Criticism and Legacy
Perhaps not surprisingly, Roussel was unpopular during his lifetime and critical reception of his works was almost unanimously negative. Nevertheless, he was admired by the Surrealist group and other avant-garde writers, particularly Michel Leiris and Marcel Duchamp. He began to be rediscovered in the late 1950s, by the Oulipo and Alain Robbe-Grillet. His most direct influence in the English speaking world was on the New York School of poets; John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch briefly edited a magazine called Locus Solus after his novel. French theorist Michel Foucault's only book-length work of literary criticism is on Roussel. A comprehensive exhibition of Roussels’ achievements entitled "Locus Solus" was exhibited within the Fundação de Serralves in Porto opening on March 24, 2012. Special attention was granted to his personal connections with Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and Marcel Duchamp who observed that Roussel was “he who pointed the way”.
Read more about this topic: Raymond Roussel
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“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
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