locus solus
raymond roussell

in defence of the transience of process in the production of work.

after attempting to model clowns in breadcrumb, he seemed to see a burst of illumination suffusing his whole life. statuary, which he had always preferred to drawing, made the mysterious abilities given him by his favourite subject blossom even further. the sculpting of clowns, he felt, would bring him fame and fortune.

but how was he to progress with only breadcrumb for clay and his fingers for tools-and without even a penny to get himself anything better.

each week he used to attend a botany lesson given by brothelande, a parsimonious bachelor settled in the suburbs and extremely devoted to his science, who put all the superfluous proceeds from his salary and lessons towards the cultivation of unusual plants under glass. finding that even the best engravings were not clear enough for his demonstrations, he would often, regardless of the inconvenience, personally transport from his home to school, some rare specimen that was to be the object of his lesson.

one day, in front of jerjeck and his companions, he unwrapped a pridiana vidua (widow of yesterday) in order to give them a lengthy dissertation on this large annamite flower resembling the tulip in shape, which owes its sad name, suggestive of bereavement, to its white stamens and black petals.

the pridiana vidua is chiefly remarkable for the bottom of its corolla, which secretes a black wax containing numerous white granules-called “nocturnal wax” on account of its resemblance to the starry firmament.

after showing the whole class this wax from the height of his rostrum, by bending the flower forward, brothelande took a small quantity of it upon the point of a paper-knife, declaring that it slowly formed again after each removal; this passed from hand to hand so that the pupils were able to study the fascinating soft substance at close range and handle it. when his turn came, jerjeck was suddenly struck by the exceptional malleability which it possessed.

brothelande was please to see how the pridiana vidua had quite captivated his young listeners, and he promised to give the exotic flower, which was easy to nurse for a long time in its pot, to the boy who came top in the very next test paper.

thinking of the giant strides a lump of nocturnal wax would enable him to make in his art, jerjeck had only one aim: to win the flower. by dint of working incessantly at his botanny course while neglecting all other homework or lessons at the risk of being often punished, he came out top in the test in question-and received the pridiana vidua from brothelande’s hands.

jerjeck watered the flower punctually and looked after it, and, until it died, applied himself to collecting the sooty wax at intervals from the corolla, where it was always renewed. in the end he had a considerable mass of it, whose softness and docility proved, from the very first trial, to be the answer to his prayers.

since he aimed at an extreme delicacy of execution that the makeshift instruments originating from his pencil-box were unable to give, it occurred to him that, although his breadcrumb was inadequate as clay, he might, at all events, use it to fashion with his fingers chisels of infinitely varied and precise forms which, once hard, could be put to use.

in practice his idea was most successful. armed with thouroughly staled tools of his own design, he made a humorous and lively clown from his lump of wax, based on the latest drawing produced by his strange process. feeling himself a fair way on towards success, he spent all his free time sculpting his subject in a thousand guises; he would begin by delineating the attitude, features and expression of each statuette with the aid of a white silhouette made by the scraper on an ink ground, which inspired him to fruitful discoveries. as soon as a work was finished, he would roll the wax between his hands into a smooth ball ready to use again.

jerjeck soon came to attach increasing importance to his strange preliminary work on paper, noticing that he definitely derived his most brilliant ideas from it. he made two very elaborate studies of each clown, front and back, which guided him step by step in the modelling-and he even, almost unwillingly, acquired the habit of reproducing in the soft black statue’s surface the evocative ink-strokes left so talentedly upon the sheet by his amazing scraper, by making fine lines out of certain white granules in the nocturnal wax-instinctively finding this a singular help in his sculpting task. thus the work, once completed, formed the exact negative, in a way, of the clown whose positive was provided in the double drawing. when the surface granules happened to be lacking, jerjeck would dig some underlying ones out of the very thickness of the wax; when, on the other hand, they were too abundant, he would push in and cover up those unusable ones which would have hindered his creation of some uniform expanse of virgin black.

for jerjeck this plastico-linear procedure was most fertile in immense results-and finally led him to create exquisite masterpieces which, the artist felt, might not have attained the same degree of perfection without it.

thus, without teachers, jerjeck developed a magnificent talent while an adolescent, to which he owed his immediate success once his studies were completed.

now, despite various attempts, he could never change his original working methods, only a double scraper-board drawing would properly illustrate the genesis of each of his clowns, and he preferred his breadcrumb tools to the unvarying range of chisels offered by dealers, since, according to his needs, he could give them thousands of ever-new shapes capable of meeting his most elaborate requirements-and they quickly became hard enough. as for the noctural wax, which a horticulturist supplied him with to order, because of the natural occurence of white specks in its black mass, it lent itself more conveniently than any other material to the clear and striking delineation of the strokes copied from the original.

once a clown was completed, he had marble copies made of it for commercial purposes, in which the linear outline did not appear at all, for after all it was only an aid in modelling. however it was a potent aid, and is importance led jerjeck to conclude that witout it he would never have attained complete mastery. so the artist was grateful to the chance that had once brought into his hands a little of this nocturnal wax, whose occassional snow-white flecks on a black ground had irresistibly prompted him to sculpt with lines forming the exact negative of the similarly very white drawing by which he was guided; his reputation owed an extra brilliance to the pridiana vidua presented, one memorable day, in the botany class.

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