The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Naming and Unaming: On Raymond Queneau by Jordan Stump
Marc Lowenthal

Jordan Stump. Naming and Unnaming: On Raymond Queneau. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998. 192 pp. $35.00.

Although Queneau’s stature in English has outgrown his previous designation as “humorist,” serious critiques of his works have, until recent years, been sorely lacking. Jordan Stump’s study is grounded in the ominously academic-sounding discipline of “literary onomastics”: the analysis between literary characters and their names. The rationale recalls Jean Cocteau’s claim that “what lies deepest in man is his skin”—the claim of onomastics being that what lies deepest in a character is his or her name. Fortunately, Stump focuses not so much on the meaning of names in Queneau’s works as in Queneau’s use of them. A “singleminded reading,” perhaps, as Stump himself admits; the result, however, proves to be both inventive and insightful. Stump is the first in a while to say things about Queneau’s work that have not already been said.
Drawing from the Queneau archives in Verviers, Stump focuses on eight of Queneau’s novels, in which “naming” proves to involve multiple issues of nationalism and identity (A Hard Winter), recognition and annihilation (as with the megalomaniacal “literary lunatics” of Children of Clay), and philosophical notions of meaning (as in the author’s particularly strong reading of the “pessimistic Cartesianism” of The Bark Tree). The interest of Stump’s approach is in the light it sheds on Queneau’s ultimate renouncement of the name: a renouncement which points to the free eroticism of Queneau’s pseudonymic Sally Mara novels, and more crucially, to the Taoist-like peace and saintliness sought after in many of the others. Stump concludes with a discussion of anonymity, and a means toward grasping the spiritual side of Queneau’s thought.
Scholarly, but not at all academic, this book is of obvious interest to any reader of Queneau, and shall—I hope—encourage the republication of those translations of his novels which have gone out of print. [Marc Lowenthal]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Naming and Unaming: On Raymond Queneau by Jordan Stump Marc Lowenthal Jordan Stump. Naming and Unnaming: On Raymond Queneau. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998. 192 pp. $35.00. Although Queneau’s stature in English has outgrown his previous designation as “humorist,” serious critiques of his works have, until recent years, been sorely lacking. Jordan Stump’s study is grounded in the ominously academic-sounding discipline of “literary onomastics”: the analysis between literary characters and their names. The rationale recalls Jean Cocteau’s claim that “what lies deepest in man is his skin”—the claim of onomastics being that what lies deepest in a character is his or her name. Fortunately, Stump focuses not so much on the meaning of names in Queneau’s works as in Queneau’s use of them. A “singleminded reading,” perhaps, as Stump himself admits; the result, however, proves to be both inventive and insightful. Stump is the first in a while to say things about Queneau’s work that have not already been said. Drawing from the Queneau archives in Verviers, Stump focuses on eight of Queneau’s novels, in which “naming” proves to involve multiple issues of nationalism and identity (A Hard Winter), recognition and annihilation (as with the megalomaniacal “literary lunatics” of Children of Clay), and philosophical notions of meaning (as in the author’s particularly strong reading of the “pessimistic Cartesianism” of The Bark Tree). The interest of Stump’s approach is in the light it sheds on Queneau’s ultimate renouncement of the name: a renouncement which points to the free eroticism of Queneau’s pseudonymic Sally Mara novels, and more crucially, to the Taoist-like peace and saintliness sought after in many of the others. Stump concludes with a discussion of anonymity, and a means toward grasping the spiritual side of Queneau’s thought. Scholarly, but not at all academic, this book is of obvious interest to any reader of Queneau, and shall—I hope—encourage the republication of those translations of his novels which have gone out of print. [Marc Lowenthal]

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