In the Anti-World

Nicholas Jenkins

• Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams by Mark Ford
  Faber, 312 pp, £25.00, November 2000, ISBN 0 571 17409 4

In 1924 the Surrealist Benjamin Péret was eager, like many artists then and since, to relate his own interests to the works of the rich, bizarre and innovative French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel. In Paris, Péret contacted Roussel’s business manager, hoping to arrange a meeting with the man whom Louis Aragon called ‘the President of the Republic of Dreams’. Members of the Surrealist group, including Péret, had consistently championed Roussel’s expensively disastrous confrontations with good taste in Parisian theatres. At a performance of L’Etoile au front in Paris earlier in 1924, for example, the Surrealists had vociferously applauded while the more conventional members of the (invited) audience jeered, hurling coins and baked apples – cruelly poetic projectiles to throw at actors performing the work of a very well-off man who suffered from anguishing food phobias.