The Philosophy of Raymond Queneau
Who is Raymond Queneau? At first glance this might seem a strange question, since the image of this writer is well known to anyone with any knowledge of twentieth-century literature, and of French literature in particular. But if each one of us tries to put together the things we know about Queneau, this image immediately takes on intricate and complex outlines, embraces elements which are difficult to hold together; and the more defining traits we manage to highlight, the more we feel that we are missing others which are necessary to round out into a unitary figure the various planes of this multi-faceted polyhedron. This writer who seems always to welcome us with an invitation to put ourselves at our ease, to find the most comfortable and relaxed position, to feel on the same level as he is, as though we were about to play a round of cards with friends, is in reality someone with a cultural background that can never be fully explored, a background whose implications and presuppositions, explicit or implicit, one can never exhaust.
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 Exercices 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 (demotiké) 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-de-force (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 much 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 École 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 title) 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 that 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, if 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.’
This passage contains all of Queneau: his practice is to place himself constantly on the two contemporary dimensions of art (as technique) and play, against the backdrop of his radical epistemological pessimism. This is a paradigm which as far as he is concerned is equally suited to science and literature: hence the ease he displays in moving from one field to the other, and in containing them both in a single discourse.
We must not forget, however, that the 1938 article, cited above, ‘What is Art?’ opened with a denunciation of the bad influence on literature of any ‘scientific’ pretension; nor that Queneau had a place of honour (‘Transcendent Satrap’) in the ‘Collège de Pataphysique’, the group formed by Alfred Jarry’s disciples, which in the spirit of that master, makes fun of scientific language turning it into caricature. (‘Pataphysics’ is defined as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’.) In short we could say of Queneau what he himself said of Flaubert, talking of Bouvard et Pécuchet: ‘Flaubert is for science only insofar as it is sceptical, restrained, methodical, prudent, human. He hates the dogmatists, the metaphysicists, the philosophers.’
In his prefatory essay to Bouvard et Pécuchet (1947), the result of years of study of this encyclopedic novel, Queneau expresses his sympathy for the two pathetic autodidacts, those researchers of the absolute in knowledge, and highlights Flaubert’s shifts in attitude towards his book and its heroes. Without the peremptoriness of his youthful outbursts, but with that tone of discretion and pragmatism which would be characteristic of his maturity, Queneau identifies with the later Flaubert and seems to recognise in this book his own odyssey across ‘false knowledge’ and ‘not concluding’, in his search for the circularity of wisdom, guided by the methodological compass of his scepticism. (It is here that Queneau enunciates his idea of The Odyssey and The Iliad as the two alternatives in literature: ‘every great work of literature is either an Iliad or an Odyssey.’)
Between Homer, ‘the father of all literature and all scepticism’, and Flaubert who understood that scepticism and science are identical, Queneau accords positions of honour, first of all to Petronius, whom he considers as a contemporary and brother, then to Rabelais, ‘who in spite of the chaotic appearance of his work, knows where he is going and directs his giants towards their final Trinc without being crushed by it’, and finally to Boileau. That the father of French classicism should figure in this list, that his Art poétique should be considered by Queneau ‘one of the greatest masterpieces in French literature’, should not surprise us, if we think on the one hand of classical literature’s ideal as awareness of the rules to follow, and on the other of his thematic and linguistic modernity. Boileau’s Le Lutrin ‘brings the epic to an end, completes Don Quixote, ushers in the novel in French and is a forerunner both of Candide and Bouvard et Pécuchet’.5
Amongst the moderns, in Queneau’s Parnassus, we find Proust and Joyce. In the former it is the ‘architecture’ of La Recherche which interests him most of all, from the time when he was campaigning for the ‘well constructed work’ (see Volontés, 12 (1938)). The latter is seen as a ‘classical author’ in whom ‘everything is determined, both the overall structure and the episodes, though nothing shows any sign of constraint’.
Although always ready to recognise his debt towards the classics, Queneau certainly did not stint in his interest in obscure and neglected authors. The very first academic work which he embarked on in his youth had been a piece of research on ‘fous littéraires’ (literary madmen), ‘heterodox’ authors, those considered mad by official culture: inventors of philosophical systems belonging to no school at all, of models of the universe devoid of any logic and of poetic universes lying outside any stylistic classification. Through a selection of such texts Queneau wanted to put together an Encyclopedia of Inexact Sciences; but no publisher would consider the project and the author ended up using the material in his novel Les Enfants du limon (The Children of Clay).
On the aims (and disappointments) of this research, one should look at what Queneau wrote when introducing his only ‘discovery’ in this field, a discovery upheld by him subsequently as well: the precursor of science-fiction, De Fontenai. But his enthusiasm for the ‘heterodox’ has always stayed with him, whether it is the sixth-century grammarian Virgil of Toulouse, the eighteenth-century author of futuristic epics J.-B. Grainville, or Edouard Chanal, an unwitting French precursor of Lewis Carroll.
From the same family, certainly, is the utopian writer Charles Fourier, in whom Queneau took an interest on several occasions. One of these essays analyses the bizarre calculations of his ‘series’ which are the basis of the social projects in Fourier’s Harmony. Queneau’s intention here was to prove that Engels, when he put Fourier’s ‘mathematical epic’ on the same level as Hegel’s ‘dialectical epic’, was thinking of the utopian Charles not of his contemporary Joseph Fourier, the famous mathematician. After piling up proof after proof in support of his thesis, he concludes that perhaps his thesis does not stand up after all and that Engels really was talking about Joseph. This is a typical Queneau gesture: he is not so much interested in the triumph of his thesis, as in recognising a logic and consistency even in the most paradoxical argument. And we then find ourselves naturally thinking that Engels (on whom he wrote another essay) was also seen by Queneau as a genius of the same type as Fourier: an encyclopedic bricoleur or doodler, a foolhardy inventor of universal systems which he constructs with all the cultural materials he has at his disposal. And what about Hegel then? What attracts Queneau to Hegel to the point where he is prepared to spend years attending and then editing Kojève’s lectures? What is significant is that in the same years Queneau also followed H. C. Puech’s courses on Gnosticism and Manicheism at the École des Hautes Études. (And did Bataille, anyway, during the period of his friendship with Queneau, not perhaps see Hegelianism as a new version of the dualistic cosmogonies of the Gnostics?)
In all these experiences Queneau’s attitude is that of the explorer of imaginary universes, carefully picking up their most paradoxical details with the amused eye of the Pataphysicist, but without cutting himself off from the possibility of noticing amongst all this a glimmer of genuine poetry or genuine knowledge. It is with this same spirit, then, that he set out to discover ‘literary madmen’ and to immerse himself in Gnosticism and Hegelian philosophy acting as both friend and disciple of two illustrious masters of Parisian academic culture.
It is no accident that the starting point for Queneau’s (as well as Bataille’s) interest in Hegel was his Philosophy of Nature (Queneau showing a particular interest in possible mathematical formulations of it); in short, in what comes before history. And if what Bataille was interested in was always the irrepressible role of the negative, Queneau would aim decisively at an openly declared point of arrival: the overcoming of history, what happens after history. This is already enough to remind us how far removed the image of Hegel is according to his French commentators, and Kojève in particular, from the image of Hegel that has circulated in Italy for over a century now, whether in its idealist or Marxist incarnations, and also from the image endorsed by that side of German culture which has spread and continues to circulate most widely in Italy. If for Italians Hegel will always remain the philosopher of the spirit of history, what Queneau the pupil of Kojève seeks in him is the road that leads to the end of history, and to the arrival at wisdom. This is the motif that André Kojève himself will underline in Queneau’s fiction, suggesting a philosophical reading of three of his novels: Pierrot mon ami (Pierrot), Loin de Rueil (The Skin of Dreams), and Le Dimanche de la vie (The Sunday of Life)(in Critique, 60 (May 1952)).
The three ‘wisdom novels’ were written during the Second World War, in the grim years of the German Occupation of France. (The fact that those years, which were lived through as though they were a parenthesis, were also years of extraordinary creative activity for French culture, is a phenomenon which does not seem to have received the attention it deserves.) In a period like that the emergence from history appears to be the only point of arrival one can have, since ‘history is the science of man’s unhappiness’. This is the definition given by Queneau at the start of a curious little treatise also written at that time (but only published in 1966): Une Histoire modèle (A Model History). This was a proposal to make history ‘scientific’, by applying to it an elementary mechanism of causes and effects. As long as we are dealing with ‘mathematical models of simple worlds’ the attempt can be said to be successful; but ‘it is difficult to make historical phenomena referring to more complex societies fit into that grid’, as Ruggiero Romano points out in his introduction to the Italian edition.6
Let us go back to Queneau’s principal objective, that of introducing a bit of order and logic into a universe which is totally devoid of those qualities. How can one succeed in doing this except by ‘emerging from history’? This would be the theme of the second last novel published by Queneau: Les Fleurs bleues (The Blue Flowers). It opens with the heartfelt exclamation uttered by a character who is a prisoner of history: ‘“All this fusstory,” said the Duke of Auge, “all this fusstory for a few puns and anachronisms: hardly worth it at all. Can we never find a way out?”’
The two ways of looking at history’s pattern, from the perspective of the future or the past, meet and overlay each other in The Blue Flowers: is history that which has as its point of arrival Cidrolin, an ex-convict who lazes about on a barge moored on the Seine? or is it one of Cidrolin’s dreams, a projection of his unconscious in order to fill a past which has been suppressed from his memory?
In The Blue Flowers Queneau makes fun of history, denying its progress and reducing it to the substance of daily existence; in A Model History he had tried to turn it into algebra, to make it submit to a system of axioms, to remove it from empirical reality. We could say that these are two processes which are antithetical but which are perfectly complementary, though of a different mathematical sign, and as such represent the two poles between which Queneau’s researches move.
On closer examination, the operations which Queneau carries out on history correspond exactly to those he effects on language: in his battle for ‘le néo-français’ he debunks the literary language’s claims to immutability in order to bring it closer to the truth of the spoken language; in his (itinerant but always faithful) love affair with mathematics he repeatedly tends to experiment with arithmetical and algebraic approaches to language and literary creativity. ‘To deal with language as though it were reducible to mathematical formulae’ was how another mathematical poet, Jacques Roubaud,7 defined the principal preoccupation of the man who proposed an analysis of language through algebraic matrices,8 who studied the mathematical structure of the sestina in Arnaut Daniel and its possible developments,9 and who promoted the activities of the ‘Oulipo’. In fact it was in this spirit that he became co-founder in 1960 of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (abbreviation: ‘Oulipo’), along with the man who would be his closest friend in his final years, the mathematician and chess expert François Le Lionnais, a delightful personality, a wise eccentric of endless inventions which were always half-way between rationality and paradox, between experiment and play.
Similarly with Queneau’s inventions it has always been difficult to draw the line between serious experiment and play. We can make out the two poles I mentioned earlier: on the one hand the fun of giving an unusual linguistic treatment to a given theme, on the other the fun of a rigorous formalisation applied to poetic invention. (Both trends are a nod in the direction of Mallarmé that is typical of Queneau and which stands out from all the tributes paid to that master in the course of the century, because it preserves his basically ironic essence.)
In that first trend we find: a versified autobiography (Chêne et chien), in which it is above all the metrical virtuosity that provides the most exhilarating effects; Petite Cosmogonie portative, whose declared aim is to put the most rebarbative scientific neologisms into the idiom of poetic verse; and of course the work which is probably his masterpiece, precisely because of the total simplicity of its programme, Exercices de style, where a totally banal anecdote reported in different styles produces highly diverse literary texts. Instances of the other trend are: his love for metrical forms as generators of poetic content, his ambition to be the inventor of a new poetic structure (like the one put forward in his final book of verse, Morale élémentaire, 1975), as well as, of course, the infernal machine of the Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961). In either trend, in short, the objective is the multiplication or ramification or proliferation of possible works starting out from an abstract formulation.
Jacques Roubaud writes: ‘For Queneau the producer of mathematical ideas, his favourite field is that of combinatory systems: combinatory systems come from a very ancient tradition, almost as ancient as Western mathematics. The analysis of Cent mille milliards de poèmes from this perspective will allow us to place this book in the context of the shift from pure mathematics to mathematics as literature. Let us remind ourselves of its principle: he writes ten sonnets, each with the same rhymes. The grammatical structure of each is such that, without forcing it, each line in each “base” sonnet is exchangeable with every other line in the same position in each sonnet. There will thus be, for each line of any new sonnet, ten possible independent choices. Since there are fourteen lines in a sonnet, there will be virtually 1014 sonnets, in other words one hundred million million poems.
‘… Let us try, by analogy, to do something similar with one single Baudelaire sonnet: for instance by replacing one line with another (either from the same sonnet or a different one), respecting what the sonnet “does” (its structure). We will come up against difficulties primarily of a syntactic nature, against which Queneau had immuned himself in advance (and it is for that reason that his structure is “free”). But, and this is what the Cent mille milliards teach us, against the constraints of semantic probability, the sonnet structure creates, virtually, from one sonnet all sonnets that are possible through substitutions which respect the structure.’
Structure is freedom, it produces the text and at the same time the possibility of all virtual texts that can replace it. This is the novelty that resides in the idea of ‘potential’ multiplicity, implicit in his promotion of a literature that develops from the constraints which literature itself selects and imposes on itself. It has to be said that in the ‘Oulipo’ method it is the quality of these rules, their ingenuity and elegance that counts in the first place; if the results, the works obtained in this way, are immediately of equal quality, ingenuity and elegance, so much the better, but whatever the outcome, the resultant work is only one example of the potential which can be achieved only by going through the narrow gateway of these rules. This automatic mechanism through which the text is generated from the rules of the game, is the opposite of the surrealist automatic mechanism which appeals to chance or the unconscious, in other words entrusts the text to influences over which there is no control, and which we can only passively obey. Every example of a text constructed according to precise rules opens up the ‘potential’ multiplicity of all the texts which can be virtually written according to these rules, and of all the virtual readings possible of such texts.
As Queneau had already declared in one of his first formulations of his poetics: ‘There are forms of the novel which impose on its subject matter all the virtues of Number,’ by developing ‘a structure which transmits to such works the last glimmers of universal light or the last echoes of the Harmony of the World.’
‘Last glimmers’, notice: the Harmony of the World appears in Queneau’s oeuvre from a remote distance, in the same way as it can be glimpsed by the drinkers who stare at their glass of pernod with their elbows on the zinc counter. The ‘virtues of Number’ seem to impose their own brightness on them especially when they manage to appear transparently through the dense corporality of living people, with their unpredictable moods, with the phenomena emitted by their twisted mouths, with their zigzag logic, in that tragic meeting of the individual’s dimensions with those of the universe, which can only be expressed through giggles or sneers or jeers or bursts of convulsive laughter, and at best through full-throated hilarity, people dying with laughter, laughter on a Homeric scale …
[1981]