ABSTRACT
Madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them. The Romantics and the Surrealists who elevated madness to supremacy were only recycling a very ancient tradition, at least as old as Plato, that equated genius and madness. A very different addict of verbal permutations, Raymond Roussel, who overlapped with Jean-Pierre Brisset, funded his printed researches with plentiful unearned income: vanity publishing. Roussel collocates his puns gratuitously, whereas Brisset finds them and then uses the readymades as grist for his mill. The subject of madness, whether in others or indeed oneself, can make at least some of the reputedly sane shiver in fearful delectation. In a sympathetic article on the kinship of reason and folly, the journalist Jean Frollo embraces both asylum inmates and Brisset. Christian Delacampagne believes that Brisset fits the bill, but Brisset looks everywhere for deep meanings in the unlikeliest verbal sites; he profits from the echoic accidents of language.
