A VERSatile Mind
Queneau was a polymath who chose a career in
writing. He was a knight-errant who found adventure, and founded ventures, in
literature, philosophy, science. Devoted to the life of the mind, Queneau
brokered fertile deals between improbable disciplines. Queneau made poetry from
number theory, channeled cosmogony into verse, and launched a campaign against
written French, assaulting the language with a battery of puns, slang, and
street talk. Too authoritative to be a rebel, Queneau established and conducted
fringe ventures in inquiry while serving the establishment as editor of the
prestigious Pléiade Encyclopedia. The
compendium of his mind bristled with lists, data, and permutations, but
knowledge – and understanding – impeded neither the quicksilver of his wit, nor
the untenable lightness of his inventive being. Forever famous as the author of
the anarchist farce Zazie dans le Métro (Zazie in the Metro) Raymond Queneau left behind him a complex legacy that far exceeded
his popular acclaim.
Cerebral to his core, Queneau nevertheless
integrates emotion, empathy, and ethics into his artistic vision. A former Marxist, he focuses his stories on
the common man. Barbara Wright, translator of Zazie, reflects: “I think Queneau chooses humble people [as the
center of his stories] 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…” (Wright, Barbara, “Reading Raymond Queneau,” Context,
Issue 9, Dalkey Archive Press) Queneau’s valuing of the common man is
unsentimental, however: what interests him is the moment when the man on the
street begins to think for himself, opening the door to a rich inner life
(Wright, Barbara, “Reading Raymond Queneau”).
Head and heart, Queneau was ahead of his
time. He anticipated the French New Novel of the 1950s in his early novels and
in his writing experiments. Queneau’s 1933 novel, Le
Chiendent (The Bark Tree), has a
numerical scaffolding; (it consists in 91 chapters, since 91 is the sum of the
first 13 numbers), and features a concierge who meditates on Being and
Non-Being – more than seventy years before literature brought forth the philosopher-concierge of The
Elegance of the Hedgehog. In his
1947 handbook Exercises de Style (Exercises in Style), Queneau renders 99
versions of the same fragmentary incident. This experiment in generating
multiple variations from a single template forces creativity through the
imposition of a formula. Subject to his own rules, Queneau tells the same story
in 99 different voices, including those of a Geometrician, a Hellenist, and a
paratactic speaker (“Then”). The recombinant DNA of literature and arithmetic
iteration turns a “slice of life” into something almost
metaphysical. Two incongruous modes of thought, combined, have transmuted reality. As Braulio Tavares
puts it, “Conceiving abstract structures and patterns is something essential to
mathematical thinking, but most writers would find it not suitable to
literature. It is curious to realize that one of Queneau’s most popular books
arose from such an idea.” (Tavares, Braulio, “Raymond Queneau,” The
Scriptorium, 1999): http://www.themodernworld.com/scriptorium/html.
Queneau ushered in the Sixties with the
publication of Zazie dans le Métro (1959)
followed by Cent mille milliards de poèmes
(One Million Million Poems).
One Million Million Poems consists
of ten sonnets, for which any of the fourteen
lines can be substituted for any line of the nine other sonnets. Thus there are
10 to the 14th power, or 100,000,000,000,000 possible combinations
of lines. Queneau’s million million poems anticipate literary experiments like Julio
Cortázar’s 1963 novel Hopscotch, in
which Cortázar designates 99 out of 155 chapters as expendable, and the 1979
Science Fiction trilogy Schrödinger’s
Cat, in which the novels have interlooping plots involving a large cast of
characters. Hopscotch can be experienced in at
least two different ways, by reading the core narrative from chapters
one through 56, or by "hopscotching" through all 155 chapters. The
numerical complexity of the Schrödinger’s
Cat books is physics-based: in Volume II, the characters “are unknowingly
connected through non-locality, i.e. having once crossed paths they are joined
in a quantum entanglement.” (“Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy,” Wikipedia) http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger’s_Cat_Trilogy Queneau’s book of verse is as literary a work
as Hopscotch, but makes greater use
of algorithm; it is more literary than Schrödinger’s
Cat, and further ahead of the ideas of the time.
Queneau was ahead of the curve – and still is – in combining literary creativity with scientific inquiry, serious
philosophy with humor. The author of eighteen published novels, ten poetry
collections, and numerous articles and essays, Queneau still found time to joke
around, becoming a member of Alfred Jarry’s parodic Pataphysics group. In 1960,
Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais co-founded Oulipo: an
organization devoted to the literary application of existing and invented
structures. As Marjorie Welish describes it, Oulipo was “premised on
experimentation through indifferent methods in the belief that such
instrumentalities of permutation and combination will generate literature
readily open to worlds beyond the author’s immediate experience.” (Welish,
Marjorie, “Science into Poetry: on Raymond Queneau,” Boston Review)
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.4/welish.php
Born in Le Harvre in 1903, Queneau was said
as a juvenile to have read the entire first volume of the Larousse Dictionary
for pleasure. Be that as it may, his voracious reading habits prepared him well
for higher learning. He came as a sixteen year-old to Paris, where he studied
philosophy at the Sorbonne. More a pioneer and a founder than a follower or a
joiner, as a young man he forged the briefest of associations with the Marxists
and Surrealists whose movements initially attracted him.
Despite the scale of his innovation, today
Queneau’s legacy is diffuse. He was praised by Jean-Paul Sartre as one of the great
novelists of the second half of the 20th century: “The whole postwar
art of the novel owes its language, its structure, to Queneau.” (Gerassi, John,
Talking with Sartre: Conversations and
Debates, Yale, 2009, p. 128) And he crafted numerous works of innovative fiction. Yet Queneau
is widely remembered as the author of just one novel: Zazie dans le Métro. Published to great acclaim in 1959, Zazie made Queneau famous overnight.
When Louis Malle made the film Zazie dans
le Métro in 1960, Queneau’s fate was sealed. The wildly popular film turned
the polymath into a French celebrity. Queneau’s name was forever linked to that
of his twelve year-old heroine. If it wasn’t a case of: ‘loaded with honors, he
sank without a trace,’ it remains true that Queneau’s celebrity widened the gap between
his profile as a one-book author, and the vast erudition and dramatic
innovation that underlay the body of his work.
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