Week 3, Locus Solus: Fates, Knots, and Curious Refractions

The Three Fates; The Triumph of Death, a 16th century tapestry
 (Victoria and Albert Museum)
http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O72702/the-three-fates-the-triumph-tapestry-unknown/

The phantasmagoric swagger of Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus compels the reader to meander the labyrinthine and exponential narrative, promising sensory overload at every turn of the page, every stitch of phrase.  It demands to be languidly consumed, and I was captivated and thoroughly engrossed with the whole of it, but I want to pause with excerpts from Chapter 3, or perhaps really just use these spots as a jumping off point, because they are visually impregnated with what seems to be Roussel’s overarching methodology.  

A spiral staircase as 
mise en abîmehttp://eye-grotto.blogspot.com/2011/02/mise-en-abyme.html

Roussel begins with an image of a "gigantic diamond" one that "attracted our attention already from afar by its prodigious brilliance" (41).  The use of a prismatic object first suggests the importance of visuality and optical illusions alluding to the many-sided nature of his tale (the matryoshka principle, as mentioned in discussion, or mise en abîme comes to mind).  His use of the siren call through the dancer Faustine as mermaid offers another form of attraction: beauty and feminine sexuality.  What is so curious about the use of visual cues to lure in spectators is Roussel’s thematic repetition of threads, cords, knots, and grid systems (Cartesian divers no less!).  While Roussel weaves all of the stories together with fragments constantly carrying and spilling over into other stories, multiplying the visual cues for the reader and creating a spiraling effect (a process of sublation where nothing really is lost), there are likewise repetitive reminders that these threads are bound to something and not necessarily controlled by the story or the characters but by another force.  For instance, Faustine “remained confined within a very restricted register,” and one of the other Cartesian divers, Alexander the Great, is tied to “[a] golden thread” (Roussel 42).  The pervasive thread imagery—indeed it runs throughout the novel—along with his repetition of the number three, allows for a reading of the Fates, calling to mind the Moirae, the mythological goddesses Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos who control human birth and death.  

Thread[s] woven
http://www.coolhunting.com/style/string-theory.php

Such an understanding may provide yet another layer representative of the anxieties of birth and death and how tethered the conscious is to the body.  Given Roussel's incantation-like repetition (in symbolic and forever morphing form), it would seem that the pattern he is providing is not only a roadmap for readers, a connecting of the dots of the many narratives, but also a seductive form of mastery, a child-like means of memorization.