ROger Caillois, thanks to his steadfast friend the writer, editor and patron Victoria Ocampo, lived for long periods in Latin America. He who loved the cold, the aridity, the stone, he who hated the sea, the luxuriant vegetation, the heat, preferred, as one might expect, Patagonia to the Amazon. During a stay in Brazil, he nevertheless had the opportunity to cross the Amazon forest. It seemed terrifying to him, spongy, voracious, very feminine, and inspired in him a dizzying repulsion.
This profusion of plants, this limitless liveliness, was in his eyes a threat: “I wonder if, to this degree, chlorophyll does not offer, exclusive and superabundant, more dangers than pollution. The sacrilegious hypothesis shows to what extent I remain warned against a blind, unlimited fertility that nothing stops, not even its own excess.” (that’s a strange opinion!).
The mineral world seemed to him to be quite the opposite. Caillois was a collector and a specialist in stones. Soon, he would never stop contemplating them, studying them and describing them (Stones, The Writing of Stones), to be absorbed in it or even to be destroyed by it. “I feel myself becoming a little of the nature of stones.” These latter bring a form of tranquility to the worried man, battered by alcohol and illness: “Between the fixity of the stone and the mental effervescence, a sort of current is established where I find for a moment, memorable, it is true, wisdom and comfort.”
To overcome the cracks
Being absorbed in stones also joins a self-destructive fantasy in Caillois: that of disappearance into a whole, of petrification, of fossilization, of fusion, of the annihilation of subjectivity (he was fascinated by the “psychasthenia”for him a dissolution of the subject in the world, of its assimilation to space). Stones also offer a possible crystallization to overcome the cracks, the inconsistencies of oneself and of the world. Better, they are the world, the“example of an immutable inhuman”l’“absence of incident” as “ransom of life”. They go beyond human time, returning man to his insignificance, to his episodic dimension. Without denying or excluding him.
So the stones are, for him, the number of a “universe without doubt”, “immense and labyrinthine”within which “the mists, the clouds which constantly fray and recompose there, conceal a gridded plan.” The world is not one “inextricable and confused forest, but a forest of columns whose rhythmic alignments echo the same message: the preeminence, beneath the general din, of a stripped-down architecture.”
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