ΒΑΣΙΣΜΕΝΗ ΣΤΗ ΣΧΕΣΗ ΤΟΥ LOCUS SOLUS ΜΕ ΤΗΝ ΔΟΜΗ ΤΟΥ ΛΑΒΥΡΙΝΘΟΥ
ΣΧΕΔΙΑΣΜΟΣ-ΑΡΧΙΤΕΚΤΩΝ ΚΩΣΤΑΣ ΑΛΙΒΙΖΑΤΟΣ
THE METAMORPHOSIS AND THE LABYRINTH
The instruments, stage settings, performances and skills exercise two great mythical functions for Roussel: those of joining and discovery.
To join beings across the greatest distances of the cosmos (the earthworm and the musician, the rooster and the writer the heart of the loaf of bread and marble, tarot cards and phosphorus); to join incompatible elements (the water line and the thread of material, chance and the rules, infirmity and virtuosity, puffs of smoke and the mass of a sculpture); to join beyond any conceivable dimension ranges of sizes without relation (scenes carved in grape seeds; musical mechanisms hidden in the thickness of tarot cards). But also to rediscover a vanished past (a lost final act of Romeo and Juliet), a treasure (that of Hello), the secret of a birth (Sirdah), the author of a crime (Rul or the soldier struck by a bolt from the red sun of Tsar Alexis), a lost formula (Vascondy's metallic lace), a fortune (Roland de Mandebourg), or reason (by a return of the past in the sudden cure of Seal-Kor or in the progressive one of Lucius Egroizard). Most of the time to Join and to Rediscover are the two mythic aspects of one and the same figure. Canterel's corpses treated with ressurectine join life and death by recreating the past exactly.
Inside the great brilliant crystal where Roussel's dream float, there are the figures which join (the tresses-harp, the cat-fish, the harnessed sea horses) and those which are discoveries (Danton's still-talkative head, the figures of divers going up and down preserving fragments of history or legend, the harness which recreates the chariot of the rising sun) ; and then between the one and the other a violent short circuit: a catfish electifies Danton's brain to make him repeat his old speech. In these games imitation has a privileged place. Ot's the most efficient by which joining is identified with discovery. Whatever imitates in fact crosses the world, the substance of beings, the hierarchy of species to arrive at the place of the original and rediscover in itself the truth of this other being.
Louise Montalescot's machine with the tagle of its electric wires joins the great living forest to the genius of the painter by the automatic movement of the wheel; and in doing this she rediscovers the very thing in front of which she is standing. It's as if she had joined so many differences between them only to rediscover the identity of the duplicate.
Thus are constructed and crisscrossed the mechanical figures of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by Western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, surrounding the quest, the return, and the treasure (that’s the geography of the Argonauts and of the Labyrinth); and the other space- communicating polymorphous, continuous, and irreversible-of the metamorphosis, that is to say, of the visible transformation of instantly crossed distances, of strange affinities, of symbol replacements (the place of the human beast). But it must be remembered that it’s the Minotaur who watches within Daedalus’ palace, and after the long corridors; he is the last challenge on the return journey, the palace which imprisons him, protects him, was built for him, manifests externally his mixed monstrous nature. On Ejur Square as in Canterel’s garden, Roussel has erected minuscule labyrinths watched over by circus Minotaurs, but where it is a question of the fate and death of men.Michel Leiris once again said it: “By Joining apparently gratuitous elements, which he himself was not wary of, he created real myths,”
The metamorphosis, with all of its related figures, occurs in Impressions d’ Afrique and Locus Solus according to a set number of rules which are evident. To my knowledge there is one sequence of metamorphoses in the category of magical spells: it’s the story of Ursula, the Huron, and the villains of lake Ontario, who are under a spell (it’s a system of magical punishment which takes on the image of a symbolic moral value, and in which the sentence lasts until the moment of freedom, at the same time predetermined but uncertain). Aside from the episode, there are no mice transformed into coachmen, nor pumpkins becoming coaches. But rather, the juxtaposition within a single form of two orders of beings not close in the hierarchy which must cross a whole intermediary gamut in order to be joined.
Michel Foucault, The Death and the Labyrinth, Continuum, London, 1986: 81-83
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