Raymond Queneau
- 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)
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For more information on Raymond Queneau, visit Britannica.com.
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]
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Raymond Queneau (February 21, 1903 – October 25, 1976) was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo).
Born in Le Havre, Normandy, Queneau was the only child of
Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. He received his first baccalauréat in
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 single son Jean-Marie in 1934, and remained with her until her 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, 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 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 with the film adaptation by Louis Malle in 1960 at the height of the Nouvelle Vague movement in French film. 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. 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. What makes the book unique — and a widely-used writing text — is that it tells that very short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place. A graphical homage to Queneau, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, a graphical story adaptation of the book's concept by Matt Madden, was published in 2005.
Queneau is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne outside Paris.
In 1924 Queneau met and briefly joined the Surrealists, but
never really shared in the methods of
Michel Leiris describes, in Brisees, how he first met Queneau in 1924, while vacationing in Nemours with Andre Masson, Armand Salacrou and Juan Gris. Incidentally, Salacrou was a childhood friend of Georges Limbour, who was a childhood friend of Jean Dubuffet. Their common friend Roland Tual met Q on a train from Le Havre and brought him over. Q 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 Certa bar (café Certa), near L’Opera, one of Surrealist hang outs. On this occasion, when conversation delved into Eastern philosophy, Q’s comments showed a quiet superiority and erudite thoughtfulness. Leiris and Q became friends later while writing for Bataille’s Documents. Once, in the 30s, Q and Leiris went together to hear Art of the Fugue in the Salle Pleyel. They went to Ibiza, just before Spanish Civil War, together with Janine Kahn.
In Odile, the character of Saxel is based on Aragon.
For Boris Souvarine’s La Critique sociale (1930-34) Q 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”
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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