Writing Rules: Raymond Roussel’s Impressions

Chapter two reveals Raymond Roussel’s attempts to devise a method for the industrial production of the serial novel, essentially doing for early twentieth-century literature what Thomas Edison was achieving at the time through media. Inspired by Edisonian media and its use of inscription upon a recording medium to manufacture profitable spectacles, Roussel’s writing process used analogous writing methods to take a mass of random source material and rapidly convert it into a fantastical weekly vignette. The spectacular nature of Roussel’s vignettes draws additional inspiration from Edison’s work, and specifically Edison’s analog fantasies of contacting the dead. While these analog dreams of resuscitating the past transduce Roussel’s historical experiences with grief, they also disclose his ambitions for recapturing the glory of famous historical figures, from Victor Hugo to Napoleon. Through a close look at Roussel’s outlandish fictionalizations of Edisonian technology, this chapter first unveils where Roussel’s novels demonstrate his particular grasp of how these devices functioned, and to what ends. From there, it continues to show how this understanding of media technology drove Roussel’s highly idiosyncratic writing process, which involved using baroque wordplay operations to generate his outlandish and unreal fictions.