"I've loved Exercises in Style for years. This translation is impeccable, extraordinary. " PHl~IP PULLMAN

RAYMOND QUENEAU

EXE[RC~SES ~N SlY~[E

FOREWORD BY WITH AN ESSAY BY lTALO CALVINO

Foreword

Reading through the contents pages of fa:ercises ill Style, it would appear that Queneau wasn't working to an overall plan. They're not .. in alphabetical order, nor do they increase in complexity. An expert in rhetorical figures will see immediately that Queneau doesn't employ the full range of these figures, or indeed only rhetorical figures. Figures of speech which are oddly missing include synecdoche, metonymy, oxymoron, zeugma - the list of illustrious absentees goes on. On the other hand, it's true that if Queneau had wanted to follow the classic repertoires of such figures compiled by Pierre Fontanier, not to speak of the German rhetorician Heinrich Lausberg, the total number of exercises would have ended up as far more than a hundred. Nor did Queneau restrict the exercises only to rhetorical figures: in the contents we find parodies of literary genres (like the ode) and of ordinary acts of speech (the abusive, for example). However, on looking more closely, the expert in rhetoric will' notice chat figures of speech and thought and tropes are much more widely represented in the exercises than the titles alone would indicate. In the case of highly technical figures, such as synchysis or epenchesis, Queneau uses the scientific term with a kind of bravado, also because (one just has to read che exercises with "difficult" titles) readers realize immediately that they're not expected to understand so much as admire the author's linguistic vircuosit}\ You need to understand the rule behind the figure in order to admire it properly, bur Queneau leaves it up to the reader to find

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RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE that out - the element of puzzling it out is probably part of the Yet it is also the case that all this display of rhetorical expertise is game he's playing. not taken too seriously: Queneau frequendy plays around by taking Yet, quite apart from the fact that all the more readable exercises the figures literally (to use an unavoidable oxymoron)-that is to sa}', contain rhetorical figures of various types - and more than one per he applies the technique of a rule to the letter while disregarding its exercise - a reader comes to realize that certain exercises play on a meaning, and turns this into a further element of che game. specific rhetorical figure even when the title is generic and accessible. To illustrate this point: prosthesis, cpenthesis and all Thcfirstexampleofthisis'Notation'itself,whichisadcmonstration consist in repositioning a letter or phoneme - the first co the front, of sen110 manifestus, in other words of plain and explicit language. the second to the middle, the third to the end of a word - but the 'Double Entry' is an exercise on synonyms and paraphrase - while examples given in the manuals of rhetoric for these figures make 'Retrograde' exemplifies hy~ero11 protero11, Surprises is a survey of sense, so to speak: g11at11s instead of natus, speciality instead of exclamations and both 'Hesitation' and Awkward use the figure of specialty, amongst instead of among. But in the exercises which d11bitatio (since in dubitatio the speaker asks his audience for advice exemplify these figures (though in strict classical terminology che}' on how to organize his speech given the difficulty of the material). arc noc figures so much as virt11tesor vitia eloc11tio11is, adornments or 'Precision', in addition to being a skilful example of redundancy, defects of speech), Queneau shifts letters and syllables around-fore could also be defined in terms of hypotyposis- a detailed description and aft and in the middle - with gay abandon, pushing the figures of an object with the intention of rendering it visible to the listener/ co the point of absurdity. He does the same with , reader - as could also the five exercises 'Olfactory', 'Gustatory', and apocopc, which, rationally handled, should produce examples 'Tactile', 'Visual' and 'Auditory'. like mittere for omittere, ma 'am for madam, and legit for legitimate, The two exercises entitled 'The Subjective Side' and 'Another but as with the additions of letters and phonemes, the subtractions Subjectivity' are an example of sermoci11atio (in which the speaker pour forth in a torrent, the intention being not to construct a literary appears to quote another person, adopting his style of expression effect but to create noise, even pandemonium. The same occurs with - this figure also applies to numerous other exercises). polyptotes, which normally is che limited repetition of a word in 'Word-.Building' is an example of mots-valise or portmanteau different syntactic contexts, as in the expression "Rome se11le po11vait words. 'Negativities' demonstrates the technique of correctio. Rome faire trembler" ("Only Rome could make Rome tremble"), but 'Insistence' and 'You Know' use pleonasm. 'Ignorance' is an in Queneau 's exercise on the figure the term co11trib11able ("taxpayer" example of retice11tia, and similitude lies at the basis of the group in the English translation) is repeated so often as to produce an effect of exercises on the five senses just mentioned. 'Telegraphic' is a of obsessive nonsense. splendid example of brevitas. 'Hellenisms' provides a classic Synchysis gets similar treatment. lt is a syntactic figure in which example of oratio emendata, and the figure of locus commrmis is anastrophe ("never a breeze up blew") and hyperbaton {"some rise brazenly on display in 'Reactionary'. 'Proper Names' appears, on by sin, and some by virtue fall") are combined to create a confusion strict analysis, to be a bizarre and not entirely explicable case of in the sequence of words which make up the sentence. But Queneau Vossian anronomasia. applies the figure to an entire text (and not for the only time in the

VUI IX RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE

book, since synchysis or mixwra verbonm1 is necessarily employed in ("srote de filecle" in the original) becomes "srot of strnig", the the exercise entitled 'Permutations by Increasing Groups of Letters'). result of an almost mechanical intervention on the phonic or Many exercises involving variations on alliteration and wrirten form of the word - but doesn't the shift of letters suggest paronomasia - such as 'Homoeotcleuton' (where the alliteration images, which as such already belong to content? Naturally there is on rhc final letter) and 'Parechesis' (where it's on the first) arc are dl!vices - is one - which start by manipulating the taken to the point of paroxysm. Queneau uses rhetorical figures to expression to set off reverberations ar the level of content (in the obtain comical effects, but at the same time he's also poking fun at same way a good spoonerism should give rise ro embarrassing rhetoric itself. double cntcndres), while there are exercises which start with He can't therefore have taken rhetoric, either as a science or a content (with metaphorical substitution for example) to produce technique, too seriously, dsspite being deeply conversant with it: changes (in this case of bold lexical substitution) at the level of it is this which probably explains the nonchalance and casualness expression. Bue seen in a broad semiotic context, tout se tie11t. with which he puts the exercises together, heedless of system or If we say, "There are many bullfighters in pain," people may classification and just following his own whim. laugh. The effect has been obtained by a simple metaplasm, the At this point, readers might think they understand why Queneau, omission of an S in the word Spain. But why is it less funny to having opted to try out various rhetorical figures at random, say "there are many gull fighters in Spain", which employs another in ocher exercises turns his back on rhetoric to look at literarr metaplasm? Because, semantically speaking, " bullfighters" parody and social convention or refer to different technical and have more to do with Spain than "gulls". The concept arises of scientific jargons. Yet rhetoric is not simply a matter of figures a semantic encrdopedia which has to supply for every word in of speech, pertaining only to elocutio. It includes i11ve11tio and some ideal dictionary a series of information which is not merely dispositio, memory, prommtiatio, the various genres of oratory grammatical. The difference between a mechanical and a significant and of 11arratio, the different techniques of argumentation, the slip of the tongue lies precisely in these connections (or in these rules of compositio - and the standard manuals of rhetoric also incongruities). Thus not even the merely metaplastic exercises can cover poetics, with the who!~ range of literary genres and t}:pes. In be entirely non-semantic. Nor even those which seem deliberately short, reading the Exercises shows us that while Qucneau doesn't to be without meaning, such as all chose which shift lerters around cry out everything there is in the ars r'1etorica, he tries out all sorts within words, can fail co affect our sense of the content. Taken of things which are included in it. His book becomes an exercise on one by one and our of context, they wouldn't make us laugh: they rhetoric itself, indeed a kind of demonstration that rhetoric is to be would appear to be the work of some unhinged typesetter whose found everywhere. boss has gone on holida)'. They become comic in the context of Queneau's project, the metalinguistic challenge which underlies What the Exercises teach us above all is that there is no precise the E.--cercises as a whole. dividing line between figures of expression and figures of content. Queneau posed himself chis question: is it possible to treat a Take the exercise 'Metathesis'. Jn the English version the "cord" basic texr by varying it in every way imaginable, so long as each

x XI ~ RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE variation adheres to a specific rule? It is this which makes even operative word. However amusing the metaplastic wordplay and the vanations which are empty of meaning appear meaningful, its mechanical shifts of letters and phonemes can be, it is not merely at least ar a mecalmguistic level. The £.wrcises play both with that which is involved. incertcxtuality (they are parodies of other types of di~course ) and Yet the Exercises also show us that it is very hard to distinguish with con-textuality. If the volume consisted only of ten exercises between the comedy of language and the comedy of situation. instead of ninety-nine, it would be less entertaining (and similarly, The distinction appears to be dear. If the Minister for Education, although perhaps a bit tiresome, it would be even more entertaining in the middle of a formal dinner, has a choking fit while saying 1f it were made up of ninety-nine thousand variations). The comic "Skol", we have a comic situation, and the amusing story can be told effect is global: it is created by accimmlatio, the dominating in different languages. But if an English person wants to express an rhetorical figure which each exercise in turn serves to exemplify. opinion on some educational reform which has gone wrong and says As one laughs over a mechanical switching-around of letters in a that the Minister for Education "choked on the word slwl", we have word, one is laughing at the same time at the challenge the author is a comedy of language -which is normally untranslatable. pursuing, at the mechanisms he needs to put into practice in order But it isn't a question of a division between the world of facts to achieve his aim, and at the nature both of a particular language on the one hand and the world of signs on the other. For a start, and of the capacity for language in general. in order for us to find the spectacle of a minister choking during 1 read somewhere that the idea of the Exercises came to Queneau a toast comic, we need to belong to a particular culture in which when he was listening to symphonic variations (I also wonder if there is a hidden desire to sec people in power humiliated. It's not in he had in mind Cyrano's variations on his nose in Rostand's play). the slightest bit funny-at least in our culture-if we're told about a As Roman Jakobson has shown, a musical variation is a synrnctic a paraplegic choking on a glass of beer. The situation (as pure fact) phenomenon which - within the context of its companion text - becomes comic only to the extent that the events and the people creates expectations and predictions, memories and deferments - involved in them arc imbued with symbolic significance. A comic and prcci~cly by so doing produces an effect of meaning. Whatever situation may not be linguistic, but it is always semiotic. the case, Qucncau has chosen not only to vary the musical theme In the same way, if an English person laughs on being told the grammaticall}; but also the way we listen. We can listen to a musical Minister of Education has choked on the word skol, it wouldn't be piece while blocking our ears rhythmically in such a way that the in the least comic if we said that the same happened to the .Minister sounds arc filtered and become a sort of breathing, an ordered for Foreign Trade. As with the "bullfighters", our reaction depends noise, a cacophony controlled by a rule. But to get the most out of on an encyclopedic representation of what public education this experiment we need to know that the symphony is still going involves (and what the minister responsible for it should be like). on in its uninterrupted wholeness, and it works even better if we've This type of information has been described as "knowledge of the already listened co it before somewhere else. world"; without wishing ro enter on the thorny question of how we Therefore each exercise takes on meaning only in the context define such a concept in semiotic terms, it should be noted that all of the others - "meaning" - and therefore content - being the comedy of language is tied to extra-linguistic contexts.

XII XIII

RAYMOND QUENEAU

Yeti tis also true that those exercises which could be characterized as metalogical, linked to psychological or social models, are dependent on rhe language rhey use as a medium. They arc possible in French because Quencau 's French reflects a civilization and refers both to a specific social context (, Paris) and a particular time. To translate these exercises literally would mean incurring che face of those translations of American thrillers which make Exercises in Style improbable and pseudo-literal attempts to transpose situations, jargons, professions, turns of speech which are typical of a different world. A word such as "downtown" for example, cannot accurately be translated into any other• language. le is not always the centre of a city (for example it isn't in New York), it is not necessarily the historic part, nor is it in all cities the part along the river: sometimes it's the maze of narrow streets where local criminals operate, sometimes the area dominated by skyscrapers and the banks. In order to understand the meaning of "downtown", you would need to know the history of each individual American city. However, Queneau's E-cercises can, at least to a certain degree, be translated, because none of them are purely linguistic and they are all bound up with incerrextuality and historical circumstance - nor can any be encirely detached from the particular language - the spirit of French - in which they were originally written. \Vith both aspects, it is not so much a question of translating as one of recreating in another language within a different social and historical and incertexcual context, which is the approach both Barbara Wright and I (in my Italian translation) have followed.

- Umberto Eco

XIV The of Raymond Queneau 1

Who is Raymond Queneau? At first this may sound like a strange question: all those readers who know something about twentieth­ ccntury literature, and French litt:rature in particular, will have • a dear image of him. But if we tr}' to put together the things we know abom Queneau, this image will suddenly become complex and fragmented, and will incorporate elements which are difficult to reconcile: as we keep discovering and adding new traits, we lose hold of others which we need if we are to keep all the facets together as a whole. Qucneau is a writer who seems to welcome us and invite us to take up the most comfortable place we can find- someone on the same level as us, someone we may settle down with as if to play a card game among friends - but in reality there are some areas behind his personality one never finishes exploring, whose presuppositions and implications, apparent or oblique, can never be exhausted. Quencau's fame stems chieflr from his novels set in the slightly uncouth and sleazy world of the Parisian bmzlieue or French provincial towns, and the word games with the spelling of everyday spoken language- a compact and consistent body of fictional work which culminates in the charming comic novel Zazie in the Metro. This is the picture of him that first springs to most people's minds: those who recall Saint-Germain-des-Pres immediately after the war will also want to include in it some of his songs made famous by Juliette Greco, such as 'Fillette, fillette'. Another entire dimension can be added to his portrait by chose familiar with the most "routhful" and most autobiographical

123 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE of his novels, Odtle: his dealings wich che Surrealisc group led by uncollected pieces, can help co give us an incellectual portrait of Andre Breton in the 1920s (his tentative approach towards them - Queneau, the basis from which his creative work sprang. From the according to the account in the novel - followed by a fairly rapid wide variety of his interests and castes-all of them well defined and falling·out, their fundamental incompatibility and his subsequent only apparently divergent - emerges the outline of an underlying merciless caricacure of them), against che backdrop of an philosophy, a point of view and way of thinking which never opt imellecrual passion for mathematics unusual in a novelist and poet. for the easy way our. But someone else will immediately object that- leaving aside the Queneau is an outstanding twentieth-century example of a no~·els and the poems - Queneau's most characceristic books are writer who is both erudite and wise, always standing counter to the unique, stti generis constructions, like b:ercises in Style or Petite dominant trends and tendencies of the age and of French culture cosmogonie portable (Smill Portable Cosmogony) or Cent mille in particular (yet never so obstinate m his intellectual stance as milliards de poemes (011e Hundred Tho11sa11d Billion Poems). The to be led into making utterances which sooner or later turn out first consists of a short episode consiscing of a few sentences which to be excessively pessimistic or foolish - and in this he's rare, not is told ninety-nine times in ninety-nine different styles; the second to say unique), with an inexhaustible need to invenr and try out is a poem in alexandrines on the origins of the Earth, chemistry, possibilities (both in the practice of literacure and in theorecical the beginnings of life, the evolution of animals and of technology; speculation) wherever the pleasure in playing a game - a defining the third is a tool for the composition of sonnets consisting of ten aspect of what it means to be human - acts as a guarantee that the sonnets, all with the same rhymes, printed on pages cut into strips, exploration never strays too far from the right track. each containing one line, in such a way that each opening line can All these qualities make Queneau seem an eccentric figure in be followed by ten different second lines, and so on, to reach the France and in the world- but one day, perhaps quire soon, he will be number of 1,014 combinations. seen, because of them, as a master, one of the few who will survh·e Then there's another detail about him we should by no means from a century crowded with luminaries who have been poor, partial, overlook: his official job during the last twenty-five years of his inadequate, or have tried too hard. Speaking for myself, Queneau has life was as an encyclopedist (he direcced Gallimard's Encyclopedic already occupied such a role for some time, even though - perhaps de la Pleiade for its volumes on literature). Already our map of because I feel too dose to him -I have never fully been able to explain Queneau starts to look rather fragmented, and every new piece why. Nor, I fear, will I succeed now in writing this. But I should like of bio-bibliographical information added to it only makes it seem Queneau himself, through his own words, to succeed. even more complicated. The first literary battles Queneau was involved in were those fought Queneau published three volumes of essays and occasional writings to establish a new language called "neo-French", his attempt to during his lifetime: Batons, chiffres et lettres (Signs, Numbers and bridge the gap between the written language (with its rigid rules of Letters, 1950 and 1965), Bards (Edges, 1963), Le Voyage en Grece spelling and syntax, its marble-like monumentality, its resistance Uourney to Greece, 1973). These books, together with some other to adaptation and movement) and the spoken language (with

124 125 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE its inventiveness, flexibiltty, expressive facility). During a trip to Itis precisely in orderto challenge the vast chaos of a meaningless Greece in 1932, Queneau became convinced that the linguistic world that Queneau establishes the need for order in poetics and situation he encountered there - characterized, even within the in the inherent truth of language. As Marcin Esslin wrote in an written language itself, by an opposition between a classicizing essay on Queneau: "It is in poetry that we can give meaning and and a spoken Greek (kathareousa and demot1ki) - also applied measured order to the formless universe - and poetry depends on to French. Armed with this conviction {and with his studies of language, whose true music can only come from a return to its true the syntax of certain Nati\'e American languages, like Chinook), rhythms in the living vernacular. Queneau's rich and varied a:uvre Queneau foretold the advent of a demotic written French for which as poet and novelist is devoted to the destrucrion of ossified forms he and Celine would be the pioneers. and the dazzling of the eye by phonetic spelling and authentic Queneau's advocacy was not• based on any love of populist realism Chinook-type syntax. Even a casual glance at his books will show or vital ism (as he wrote in 1937, "I ha~·e, in any case, no respect for or numerous examples of this kind of alienation effect: 'spa' for particular interest in the popular, in mutability or in the 'life force', 'n 'est-ce pas', 'Polocilacru' for 'Paul aussi /'a cru', 'Moua chsui etc."): what impelled him was the desire to mock literary French dpari' for' Moi,je s11is de Paris',' Doukipudonktan' for' D '011 qu'il (which he certainly had no wish to see abolished; rather he wanted pue done tatrt' ... "l it preserved in all its purity as a language apart, like Latin) and the In its attempt to construct a new correspondence between the conviction that all the significant new developments in language spoken and the wrinen language, Queneau's "Neo-French" was and literature occur in transitions from the spoken to the written only one example of his more general need to insert what Esslin language. But there's another point to be made about these beliefs: calls "small areas of symmetry" into the universe as part of an the revolution in form which Queneau was predicting is part of a order which only invention (both literary and mathematical) can wider picture, one which is, from the outset, philosophical. create, given that the whole of reality is chaos. His first novel, published in 1933, was Le Chiendent {translated This purpose remained central to Queneau's work, even when into English in 1968 as The Bark Tree, although the title literally the focus of his interests began to turn away from the battle to means "couch grass"). Written after the defining experience of establish "Neo-French". In his fight for a linguistic revolution he reading Joyce's Ulysses, it was intended to be not only a linguistic found himself alone (Celine, for his part, was driven by demons of and compositional tour de force (based on a symmetrical and an entirely different nature), waiting for the outcome to pro\·e him numerological scheme and employing a catalogue of different right. But the exact opposite took place: the didn't genres), but also a definition of being and thinking - develop in the way Queneau thought it would. Spoken French itself nothing less than a commemarr in the form of a novel on Descartes's started to ossify, and the advent of television ensured the victory of Discourse on Method. The plot of the novel is about those things a cultivated norm over popular creativity (just as in Italy television which are thought but are not true, and which nevertheless affect has played a hugely significant role in unifying spoken Italian, made the reality of the world, a world which is in itself entirely without up, far more than in France, of a multiplicity of local dialects). meaning. Queneau realized this and was ready to admit-in an essay of 1970,

126 127 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE

'Errata corrige' - that his theories (which he had in any case long "was published in the fifth issue (March 1932) under the title 'La ceased to advocate) had been proved wrong. Critique des fondements de la dialectique hegelienne' ('Critique of But this aspect alone is far from summing up che intellectual the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic'). The article as a whole roles taken on by Queneau. From the very beginning his polemical was written by Georges Bataille; I confined myself co che part on bacdes were fought along a wide and complex front. After his Engels and the dialectics of mathematics." estrangement from Breton, he remained closest co the demenr of This text on the application of dialectics to the exact sciences the Surrealist diaspora led by Georges Bacaille and Michel Leiris, in Engels (which Queneau went on to include in his collections of although his involvement in their magazines and various initiatives essays, in the section on mathematics) is only one manifestation of was always somewhat marginal. what was a sustained interest in Hegelian philosophy on Queneau 's La Critiqtte Sociale (Social ~ritiqtte) was the first journal with part. The history of this involvement can best be reconstructed which Queneau, together with Bataille and leiris, collaborated on a by reading a late essay (from which the two previous quotations more or less regular basis during the years 1930-34. le was the organ have been taken) published in a special issue of La Critique of the Cercle Communisce Democratique led by Boris Souvarine (a dedicated to the memory of Georges Bataille (August- September dissident ahead of his time who was the first in the West co make 1966, nos. 195-96). Queneau recalls his friend in his 'Premieres clear what Stalinism would be like). "le should be remembered," confrontations avec Hegel' ('First Confrontations with Hegel'), Queneau wrote thirty years later, "that the group behind La Critique but he does not describe only Bataille's encounter with Hegel's Sociale, founded by Boris Souvarine, was the Cercle Communistc philosophy - a system of thought which was profoundly alien to Dcmocracique, made up of former militants who had been expelled the French philosophical tradition - but also, above all, his own. from the Party or were in conflict wich it; chis nucleus was joined by a If che consequence of Bacaille's reading of Hegel was in effect to handful of ex-Surrealists like Bataille, Michel Leiris, Jacques Baron reassure him he was not a Hegelian, for Queneau the opposite was and myself, who came from a completely different background." true, since his interest led to his meeting with Alexandre Kojeve and Queneau's contributions co La Critique Sociale consisted of to his embracing, up to a certain point, of a Hegelianism closely brief reviews, which were rarely of literary texts (although one of modelled on Kojeve's approach. these urges readers co discover the work of Raymond Roussel, "an I'll return to this a bit later, but for the moment it's enough co imagination which combines the delirium of the mathematician recall that over five years, from 1934 to 1939, Queneau attended with che reason of a poet"), but more frequently of scientific or Kojeve's lectures on the Phenome11ology of Spirit at the Ecole des academic works (such as those on Pavlov, or the work of Vernadsky Hautes Etudes. He lacer published an edition of them.J Bataille - the seed of Queneau's lacer concept of the circularity of the remembered: "How often Queneau and I would come our of the sciences - or the review of a book by an artillery officer on the small lecture room completely overwhelmed, transfixed ... I was history of horse armour, which Queneau praises as a revolutionary shattered, shredded, killed ten times over by Kojeve's lessons." contribution to historiographical mechodolog)'}. He also wrote, as (Qucneau, on rheconcrary, with a touch of malice, recalls his fellow joint author with Bataille, an article which, as he lacer described it, student as being not very attentive and on occasion nodding off.)

128 129 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES JN STYLE

Queneau's edition of Kojeve's university lectures is without doubt Nevertheless, Queneau's line of approach remains his own. It the most demanding academic project he ever undertook, but the can be summarized m a quotation from an article which appeared volume contains no contribution of his own. The late and obliquely in 1938: 04Another extremely false idea currently bandied around is autobiographical essay on Bataille remains an important piece of that inspiration, exploration of the subconscious and freedom are evidence for his im·olvcmcnt with Hegelian philosophy, when he equivalent. But this kind of inspiration, which consists in blindly played an acm·e role in some of the most ad\'anced debates raking following each and every impulse, is in reality a form of servitude. place in French philosophy at the nme. Traces of this involvement The classical author who writes a tragedy following a certain can be found in all his narrative fiction, which often seems to call om number of rules with which he's familiar is more free than the poet for a reading that unlocks the allusions to the theories and research who writes down whatever comes into his head and is the slave of which so preoccupied Paris's ifitellectual journals and institutions in other rules of which he is unaware." that period, transformed m the novels into pyrotechnic pantomimes Leaving aside the contemporary polemic against Surrealism, of grimaces and twirls. In particular it would be worth examining these words are an explicit statement of some of the aesthetic from chis point of view the trilogy of novels G11e11/e de Pierre (Stone and moral principles Queneau would stick to: a rejection of Face), Les Temps me/es (Mixed Tenses ), Saint-Glmglin, which "inspiration", of Romantic lyricism, of the cult of chance Queneau later rewrote and collected under the latter citle. and automatism (the idols of the Surrealists), and instead an appreciation of work which has been elaborated, finished and In the 1930s Queneau participated, with his characteristic reserve brought ro a conclusion (Queneau had earlier inveighed against and discretion, in the debates of the literary avant-garde and of the poetics of the incomplete, of the fragment and the sketch). specialized philosophical studies, but we have to wait until the years Not only that: the artist must have a full awareness of the immediately before the Second World War for an explicit dc:daration formal rules which govern his work, of its specific and universal of his own ideas, when his polemical role found an outlet in the meaning, its function and effect. Such theoretical "classicism" journal Volo11tes (Wishes), to which he was a contributor from the might astonish us when we think of Queneau's own writing, first issue in December 1937 to its last, the publication of which was with its improvisational brio and air of mockery - and yet this prevented by the German invasion of France in May 1940. article, called 'Qu'est-ce que l'art?' ('What Is Art?'), together The journal was edited by Georges Pelorson (Henry Miller was with its companion piece 'Le Plus et le moins' ('The Plus and also on the editorial board) and its existence was contemporaneous the Minus'), also published in 1938, constitute a declaration of with the activities of the College de Sociologie founded by Georges principle which (if we discount its tone of youthful enthusiasm Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Callois (with the participation, and urgent appeal, which subsequently disappeared from his later among others, of Kojevc, Klossowski, Walter Benjamin and Hans writing) Queneau never renounced. Mayer). The discussions which took place in the College form a It is even more disconcerting when, in the course of his argument backdrop to the articles appearing in Volo11tes, especially those by against the Surrealists, Queneau - of all people - attacks the Queneau.~ concept of humorousness. One of his first pieces for Volontes was

130 131 RAYMOND QUE.NE.AU EXERCISES IN STYLE an invective against humour, which was undoubtedly inspired by the mathematical is reversed in the transformation of mathematics certain preoccupations, even certain forms of social behaviour when it is applied to problems in the natural sciences. It is in ocher of the time (Queneau's target is the reductive and dt:fensive words a two-way connection, which can take the form of a circle, at assumptions which can underlie the exercise of humour) - yet the point where logic is proposed as a model of the way the human what really matters even in this piece is the pars co11strue11s, its intellect functions - if Piaget's dictum is right chat "the method of constructiveness: the praise of comedy in the fullest sense, as logic is the axiomatization of the process of thought itself". And characterized by Rabelais and jarq~ (The question of Breton's here Queneau adds: "But logic is also an arr, and axiomatization black humour is one which Queneau returned to after the Second a game. The ideal which scientists have constructed for themselves World War in order to judge how well it stood up after the from the beginning of this century has been the representation of experience of such horror-and again, later, in an additional note, science not as knowledge, bur as rule and method. There are notions he discussed Breton's own remark• s on the moral implications of (undefinable), axioms and instructions for use: in other words, a the subject.) system of conventions. Bue if so, isn't this a game, exaccly like chess Another recurrent target of Queneau's criticisms in his articles or bridge? Before going on to examine this aspect of science, we must for Volo11tes (and here we need to think of his later career as an stop and ask ourselves: is science a form of knowledge, docs it help us encyclopedisc) is the mass of information which pours down on to know? Given that we're talking (in this essay) about mathematics, contemporary people without ever becoming an integral pare of what exactly do we know in mathematics? Precisely nothing. There their personalities or identified with a fundamental need ("The is nothing to know. \Ve do not know points, numbers, groups, sets, equivalence between what one is and what one truly, really functions any more than we know electrons, life, human behaviour. knows ... the difference between what one is and what one believes We don't know the world of functions and differential equations one knows but which in actual fact is not known.") any more than we 'know' the Concrete Reality of Everrday Life on Thus we may say that the thrust of Queneau's polemics in the Earth. All we can know is a method which is accepted (consented 1930s was twofold: against the idea of poetry as inspiration and co) as true by the scientific community, a method which also has again~t "false knowledge". the advantage of linking up to techniques of manufacture. But chis method is also a game - or, more accurately, what's called a jeu The figure of Queneau as an encyclopedist, as a mathematician, as d'esprit. For chis reason, science taken as a whole, in its achie\·ed a cosmologist needs to be carefully described. Queneau's concept form, presents itself as both technique and game. Which is to say, of knowledge reflects a need for universality, but at the same time is no differently- not a jot more or less-from the way art-that other characterized by a sense of limitation, by a distrust of any kind of human activity-presents itself'. absolute philosophy. In the sketch of the circularity of the sciences In this quotation we have Queneau in a nutshell: his own practice he drew up in a piece which can be dated to the mid-to-late 1940s is always located in the two simultaneous dimensions of art (in which the natural sciences lead on to chemistry and physics, and (understood as technique) and play, against the background of his these in turn to mathematics and logic), the general tendency towards radical gnoseological pessimism. For Quencau, this is a paradigm RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE which can be adapted equally well both to science and literature, In his personal Parnassus, between Homer - "the father of and it is this which lies behind the nonchalance with which he lireracure and scepticism" - and Flaubert, who saw that scepticism moves from one to the other and which is capable of containing and science (and lirerarure) are rhe same, Queneau awards them both within a single discourse. Petronius, whom he regards as a conremporary and a brother, the Yet we should not overlook the fact that the 1938 essay we have foremost place of honour, followed by Rabelais, "who, despite the already quoted, 'Qu'est-ce que I'arc?', opened with a denunciation apparenr chaos of his work, knows where he's going and directs his of the bad influence of all "scientific" pretensions on literature gianrs towards the final Tri rich without getting crushed by them on - nor should we forget that Queneau was a honoured member the way", and finally, Boileau. It should not surprise us to find in chis ("Transcendent Satrap") in the association of Alfred Jarry's list the father of French classicism, whose Art poetiq11e Quencau disciples known as the College de 'Pataphysique which, in the regards as "one of the greatest masterpieces of French literature", spirit of their master, mocked scientific language by caricaturing it when we think on the one hand of Boileau's ideal of classical ('pataphysics being defined as the "science of imaginary solutions"). literature as awareness of rules and on the other of his thematic and In describing Queneau's position, one can echo his own words linguistic modernity. Boilcau's verse mock epic Le Lutrin "spells an about Flaubert, in connection with 8011vard et Pec11c'1et: "Flaubert end to the epic, completes Dou Quixote, inaugurates the French supports science to the precise extent that he is sceptical, reserved, novel, and heralds both Candide and Bouvard et Pecuchet".s methodical, prudent, human. He has a horror of the dogmatists, Among rhc moderns in Queneau's Parnassus we find Proust rhe mctaphysicians, the philosophers." and Joyce. Ever since his advocacy of the "elaborated" work, it was the "architecture" of the Recherche which above all interested In his introductory essay of 1947 to 8011vard et Pecue/Jet, the result Queneau, while he regarded Joyce as a "classical author" for whom of an extended consideration of this novel-cum-encyclopedia, "everything - the parts as well as the whole - is determined and Qucneau expresses sympathy for the book's couple of hapless nothing appears constricted". autodidacts on their quest for absolute knowledge, and analyses the oscilllations in Flaubert's. attitude towards both his book. and its Queneau was always quick to acknowledge his debt ro rhe classics two heroes. The peremptory tones of the young man have given way of literature, but at the same time he did not neglecr more obscure to the discretion and pragmatism which are typical of his maturity: and overlooked writers. The firsr scholarly work he attempted Queneau can identify with the late Flaubert and seems to find in his youth was a research into the so-called "fo11s litteraires" or mirrored in the novel his own odyssey through "false knowledge" "heteroclites" whom cstablishmenr culture regarded as crazy: and "inconclusion" in the search - guided by the methodological creators of philosophical sysrems unknown to any philosophical compass of his scepticism - for the circularity of knowledge (it is school, cosmologies lacking all sense of logic and poetic universes in this essay that Queneau states his view of the Odyssey and the which defeated all attempts at stylistic classification. Qucneau Iliad as two alternatives in literature: "Every great work is either an wanted to compile a selection of such texts to form what he called Iliad or an Odyssey"). an "encyclopedia of the inexact sciences", but no publisher was

134 135 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE interested and he ended up by incorporating the work he had done on edition of them? lt is significant that at the same time Queneau was this project in the novel Les Et1fa11ts d11 limon (The Childrett of Clay). attending these classes at the Ecole des Hautes Erudes he also went An example of this research - of its aims (and disappointments) co Henri-Charles Puech 's courses on Gnosticism and Mamchaeism - is Queneau's essay on the one "discovery" of his in this field (and, come co that, didn't Bataille, in this period when he and which he continued co promote: the precursor of science fiction, Queneau were friends, see Hegelianism as a new version of rhe C.I. Defontenay. Bue his enthusiasm never left him for this category dualistic cosmogonies expounded by the Gnostics?). of writers beyond the bounds of normal literary convention - Qucneau's poinr of view in all these experiences is that of figures such as the sixth-century grammarian Virgil of Toulouse an explorer of imaginary universes, keeping an amused - and or Jean-Baptiste Grainville, the eighteenth-century author of '"pataphysical" - eye open for the most paradoxical details, futuristic epics, or Edouard• Chanal, who was (unwittingly) a but always prepared to sec the glimmers of real poetry and real French version of Lewis Carroll. knowledge they can contain. The same spirit of approach underlies The utopian writer Charles Fourier, on whom Queneau wrote Queneau's researches into the category of "fo11s litteraires" and several pieces, also belonged to this category. One of Queneau's his interest - expressed through his attendance, as their disciple essays on him examines the bizarre calculations which form the and friend, of the lectures given by two luminaries of the Parisian "series" which underpin the social projects in Fourier's Universal academic establishment- in Gnosticism and Hegelian philosophy. Harmony. Queneau wants to prove that when Engels compared the "mathematical poem" of Fourier to Hegel's "dialectical poem" he It is not by chance that Queneau's interest in Hegel (like that of was thinking of the utopian theorist rather than his contemporary Bataille's) was awakened by the Philosophy of Nature (with, Joseph Fourier, a celebrated mathematician. But after amassing in Queneau's case, a particular interest in the theory's possible evidence in support of his theory, Queneau, in a highly characteristic mathematical formulations): in a word, what there is before history. gesture, concludes that perhaps he's on the wrong track and Engels And whereas Bataille was always more interested in the role of the was actually referring to Joseph: what matters to him is not gecting negative which can never be suppressed, Queneau was focused ochers to acceP.t his theory as right, but gening them to see that instead on an explicit point of arrival: the superseding of the the most paradoxical construction can be logical and coherent. historical, what comes after histor}: Just remarking on this can help And it is easy to understand how Engels (on whom Quencau also us to understand how different Hegel's image was in the eyes of his wrote) could also be seen as having the same kind of intelligence French commentators, in particular Kojeve, from the Idealist and as Fourier's, engaged in a kind of encyclopedic bricolage, boldly Marxist incarnations which havi: held sway in Italy for over a cenrur}~ inventing universal systems constructed with whatever cultural as well as from the official version adopted by that part of German material they had to hand. And, if chis is true, then what about philosophical culture which has always been more widely accepted Hegel himself? What attracts Queneau to Hegel so much that he's in Italy. For Italians, Hegel will always be the philosopher of the Spirit prepared to dedicate years of his life first to following Kojeve's of History, but Queneau, as Kojeve's pupil, searches the German's courses on the German philosopher and then to preparing an philosophy for the road which leads to the end of history and the

136 137 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE accomplishment of wisdom. This is the theme which Alexandre F/eurs blc11es. ls history that which ends with, as its arrival poinc, Kojeve himself found in Queneau's fiction when he advanced- in an the ex-con Cidrolin idling on a barge anchored on the Seine? Or is it essay in Critique in 1952 (No. 60)-a philosophical interpreration of Cidrolin's dream, a projection of his unconscious to fill up the empt}' the rhree novels Pierrot 111011 ami (Pierrot, i\i[y Friend), Loi" de R11eil space left by a past which has been cancelled from his memory? (Far from R11eil) and Le Dima,,che de la vie (The Sunday of Life). ln'Les Fle11rs ble11es, Qucneau makes fun of history by denying These three "romans de la sagesse", as Kojeve calls them, were It the auribute of becoming and instead reducing it to the nature writtendurmgtheSecond World War, in thedarkyearsof rheGerman of ordinary daily existence, whereas in Une histoire modele he had occupation of France (the extraordinary creative flowering which tried to turn it into algebra, to subject it co a system of axioms, took place in French culture during those years is a phenomenon to withdraw it from the realm of empiricism. These are opposing which has yet to be studied in dtpth). At a time like that, an exit from procedures which nevertheless correspond perfectlr to each other, history seemed the only point of arrival one could aim for, given chat even though they operate quite differently: as such, they represent "history is the science of human unhappiness", as Queneau defines the two poles between which Queneau's quest keeps moving. ir at the beginning of a curious little treatise dacing from the same period but only published much later, in 1966. Une histoire modele Oncloserinspection,wecanseethatQueneau'streatmentofhistory (A Model History) proposes a way of making history "scientific" corresponds exactly to the way he approaches language. During by applying to it an elementary mechanism of cause and effect. So his campaign for "Neo-French" he was incent on toppling from its long as it's a question of "mathematical models of simple worlds", pedestal the assumed immutability of literary language in order to Queneau's application succeeds (and indeed he doesn't get beyond bring it closer to the truth of actual speech; in his fluctuating but prehistory}, but as Ruggiero Romano observes in his incroduccion to persistent love affair with mathematics he repeatedly attempted to the Italian translation, "it is difficult to impose the grid on hisrorical apply arithmetical and algebraic solutions co language and literary phenomena relating to more complex societies" .6 composition. "To treat language as though it could be made But let's remind ourselves of Queneau's main aim: his wish to mathematical" was how another mathematician-poet, Jacques introduce some order, some logic into a disordered and illogical Roubaud, summed up the main concern impelling the Queneau universe. How can this be done without "exiting from history"? who proposes an analysis of language based on algebraic matrices, This is the theme of Queneau's penultimate novel, Les Flems ble11es who studies the mathematical structure of Arnaut Daniel'ssestinas (Blue Flowers, 1965), which opens with a heartfelt exclamarion and its potential applications, who promoted the activities of from one of che characters, who is a prisoner of history: "All this . It was in this very spirit that Queneau in 1960 co-founded history-said the Duked' Auge to the Duked'Auge-all this history the Ouvroir de Litterature Potencielle (Workshop of Potential for a few puns, for a handful of anachronisms: what a wretched Literature, shortened to Oulipo) - together with the friend come-down. Will we never find the way out?" who was closest to him in later life, the engaging and eccentric The two ways of seeing history's patterns-from the point of view savant Fran~ois Le Lionnais, a mathematician and chess player of the future or from that of the past - intersect and overlap in Les and an inexhaustible source of inventions - suspended between

138 139 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE the rational and the paradoxical, scientific experimentation and the Cem mille milliards de poemes from this angle we can see that playfulness, as in a game. the book is an attempt co 'literalize' mathematics. The principle of With Queneau's inventions too it is always difficult co draw a clear che book is chis: ten sonnets are written wich the same rhymes. The dividing line between the wish to experiment and the wish to play grammatical structure of each piece is such that, effordessly, each a game. There is chat same oscillation between two poles we have line of each of the ten 'base' sonnecs can be interchanged with any already remarked on: on oneside chepleasure in creating a given theme other line in the same position. In ocher words, for each line in the in unusual language, on che other che pleasure caken in applying a composition of a new sonnet, there are ten separate possibilities scrict formulacion to poetic composition (and in both approaches co choose from. As there are fourteen lines in a sonnet, there is there's a genial nod, typical of Queneau, towards Mallarme, which the potential to generate 1,014 sonnets, or one hundred thousand distinguishes him from all ths other twentieth-century devotees of billion texcs. [ ... ] If we try, by way of analogy, to do something che poet's cult, since it highlighcs the essential Mallarmean irony). similar with one particular sonnet - by Baudelaire, for example - So, tending towards the first pole, we have an exhilarating and replace one line with another (taken from the same sonnet or verse autobiography, Chene et chien (Oak and Dog), which elsewhere), paying heed to maintain the structure chat makes it a derives much of its effect from its metrical virtuosity, che Petite sonnec, we'll soon be confronted by various problems, especially cosmogonie portative - whose declared intention was co make the syntactic ones, against which Queneau has already guarded himself most objectionable of modern scientific neologisms part of poecic (this is the reason his 'structure' is 'free'). But - and chis is whac diction - and, of course, whar is probably his masterpiece, the the 'hundred thousand billion' demonstrate- in compensation for Exercises in Style, in which an anecdote of the utmost banality is the constrictions of semantic verisimilitude, che sonnet structure told in different styles, giving rise to a whole range of wildly diverse generates, virtually, from a single sonnet all possible sonnets literary texts. In the works oriented towards the second pole we through che substitutions which respect chat structure." find Queneau's love of using metre to generate poetic content and Structure is freedom: it produces the text and at the same time the his aspiration to become the inventor of a new poetic form - such possibility of all the other virtual texts which can replace ic. This as chac found in his lase book of poems in 1975, Morale eleme11taire is the innovative aspect of Queneau's concept of the "potential" (Elementary Morality) - and, once again inevitably, the infernal multiplicity implied in the idea of a literature which is born from che machine of che Cent milie milliards de poemes of 1961. But whether constrictions which it itself chooses (for itselO and applies (to icselO. he's moving in one direction or the other, the intention is to use an It has to be said thac in the mechod of Oulipo it is the quality of these abstract formal framework in order to generate a multiplicity of rules-cheir ingeniousness and elegance-which matters above all: if possible works which can proliferate and ramify. the quality of the results obtained-the works which are produced by Jacques Roubaud wrote about the latter work: "Queneau as these mechods - matches, so much the better, buc whatever the case a mathematical thinker especially favours the combinatorial, chey are merely examples of the potentiality which can be attained which is part of a very ancient tradition, almost as ancient as the only by passing chrough the narrow gate of the rules. The automatic discipline of mathematics itself in the Western world. If we analyse aspect of che way in which the rules of the game generate the work

140 141 RAYMOND QUENEAU EXERCISES IN STYLE can be contrasted to the Surrealist concept of automatism, m which chance or the workings of the unconscious are invoked, where the NOTES ..... creation of the work is entrusted co factors beyond our control which we have no choice but co obe}: In other words, it's a contrast between From 'ln1roduz1onc' :ind 'No1:1', tn R:i}mond Quenc:iu, Seg,,,, c1fre e lettere e constrictions which are voluntarily chosen and those which are .iltri s,1gg1 (Turin: Ein:iui:h, 1981), pp. v-xxrn. submitted to, imposed from outside (our specific linguistic, cultural, :?. In John Cruiksh:ink, Tht Nol'elist as l'l1ilosopl1er. St11di1ts i11 Fre11c'1 Fictio11 etc., environment). Each example of a text constructed according to 1935-bO (London: Oxford Uni,ersity Press, 1962), pp. 85-86. precisely defined rules opens up the "potential" multiplicity of all 3 Alexandre Kojcvc, 1"trod11ctio11.i l.i leclllre de Hegel. Lefons s1u la p/Jenomenol­ the texts which might be written according to those rules, as well as ogic de /'esprit professees de 1933.; /'Ecole des Hallles Et11dts, re11nits el p11bliees all the readings which might 11sult of those texts. p,1r Rnymo11d Q11cmta11 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). As Qucneau once put it, in one of the first statements of his 4 Sec the :rnchology edited by D. Hollier, Le College de Sociologie ( 1937 39) (Paris: poetics: "There are forms of the novel which impose on their G:illim:ird, 1979). subject matter all the virtues of Numbers", thus giving rise to "a 5 Les Ecrwams cdebres (Famous \t'riters), ,·ol. 2. Before he took on the d1recuon structure which bestows on these works the last reflections of the of the Encrclopedie de la Plci:ide for the Gallim:ird publishing house:, Quenc:iu universal light or che final echoes of the Harmony of the Worlds". \\:is the: chief editor, for the publisher M:izcnod, of a l:irge three-volume work, Note they are "the last reflections": in Queneau's work the Les Ecrivaius celebres, and also compiled, as :in appendix 10 the main text, an H:umony of the Worlds is seen from far off, from a remote 'Ess:ii Jc repertoire hisroriquc dc:s ccri,·ains cclebrcs' ('Hiscoric:il Review of fa. distance, as a drinker with his elbows propped on the metal bar mous Writers') The chapters on mdi\'idual authors were gi\·en to spc:cialiscs or counter staring into his glass of Pernod might see it. The "virtues wdl-knO\\ n writers. The list of :iuthors Qucne:iu chose 10 wrice on is significant: of Numbers" seem to be most evident when these arc glimpsed Petronius, Boile:iu, Gc:nrude Stein. Quene:iu also wrote: the: introduction 10 the through the dense corporal existence of living persons, with their fin:il section of the book on some in1por1ant twcntiech-cemur)' writers, in which unpredictable moods, the phenomena thc:y twistedly give rise he talks of Hcnr~ James, Gide, Prouse, Jorce, Kafk:i, Gere rude Stein. Quene:iu to, their zigzagging logic, in that tragic. confrontation between did not include :iny of his comribucions w chc: work in his l:11er collections of the smallness of each individual mortal and the vastness of the css:iys. Another publishing \'Cnture which was highly WQucnc:iucsqucft was chc: universe, which can only be expressed with a chuckle or a sardonic volume he edited enci!led Pour 1111e bibliotbeq11e idealt {for an Ide.ii Ubrary, grin or a cackle or shrieks of mirth - and, in the best of cases, with Paris: G:illim:ird, 1965), in which le:iding French \Hitcrs :ind scholars were asked hearty, side-shaking, Homeric laughter. .. to list che books they would include in their ideal libraries. 6 R:i)'mond Qucneau, U11.i storr.t mode/lo, imroduccion b)· Ruggero Romano - ltalo Calvino ,Milan: F:ibbn, I 973).

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interest in vernacular English, which goes some way towards explaining her suitability as his translator. The Themersons first met Queneau in Paris in che early 1950s, probably in 'pacaphysical circles. They first corresponded in 1954 Queneau and Gaberbocchus Press about the publication of two Queneau short stories ('The Trojan Horse' and 'Ac the Edge of the Forest') in No. 2 of theGaberbocchus Black Series, a dozen small paperback pamphlets that ran through The collaborations between Raymond Queneau as writer, Stefan the 1950s. These were translated by Barbara Wright, who had Themerson as publisher and Barbara Wright as translator might joined the Press in 1949, and cut her teeth as a translator on the first almost have been expected r.o happen. English edition of Jarr}''s Ubu Roi (1951 ). The mission behind Queneau's passionate interest in the They remained in imermictem contact, and then, in 1958, they spoken (as opposed to written) French language was his corresponded about an English edition of fa:ercices de Style. The belief that "modern written French must free itself from the possibiliry had cropped up in conversation between Queneau conventions which still hem it in (conventions of style, spelling and Wright, who in the course of a year moved from thinking ir and vocabulary), and then it will soar like a butterfly away from untranslatable to finding herself so enjoyably steeped in the challenge the silk cocoon spun by the grammarians of the sixteenth century chat she couldn't stop. The final character of the English edition, in and the poets of the seventeenth century" (Batons, Chiffres et which some of the original ninety-nine chapters were reinterpreted, Lettres, 1950). or reinvented, was the outcome of many exchanges- face·to-face, by One year before Queneau wrote that, Themerson had first telephone or by letter-between writer and translator. unveiled his "Semantic Poetry" in the novel Bayamtts (1949), driven Queneau was as delighted with the translation, particularly its by an almost iden~ical ambition for language to soar away from humour, as with the appearance of the book, which was another its conventional constraints, away from a poetry that "arranged inspired collaboration between the Themersons: Franciszka, who verses like bunche~ of flowers". "I wanted to strip words of their designed the book, and Stefan, who made a photo-collage portrait associations, to cut their links with the past," he wrote lacer. "I of the author for the cover and invented an alphabet of drawn, wanted co disinfect words, scrub chem right down to the very anthropomorphic initials for the title of each chapter. These merit bone of their dictionary definitions. That was how - somewhat the traditional description of "'illuminations" in the degree to ferociously and sardonically - I invented Semantic Poetry. It was wh ich their simple hilarity spotlights the eccentric brilliance of meant co be funny. Both serious & funny." (1970). Queneau's texts. The marriage of levity and graviry linked hands easily with Queneau's autograph idiom, and it was a manner which rapidly - Nick Wadley became second nature for Barbara Wright. Queneau's interest in the spoken language found echoes in Wright's own compulsive

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