The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Stories and Remarks by Raymond QueneauJames Crossley
Raymond Queneau. Stories and Remarks. Trans. and intro. Marc Lowenthal. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. 155 pp. Paper. $15.00.
Few writers can claim as various and influential a body of work as Raymond Queneau, and nearly every aspect of his distinctive art is on offer in this slender volume. The twenty-one short pieces included here range in date of authorship from the twenties, when Queneau was a young man deeply involved in the surrealist project, to the early seventies, well after he’d made his reputation as the founder of the Oulipo group. As well as chronological diversity, the book demonstrates considerable formal diversity; it contains fablelike stories, fragments of uncompleted novels, pseudoacademic treatises, “texticles,” and even a playlet. Not surprising then, that there’s a hodgepodge quality to the collection. Stories and Remarks is saved from being a mere desk-clearing effort, though, by at least two things. First, the translator, Marc Lowenthal, has extensively annotated each story and almost every remark, providing a publishing history and establishing a context for them all. More important, there’s a consistent tone of humor throughout. Some have termed Queneau’s brand of comedy black, since he considered any subject, scatological or eschatological, as pun worthy, but his attitude wasn’t bitter enough to warrant that assessment. Here as elsewhere in his oeuvre, whimsy abounds and the darkest mood is one of rueful amusement at the banality of life. Lowenthal notes that Queneau’s first published work was an account of a dream, and the final piece in this miscellany, written near the end of his life, purports to recount several more. The events of each narrative are mundane—a woman shells peas, another walks a cat on a leash—but their atmosphere is the recognizable strangeness of our own nocturnal imaginings. It turns out that the bland tales are true and the only oneiric quality about them is the intentionally stilted way in which they’re told. Queneau may have begun by turning a dream into prose, but by the end of his fifty-odd-year career, he could make the most prosaic detail dreamy. [James Crossley]