1. On these matters see the informed and perceptive discussions in Virginia Spate, Orhism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-14 (Oxford, 1979). And for a sophisticated dissection of the various cultural and political possibilities inherent within Bergsonianism and realized in cultural movements, see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, 1993). Antliff makes clear the connections between the cubists around Gleizes and Metzinger and the cultural world of symbolism, adding an important dimension to the discussion of On Cubism given above. See also Fanette Roche-Pézard, L'Aventure futuriste, 1909-16 (Rome, 1983). On Apollinaire's relationship to the various currents in symbolism see Michel Déaudin, La Crise des valeurs symbolistes: Vingt ans de poésie française, 1885-1914 (Paris, 1960).

2. Spate, Orphism , 22. Picabia, who was close to Duchamp in these years, also spoke of having his work express "states of soul"; ibid., 331-32.

3. Duchamp, "Apropos of Myself," talk delivered at the St. Louis City Art Museum, November 24, 1964; cited in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 256.

4. On Marey, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York, 1990; paper ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), 105, 107; on Raymond's teacher, Albert Londe, see Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 30.

5. Duchamp, "The Great Trouble with Art in This Century," an interview with James Johnson Sweeney, originally published in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 13 (1946), and reprinted in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp , 124.

6. See Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 73, who cites Robert Coates for this suggestion.

7. Marquis suggests that Sad Young Man on a Train may be "his troubled reaction to a fantasy about his little sister, Suzanne"; ibid., 73.

8. See John Golding, Marcel Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (London and New York, 1972), 61. Most writers about Duchamp insist on seeing in this drawing the first intimation of Duchamp's later interest in machines; this seems to me at best doubtful, since his other work at this time was still involved with the themes of linear motion and formal dissolution; only later would machines enter into his artistic work, and for reasons that I will try to show were much more personal than most commentators are willing m recognize. Molly Nesbit points out, however, that the coffee mill echoes exercises in mechanical drawing that were taught in early twentieth-century French schools, a comparison that seems enlightening even though (for reasons that will appear clearly enough below) I cannot share her view that this connection means Duchamp was trying to assimilate art to the condition of industrial objects. See Molly Nesbit, "Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model," October 37 (1986): 53-64.

9. For most of this information, see Ephemerides , June 6, 1968, June 21, 1912, and August 7, 1912.

10. Sweeney interview, Writings , 124.

11. Spate, Orphism , 32.

12. Ibid., 36.

13. See Golding, Marcel Duchamp , 41.

14. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 73n.

15. It should be remembered, however, that Gleizes and Metzinger, in On Cubism , had also declared a departure from the retina; in addition, the theme of the "passage," which would soon surface in Duchamp's work, was also one they had developed.

16. Sweeney interview, Writings , 124.

17. Virginia Spate writes: "What appears as a ground plane can also be read as a plane in the process of becoming concave or as the convex interior of a sectional form"; Orphism , 317.

18. The suggestion of Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., "Marcel Duchamp and the Machine," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 73.

19. Quoted by John Tancock in "The Influence of Marcel Duchamp," in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 164.

20. Lebel, Marcel Duchamp , 14; William Rubin, "Reflexions on Marcel Duchamp," originally in Art International 4, no. 9 (December 1968), reprinted in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , 41-52.

21. This paragraph owes much to the analysis provided by Lawrence D. Steefel Jr., "Dimensions and Development in The Passage from the Virgin to the Bride ," in Masheck, ed., Duchamp in Perspective , esp. 91-95. I find it impossible to see certain things in the picture that Steefel finds there, however, and the argument about Duchamp's development made here does not go in quite the same direction as his.

22. See Sweeney interview, Writings , 126; Cabanne, Dialogues , 33-34 and 40-41.

23. See Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres (Paris, 1935; facsimile ed., Paris, 1963, 1985), 15.

24. Readers who want to know what series of puns and verbal games lay behind these things can find them explained in Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres .

25. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1963), published in English as Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel , trans. Charles Ruas (New York, 1986); there are some speculations on Foucault and Roussel in my article "Avoiding the Subject: A Foucaultian Itinerary," Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990): 273-99. For Roussel, Duchamp, and antihumanism, see the discussion already referred to in Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture .

26. The best general source for Roussel's life is François Caradec, Vie de Raymond Roussel (Paris, 1972); there is much insightful commentary also in Raynet Heppenstall, Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide (London, 1966). Much of interest, although often speculative, can be found in Philippe G. Kerbellec, Comment lire Raymond Roussel: Cryptanalyse (Paris, 1988), and (equally learned and enlightening, but less speculative) in Gian Carlo Roscioni, L'Arbitrio Letterario: Uno Studio su Raymond Roussel (Turin, 1985). Michel Leiris's various and enlightening pieces on Roussel are collected in Roussel l'ingénu (Paris, 1987).

27. Much of this information comes from the one vanguard figure to whom Roussel was personally close, Michel Leiris, whom Roussel knew first as the son of Eugène Leiris, his family's financial agent and adviser. Most of the other information in these paragraphs comes from Caradec; the details about Roussel's clothes obsessions were furnished to Michel Leiris by Charlotte Du Frène. Most accounts of Roussel's life regard his death as a suicide, but I follow Caradec here too in concluding that death may not have been his intention.

28. Comment j'ai écrit , 127-32, reproducing Pierre Janet, De l'angoisse à l'extase (Paris, 1926), 1: 132-37. Roussel's own account of the same crisis appears earlier in Comment j'ai écrit , 28-30.

29. Impressions d'Afrique (Paris, 1910; reprint Paris, 1963), 158.

30. See Kerbellec, Comment lire Raymond Roussel