With the publication of Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (How I wrote certain of my books), Raymond Roussel posthumously revealed the secret of his idiosyncratic method of writing. He would compose many of his fantastical stories by creatively connecting two different meanings of the same word, or two different words spelled nearly the same, in clandestine, virtuosic acts of metonymy. He describes this as “essentially a poetic method.” As strange as his procedure may at first seem in terms of writing, I think we all do something like this when we read, especially when we love to read; we allow one thing we’re reading to suggest something else to read and find delight in the surprises and correspondences generated between the texts along the way.
–from “Dining with Proust” by Jeffrey Lependorf
found in A Public Space, issue 12, 2011
