Of course Queneau’s fame is based primarily on his novels about the rather uncouth and shady world of the Parisian banlieue or of provincial French towns, on his word-games involving the spelling of everyday, spoken, French. His is a narrative oeuvre which is extremely consistent and compact, reaching its apogee of comic elegance in Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the Metro). Whoever remembers Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the early postwar period will include in this more popular image some of the songs sung by Juliette Gréco like ‘Fillette, fillette’ …
Other layers are added to this picture by those who have read his most ‘youthful’ and autobiographical novel, Odile: there we find his past links with the group of Surrealists surrounding André Breton in the 1920s (this account tells of his first, tentative approach towards them, his rather rapid distancing from them, their basic incompatibility, all in a series of merciless caricatures) against the backdrop of a rather unusual intellectual passion in a writer and poet: mathematics.
But someone might object that, leaving aside the novels and the collections of poetry, Queneau’s most typical books are works which are unique in their own genre, such as Exercises de style (Exercises in Style), or Petite Cosmogonie portative (The Portable Small Cosmogony) or Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Million Million Poems). In the first, an episode narrated in a few sentences is repeated 99 times in 99 different styles; the second is a poem in Alexandrines on the origin of the earth, chemistry, the origin of life, animal evolution and the development of technology; the third is a machine for composing sonnets, consisting of ten sonnets using the same rhymes printed on pages cut into horizontal strips, one line on each strip, so that every first line can be followed by a choice of ten second lines, and so on until the total of 1014 combinations is reached.
There is another fact which should not be overlooked, namely that Queneau’s official profession for the last twenty-five years of his life was that of encyclopedia consultant (he was the editor of Gallimard’s Encyclopédie de la Pléiade). The map we have been outlining is now quite jagged, and every piece of bio-bibliographical information which can be added to it only makes it even more complicated.
Queneau published three volumes of essays and occasional writings in his lifetime: Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Signs, Figures and Letters) (1950 and 1965), Bords (Borders) (1963), and Le Voyage en Grèce (The Journey to Greece) (1973). These works, along with a certain number of uncollected pieces, can give us an intellectual outline of Queneau, which is the starting-point for his creative work. From the range of his interests and choices, all of them very precise and only at first sight rather divergent, emerges the framework of an implicit philosophy, or let us say a mental attitude and organisation which never settles for the easy route.
In our century Queneau is a unique example of a wise and intelligent writer, who always goes against the grain of the dominant tendencies of his age and of French culture in particular. (But he never—and he is a rare, or rather, unique example of this—allows himself through intellectual self-indulgence to be dragged into saying things which are later shown to be disastrous or stupid mistakes.) He combines this with an endless need to invent and to test possibilities (both in the practice of literary creation and in theoretical speculation) only in areas where the fun of the game—that distinctive hallmark of the human—guarantees that he will not go far wrong.
These are all qualities which make him still, both in France and in the world at large, an eccentric figure, but which perhaps in the not too distant future may reveal him to be a master, one of the few who will stay the course in a century in which there have been so many flawed maestros, or ones that have been only partially successful or inadequate or too well-intentioned. As far as I am concerned, without going farther afield, Queneau has assumed this magisterial role for some time now, even though—perhaps because of my excessive adherence to his ideas—I have always found it difficult to explain fully why. I am afraid that I will not succeed in explaining it in this essay either. Instead I would like him to explain it, in his own words.
The first literary battles in which we find Queneau’s name embroiled were those which he fought in order to establish ‘le néo-français’, in other words to bridge the gap between written French (with its rigid rules of spelling and syntax, its monumental immobility, its lack of flexibility and agility) and the spoken language (with its inventiveness, mobility and economy of expression). On a journey to Greece in 1932, Queneau had convinced himself that that country’s linguistic situation, characterised even in its written form by the split between the classicising (kathareuousa) and the spoken (demotikê) language, was no different from the French situation. Starting from this conviction (and from his studies of the peculiar syntax of American Indian languages such as Chinook), Queneau speculated on the advent of a demotic written French which would be initiated by himself and Céline.
Queneau did not opt for this choice for reasons of populist realism or vitality (‘In any case I have no respect nor consideration for what is popular, the future, “life” etc.’, he wrote in 1937). What inspired him was an iconoclastic approach to literary French (which, however, he did not want to abolish, but rather to conserve as a language in its own right, in all its purity, like Latin), and the conviction that all the great inventions in the field of language and literature emerged through transitions from the spoken to the written language. But there was more to it than this: the stylistic revolution he promoted derived from a context which was philosophical right from the start.
His first novel, Le Chiendent (The Bark-Tree) (translated into Italian as Il pantano, 1947, though the title literally means ‘couch-grass’, and figuratively ‘spot of bother’), written in 1933 after the formative experience of Joyce’s Ulysses, was intended to be not only a linguistic and structural tour-deforce (based on a structure that was numerological and symmetrical, as well as on a catalogue of narrative genres), but also a definition of existence and thought, nothing less than a novelised commentary on Descartes’ Discourse on Method. The novel’s action spotlights those things which are thought but not real, but which have influenced the reality of the world: a world which in itself is totally devoid of meaning.
It is in fact to challenge the endless chaos of the meaningless world that Queneau establishes the need for order in his poetics and for a truth within language. As the English critic Martin Esslin says, in an essay on Queneau:
It is in poetry that we can give meaning and measured order to the formless universe—and poetry depends on language, whose true music can only come from a return to its true rhythms in the living vernacular.
Queneau’s rich and varied oeuvre as poet and novelist is devoted to the destruction of ossified forms and the dazzling of the eye by phonetic spelling and authentic Chinook-type syntax. Even a casual glance at his books will show numerous examples of this kind: ‘spa’ for ‘n’est-ce pas’, ‘Polocilacru’ for ‘Paul aussi l’a cru’, ‘Doukipudonktan’ for ‘D’où qu’il pue donc tant’ …’1
‘Le néo-français’, inasmuch as it is an invention of a new correlation between the written and spoken word, is only one particular case of Queneau’s general need to insert into the universe ‘small areas of symmetry’, as Martin Esslin says, a sense of order which only (literary and mathematical) invention can create, given that all of reality is chaos.
This aim will remain central in Queneau’s oeuvre even when the battle for ‘le néo-français’ fades from his centre of interest. In the linguistic revolution he had found himself fighting on his own (the demons which inspired Céline turned out to be completely different) waiting for facts to prove him right. But it was the opposite that was happening: French was not evolving at all as he thought it would; even the spoken language was tending to ossify and the advent of television would determine the triumph of the learned norm over popular inventiveness. (Similarly in Italy, television has exercised a powerful unifying influence on the language, even though Italian was characterised mu
ch more strongly than in France by the multiplicity of local dialects.) Queneau realised this and in a statement in 1970 (in Errata corrige) he had no hesitation in admitting the inaccuracy of theories which in any case he had for some time now ceased to promote.
Of course it must be said that Queneau’s intellectual role had never been limited to that one linguistic battle: right from the outset the front on which he campaigned was vast and complex. After he distanced himself from Breton, the members of the Surrealist diaspora to which he remained closest were Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, even though his involvement in their journals and initiatives was always rather marginal.
The first journal on which Queneau collaborated with any continuity was La Critique sociale, in 1930-34, again with Bataille and Leiris: this was the journal of Boris Souvarine’s Cercle Communiste Démocratique (Souvarine was a ‘dissident’ avant-la-lettre, who was the first in the West to explain what Stalinism would be). ‘One has to recall here/ wrote Queneau some thirty years later, ‘that La Critique sociale, founded by Boris Souvarine, was centred round the Cercle Communiste Démocratique, which was made up of former Communist militants who either had been expelled from or were in dispute with the party; this group had been joined by another small band of former Surrealists such as Bataille, Michel Leiris, Jacques Baron and myself, who all came from a very different background.’
Queneau’s collaboration on La Critique sociale consisted in brief reviews, rarely to do with literature (though amongst these was one in which he invited readers to discover Raymond Roussel: ‘his imagination combines the passion of the mathematician with the rationality of a poet’). But more often they were scientific reviews (on Pavlov, and the scientist Vernadsky who would later suggest to him a circular theory of sciences; or his review—included in this Italian translation of Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Signs, Figures and Letters) (Turin: Einaudi, 1981)—of the book by an artillery officer on the history of equestrian caparisons, a work greeted by Queneau as revolutionary in its historical methodology). But he also appeared in it as co-author, with Bataille, of an article ‘published’, as he will clarify later, ‘with our signatures in issue number 5 (March 1932) with the title “La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne (A Critique of the Foundations of Hegelian Dialectic)”. Georges Bataille really wrote the whole article: I only dealt with the passage on Engels and mathematical dialectic’
This work on the application of dialectic to exact sciences in Engels (which Queneau later included in the ‘Mathematics’ section of his collected essays and which appears under this heading in the Italian translation) gives only a partial account of Queneau’s quite considerable period spent studying Hegel. But this period of study can be more accurately reconstructed from something he wrote in his last years (and from which the two preceding quotations came), published in the journal Critique, in the issue dedicated to Georges Bataille. Here he recalls his late friend’s article, ‘Premières confrontations avec Hegel’ (Critique, 195-196 (August-September 1966)), in which we see not only Bataille but also, and perhaps even more intensely, Queneau dealing with Hegel, a philosopher who is as alien as can be from the traditions of French thought. If Bataille read Hegel essentially to reassure himself that he was not at all Hegelian, for Queneau it was a more positive journey, in that it involved his discovery of André Kojève, and his adoption to a certain extent of Kojève’s brand of Hegelianism.
I will come back to this point later on, but for the moment suffice it to say that from 1934 to 1939 Queneau was at the Ecole des Hautes Études attending Kojève’s lectures on The Phenomenology of the Spirit, which he would later edit and publish.2 Bataille recalls: ‘how many times did Queneau and I emerge drained from the tiny lecture hall: drained and exhausted … Kojève’s lectures destroyed me, ground me down, killed me ten times over.’3 (Queneau actually, with a hint of malice, remembers his fellow student as not very assiduous and sometimes rather sleepy.)
Editing Kojève’s lectures certainly remains Queneau’s most substantial academic and editorial undertaking, though the volume does not contain any original contribution by Queneau himself. However, on this Hegelian experience we have the precious evidence of his memoir on Bataille which is also indirectly autobiographical, where we see him participating in the most sophisticated polemics of French philosophical culture in those years. Traces of these arguments can be found throughout his fiction, which often seems to demand a reading which is sensitive to the erudite researches and theories which then preoccupied Parisian academic journals and institutions, though they are all transformed into a pyrotechnic display full of clowning grimaces and somersaults. The three works, Gueule de Pierre, Les Temps mêlées and Saint Glinglin (subsequently rewritten and collected as a trilogy under this last tide) would repay a close analysis from this perspective.
We could say that if in the 1930s Queneau took an active part in the discussions both of the literary avant-garde and of academic specialists, while maintaining that restraint and discretion which will remain his stable character traits, to find the first articulation of his own ideas we have to wait for the years immediately preceding the Second World War, when his polemical presence finds expression in Volontés, a journal on which he collaborates from its first issue (December 1937) to its last (whose publication was prevented by the German invasion of May 1940).
This journal, edited by Georges Pelorson (and which also had Henry Miller on its editorial board) ran for the same length of time as the Collège de Sociologie run by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Callois (and also enjoyed the participation of Kojève, Klossowski, Walter Benjamin and Hans Mayer). The debates of this group are the background to the articles in the journal, especially those by Queneau.4
But Queneau’s discourse follows a line that is very much his own and which can be summed up in this quotation from an article written in 1938: ‘Another highly fallacious idea which nevertheless is very popular nowadays is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious and liberation; between chance, automatic reaction and freedom. Now this inspiration which consists in blindly obeying every single impulse is in reality a form of slavery. The classical writer composing a tragedy by observing a certain number of rules with which he is familiar is freer than the poet who writes down whatever flits through his head and is enslaved to other rules which he is not aware of.’
Leaving aside the contemporary polemic against Surrealism, here Queneau articulates a number of constants in his aesthetics and ethics: the rejection of ‘inspiration’, or romantic lyricism, of the cult of chance and automatic suggestion (Surrealism’s idols), and instead the appreciation of a work that has been constructed, finished, completed (previously he had campaigned against the poetics of the incomplete, the fragment, the sketch). Not only this: the artist must be fully aware of the aesthetic rules which his work obeys, as well as of its particular and universal meaning, its function and influence. If one thinks of Queneau’s method of writing, which appears only to follow the whims of improvisation and clowning, his theoretical ‘classicism’ might seem astonishing; and yet the text we are discussing (‘What is Art?’, along with its complementary piece, ‘More and Less’, both written in 1938) has the status of a profession of faith which he never renounced (though the still rather youthful tone of aggression and exhortation would disappear in the later Queneau).
All the more reason, then, why we should be amazed that this anti-Surrealist polemic should lead Queneau (of all people!) to attack humour. One of his first pieces in Volontés is an invective against humour, which of course was linked to issues of the moment, even to contemporary mores (it is against the reductive and defensive premises of humour that he takes issue), but what counts here too is the pars construens: his praise for total comedy, the line that extends from Rabelais to Jarry. (Queneau would return to the topic of Breton’s humour noir immediately after the Second World War, to see how well it had stood up in the experience of t
hat horror; and again in a later note, he would take account of Breton’s clarification of the moral implications of the question.)
Another recurrent target in his Volontés articles (and here what we need to try and square these with is his future role as encyclopedia director) was the endless mass of information which lands on top of contemporary man without forming an integral part of his existence, or being an essential necessity. (‘The identity between what one is and what one really and truly knows … the difference between what one is and what one thinks one knows but does not really know.’)
We can say, then, that Queneau’s polemics in the 1930s go in two main directions: against poetry as inspiration and against ‘false knowledge’.
Queneau’s figure as ‘encyclopedist’, ‘mathematician’ and ‘cosmologer’ has therefore to be carefully defined. His ‘wisdom’ is characterised by a need for global knowledge and at the same time by a sense of limits, and a diffidence towards any type of absolute philosophy. In his outline for the circularity of sciences which he drafts in a work written between 1943 and 1948 (from natural sciences to chemistry and physics, and from these to mathematics and logic), the general tendency of sciences towards mathematisation is reversed and mathematics is transformed when it comes into contact with the problems posed by the natural sciences. This is consequently a line that can go in either direction and therefore can turn itself into a circle, at the point where logic is proposed as a model for the functioning of human intelligence, i£ what Piaget says is true: namely that ‘logic is the axiomatisation of thought itself’. At this point Queneau adds: ‘But logic is also an art, and turning things into rules is a game. The ideal constructed by scientists throughout the whole of this first half of the century is a presentation of science not as knowledge but as rules and method. They offer (indefinable) notions, axioms and instructions for use, in short a system of conventions. But is this not perhaps a game just as much as chess or bridge? Before proceeding to an examination of this aspect of science, we must dwell on this point: is science knowledge, does it help us to know anything? And given that (in this article) we are dealing with mathematics, what does one know in mathematics? Precisely nothing. And there is nothing to know. We do not know the point, the number, the group, the set, the function any more than we “know” the electron, life, human behaviour. We do not know the world of functions and differential equations any more than we “know” Daily, Concrete Life on Earth. Everything we know is a method accepted (agreed) as true by the scientific community, a method which has also the advantage of being linked to manufacturing techniques. But this method is also a game, or more precisely what is called a jeu d’esprit. Hence the whole of science, in its most complete form, presents itself to us both as technique and as a game. That is to say no more and no less than the way the other human activity presents itself: Art.’
Why Read the Classics? Page 28
