Locus Solus
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Locus Solus is a 1914 French novel by Raymond Roussel.
Plot summary
John Ashbery summarizes Locus Solus thus in his introduction to Michel Foucault's Death and the Labyrinth: "A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. 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."
References in Popular Culture
- The main antagonist of the anime film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence takes its name from this book. Also in the film, Section 9 members Batou and Togusa go to the North to question a mercenary hacker named Kim who lives in an elaborate mansion filled with odd mechanical and sensory art - as is also described in the book. Togusa looks inside a view hole in a model of the mansion and upon looking down at it, Togusa sees a tableaux vivants of himself and Batou, and begins continually to view different possible memories and futures that are the result of entering the mansion. The view hole is also taken from the novel's eight tableaux vivants.
