Raymond Roussel clipped “Bertha, The Child-Flower” from the final manuscript of his masterpiece Locus Solus (1914), but here she blooms again.
Earlier this month, Mary Ann Caws allowed me to reprint her translation of the story, which first appeared in her anthology Surrealist Painters and Poets. Not finding a suitable illustration, I decided to create the (first ever?) Raymond Roussel Illustration Contest.
Contest winner! Mahendra Singh
Contest winner Mahendra Singh is an illustrator from Montreal “busily fitting Lewis Carroll into a protosurrealist straitjacket with matching dada cufflinks” on The Hunting of the Snark. You can see more of his illustration work here and here. For his winning entry he will receive a copy of Locus Solus (OneWorld reprint), a copy of Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology, and an oddity from my book collection.
I asked Mahendra to describe the methods and thoughts behind his piece:
The drawing was done in pen & ink on mylar, my usual MO, then colored in Photoshop. I made several decisions in the beginning, as I researched & pondered the assignment. First, I wanted to use a pen technique that was somewhat old-fashioned, even stodgy. This gave the feel of an Edwardian/Victorian illo, which is the fictional ambience of Roussel’s work. He really is a pulp fiction writer, in the manner of Verne or H. Rider Haggard, except that his grammar is perfect and of course, he’s utterly insane.
Second, I wanted the compositional style to be a bit dead-pan & uninspired, I didn’t want to break the Rousselian atmosphere of bourgeois platitudes. So, no collages, no vignettes, nothing but a straight-on picture of an actual incident.
The woman was obvious, make her submissive to play up the lurking sense of whatever you call this kind of sexual pathology (vegefetishism?). The “plant” in her lap is pretty obvious, and the stamen bending over her made a nice, passing reference to her backstory. The gent with the moustache is Roussel, the other gent, I honestly don’t know why I made Boudet into such a blatant freak. I sort of broke the deadpan pretense there but it seemed right.
The leash was critical for me, it balanced the stamen and more important, it gave a feeling of aggression and domination to the whole situation. To me, this story is very aggressive, more so than usual for Roussel. Catherine is a living seedbank and Bertha is a sort of vegetable Frankenstein, all of them at the beck & call of Roussel & Boudet.
Surrealism has a lot of concealed sexual aggression & that’s always been part of its appeal to people, I think. I’m not sure if I’d classify Roussel as a Surrealist, he’s not quite with the program, as they say. I think he was absolutely honest in his methods, he meant exactly what he wrote, to him there were no hidden meanings and he would have been shocked at this illo, I’m certain.
***
Second place goes to Marcus Parcus for his impressive triptych. I particularly love that Marcus tackled Catherine’s forty-five happy children in Texas, and if I’m not mistaken he even plays off of Zo’s illustrations for Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa. (See also Marcus’s Roussel portrait.)
Everyone else featured here tied for third place. I received too many entries and didn’t have space for all of them, but — DEAR GOD — thank you all!
Click for larger versions.
Marcus Parcus
(Please click for a larger view)
Marcus Parcus (“La mer curieux des enfants”), detail from the above
James Morrison (aka Caustic Cover Critic)
Jana Traboulsi and Khaled Malas
Denis Kostromitin
Denis notes: “In the spirit of early surrealism I have decided to combine the wonder infant and the stupefied witness into one (locked) figure. My intent of conveying this ‘exhibit’ feel suggested the pitch environment, which helps to focus the attention on all the living detail of the creature. The bee was added purely for the fun of it.”
Carolyn Reed Barritt
Carolyn notes: “When I read the story I sensed an underlying feeling of love and pride from both Catherine and Boudet. I thought that if the child was too grotesque it would be difficult to feel either of those emotions, so I painted her as a pretty, but not quite normal, baby. I also thought Boudet would construct and paint a tray befitting his pride and reflecting her origins.”
Mark Greene Shehan (you can reach Mark at mercystreetstudios [at] gmail [dot] com)
Monica Rochester aka Gentress Myrrh
Myrrh (who has long been working on a Roussel-inspired animation) notes: “When I read the excerpt, what struck me as most disturbing (even more so than the opaque flower-child itself) was the impregnation/pollination of the ‘fertile Texan peasant.'” Indeed!
Previously:
