Context
Reading Raymond Queneau
Barbara Wright
Right from his very first book, The Bark Tree (1933), Queneau acquired a few farsighted fans who understood that
something new and special had arrived on the French literary scene.
They remained a select few for over twenty years, until in 1959 Zazie in the Metro became a bestseller—for all the wrong reasons. Roland Barthes suggested
one explanation: he said it was doubtless that the fact Queneau’s
fiction made its readers laugh out loud originally prevented it from
being held in as high esteem as it deserved. It is true that
"France neither looks for nor expects humor from its great writers,"
but although it may well be Queneau’s humor that makes his novels so
enjoyable on a first reading, he was always an innovator, and as
everyone knows, the general public has always needed to take its time
to get the hang of something it’s not used to. And while Queneau’s
novels always have plenty of plot, and plenty of believable (if
unusual) characters, they are also chockablock full of the erudite—even
serious—subjects in which Queneau took a passionate interest, but for
which many of us, alas, still retain the distaste implanted in us by
some of our schoolteachers. . . . His genius, though, is that
he makes these subjects attractive, and even understandable; he
imbricates them within his all-embracing, sui generis, and
sometimes cheerfully coarse humor, and he paradoxically tends to give
his most philosophical reflections to his most unsophisticated
characters. Apparently simple, ordinary people, probably belonging to
the "lower middle classes," "innocents," sometimes quite
uneducated—such people are often seen as "typical Queneau characters."
(His favorite character in literature, he said, was Dostoyevsky’s
Idiot.) But Queneau’s characters are never stereotypical; and although
they are always entirely believable, they are never really like anyone
one has ever known. Such are Saturnin the concierge, in The Bark Tree, who meditates at some length on Being and Non-Being; Pierrot the fairground worker in Pierrot Mon Ami; Valentin Bru the ex-private soldier in The Sunday of Life; twelve-year-old Zazie (in the metro). . . . Queneau
was a natural polymath. As a boy he read every word of one of the
dictionaries—I think it was the Petit Larousse—for pleasure. He is the
first of the ten writers featured in John Cruickshank’s The Novelist as Philosopher (1962), in which Martin Esslin writes: Yet
he still likes to choose the "common man" as the center of his
interest. This common man may start life as underprivileged and
uninteresting, but Queneau allows him to find salvation. This starts
when he begins to think, and not necessarily to think great
thoughts—just to think for himself. Once this process is set in motion,
it gradually becomes possible for him to acquire a fulfilling inner
life. Jacques Bens says that "Queneau doesn’t despise anyone, because
he loves his fellow-men. He loves them very simply, without saying so,
without trying to improve them, in silence, and just as they are." I
think Queneau chooses humble people because he feels that the
unpretentious man (and woman) in the street is potentially much more in
touch with the realities of the world around him, and around us, than
are the "experts," and that when the common man makes discoveries about
life and human nature he does so in an honest, straightforward way, and
not in order to further his career, or his "image," or to get people to
think how clever he is. John Cowper Powys said that "the supreme
masters are never professional philosophers." Bens further
says that Queneau’s characters are "realistic types placed in unreal
(poetic) situations." Here it should be mentioned that Queneau often
declared that he saw no essential difference between prose and poetry.
Hence all his books, even his scientific essays, are shot through with
poetry (in its widest sense). (And his many volumes of poetry are also
imbued with his academic and other interests. Which doesn’t stop them
from being comic, when that is what he wants.) (And it doesn’t stop his
basic purpose from being to paint a vivid, sympathetic picture of
everyday life.) Queneau, a Norman, was born in Le Havre on February 21, 1903—as he tells us in his 1937 autobiographical "novel in verse," Oak and Dog. His parents owned and ran a haberdashery. His childhood was not very
happy, but he was a brilliant student and in 1920 he went to Paris to
study philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he developed a passionate
interest in mathematics—and also in billiards, in the cinema—and,
really, in anything that took his fancy. He acquired an excellent
knowledge of English. He worked in a bank, but not for long, and for a
few years in the 1920s he was a member of Andre Breton’s Surrealist
movement. In the summer of 1932, Queneau and his wife
Janine—whose sister was the first wife of Andre Breton—set out for
Greece, where they stayed until November. There he became interested in
the differences between classical and demotic Greek. He realized that
the one was dead, while the other was very much alive, and flexible,
and open to change. He compared this vitality with the ossification of
"modern" French, and wrote: "It was then that I saw it was obvious that
modern French must now finally free itself from the conventions that
still hemmed it in; the conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary
that date from the grammarians of the sixteenth century and the poets
of the seventeenth." This was a peculiarly French problem, he saw, for (Without saying so, though, he reserved the right to amuse himself with these acts of creation.) So,
with a serious purpose, Queneau indulges in "language as a game." He
gives us neologisms and fantasies, plus archaisms, anachronisms, puns,
real and phony proverbs, catch phrases, intentional cliches, foreign
words frenchified or written as some French people mispronounce them—metinge for "meeting," standigne for "standing" (which is franglais for our English "status"). He will
change and rechange the tenses in one short sentence—and this is not
purely arbitrary: on analysis you can always find a subtle reason for
it. He spells words the way everyone pronounces them. . . .
Since I became familiar with his word "ekcetera," I have lent an ear in
every country I have been in and, almost without exception, everyone,
in every country, says EKCETERA. . . . Then there are houatures for "voitures," ouiski for the drink that the French strangely seem to prefer to cognac these days. Ekc, ekc. Very
striking is his logosymphysis. (I neologized this sonecessary word in
order to work in a discreet explanation of the now-famous example of
words run together—POLOCILACRU—in my translation of The Sunday of Life.) "Polocilacru" stands for Paul aussi l’a cru, or "Paul believed it too." People really do speak like that, but we
tend not to notice it until it is pointed out to us in writing. The
very first word in Zazie famously begins with a similar sort of word: "Doukipudonktan?"—which stands for: D’ou qu’ils puent donc tant? meaning "How come they stink so, though?" Queneau
forged his own very conscious theory—and practice—of the novel; he knew
perfectly well what he was doing, and why he was doing it. This was one
of the reasons why he soon left Breton and his Surrealist doctrines: he
couldn’t accept that anything worthwhile could come out of chance and
dozy automatic writing. Nevertheless—another Queneau paradox—you will
find plenty of lovely non sequiturs nestling among all his logic. He
was extraordinarily articulate about his tenets, and wrote very clearly
about them in his book of essays, Batons, chiffres et lettres ("Sticks, Numbers and Letters"), and in two published texts of
conversations with Georges Charbonnier and Marguerite Duras.
Charbonnier asked him how he decided on the proper proportions of
"correct" French and "neo-French" in his books, and he replied: None of Queneau’s complicated constructions ever gets in the way of the story he is telling. Etienne, the bank clerk hero of The Bark Tree, starts life—his life in the book—as a silhouette, but because he is an embodiment of Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum (although that is something you either have to be told, or be clever
enough to work out for yourself), once he accidentally begins to think
for himself, he first develops into a flat entity, and then finally
achieves the full status of a rounded character. His fate is played out
in the slummy northern suburbs at Paris. All Queneau’s novels, though, have very different backgrounds. After The Bark Tree he wrote three autobiographical novels: The Last Days, in which Roland Travy, his alter ego, is a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1920s; Odile, in which Anglares is an amusingly cynical portrait of Andre Breton; and Un rude hiver ("A Harsh Winter"), which is set in his native Le Havre during the First World War. It was Zazie (1959) which finally alerted the general reader to the existence of
Raymond Queneau. Readers chuckled over the fact that Uncle Gabriel, who
is looking after the child in Paris for a couple of days, is a
homosexual female impersonator in a night club—although Gabriel of
course denies being a "hormosessual" when Zazie a) wants to know what
it is, and b) whether he is one. And the "foul" language Zazie is
always coming out with without even noticing is also very funny, but
the point is that she is merely parroting the language she has always
heard around her from her provincial parents, and has no idea of the
effect she is making. Martin Esslin wrote: "English critics did not
notice the brilliant philosopher-poet behind the downing. Yet the
intention of showing the mad rat-race and corruption of urban life
against a figure of innocent humanity is deafly present in the book." In The Blue Flowers, Queneau indulged his passion for history. The story starts in 1264,
with the fiercely feudal Duke of Auge appearing at the summit of the
keep of his castle in Normandy, "there to consider, be it ever so
little, the historical situation. It was somewhat confused." After two
and a half pages, we make the acquaintance of Cidrolin, a peace-loving
citizen who is living on his barge moored on the outskirts of Paris,
minding his own business—in 1964. The story unobtrusively jumps 175
years ahead every so often, which means that for a while it stops off
in 1789. We realize that the Duke and Cidrolin are each the dream of
the other, and when they finally meet on Cidrolin’s barge in 1964, they
too begin to sort of realize it. . . . Queneau’s last novel, The Flight of Icarus, was published in 1968. Set in 1896, half its characters are various
Belle Epoque novelists—and the other half are the characters these
gentlemen are writing about. Hence we have a fairly complicated
meditation on what is fiction and what is not, but again, the book is
very, very funny. The novelist Hubert Lubert (a nod to Nabokov’s
Humbert Humbert) has carelessly lost his character Icarus, after only
ten or fifteen pages, and he suspects his fellow writers of having
stolen him. So he engages a dopey private eye, Morcol, to find him for
him. Morcol says, dreamily: "How very Pirandellian." (In 1896.) The
novel is written almost entirely in dialogue; it would make a fabulous
play. (The other day, at a Queneau reading in the London publisher John
Calder’s new bookstore, Calder himself and a brilliant actor, Sean
Barrett, read the first scenes of Icarus, and the audience spontaneously illustrated Queneau’s useful verb, to "crylaugh.") One
part of Queneau’s life was properly "Establishment." In 1938, he became
a reader of English books for Gallimard; in 1941, he became their
Secretary General. By 1951, he had been elected to the Academie
Goncourt—but in that same year he indulged his more liberal (or
anarchic?) tendencies by joining the College of ‘Pataphysics. If you
don’t know what that is: ‘Pataphysics is the "science of imaginary
solutions," and it was invented by one Doctor Faustroll, who was a
character invented by Alfred Jarry. Jarry (1873-1907) was another
universal man, who as well as writing the world-shattering (that’s not
a great exaggeration) Ubu Roi, also wrote erudite, symbolist,
seriously serious works. The College—which has no material
existence—just as ‘Pataphysics, by definition, doesn’t exist—was
started in the late 1940s by some frustrated super-intellectual
professors of philosophy, mathematics, ekc. ekc., in Rheims. They were
frustrated because the French educational system arbitrarily dispatches
such people to lycees hither and yon, take it or leave it, so they
found themselves stuck in what was to them the remote and philistine
sticks. One of their purposes was to use their brains in a way that
amused them, another was to thumb their intellectual noses at that same
Establishment. Which they most successfully did. I remember reading a pompous, indignant article in Le Figaro, complaining of their disgraceful behaviour and ideas, and implying that
they should be completely ignored. That was not so easy. Taking
absurdity to its limits, the "College" had invented its own
‘Pataphysical calendar, dating from the birth of Alfred Jarry,
September 8, 1873, and based on the Napoleonic calendar, but a great
deal funnier. It also created its own honors list. Queneau, of course,
came into the very top category: he was a Transcendant Satrap. So,
likewise, were other people it was equally hard to ignore: Jacques
Prevert; Max Ernst; Rene Clair; Eugene Ionesco, (he had never been
heard of until The Bald Soprano was published in a Cahier of
the College of ‘Pataphysics); Joan Miro; Boris Vian; Marcel Duchamp;
Jean Dubuffet; Michel Leiris; Man Ray. . . . (Or if they weren’t
actually Transcendent Satraps, they were of an only slightly less
elevated rank.) (Roger Shattuck, who wrote that seminal work The Banquet Years, is a longstanding member of the College of ‘Pataphysics.) (Messrs
Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx were all Transcendent Satraps.) It
is obvious, then, that Queneau knew everybody. And he was much loved
and respected by his friends. Several of them describe his famous
"pudeur"—the nearest translation I can find is "reserve"—although the
word contains a bit of "modesty," too. . . . Both Armand Salacrou (a
fellow student at the Le Havre Lycee), and Jacques Prevert, spoke of
the way he liked to sit in the background, taking everything in, a
mysterious smile on the corner of his lips, "like someone who knows
what he is not going to speak about," after which he would suddenly
explode with a great burst of laughter, slapping his thighs. . . . The
OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or, Workshop of Potential
Literature), founded in 1960 by Queneau and the mathematician Francois
Le Lionnais, started life as a new subcommission of the College of
‘Pataphysics. (I also notice that around 1960, Pablo Picasso and Asger
Jorn were made Exquisite Commanders.) The aim of the OuLiPo was to
inspire new works of literature through manmade constraints,
mathematical or otherwise, in the same way as the strict rules of the
sonnet have given rise to some rather well-loved poetry. But the rules
of the sonnet are old. And the OuLiPo was looking to the new.
(Incidentally, Queneau said to Marguerite Duras: "A novel is a little
like a sonnet, although it is much more complicated.") I don’t need to
say more about the OuLiPo, as CONTEXT #6 contains a most comprehensive
article by Le Lionnais himself. One of the first fruits of the OuLiPo was Queneau’s own 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. These began, very simply, by being 10 sonnets, all with the same rhyme
scheme. They were printed on big pages cut into strips, so any one line
of any of the sonnets can be substituted for any similarly numbered one
of any of the others. And every one of these 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets still makes some sort of sense. . . . A later miracle of ingenuity is Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a full-length novel, a lipogram entirely without the most common letter
of our alphabet, E. (People didn’t notice.) Later came Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. . . . I haven’t found room for so many other things. . . . The 1947 Exercises in Style—originally
refused by Gallimard, but now translated all over the world (by Umberto
Eco, among others). That Queneau was a painter who held exhibitions. .
. . That he translated from English (Amos Tutuola, Sinclair Lewis, ekc.
ekc.). . . . That he acted in the original wartime private performance
of Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail. . . . That he made films with Bunuel, with Alain Resnais. . . . A "Universal Man"?
Queneau is that rarest of rare phenomena in an age of
specialists and watertight compartments of culture: a truly universal,
encyclopedic mind, a poet who is also a philosopher, mathematician, and
scientist, the editor of the brilliantly conceived attempt at
presenting a complete synthesis of twentieth-century culture, the Encyclopedie de la Pleiade."
Le Monde agreed: shortly before his death, it called him "the most universal mind of our time."
English writers write spoken English and American writers write
spoken American. And the most striking thing of all is that their
scientists, their scholars and their historians write an English that
is the English of the man in the street, whereas in France, when it
comes to science or history, we are still obliged to write in formal
language. I want to write in a living language—in the language of the
ordinary man. The language you want to write in is your so-called
maternal language.
And this became one of Queneau’s major preoccupations, the
creation of "a third French," "a modern written language which
corresponds to the language actually spoken. So what is needed is a
triple reform, or revolution: the first concerning vocabulary, the
second syntax, and the third spelling." But he soon qualified this
statement by adding: "It is not a question of reform, but of creation."
When there is a mixture, the appearance of the spoken language
is, I think, always spontaneous and involuntary. That’s to say that at
a certain moment I have the impression that that’s the way it should
be, I mean that it should be written in more or less phonetic language.
I say: "more or less phonetic," because sometimes it is completely so,
at other times less so. Well, I don’t know . . . it isn’t at all
systematic . . . it’s entirely instinctive; it’s because at that
particular moment I have the impression that that is how it must be.
Many people consider Queneau’s first book, The Bark Tree, to be his most perfect novel, perhaps because it contains every element that later became so important to him. How old was he when he
wrote it? In 1932, he was 29. . . . With all his other interests,
mathematics was already vital to him. In his 1962 conversation with
Georges Charbonnier, he said,
I have always thought that a literary work should have a structure
and a form, and in the first novel I wrote I took great pains to see
that the structure was extremely strict, and furthermore, that it was a
multiple structure. . . . Since at the time I was, let’s say, rather
arithmomaniac, I built this construction on combinations of numbers,
some more or less arbitrary, others according to my personal
preferences.
This structure, he said, was like a scaffolding, which is removed
when the construction is finished. He added that he hoped it wasn’t
obvious. It certainly wasn’t: no one even suspected it until he wrote
about it much later.
