Raymond Roussel, a writer considered by André Breton as “the greatest magnetizer of all time”, was one of those illustrious unknowns who influenced half the world of acquaintances, and who anticipated the experiences of fluctuation between meaning and signifier carried out in literature, cinema and visual arts of the 20th century. In most of his books – Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus(1914), among others – Roussel developed pioneering language procedures that would come to be used especially by the Dadaists and Surrealists. For example, the extensive use of homonymous or similar words, as is the case of “billard” (billiards) and “pillard” (looter), allowed him to construct sentences and texts that were arbitrary in form and content, thus raising the pathological potency of language.
The word games, practiced incessantly throughout his life, led him to discover unsuspected spaces in writing and to attest to the existence of a second reality – not as a repetition of the first, but as a hilarious alternative –, to the point of committing suicide for excess of barbiturates in a hotel in Palermo, Italy, aged 55.
