DEATH AND THE LABYRINTH: The World of Raymond Roussel

by Michel Foucault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 21, 1986

During the early 1960's, Foucault briefly put aside the final drafts of Madness and Civilization to write this--his only work centered on a single author. Attracted to Roussel precisely because he was a neglected author--""not part of the great literary patrimony""--Foucault wrote this study quickly and with little revision. The haste of composition, the specifically literary focus, and the choice of a nearly contemporary subject (Roussel lived from 1877-1933) all make this newly translated work a decidedly unusual posthumous offering from this magisterial anti-historian and excavator of myth. Roussel's work survives only as an influence on the development of the French ""new novel,"" particularly the work of Robbe-Grillet. In the 1983 interview that concludes this volume (Foucault died in 1984), he mentions that he decided to write on Roussel shortly after visiting a fun-house with Robbe-Grillet (ah, these French!); and that his friend's Le Voyeur had originally been titled La Vue in homage to Roussel, whose poem of the same title appeared in 1904. Roussel's style is a punning one: his first published work, a novel-inverse, is titled La Doublure, meaning both ""The Understudy"" and ""The Lining."" His work is obsessive and repetitive. He bracketed thoughts by structuring his sentences within multiple parentheses--sometimes as many as five within a single sentence. Foucault suggests that life imitated art in Roussel's manner of death--his 1933 suicide within a locked room paralled his no-exit grammatical formulations. If this is one of Foucault's more bizarre conceits, there are many points at which the analysis truly soars: ""Roussel's experiment is located in what could be called the 'tropological space' of vocabulary. . . It is not where the canonical figures of speech originate, but that neutral space within language where the hollowness of the word is shown as an insidious void, a trap."" Interesting to see Foucault--some 25 years ago--flirting with the Derridean abyss. Anyone interested in avant-garde writing and postmodernism will be fascinated with Foucault's analysis. And if this does not compare in scale with such monumental achievements as Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality--if it remains something of a miniature and a curio--it is nonetheless quite beautifully wrought.

Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION