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Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) |
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French poet, novelist, and publisher, a precursor of postmodernism. Raymond Queneau's internationally best-known novel, Zazie dans le métro (1959, Zazie), was made into a successful film in 1960, directed by Louis Malle. Queneau often used in his novels and poems colloquial speech and phonetic spellings. After World War II his work formed a bridge between the irrational world of Breton and other surrealists and the philosophical 'absurd' of existentialism. He saw that Houssette believed him. Valentin felt awkward, and wanted to undeceive him. He admired the facility with which he had created a little zone of error in the reasonable mind of the grocer. Up till now he had always thought that language ought to formulate the truth, and silence hide it. The words he would use to Madame Saphir's customers, male and female, it wouldn't even be zones of error that they would form, but zones of confusion in which illusion might remain in suspense until the end of a life. (from The Sunday of Life: A Novel by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by Barbara Wright, New York: New Directions, 1977, pp. 148-149; original title: Le Dimanche de la vie: roman, 1951) Raymond Queneau was born at Le Havre, the son of Auguste Queneau, an ex-colonial soldier, and the former Jeanne Mignot. His parents owned and ran a haberdashery. Queneau once said that his childhood "wasn't much fun" and in the 1930s he underwent psychoanalysis, "which wasn't much fun either." Queneau was educated at the lycée in Le Havre and in 1926 he graduated from Sorbonne. While working as a bank clerk, he began to write. Between the years 1924 and 1929, Queneau was active in the surrealistic movement. Their manifest, Permettez!, composed by Queneau, was signed by the entire group, but later he broke with them. When Arthur Rimbaud's statue was inaugurated in 1927, Queneau cited for the horror of the public the works in which Rimbaud expressed his contempt for the Church, the famous "French taste," and culture. In 1934 Queneau married Janine Kahn; they had one son. He became in
1938 a reader for Gallimard and from the late 1940s he was the
principal editor of the Gallimard Encyclopédie de la Pléiade and histories of literature published in the Pléiade series. Throughout his life, he contributed to newspapers and journals. Le Monde
referred to him as "one of the most universal minds of our time." In
1952 he was elected to the Goncourt Academy. It has been argued, that
Queneau was not only a reader of mathematics, but a serious
mathematician. Queneau collaborated with a number of 'New Wave' film directors.
Juliette Greco made popular his song 'Si tu t'imagines.' Although
Queneau has been called the creator of le noveau roman a generation ahead of its time, in Le vol d'Icare (1968,
The Flight of Icarus) he also parodied among others one of the central
writers of the movement, Alain Robbe-Grillet. In 1960 a group of
leading
French writers and mathematicians founded the Ouvroir de Litterature
Potentielle, usually called the Oulipo, and Queneau became one of its
writers. Other
Oulipians have been Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, the Italian writer Italo Calvino, and the American writer Harry Mathews. Raymond Queneau died on October 26, 1976. By nature, he was essentially a secretive writer, but in his early works he used a considerable amount of autobiographical matter, including Chêne et chien (1937), a verse novel. Queneau's Journal 1939-1940, which was published in 1986, reveal a man concerned with spiritual self-transformation, who finds inspiration in neo-Platonist thought, Chinese philosophy, and Christian mysticism. From a very early age Queneau was interested in language. During his military service in North Africa in 1925, he found out that he did not understand the ordinary language of the ordinary French soldier. Years later he visited Greece and became involved in discussions about the differences between classical and demotic Greek. He saw that modern written French must free itself from the conventions of style, spelling, and vocabulary that date from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. His first book, Le chiendent (1933, The Bark Tree), Queneau began to write on his journey in Greece in the summer of 1932; Robbe-Grillet has called it the first real New Novel. The story, structured on mathematical principles, was set in Paris and dealt with a search of an immense sum of money. Le chiendent was noted for its slangy use of language and is considered Queneau's best. Its title has many meanings, but in parts of North America chiendent is known as witch grass. Language was not for Queneau simply a means of expression. He argued
that the real subject of his work is language itself. Many's of
Queneau's novels and poems are very difficult to translate -
they are experimental, based on spoken French, and play with words,
spelling, puns, and slang. Fully aware of this, he even wrote in one
poem "allez me traduire ça en anglais!" Zazie dans le métrostarts
with the the line "Doukipudonktan, se demanda Gabriel excédé."
"Doukipdonktan" is a phonetic transcription
of "D'où est-ce qu'ils puent donc tant?" (What part of them is it that
stinks so much?). In the English edition, published by The Bodley Head
Ltd., 1960, it was translated as: "Howcanaystinksotho, wondered
Gabriel, exasperated." Si tu t'imagines (1952) contains most of Queneau's central poems. The work has been noted for its Joycean wordplays and neologisms. Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961, One Hundred Million Million Poems), which consists of a set of ten sonnets in separate 14 strips, fused mathematic with poetry. It is possible to construct one hundred trillion poems from its lines. Queneau's novels portrayed unpretentious ordinary people,
characters from margins of society, and such urban locales as metro
stations, small cafés, suburban cinemas. Occasionally he played with
the conventions of the gangster genre. On est toujours troup bon avec les femmes
(1947, We Always Treat Women Too Well ), a thriller set
in Dublin created by James Joyce, first appeared under the covers of
"Editions du Scorpion," in the wake of James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and Boris Vian's J'irai cracher sur vos tombes
(I Spit on Your Grave), both of which enjoyed great success in France,
but Queneau's novel did not reach out to the masses. He deliberately
turned the basic situation of Chase's novel - a young helpless woman at the mercy of psychopaths - upside down: now she seduces her kidnappers, a group of Irish Republicans. The IRA men are named after figures in Ulysses.
"We always treat women too well," says Corny Kelleher, who is shot
death at the end. Originally the work was published under the pseudonym
Sally Mara. In Joyce's novel, Kelleher works for Henry J. O'Neill,
carriage maker and undertaker. Pierrot mon ami (1942) was a detective story, perhaps without a crime. Queneau has noted that in the American crime novel writers are no longer concerned with the puzzle as much as with the characters. The detective story has become existentialist in the journalistic sense. In Loin de Ruel (1944) the protagonist turns into the hero of films he sees - like Buster Keaton in Sherlock, Jr. (1924) or much later the young movie fan in Arnold Schwarzenegger's underrated Last Action Hero (1993). Exercices de style (1947)
explored linguistic conventions. Queneau presented ninety-nine
different versions of a single, totally insignificant anecdote -
a man gets on a crowded Paris bus, Route S, a youngish man
complains that his fellow-traveller is stepping on his feet. When he
sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it. Later Queneau observes the
same man talking to a friend on a street -
the friend says: "You ought to get an extra button on your overcoat,"
and shows him where. (Exercises in Style, translated by Barbara Wright, London: John Calder, 1998, pp. 19-20) The story is told among others as an official
letter, as a blurb for a novel, as a sonnet, and in "Opera English."
Queneau creates ninety-nine times a different atmosphere with
inventive, different choice of words, and makes the reader to pay
attention to the manner in which a story is told. "At the hour when the
rosy fingers of the dawn start to crack I climbed, rapid as a tongue of
flame, into a bus, mighty of stature and with cow-like eyes, of the
S-line of sinuous course." (Ibid., Noble style, p. 86) Queneau's work inspired Matt Madden's graphic novel 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style
(2005), in which a man gets up from his computer, walks into his
kitchen, speaks to his wife and opens his refrigerator, only to
discover that he can't recall what he was looking for. In Zazie dans le métro a young girl comes to Paris for a few days. Zazie spends time with her heterosexual uncle Gabriel, who works as a dancer in a gays' night-club. After finishing his act, a lady says to Gabriel, "We've had a simply wonderful time. Messieu so amusing." And he replies, "Don't forget the art in it, though. It's not just fun and games, it's art as well." (Zazie, translated from the French by Barbara Wright, London: John Calder, 1982, p. 184) Zazie has an obsession: she wants to ride on the métro. But the métro workers are on strike and she crisscrosses Paris in a cab, taking part in a series of farcical events, and making comments on the grown-ups. Again Queneau writes in a semiserious way and uses widely dialogue, meaningless everyday language, swearwords, and phonetic spelling - Zazie wants a "cacocalo" and wears "blewgenes" (bloudjinnes). Her phrases include: "Napoleon my arse," "Pension my arse" and "Kind my arse." When her mother Jeanne Lalochère comes to collect her daughter, they have a short dialogue, which ends the novel: "'Well, did you enjoy yourself?`'All right.' 'Did you see the métro?' 'No.' 'What have you done, then?' 'I've aged.'" (Ibid, p. 207) The novel was adapted for the screen by Louis Malle in 1960. Pauline Kael described the film in The New Yorker as "bold, delicate, freakish, vulgar, outrageous and occasionally nightmarish." Malle played with the conventions of film like the author had played with language. Le Dimanche de la vie (1951, The Sunday of Life) was Queneau's tenth novel, cheerful as the later Zazie,
and it also gained popularity as a film. The central figure is Valentin
Brû, ex-Private, whom Queneau follows during the period of 1936-40. In
the sardonic story Valentin is selected by two sexually-frustrated
older women as the ideal mate. He marries Julia, but she is busy with
hordes of customers. "Have to admit, said Julia, have to admit that a
marriage without a honeymoon, that doesn't exist. No, said Valentin, no, that doesn't exist." (Ibid., p. 35) The
book contains some new words and concepts (difficult to translate
without explanation): "Crylaughing, Chantal added: "Polocilacru," thus
containing one of the most celebrated examples of queneautic
logosymphysis, meaning: "Paul believed it too."(Paul aussi l'a cru) (Ibid., p. 8) For further reading: Raymond Queneau by Andrée Bergens (1963); Raymond Queneau by Jacques Guicharnaud (1965); Raymond Queneau by Paul Gayot (1966); Jeu et profondeur chez Raymond Queneau by Jean-Marie Klinkesberg (1967); Raymond Queneau: Le voyage en Grèce by Jean Queval (1971); Les poèmes de Raymond Queneau by Renée Baligand (1972); Critical Essays by Roland Barthes (1972); The Flowers of Fiction: Time and Space in Raymon Queneau's Le Fleurs Bleues by Vivian Kogan (1982); Queneau's Fiction: An Introductory Study by Christopher Shorley (1985); The Lyric Encyclopeadia of Raymond Queneau by Jane Alison Hale (1989); The Representation of Women in the Autobiographical Fiction of Raymond Queneau by Madeleine Velguth (1990); Literature and Spirituality, ed. by David Bevan (1992); Rewriting Greece: Queneau and the Agony of Presence by Constantin Toloudis (1995); 'Raymond Queneau', ed. by Mary Campbell-Sposito, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1997); Naming & Unnaming: On Raymond Queneau by Jordan Stump (1998); Queneau's Fictional Worlds by Nina Bastin (2002); Queneau's Fiction: An Introductory Study by Christopher Shorley (2012); Queneau et le cinéma by Marie-Claude Cherqui (2016); Des chiffres et des mètres: la versification de Raymond Queneau by Anne-Sophie Bories (2022); OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature by Natalie Berkman (2022); Légèreté pensive et énergie romanesque: Italo Calvino, Iris Murdoch, Raymond Queneau by Barbara Servant (2023) Selected works:
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