"Reading Raymond Queneau" by Barbara Wright
First of two Queneau posts. This is the smarter one.
After a week of “emergency podcasts” about the National Endowment for the Arts (one on the history of the NEA, one about the impact of the loss of these recent grants, and one about the nonprofit narrative for funding), I’m back on schedule with the piece below on Raymond Queneau, which Barbara Wright wrote many years back for Context magazine.
Before we get to her piece though, I just want to do one final bit of housekeeping in relation to the NEA, namely explaining how Open Letter, Dalkey Archive Press, and Deep Vellum are intertwined. As many of you know, I was the associate director at Dalkey for a handful of years back in the early 2000s and left under tense circumstances at the end of 2006 to move to Rochester, NY, and start Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester. (Some day this full story will be publicly told . . .) Anyway, after 18 years, in order to maximize opportunities for Open Letter’s books—relieve some major pandemic-incurred burdens by us as, ultimately, a two-person operation—and minimize the UR’s investment, we decided to partner with Deep Vellum.
What changes does this bring? Well, to any general readers, hopefully none. I remain the publisher of Open Letter Books and an employee of the University of Rochester, where I teach classes on literary publishing and world literature in translation, and also assist with running our literary translation studies programs for both undergrad and grad students. As per the arrangement, Deep Vellum is responsible for publishing ten Open Letter titles a year—selected, acquired, and edited by me, but paid for, marketed, and produced by Deep Vellum employees. (If you’re a bookseller or reviewer, please feel free to email me, but Deep Vellum will end up handling these requests in the end.) As such, Deep Vellum will receive the sales income from Open Letter titles past, present, and future, and can use Open Letter’s activities—as a press that, since its inception, has been highly invested in nonprofit-y projects to benefit the literary community, such as the Best Translated Book Award, Translation Database, Three Percent Blog (now Substack), the Three Percent and Two Month Review podcast, etc.—for fundraising purposes.
Eighteen years of stellar works of international literature (including books by Dubravka Ugresic, Marguerite Duras, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Mathias Énard, Can Xue, Mercè Rodoreda, Rodrigo Fresán, Sara Mesa, etc.) alongside our other altruistic enterprises is an obvious benefit to Deep Vellum; and on our side, I, theoretically, should have more time to edit, read submissions, revamp the Translation Database, write for both this Substack and the one about Open Letter (which also includes posts about international literature and the business of books writ large), do podcasts, work more closely with students, etc.
The main point is that if, after learning about the termination of Open Letter’s grant from the NEA (again, we should be able to get the $30,000 for the Korean and Latvian Triptychs we published over the past year), you want to help out, you can a) take out a subscription to Open Letter, b) donate to Deep Vellum, and/or c) tell your friends to subscribe to these Substacks and encourage your local bookstore to stock our titles. (Full list of forthcoming Open Letter titles will be here in the near future.)
Also, just for transparency, my salary is entirely paid by the University of Rochester. I have never received a dime (or even a fifth of whiskey, my preferred payment) for my work for Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive Press, from getting John O’Brien to agree to this arrangement (when UR initially balked, given this was in play at the start of the pandemic), through overseeing the relaunch of Dalkey Archive Press, to developing the Essentials series, scanning and proofreading dozens of texts, and writing posts like this—all for the love of spreading the word about various Dalkey Archive Press titles.
That’s a lot of words to say that any paid subscriptions to this Substack do go to me, mostly to purchase used copies of Dalkey titles I don’t currently have to use in future posts, and aren’t a donation to Dalkey Archive or Open Letter or anyone else.
And I do really appreciate all the subscribers and promise that you’ll be getting some fun bonuses for your support. In fact, the article below was going to be for subscribers only—totally worth it, Barbara Wright was a genius and her introduction to Queneau is fantastic and has me pulling a number of his books back off my shelves—but given all the NEA stuff, I figure we need more joy in the world. (Especially if you’re that rare bird who listened to all three of those epic podcasts last week . . . I should be paying you for that!)
As mentioned above, Barbara Wright wrote the following piece, “Reading Raymond Queneau,” for Context magazine, which ran two to four of these “readings” in every issue. These were meant to be introductions to important authors, to provide entryways to “difficult” authors, to articulate what made these authors so interesting.
And, as you’ll see, Barbara accomplished that with the same sort of grace and lightness found in Queneau’s writing.
Enjoy! And I’ll be back later this week with my own minor introduction to Queneau in the form of a list of various starting points for anyone unfamiliar with one of France’s greatest writers ever.
Reading Raymond Queneau
Right from his very first book, The Bark Tree (1933),1 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 when 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 Dostoyevesky’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 mediates at some length on Being and Non-Being; Pierrot the fairground worker in Pierrot Mon Ami; Valentin Brû the ex-private soldier in The Sunday of Life; twelve-year-old Zazie (in the métro). . . .
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:
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 Encyclopédie de la Pléiade.
Le Monde agreed: shortly before his death, it called him “the most universal mind of our time.”
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. Jacque 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 sad that “the supreme masters are never professional philosophers.”
Bens further says that Queneau’s characters are “realistic types place 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 André Breton’s Surrealist movement.
In the summer of 1932, Queneau and his wife Janine—whose sister was the first wife of André 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
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.”
(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 clichés, foreign words frenchified or written as some French people mispronounce them—métinge 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 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 ot us in writing. The very first word in Zazie famously begins with a similar sort of word: “Doukipudonktan?”—which stands for: D’oû 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 Surrealistic 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 books of essays, Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (“Sticks, Numbers and Letters”), and in two published texts of conversations with Georges Charbonnier asked him how he decided on the proper proportions of “correct” French and “neo-French” in his books, and he replied:
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 of 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 ot 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.
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 Anglarés is an amusingly cynical portrait of André 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) wantes to know 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 in1264, 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 he 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 “cry-laugh.”)
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 Académie 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 lycées 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 the same Establishment.
Which they most successfully did. I remember reading a pompous, indignant article in Le Figaro, complaining of their disgraceful behavior 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 Prévert; Max Ernst; René Claire; Eugène Ionesco, (he had never been heard of until The Bald Soprano was published in a Cahier of the College of ’Pataphysics); Joan Miró; 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 Lycée), and Jacques Prévert, 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 (Ouvoir de Littérature Potentielle, or, Workshop of Potential Literature), founded in 1960 by Queneau and the mathematician François 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 ht esonnets can be substituted for any similarly numbered one of any of the others. And every one of these 1014 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 Tutuloa, 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 Buñuel, with Alain Resnais. . . .
A “Universal Man”?
Selected Works by Raymond Queneau in English Translation:
The Bark Tree / Witch Grass
Children of Clay
Oak and Dog
We Always Treat Women Too Well
This article first appeared in Context #9.
Ed. Note: This was reissued as Witch Grass by NYRB. All links below go to their edition, however, I’m preserving The Bark Tree for historical reasons
Makes for great reading with Umberco Eco’s Foreword to Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Thanks.
Oh, to have been able to have had coffee or dinner with Barbara Wright...! She sounds so damn cool, and a person to learn so much from.