" [sic, should be "statue" in context]
p. 136 "stupendous invention, capable of bring about" [sic, should be "bringing"]
p. 154 "famous throughout the country," [sic, end of sentence/paragraph in context, needs a period]
p. 167 "This cursed sentence, ringing in his eyes" [sic] Should be "ears." And I even went back to the French original to make sure I would find oreilles, rather than yeux.
p. 190 "played the second half the final sound" [sic, missing an "of"]
p. 191 "A that moment" [sic]
p. 230 "born by a dancing girl" [sic, should be "borne" in context]
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