ABSTRACT
Meddling with language, risking delire and madness, means accepting disintegration and struggling to restore the unity of the self. There lies Raymond Roussel's own brand of delire, a rather mild variety: on the frontier between the attraction of disorder and the love of order, in the contradictory disruption of language at one level (the semantic, or the referential level), and the strict respect for the merest of its rules on another, syntactic or morphological, level. The situation is now familiar: a delire which has nothing to do with delirium; risks, which in Louis Wolfson's case are imposed by his illness rather than taken; a threatening disorder and a struggle to restore order. Artaud is an extreme point in the corpus: if Lewis Carroll's language is on the 'normal' side of delire, Artaud's poetry is beyond delire, at a point where the contradiction has been resolved, by the destruction of the surface organization of language.
