A VERSatile Mind

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”).

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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 14^th 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 20^th 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.

The End is Where We Start From

 

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light

Writers often struggle with endings.  Playing in the Light, Zoë Wicomb’s novel, ends with a whiplash that redirects the narrative. What should readers make of the turnabout in the last paragraphs of the book –– the short conversation that results in Marion pulling over and telling Brenda to get out of the car?

Marion swerves, pulls off the road. Her voice is cold with rage. So in the guise of a do-gooder, you went back to prise more out of a lonely, senile old man who was grateful for your visits? Sis. How dare you! Why don’t you write your own fucking story?

I know it’s a rhetorical question, but let me answer all the same. Writing my own story, I know, is what someone like me is supposed to do, what we all do, they say, whether we know it or not, but Christ, what story do I have to tell?

…Now your father, there’s a story, with his pale skin as capital, ripe for investment…

That’s enough. Get out. I know my father’s fucking story.

Actually, Brenda says, I suspect you don’t.

She keeps her eyes averted as she gets out. Her thumb flicks at the lock before she shuts the door with a quiet click.

The twist-in-the-tail ending, transforming what went before, is a classic feature of the short story, but is rarely used in novels. How well does the technique work here? Brilliantly.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.  So the novel begins with an ironic title, and with an oddly diffident central character.

“Playing in the Light” is a delightful phrase suggesting innocence. In fact, Zoë Wicomb’s novel of that name exposes the excruciatingly cautious and secretive lives of mixed race South Africans who passed for white under apartheid. 

From the beginning, Playing in the Light tells the story of Marion Campbell, an Afrikaner who runs a travel agency but hates to travel, an attractive middle-aged woman who lives alone, chary of romance and friendship. 

Wicomb’s publisher summarizes Marion’s story as follows: “Fresh off hiring her first black employee, Marion, usually not preoccupied with national politics, becomes entrenched in the happenings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings after a photo in a newspaper triggers a lost childhood memory. What she knows about herself and her family’s past all comes into question as she is forced to uncover the lies all too often told by families seeking to avoid the hardships of apartheid.”

Marion hires Brenda, a young colored woman who gradually, and disconcertingly, becomes a more and more significant presence in Marion’s life. Toward the story’s end, while Marion travels to London, Brenda visits, attends to, and interviews John, Marion’s father, an old man whose dementia has not completely destroyed his memories of life under apartheid.

The ending of Playing in the Light poses a challenge. Why does the novel end with Marion leaving Brenda by the side of the road? Marion virtually jettisons Brenda when she finds out that Brenda is writing a novel about her father, John. In leaving Brenda by the side of the road, Wicomb upends the reader, whose assumptions about the meaning of Marion’s story, and John’s, must now be reconsidered.

Within the world disclosed by the narrator, there is a double consciousness: that of Marion and, gaining momentum by the end, that of Brenda.

In the middle section of the book –– in which the author tells the stories of Marion’s mixed race parents, Helen and John – Wicomb prepares the reader in a subtle way for the abrupt shift that takes place in the novel’s final paragraphs. Wicomb does this by moving the story away from Marion, for while the lives of Helen and John are part of Marion’s story – and her discovery about herself – there are aspects of her parents’ lives under apartheid that Marion can neither imagine nor understand.

What we call the beginning is often the end. At the beginning of Playing in the Light, Brenda appears to play a supporting role in the tale of a white-identified colored woman who takes a journey into the heart of South African darkness, and learns to view the evils of apartheid from a new, informed perspective. Brenda, with her full-fledged colored identity, is introduced as a secondary character: Marion’s new hire, and the first colored worker at Marion’s travel agency. Brenda gradually becomes Marion’s friend – a simpatico adjunct much like the black friend or sidekick in so many American television dramas.

With its whiplash ending, the novel supplants Marion’s perspective with Brenda’s. As the author of John’s story, is Brenda to be identified with the author of Playing in the Light? Brenda becomes the writer of a novel within the novel, perhaps akin to the writer of the novel itself.

Wicomb highlights the authority of Marion’s and Brenda’s perspectives by describing one woman as Reader, the other as Writer.

Marion’s internal journey takes her to a place where she is just beginning to enjoy reading for pleasure. (The book she reads in her London hotel room, The Conservationist, is by Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel prize-winning white South African writer of English ancestry.) As a reader, Marion is baffled by the experience of identification with a book’s characters. She finds such identification, when it clicks, intense and emotionally wrenching. Yet Marion is just beginning to understand the process of identification with a literary character, and finds that there is not always a comfortable fit between her experience and that of the characters she reads about.

Brenda’s desire to write a novel is casually mentioned early on, so it is a surprise to learn that she is writing John’s story. Explaining her motivation as a writer in the novel’s final scene, Brenda tells Marion how her writing project came together, and why she believes John’s story is the one that should be told.

Even after an epiphany in her London hotel room, watching the play of light on the wall, Marion’s consciousness remains stunted. Back in Capetown, she imagines Brenda has stolen her man. As indeed she has. But it is not Geoff, Marion’s white corporate colleague and sometime boyfriend, whom Brenda has taken: it is John, Marion’s beloved, often forgetful father, who yet remembers his past. Has Brenda indeed inveigled her way into John’s life and opportunistically stolen his story? Or has she visited and comforted him in Marion’s absence, and been rewarded by the outpouring of his memories?

Marion rejects Brenda as the author of John’s story. Despite her journey toward self-awareness, Marion rejects the notion that her father’s story, and by implication her own, might be meaningful to a wider community. Like her mother Helen, Marion wants to keep the story of their family private.

Playing in the Light is not, after all, a linear narrative: a journey of self-discovery by the daughter of play-white parents. Marion’s consciousness, even after she opens up through travel and reading, is far too limited to comprehend the history of apartheid, and the complex identity of South Africa’s colored people before and after liberation. Unexpectedly, it is Brenda’s consciousness (from her sharp remarks about no one having voted for the Nationalist Party to her intimate knowledge of racism) that prevails. It is Brenda’s authenticity, grounded in her colored – as opposed to play-white – experience, that redirects our understanding of the novel.