In art and art history, influence is a tricky concept, difficult to trace, often impossible to seriously document, and since quite some time easy to deconstruct. As Borges and after him many others have demonstrated the roles of influencer and influenced are not stable and overlap in more than one sense: without Kafka (“influenced”), there would have been no forerunners ( “influencers”) of Kafka.

The relationship between Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), perhaps the most “influential” artist of the twentieth Century, and Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), the no less radical yet much less successful French writer who is claimed to have had a decisive influence on Duchamp as well as many literary and artistic movements from Surrealism to the New Novel or postmodern poetry, is a wonderful test case for an in-depth reflection on the question of influence. On the one hand, Duchamp knew Roussel’s work since 1912 – they also sporadically met, yet never in a personal way (they once played chess in the same café, for instance) –, he bought and intensely read Roussel’s books throughout his whole career, but never publicly acknowledged this familiarity during Roussel’s life. The influence of Roussel on Duchamp can therefore not be doubted and the (mostly American) scholarship on this topic is detailed and convincing. On the other hand, Roussel, a man living in splendid isolation and shying away from the artistic milieu, did not know Duchamp’s work, and there is no trace whatsoever of any influence of the latter on the former, despite the blatant similarities with the kind of writing illustrated by Roussel based on the mechanical, impersonal transformation of well-hidden constraints resulting in extremely complex and generally totally opaque results (both in print and on stage).

In other words: the Roussel-Duchamp connection is a classic example of covert but linear influence of one artist on another one, and not the other way round, as there are so many cases in literature as well as art history. This is also how specialists in the field continue to deepen our knowledge of Roussel in Duchamp. The opposite relationship, that is the presence of Duchamp in Roussel, is almost complete terra incognita. Philippe Lapierre’s study on Roussel and Duchamp as “twins” (as announced by the subtitle of the book) is a vital and surprising contribution to this ongoing discussion, which it reframes in a totally new perspective, yet not in the way one might have expected. French readers might have thought that Lapierre’s take on the question would follow the line of the highly popular and suggestive work of Pierre Bayard, the author of the bestselling How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read (2007, available in English translation) but also of an Oulipo-inspired book on “plagiarism by anticipation” (Le Plagiat par anticipation, 2009), which playfully rethinks the relationship of influencer and influenced. However, this is neither what Lapierre does nor claims to do. From the start he makes clear that his purpose is not to unearth some hidden influence of Duchamp on Roussel, and in the conclusion of his book, which makes us understand how useful it is to think of Duchamp as a key to understand what Roussel’s work, he honestly repeats that there is no reason of think of this kind of influence in the traditional meaning of the word. At the same time, however, Lapierre’s book shows that it makes sense to see both artists as twins and thus to read their life and works as mutually reflecting and revealing mirrors.

To build his case, Lapierre relies on a triple argumentation. First, he presents a “complete” analysis, that is an analysis that radically mixes life and work, biography and art history, a distinction that in the case of Roussel and Duchamp no longer holds, not only because this is a kind of dogma of all avant-garde artists, but also because both artists  –  the latter thanks to his immense personal fortune, the latter thanks to the support of rich sponsors – managed to invent new forms of merging life and work. Second, Lapierre also abandons the linear and chronological study of his twin biography, shifting instead to a thematic approach which allows him to disclose compelling analogies that prove much stronger than the classic way of addressing implicit or explicit influences. Rather than outlining the impact of this or that element of Roussel’s life or work on Duchamp, Lapierre elaborates an original thematic framework based on similar biographic but also artistic roles and functions that structure the life and work of both Roussel and Duchamp. More concretely, he defines sixteen roles, each of them tightly related to each other (the architect, the ophthalmologist, the pornographer, the notary, etc.), which he then close-reads comparatively, disclosing clear analogies between the two artists so that progressively the idea of a “presence” of Roussel in Duchamp becomes almost self-evident, even in the absence of any direct or indirect allusions. The diptych-like structure of the sixteen comparisons, always starting with Roussel and continuing with Duchamp, increases of course the strength of this argumentation (and also prevents us from falling prey to the illusion that the influence of A on B can also be read in the other sense). Third and certainly not last, Lapierre takes seriously the intermedial dimension of his study, which compares the verbal medium of Roussel and the visual (though anti-retinal) medium of Duchamp. He therefore adds his own amazing visual double to his text: a set of 158 black and white images (most of them full page) referring to the typical style of 19th Century illustrations and summarizing the main findings of his comparison. Instead of including “authentic” documents like family pictures or photographic reproductions of artworks, Lapierre has thus made engravings that help combine the two universes. The effect of this unusual is stunning: the illustrations offer a welcome didactic summary of the author’s argument, while also criticizing the still widespread idea of the extreme abstraction if not total opacity of Roussel and Duchamp. In addition, the stylistic cohesion of an uncommon visual style underscores the fundamental proximity between the worlds of the writer and the visual artist.

Raymond Roussel et Marcel Duchamp. Enquête sur une gémellité is a surprising and highly refreshing new reading of a key moment of the dialogue between arts and media in the twentieth Century. It is a very complete analysis, addressing as much the life as the work of two essential creators. It also proposes an original methodology that is now open to be reused for similar cases. And is it itself a work of art, thanks to the intriguing use of a new type of illustrations. Elegantly written and perfectly documented (with also an admirable index), this is a book that deserves to be translated as soon as possible. The connection between Duchamp and Roussel is strongly present on the research agenda in the Anglo-Saxon world and Lapierre’s work offers a welcome broadening of the debate.