E A DE M M U T A T A
RESURGO:
A N A F T ERWOR D
by

JAMIE HILDER.

R odney Graham was introduced to Edgar Allen
Poe’s “Landor’s Cottage” by Charles Baudelaire.
The French symbolist and champion of Poe’s work left
for his researcher M. Laumonier—who then left it for
posterity—a small, nondescript carte de visite with
“Charles Baudelaire” written on one side and a series
of words and phrases jotted on the other. No further
instruction was necessary for M. Laumonier; the name
and the list were sufficient to express a space of uncertainty, and the resulting desire. What exactly is,
Baudelaire’s handwriting wondered, a “ground glass
astral (not solar) lamp,” an object glanced over in a
quick survey of Landor’s living quarters? What is the
French for “silver willow” or “red-bud,” two of a litany
of trees and shrubs comprising the botanical inventory
of Poe’s landscape? Graham, coming across a copy of
the small card in the Vancouver Public Library in the
early 1980s, found Baudelaire’s curiosity and appetite
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for accuracy still resonant. Going far beyond the work
of Baudelaire’s assistant, he struck up an intense relationship with Poe’s text that would occupy much of
his time over the next few years, and would result in a
masterwork of contemporary literature, reprinted in
the present edition for the first time in wide release.

novel, and who occupies the rhetorical position of an
authoritative, earth- and body-bound perspective of
the witness, emerges into a scene of natural composition, “in which the most fastidiously critical taste
could scarcely have suggested emendation” (7). This
scene, Poe critics have argued, is an idealized representation of Poe’s own cottage just outside the village of
Fordham, NY, a fact which might explain why after
spending the bulk of the story describing in meticulous detail the harmony of a cottage and a landscape,
the reader is left standing inside the cottage with no
elucidation of the manner in which the structure or its
surroundings came into being. The story remains a
spatial autobiography, written at some distance from
the self; any description of “how he made it what it
was—and why” is deferred to some future moment of
introspection (308).

Poe’s story, the full title of which is “Landor’s
Cottage: A Pendant to the Domain of Arnheim,”
is an odd tale, and one which is collected with less
frequency than most of his other works. It was the
last story Poe wrote before his death in 1849, and is
on the surface void of the type of terror readers might
associate with him as an author. If the reader feels
discomfort or a sense of the uncanny in the text, it is
as a result of a surfeit of calm and beauty: as if in
some inversion of the sublime, nature had conspired
to participate in a presentation of a perfectly ordered
and balanced landscape to rival the greatest achievements of the tradition in painting. Poe’s narrator,
who would become Graham’s narrator, begins the
story nervously, embarrassed to have become lost
on his hike, but not perturbed. At the point of his
greatest uncertainty, where he is no longer confident
that the path he follows is, in fact, a previously travelled path, he stumbles upon a road which exists in
complete harmony with its surroundings: the “overgrown undergrowth” meets the shrubbery to create a
canopy just large enough for the passage of a mountain wagon, and the road’s surface is not of dirt and
gravel, or tufted grass, but a “pleasantly moist surface
of—what looked more like green Genoese velvet than
anything else” (6). Following this road, the narrator,
who will remain unnamed throughout Graham’s

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Graham, in a kind of reader’s revenge, shortcircuits Poe’s tantalization, interpolating a bizarre
series of nested tales in between the narrator’s introduction to Landor and his abrupt refusal to expand
on his adventure. Indeed, it is very much the “how
he made it what it was” that Graham grafts onto Poe’s
tale, beginning with a shift in perspective that moves
the narrator back to his position at the high ground
where the cottage first comes into sight. It is from
this view that the annex Graham imagines as the
source of the “system” of the cottage is first presented.
This small structure, we find out, determines the size,
shape, and position of the three wings so carefully
described by Poe, who perhaps unknowingly devises a
system of architectural expansion rooted in the sesquialteral right-angle triangle. As the younger Landor,

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significantly named “Allan,” explains, the cottage’s
three wings grew in tribute to the annex’s relationship
to the sesquialteral, or equiangular, or logarithmic
spiral, also known as spira mirabilis: the miraculous spiral. The “system” is not something Graham
interpolates; it is something he extrapolates. As Poe
describes the cottage:

The way Graham ends the text inverts the frustration and dissatisfaction of Poe’s ending; the reader
is informed that the cottage is still only a work in
progress, and that the architectural marvel of the
proposed “system” will only be available to future visitors, making its presentation to the reader an impossibility, not a decision on behalf of a stubborn and
exhausted narrator. There is also a strong correspondence between the geometrical-architectural
“system” of the cottage and that of the sesquialteral
spiral that recurs throughout the lengthy aetiology of
the machine built by the elder Landor, providing the
equivalent of a “happy ever after” ending within the
domain of scientifically ornate tales of invention and
future discovery: the son continues where his father
left off, the elder Landor having lived an extraordinary life of intellectual achievement and having died
in the very spot that the son’s monument begins.
Thus the work’s structure adheres to the order of the
sesquialteral spiral as well as its motto: EADEM
MUTATO RESURGO. The Latin phrase, which
translates as “Although changed, I shall arise the
same,” became affiliated with the spiral through the
work of the 17th century Swiss mathematician Jacob
Bernoulli, who was so enamoured with the shape and
its appearance in natural phenomena—from sea-shells
to flowers, and also galaxies and hurricanes—that he
ordered the phrase etched onto his tombstone in what
was likely a faith sprung from a life spent pursuing
geometrical harmony in the universe.

The main building was about twenty-four feet
long and sixteen broad—certainly not more. Its total
height, from the ground to the apex of the roof, could
not have exceeded eighteen feet. To the west end of
this structure was attached one about a third smaller
in all its proportions:—the line of its front standing
back about two yards from that of the larger house,
and the line of its roof, of course, being considerably
depressed below that of the roof adjoining. At right
angles to these buildings, and from the rear of the
main one—not exactly in the middle—extended a third
compartment, very small—being, in general, one-third
less than the western wing.
Graham determines that the annex, following the
architectural pattern of the cottage, would itself be one
third smaller than Poe’s smallest wing, and would be
“nestled between the west wall of the north wing and
the north wall of the main house” (20). The calculations as explained by the younger Landor near the end
of Graham’s text perform a dialogue between Graham
and Poe, in which Graham congratulates Poe on the
accuracy of his narrator’s estimation of the height of
the main house. The narrator claims it “could not have
exceeded eighteen feet.” In actual fact, the younger
Landor informs him, it is 17.888 feet (302-3).

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The spiral, in its requisite expansion, is distinguished from the loop by its relationship to time.
The loop has played a significant role in Graham’s

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work, appearing first in the bookwork Lenz, which
precedes The System of Landor’s Cottage.
For
Lenz, Graham resets the layout of George Buchner’s
short story “Lenz,” an account of an episode in the
life of Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Lenz, so that
the preposition “through,” the final word on the first
page, is completed by the noun phrase “the forest”
on the second. The final word on page five is again
“through,” which leads into a repetition of the passage
beginning at the top of page two with “the forest,” and
creates a sealed narrative that neither returns to the
beginning of the text nor terminates in any resolution.
This condition is better displayed in the text-sculpture
Reading Machine for Lenz (1993) than the book or
prospectus Graham first produced, as it illustrates the
trap a reader or writer might fall into, and the type
of perseveration which characterizes the madness of
Lenz.

a plane bisecting its expanding diameter, but it will do
so in increasing intervals, offering the surprise of the
irregular within the constant. In this way the ending
of The System of Landor’s Cottage, in its suggestion
of the inevitable expansion of the cottage, provides the
pleasure of a resolution within a promise for change.

The loop appears in Graham’s film work, as well,
most famously in Vexation Island, where the camera
lingers on the unconscious body of a shipwrecked
sailor with a head wound, watches him awake, and
follows him in his attempt to shake loose a coconut
from a tree, only to have it drop onto his head and
knock him unconscious, over and over again. Jeff
Wall has linked Hegel’s concept of “bad infinity” to
the loops in Graham’s work, and while it might be too
broad to condemn the loop as characterized automatically by anxiety, it is an interesting counter-example
to the sesquialteral spiral, which does not so much
repeat as it does stretch toward the “good infinity,” the
historical impulse to move beyond socio-cultural limitations (Wall 12-13). The spiral will repeatedly cross

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The French writer and ’pataphysician Raymond
Queneau, like Graham and Bernoulli, was also enamoured with the characteristics of the spira mirabilis, to the degree that he convinced the Collège
de ’Pataphysique to adopt EADEM MUTATO
RESURGO as its motto in 1965.
The Collège,
founded in 1948 in order to continue the project of
Alfred Jarry, and of which Graham is currently a
member, concerns itself with the investigation of
imaginary solutions. Jarry developed the pseudoscience of ’pataphysics—the term means that which
is above that which is beyond physics—in response to
the progressivism of his period, the late 19 th and early
20 th centuries. Steven Harris notes that the Collège
formed in similar circumstances, counterposing itself
against the dominant trends of surrealist flight into
the unconscious and the existentialist commitment to
the real conditions of struggle (Harris 3). By emphasising imaginary solutions, ’pataphysicians adopt the
position that all solutions are sprung from powers of
imagination. Their project is playful, but their play
is serious, and rigorous. It inserts doubt into systems
of political or scientific dominance, substituting the
spiral for the now suspiciously naïve metaphor of the
march of progress. Graham’s text offers a particularly apt metaphor for such a shift in historical imagining in the presentation of the behaviour of the South

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American Mitaires seriatim, whose constant recalibration of its path towards a light source—motivated by
its biological urge for a ‘luminous centre’—is determined by its compound eye’s physical orientation, and
mimics the path of an sesquialteral spiral (253).
The Mitaires seriatim, true to their name, march in
a line, but that line takes the shape of a spiral.

by the older Al Ma’araji into ninety-nine cantos of
ninety-nine stanzas each, interpolated into each of the
original stanzas, as well Sligo’s translation, completion, and encryption of it, are similarly Oulipian in
character. And one could certainly argue that the
system of Landor’s cottage itself, though only in the
early stages, is a design that would fit perfectly into
the currently underdeveloped project of Ouarchipo,
the Laboratory of Potential Architecture.

Besides his role as a ’pataphysician, Queneau was
a founding member (along with fellow ’pataphysician
and amateur mathematician Francois Le Lionnais)
of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo), a
literary coterie devoted to the investigation of links
between literature and mathematics. The emphasis
on authorial constraints was, again, posed against the
attempts of the surrealists to access the unconscious
through methods of automatism or the rejection of all
artistic legislation. Queneau’s position was that the
rejection of rules was a fantasy that encouraged an
ignorance of the wider constraints placed on human
creativity. By imagining and developing one’s own
labyrinth, however, one might develop the skills to
escape those built for us by others.
While Graham’s text itself might not be considered
Oulipian, the texts he imagines within his narrative
certainly could be. The ode to the number nine—a
number whose shape resembles a sesquialteral spiral—
composed by the young Al Ma’araji, at the behest of
his tutor, Mukhazniz Oum-er S’afd, who required
that it take the form of “ninety-nine stanzas of nine
verses each, with each verse further containing nine
long, and nine short syllables,” adheres to an essentially Oulipian constraint (68). The poem’s expansion

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Graham’s novel therefore occupies a middle-ground
between ’pataphysics and the Oulipo, and as such
shares a space with a figure whose work is often associated with Graham’s, Raymond Roussel. Roussel
has been claimed as an influential figure by both the
Collège de ’Pataphysique as well as Oulipo, who list
him as an anticaptory plagiarist for his anomalous
historical position in advance of the group’s forming,
and it is perhaps his work that looms largest over The
System of Landor’s Cottage. Indeed, apart from the
entirety of Poe’s tale and a short passage from William
Beckford’s fantastical eighteenth century novel,
History of the Caliph Vathek, a text Poe references in
his story, Roussel is the only other author to be quoted
directly by Graham, in the form of a passage from
Locus Solus describing the grounds of the inventor
and scientist Martial Canterel, which Graham adapts
to the property of the elder Landor on the outskirts
of Boston. But there are factors beyond quotation
that link Graham’s text to Roussel, the first being a
tendency towards resolution, and the second being an
intricacy of description as a technique of defamiliarization, one that stretches the signifying capabilities of
language.

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As both Graham and Roussel function within a
’pataphysical tradition, it is not surprising that their
work should bend towards resolution. ’Pataphysics
is, after all, the science of imaginary solutions, not
imaginary riddles or enigmas, and the pleasure felt by
solving an elaborate algebraic problem is the same in
spite of the use value of its variables. The Oulipo,
in their emphasis on the constraint as equation, and
the writing as proof—the ideal Oulipian text is not a
literary text, but the constraint under which a literary
text might be written—performs a similar rejection of
the disjunction and indeterminancy that characterizes
much of modernist literature. Roussel’s long poem,
New Impressions of Africa, is a strong example of a
structural resolution, as it is comprised of sections that
divide into parenthetical regressions, and beyond the
parentheses into footnotes, all the while adhering to
a rigorous rhyme and meter. Just like in an equation, the interior functions (the relationship between
variables and numbers within parentheses) need to be
completed before the exterior functions (the relationship between the interior functions and the numbers
and variables that lie outside of them) can be resolved.
If that sounds complicated, it should go some way
towards evoking the disorienting experience of reading
Roussel.

sprawling property, which he has cultivated as a kind
of garden of inventions. Canterel guides a group of
curious visitors that includes the narrator around
his grounds, stopping at various points to first
present a seemingly incomprehensible scene, and
then to offer an in-depth scientific explanation of its
creation. A similar structure is at work in Roussel’s
Impressions of Africa, except the scene is the coronation of an African emperor-king in some imagined
equatorial, West African nation, where a procession of bizarre performances, including both scientific and bodily feats, are presented to a group of
invited guests. The generation of Roussel’s bizarre
scenes comes from a method he describes in his essay
“How I Wrote Certain of My Texts” that involves
beginning from words or phrases that are identical but
for a single letter, and trying to construct a narrative
that can lead from one to the other. One example he
offers is of the French words billard [billiard table]
and pillard [plunderer], which he then inserts into the
phrase Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux
billard / pillard [The white letters on the cushions of
the old billiard table… / The white man’s letters on the
hordes of the old plunderer…] (4). Both phrases then
form scenes and characters from which part of the
narrative of Impressions of Africa is built. Another
example implements the technique of homophony
to challenge the author’s imaginative capabilities.
Roussel provides the example of coming across a
pencil drawing of a man sitting in a Ministerial antechamber and captioning it with the phrase “Patience
à antichambre ministérielle.” He then extracts from
his caption the phrase “patience à entiche ambre mine
hystérique”: [button-stick attracts agitated amber

The pleasure of Roussel’s texts—and there is a
great deal of pleasure involved—often comes in the
play between disorientation and scientific explanation. The structure of Locus Solus is perhaps the
best example, as it presents a tour led by Martial
Canterel—a character who in both his genius and
wealth parallels Graham’s Landor, Sr.—of his

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lead] or [lead which rushes towards … amber, which
is attracted to…] (14). Out of this slight but odd shift
in meaning comes the scene in Impressions of Africa
where the scientist (a favourite character type for
Roussel and Graham alike) Bex displays the extraordinary powers of attraction of a new, “very complex”
substance he has developed and christened “magnetine.” The properties of magnetine are presented to
the gathered spectators in the form of a demonstration, one which begins with Bex bringing out a giant
button-stick, then a set of ten large pencil-like cases
which house amber-colored leads. Upon removing
the tops of the pencils, exposing the magnetine leads,
Bex hides behind the giant button-stick while the leads
shoot across the esplanade towards the particular
metals to which they are attracted. After the demonstration, which Roussel describes matter-of-factly,
comes the act of resolution, triggered by a phrase that
is but one version of many: “An explanation was necessary” (48).

rooted in the strange machine in the annex.
There is no reader of Roussel or Graham who will
fail to be disoriented by the scientific and mathematical
language found in their texts, for the very basic reason
that the science, though accurate, is not always true.
An entomologist might have a deep understanding
of insect behaviour, but that will not prepare him or
her for the description of the unique properties of the
chanter beetle, or the Mitaires seriatim in Graham’s
work; a mathematician might be aware of the formula
for the sesquialteral spiral, but that will not prepare
him or her for its relevance to the vocally-triggered
hydraulic mechanism that raises the grand pavilion
from its watery depths. The geographer will not have
an advantage when it comes to Ginnistan; the philosopher will be unaware of Leibniz’s genealogical tribute
to the House of Welf, or Voltaire’s sympathies in the
coffee wars. Compounding this instability in the position of the reader is an emphasis on what appears to
be exact, diagrammatic language. This strategy is
present in Poe’s story, and in much of Roussel’s work,
as well. The challenge is to the reader’s imagination, particularly in her / his ability to keep in mind
the various intricately described components within a
larger scene or structure. This technique is perhaps
best displayed in Graham’s text during the account
of how Rocnaz transforms her pendant into two small
heat engines in order to save the life of her condemned
lover, Atalmuc, who has been sentenced to The Period
by the cruel and jealous Caliph Fakreddin. Over an
extended passage, Graham describes Rocnaz’s process
in great detail, demanding that the reader imagine a
complex and delicate operation within a literary space
(113-19). The text stretches the limits of language’s

While Graham’s text does not spring from the
polysemy of metagrams and homophones, it nevertheless parallels Roussel’s method of alternating between
stupefaction and remediation. Instead of a series of
vignettes presented in succession, though, Graham’s
text begins by presenting a total structure—the
machine in the annex to Landor’s cottage that speaks
the mathematical definition of locus and mysteriously flashes the equation of the sesquialteral spiral so
brightly that the afterimage is inscribed on the retina
of the visitor—that Graham spends the rest of the text
explaining in a series of narrative regressions, finally
coming to the “system of Landor’s cottage,” itself

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accuracy and of the reader’s ability to store information, and results in a sort of stupefaction that is related
to the description of the scene of Landor’s cottage in
Poe’s text, or in Roussel’s presentation of Canterel’s
inventions in Locus Solus.

This constant play between doubt and confidence,
instability and stability, enacts the drama of language:
a communicative system that relies on misunderstandings to spawn the pleasure of understanding, the slipping away and coming into being of meaning and its
constantly shifting historical conditions.

The more information that is piled onto previous
descriptions, themselves vague and reliant on assumptions for size, texture, placement, and color, the
less stable the idea becomes in the reader’s mind.
Graham often performs this conceptual agitation by
describing shapes within shapes, frustrating a stable
frame of reference. In describing the machine in
the annex from his exterior view, for example, the
narrator describes the structure in depth, making
note of the shape, angles, and orientation of various
planes, and positioning them in relationship to the
wings of the cottage. Then, in describing the flash
of light emanating from the structure, he describes it
as having its source in “the center of the pink cloud’s
lower half” (23). Even if the reader had been able
to keep the shape, size, and position of the annex in
her or his mind—not a simple task, by any means—s/
he encounters a description of a flash coming from a
quarter of the way up a cloud, a term which signifies
an irregular mass resistant to measurement. It is a
synonym for vague, or obscure, and thus performs the
impossibility of Graham’s text that is so exhilarating.
For it is in the resolution of the exhausting description—the success of Rocnaz’s machines to function as
planned, thus saving Atalmuc and ruining Fakreddin,
or the rational explanation of the functioning of the
bizarre monument to Landor, Sr.’s accomplishments—
that assures the reader that s/he had it right all along.

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The System of Landor’s Cottage is, ultimately,
a hopeful text, one that celebrates the instability
of language and authorship as an opportunity for
the imagination to transcend itself, to follow the
constantly expanding spiral path of history. Its
emphasis on the idea of the pendant performs that
hope, as a reminder that things can always be added.
The novel is described as a “Pendant to Poe’s Last
Story,” which was itself a “Pendant to the Domain of
Arnheim,” a story in which Poe offers an account of
Ellison, an accidentally extremely rich man who turns
his wealth and genius to the creation of a perfectly
poetic landscape, like Poe’s Landor but on a much
larger scale. It can be argued that Rocnaz’s manipulation of the pendant given to her by Fakreddin is
the hinge on which the entire story turns; it is the
love story between her and Atalmuc, after all, that
prompts the poem of Al Ma’araji, which prompts
Sligo’s cipher, and which provides Landor, Sr. with
his greatest intellectual moment. Graham’s text also
refers to various other pendants throughout: the annex
“appended to the main house” (we find out later it is
actually the other way around) (20); the laboratories
“appended” to Landor, Sr.’s house (55); the “sprawling
garden appended to the palace” in Ambreadad (68);
and Al Ma’araji’s appending of his youthful panegyric, written to the number nine, in a manner that

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references Graham’s own relationship with Poe’s story
(147-8). These pendants have central roles in the text,
to the point that they are almost more important than
the bodies and forms they attach to.

—. Impressions of Africa. Trans. Lindy Foord
and Rayner Heppenstall. London: John Calder, 2001.
Wall, Jeff. “Into the Forest: Two Sketches for
Studies of Rodney Graham’s Work.” Rodney Graham:
Works from 1976 to 1994. Ed. É. Van Balberghe and
Y. Gevaert. Toronto, Brussels, Chicago: Art Gallery
of York University, Yves Gevaert, and The Renaissance
Society at the University of Chicago, 1994: 11-26.

The etymological relationship between the physical
space of an appendage and its temporal character—
the word source is in the French pendant, which refers
to the condition of hanging from as well as meaning
“during”—offers a further understanding of Graham’s
project. The text fuses writing from disparate times
into one narrative body: William Beckford from the
eighteenth century, Edgar Allan Poe from the nineteenth, Raymond Roussel from the first half of the
twentieth century, and Rodney Graham from the
second. The appendages have subsumed the core, and
the impulse is to continue the agglomeration, perhaps
with surgical and architectural incisions and excisions as they become necessary, on the next turn of the
spiral.

WORKS CITED
Graham, Rodney. The System of Landor’s Cottage:
A Pendant to Poe’s Last Story. Brussels; Toronto:
Yves Gevaert and The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1987.
Harris, Stephen.
“’Pataphysical Graham: A
Consideration of the ’Pataphysical Dimension of the
Artistic Practice of Rodney Graham.” Papers of
Surrealism 5 (Spring 2007): 1-19.
Roussel, Raymond. How I Wrote Certain of My
Texts. Brewster, MA: Exact Change, 1995.

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