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Raymond Queneau

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Raymond Queneau
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(born Feb. 21, 1903, Le Havre, France — died Oct. 25, 1976, Paris) French author. After working as a reporter, he became a reader for the prestigious Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, a scholarly edition of past and present classical authors; by 1955 he was its director. Verbal play, black humour, pessimism, and a derisive posture toward authority appear often in his more than 30 works of prose and poetry, which include the novels Zazie dans le métro (1959; film, 1960), perhaps his best-known work, and The Blue Flowers (1965).

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French Literature Companion: Raymond Queneau
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Queneau, Raymond (1903-76). French poet, novelist, and essayist, and persistent rejector of the rigid separation of these categories. Queneau was early associated with Breton and the Surrealist group, collaborating in La Révolution surréaliste from 1924 onwards, but he broke definitively with them in 1929; his military service in the 3e Zouaves, which took him to Morocco (1925-7), together with his early years spent in Le Havre, probably had a more profound influence on him. Three early prose works, Les Derniers Jours (1936), Odile (1937), and Les Enfants du limon (1938), together with the verse novel Chêne et chien (1937), settle his accounts with childhood and psychoanalysis, thereafter leaving the writer free to invent and to innovate as few others have done.

It was above all in the field of language that Queneau found the challenge that inspired much of his work. By 1930 he was increasingly focusing on the problem of the nature of written French, which he saw as largely static in its vocabulary and syntax since the grammarians of the 17th c. had codified and policed the language of Renaissance France, and Voltaire and his contemporaries had made of it the instrument of rational clarity. The literary instrument, however, bore little resemblance to the language spoken in everyday life; Queneau's military experience had driven that home to him, but it was his trip to Greece (where he spent July to September 1932 and composed the greater part of Le Chiendent) which crystallized his views. He came to see the French language as threatened by the same radical schism which had split the literary and demotic forms of Greek—Le Voyage en Grèce (1973) gives details. His experiments with the transcription of the spoken tongue (what he was to call ‘le néo-français’) as a medium suitable for any form of literary expression make of him one of the most interesting stylists of the century, but his importance far exceeds that. If such experimentation led him early in the direction of a literature that is at the same time richly comic and a densely observed portrait of modern urban life, especially among the lower classes, it is also true to say of his works that they are able to combine a Joycean richness of texture with a whimsy worthy of Lewis Carroll; both Joyce and Carroll were important influences on his work.

Queneau's constantly experimental approach to literary form led him to found, with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OULIPO) in 1960. As with Exercices de style, which tells the same anecdote 99 different ways, ranging from ‘latinate’ to ‘javanais’ [see Argot], the task set themselves by Queneau and other OULIPO authors was to produce works obeying strict mathematical rules of composition. These are sometimes applied to the transformation of existing works, or simply words, sayings, etc. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Queneau's own Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a collection of 10 sonnets composed on the same rhyme scheme and grammatical structure, originally published in a form allowing each line to be turned individually. It therefore becomes a machine capable of generating 1014 poems—substantially more than any single human lifetime could encompass.

Queneau's erudition, his pleasure in the arcane—he was editor of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade [see Encyclopedias]—and his fascination with the banal make the characteristic tenor of all his work the always astonishing juxtaposition of high and low, of grand ideas and ordinary, even droll, words. In the same way, he refused to think of literary forms as rigid, while holding strictly to the notion that formal qualities are the essence of art, and typically professed his intention to ‘faire du roman une sorte de poème.’

His best-known works in prose are Le Chiendent (1933), Pierrot mon ami (1942), Loin de Rueil (1944), Exercices de style (1947), Zazie dans le métro (1959), and Les Fleurs bleues (1965); while his poems, from Les Ziaux (1943) to Fendre les flots (1969), have found, though rather more slowly, an appreciative audience, many of them, perhaps, beginning from Juliette Greco's recording of his ‘Si tu t'imagines’, a demotic and barbed rendering of the carpe diem theme.

[Ian Revie]

Bibliography

  • J. Quéval, Raymond Queneau (1971)
  • C. Shorley, Raymond Queneau (1985)
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Raymond Queneau
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Columbia Encyclopedia - People
Queneau, Raymond (rāmôN' kĕnō'), 1903-76, French author and critic. He was an advocate of surrealism during the middle and late 1920s. Queneau is best known for his manipulations of style and language and his use of street slang in literary works. He often parodied traditional literary forms, as in his pastiche Exercices de style (1947). His novels include Le Chiendent (1933; tr. The Bark Tree, 1968), Les Enfants du Limon (1938; tr. Children of Clay, 1998), Un Rude Hiver (1940; tr. A Hard Winter, 1948), Pierrot, mon ami (1943), Le Dimanche de la vie [the Sunday of life] (1952), and the comic bestseller Zazie dans le Métro (1959; tr. Zazie, 1960). He also wrote a great deal of poetry (see his Selected Poems, tr. 1970), and many of his novels contain extended verse passages.
Writer: Raymond Queneau
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Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Actors
  • Occupation: Writer, Actor
  • Active: '50s-'70s
  • Major Genres: Comedy, Crime
  • Career Highlights: Zazie Dans Le Metro, Monsieur Ripois, Le Dimanche De La Vie
  • First Major Screen Credit: Monsieur Ripois (1954)

Biography

Distinguished author and poet Raymond Queneau is an important literary figure in his native France and was quite active in the development of the surrealist movement during the 1920s. In addition, he was among the more prominent editors of the Pléiade encyclopedia. Queneau was also periodically involved with French cinema writing scripts and directing one short film, Le Lendemain, in 1950. In 1960, he made his acting debut in Mocky's Un Couple and two years later had a major role in Landru. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Wikipedia: Raymond Queneau
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Raymond Queneau (21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo).

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Biography

Born in Le Havre, Normandy, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. He received his first baccalauréat in 1919 for Latin and Greek, and a second in 1920 for philosophy, then studied at the Sorbonne (1921–1923) where he was a fair student of both letters and mathematics, graduating with certificates in philosophy and psychology.

Queneau performed military service as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–1926. He married Janine Kahn in 1928, with whom he had a son, Jean-Marie, in 1934. They remained married until Janine's death in 1972. Queneau was drafted in 1939 but demobilized in 1940, and through the remainder of World War II, he and his family lived with the painter Élie Lascaux in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat.

Queneau spent much of his life working for the Gallimard publishing house, where he began as a reader in 1938. He later rose to be general secretary, and eventually became director of l’Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956. During some of this time, he also taught at l’École Nouvelle de Neuilly. He entered the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 1950, where he became Satrap, and was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1951, l’Académie de l’Humour in 1952, and the jury of the Cannes Film Festival 1955–1957.

During this time, Queneau also acted as a translator, notably for Amos Tutuola's Palm Wine Drinkard (L'Ivrogne dans la brousse) in 1953. Additionally, he edited and published Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Queneau had been a student of Kojève's during the 1930s and was, during this period, also close to writer Georges Bataille.

As an author, Queneau came to general attention in France with the publication in 1959 of his novel Zazie dans le métro, and again in 1960 with the film adaptation by Louis Malle at the height of the Nouvelle Vague movement. Zazie explores colloquial language as opposed to 'standard' written French; a distinction which is perhaps more marked in French than in some other languages. The first word of the book, the alarmingly long "Doukipudonktan" is a phonetic transcription of "D'où qu'ils puent donc tant?" "Why do they stink so much?".

Juliette Greco made popular his song 'Si tu t'imagines.'

Even before the founding of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) in 1960, Queneau was attracted to mathematics as a source of inspiration. He became a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948. In Queneau's mind, elements of a text, including seemingly trivial details such as the number of chapters, were things that had to be predetermined, perhaps even calculated. A later work, Les fondements de la littérature d’après David Hilbert (1976), alludes to the mathematician David Hilbert, and attempts to explore the foundations of literature by quasi-mathematical derivations from textual axioms.

One of Queneau's most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man seeing the same stranger twice in one day. It tells that very short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place. A graphical story adaptation of the book's concept, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, was published by Matt Madden in 2005.

Queneau is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne outside Paris.

Queneau and Surrealists

In 1924 Queneau met and briefly joined the Surrealists, but never fully shared in the methods of automatic writing or Surrealist ultra-left politics. Like many surrealists, he entered psychoanalysis—however, not in order to stimulate his creative abilities, but for personal reasons, like Leiris, Bataille, Crevel.

Michel Leiris describes, in Brisees, how he first met Queneau in 1924, while vacationing in Nemours with André Masson, Armand Salacrou and Juan Gris. A common friend, Roland Tual, met Queneau on a train from Le Havre and brought him over. Queneau was just a couple years younger and felt less accomplished. He did not make a big impression on the young bohemians. After Queneau came back from the army, around 1926-7, he and Leiris met at the Café Certa, near L'Opera, a Surrealist hang-out. On this occasion, when conversation delved into Eastern philosophy, Queneau's comments showed a quiet superiority and erudite thoughtfulness. Leiris and Queneau became friends later while writing for Bataille's Documents.

Queneau questioned the Surrealist support to the USSR in 1926. He remained on cordial terms with André Breton, although he continued associating with Simone Kahn, after Breton split up with her. Breton usually demanded that his followers ostracize his former girlfriends. It would have been difficult for Queneau to avoid Simone, however, since he married her sister, Janine, in 1928. The year that Breton left Simone, she sometimes traveled around France with Queneau and his wife.

By 1929, Queneau had separated himself significantly from Breton and the Surrealists. In 1930, the year Crevel, Eluard, Aragon and Breton joined the French Communist party, Queneau participated in Un Cadavre (A Corpse, 1930), a vehemently anti-Breton pamphlet co-written by Bataille, Leiris, Prévert, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Baron, J.-A. Boiffard, Robert Desnos, Georges Limbour, Max Morise, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Roger Vitrac.

For Boris Souvarine's La Critique sociale (1930-34) Queneau mostly wrote brief reviews. One characterized Raymond Roussel as one whose ‘imagination combines passion of mathematician with rationality of the poet’. He wrote more scientific than literary reviews – on Pavlov, on Vernadsky (from whom he got a circular theory of sciences), and a review of a book on the history of equestrian caparisons by an artillery officer. He also helped with the passages on Engels and mathematical dialectic for Bataille's article "A critique of the foundations of Hegelian dialectic."

Bibliography

Novels

Poetry

Essays and articles

  • Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950)
  • Pour Une Bibliothèque Idéale (1956)
  • Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier (1962)
  • Bords (1963)
  • Une Histoire modèle (1966)
  • Le Voyage en Grèce (1973)
  • Traité des vertus démocratiques (1993)

Other

In other art

  • Pierre Bastien has made a CD with the bilingual pun title Eggs Air Sister Steel, based on Exercices de Style (which "Eggs Air Sister Steel" sounds like when spoken).

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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