ABSTRACT
Raymond Roussel revels in the details of his invention, creating technical descriptions surpassing in minutiae those of his mentor, Jules Verne. Though Roussel's fiction is very much in the literary vanguard of its time, it also contains arcane and archaic devices that echo the literary movements of centuries. From the Gothic novels, Roussel takes his fascination for folk-tales, dreams, fantastic creatures, imaginary kingdoms populated by princesses, dangerous dungeons, genii, talking animals, and magical objects. Roussel's secret mechanism is a sort of primitive linguistic feedback mechanism constructed of self-reflexive levels of narration. The cosmology implied by Roussel's imagination suggests a deserted, intricate machine world in which solitary humans, if humans exist there at all, have as their sole task to be tourists, discovering the principles which operate the machine. The individual intelligence is marooned in a solitary place, or else dissolved into the nous, the collective consciousness which bears mute witness to the machine's self-perpetuation and elaborate expression.
