Despite a disappointing graphically, New Impressions of Africa Published at Leo Scherr is associated with a theoretical very enlightening on the work of R. Roussel. Jacques Sivan, designer of this edition and author of the afterword, highlights the process of writing R. Roussel and his conception of the book. The dynamism of the language of R. Roussel unfolds through the colors that are alternately assigned to text (colored in white, red, green, black or yellow). Each shade giving different impression, the text acquires perceptual qualities in addition to its typographic form and its positioning on the page. R. Roussel and puts in place an internal logic to the text where the color closely associated with it, becomes an element of interpretation and reveals a writing process.
Jacques Sivan connects the theories of Wittgenstein, Claudel Kadinsky and other writings about the reflective color to support his case. In the confusion, we note: The description of the color "bis" or the color of a gray, that of neutrality, non-event, the constant shift between white and black, blue and yellow concentric eccentric which to meet their respective spin create color balance: green. It read: neutrality immobile (gray) vs. dynamic balance (green). Other colors (red, white and black) will color the language of R. Roussel as active functions to move from a system of writing to another.
Note also the interest of R. Roussel to the question of the book as a generative process , print mode and three-dimensional object :
- bis , in addition to the gray, also evokes the notion of repetition. For R. Roussel, repetition - Duplication - is a fundamental process by which everything is generated, which produces the motion by the recurrence in time. So that there is a double statement: repetition is the condition Sinequa not the existence of anything (the identity can not be compared as a double) and the origin of a movement. By the use of color as color bis substantive text R. symbolizes the perpetual doubling of its text, that is to say the possibility of a new meaning and plural readings of reality constantly renewed.
- Mechanical textual R. Roussel refers to the mechanics of the five senses (especially that of vision) and resembles an optical process developer. (It is no coincidence that the titles of his works the words impressions, view , lining appear.)
New Impressions of Africa consists of 59 pages of text and 59 pages illustrations that are interspersed, creating a duplicate book, a book in the bifocal optical sense of the word. The book is by its variations of colored text to an optical device as defined be impressed (we mean by the term impress: leave an image on a sensitive surface by means of light in photography for example) but also by its different levels of interpretation and meaning it produces, News impressions Africa is an eye, an optical catalyst, an expression of vision Raimbaldien within the meaning of the term. The poet is the visionary and the book is the device for reading vision.
- R. Roussel sees his writing as a material process that will generate up to the book as object in its tri-dimensionality itself. They mean by structure, notebooks, number page and the book folds architectent. In it, R. Roussel joined Walter Benjamin, who advocates a writing whose typographic forms and graphics to text would be a relay (in Accountant , One Way), condemning the book in favor of text-book-object.
But if you look closer, R. Roussel is trying to offer a book-world, the significance of number 4 in the manufacturing process means symbolically all. The books are books of 8 pages, ie quarto, which are in themselves units of worlds. Totality is also symbolized by the 4 songs that structure New Impressions of Africa. We thus find, like Borges included the concept of the world into another world, itself included in another and at infinity. A world that is repeated through the mirrors created by the folds: they create virgins who reflect back (split) of full duplex.
New Impressions of Africa operates under a self-mechanics, a very accurate. The author is the operator, ie, one that is not the cause of "his" creation, but who is the agent provisional, and at some point, this building (or in the words of Mallarme "pure work implies the disappearance of the poet elocutionary ceding the initiative to word.")
In the system implemented by the BlackBookBlack , operators are being replaced not only the black pages (black print), making their own autonomy, but also to the book (all the books are unique, or are "potentially" different), and the reader (readings are multiple and depend only on the player that built them). Operators thus become developers (see the developer photograph) of a creation that tends to exist. The operator involved in the transmutation of matter, giving body to another body so that it becomes visible , the operator-alchemist participates in transition from black to a new form of existence.
New Impressions of Africa consists of 2 x 30 illustrations that respond symmetrically and that can be read as centripetal (from outside toward the center of the book) or centrifugal (from center to outside of book). With the peculiarity that the 30th pin image is the image that refers to all other and that the principle of symmetry can be achieved. The 60th image, it is absent or image, one invented by the reader. So there are 59 illustrations in the book, of which 29 correspond to 29 others through a 59th located in the center.
This image center is not without significance: it is the only one's own image back to itself (since it is the only one not to have another image that responds) and is the keystone of book. It reveals the scale reading of the book: it shows a man dragging a donkey guide under a sheet of paper. This tool - used to share a segment into parts same length - is a surface set at equal intervals. In its representation, which ruled lines are the draw at the same illustrations that make up the book placed at regular intervals. Yet it is only through a certain transparency that this grid we can appear (as it is placed under another sheet of paper), thus revealing all the underlying aspects of the work by the readings plural he proposes. R. Roussel and we still talk of colors, as transparency and opacity are qualities which also contribute to their descriptions.
The book is thus regarded as a space for realizing the vision, becomes the eye-book to better re-focus its vision, we propose a structure of double reading, reading bifocal, consisting of 29 pairs images with a separation (the central image, the fold) are those areas where vision may occur.
It is the projection space as envisaged in Duchamp, the mechanism that allows the "crossing" of the second dimension to the third dimension and the 3rd to 4th. Linear reading and comparative reading, movement and temporality, fall turns in reading passages operating constant coming and going between all dimensions of the projection space that constitutes the book.
