Raymond Roussel

Through his novels, poems, and plays he exerted a profound influence on certain groups within 20th century French literature, including the Surrealists, Oulipo, and the authors of the nouveau roman.

We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with 'resurrectine,' a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."

New Impressions of Africa is a 1,274-line poem, consisting of four long cantos in rhymed alexandrines, each a single sentence with parenthetical asides that run up to five levels deep.

But due to the missing spaces which separate letters the ensemble of dots and dashes as well as a concealed message remained an hypothesis... until it was deciphered by Jean-Max Albert (another painter), revealing (at least partially) the rousselienne formula, which can't be fortuitous : « RELIVE YOUR DREAMS AWAKE  » ( Revis tes rêves en éveil).

His most direct influence in the Anglophonic world was on the New York School of poets; John Ashbery, Harry Mathews, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch briefly edited a magazine called Locus Solus after his novel.

Special attention was granted to his personal connections with Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp, who observed that Roussel was "he who pointed the way".

Indeed, Duchamp claims in his writings The Trouble with Great Art that “it was fundamentally Roussel who was responsible for my large glass The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even”.

In 2016, The Raymond Roussel Society was founded in New York by John Ashbery, Michel Butor, Joan Bofill-Amargós, Miquel Barceló, Thor Halvorssen and Hermes Salceda.