As Joyce's centenary ends, Desmond O'Neill looks at French polymath Raymond Queneau, and his entertaining 'Ulysses' homage.
James Joyce famously boasted that if Dublin was destroyed it could be reconstructed from the pages of Ulysses. While the accuracy of this claim is contested, it is less well known that a first challenge was launched within a decade of his death. In 1947, the great French polymath and writer, Raymond Queneau, tested this hypothesis in his novel, On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes. This racy and entertaining romp is set in an imaginary sub-post office on the corner of Sackville Street and Eden Quay during the 1916 Easter Rising.
The liberal use of street names from Ulysses gives a reasonable sense of topography and Joyce devotees will note that the names of the protagonists render further homage to Queneau's favourite novelist. Larry O'Rourke, Corny Kelleher and Caffrey are all straight from Ulysses, and the Republican war cry is "Finnegans Wake!" The heroine/anti-heroine, Gerty Girdle, is a clear allusion to Gerty McDowell, who tempts Leopold Bloom during the Nausicaa episode. Queneau pokes his usual puckish fun by having the illiterate Caffrey proclaim: "Well, well . . . we're certainly learning some new words today. Anyone can see we are in the land of James Joyce" - a delightful anachronism at several levels! To add to the translocation, Queneau wrote the book under a pseudonym, pretending that it had been translated from Irish.
Yet Queneau never set foot in Ireland. However, he had an excellent grasp of English and was enormously taken by Ulysses in its French translation (1929). This not only kindled his interest in Ireland but also influenced and supported him in the development of his own unique style. He translated Maurice O'Sullivan's Twenty Years A-Growing (Vingt Ans de Jeunesse) within a year of its appearance in English. His first novel, Le Chiendent (Witch Grass), is his most obvious homage to Ulysses in the way he uses different narrative modes throughout the novel. Queneau's love of mathematics is not immediately apparent but features already. Prior to writing the novel, he settled on a structure of 13 chapters, each with seven sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers of which he was particularly fond, seven and 13.
It is almost impossible to classify his works under any one rubric: poetry, novels, encyclopaedias all mixed and mingled, for Queneau saw similarities between these various forms of literature. All are entertaining - indeed, Roland Barthes thought that their ability to make readers laugh out loud distracted from their deep underlying worth. John Updike is a great admirer of Queneau and likens his works to Mozart operas in their ability to match high purpose with appealing and attractive presentation and structures.
Anyone who enjoys Flann O'Brien could not help but enjoy the humour and originality of Queneau. He is still most widely known for his Zazie dans le Métro, made shortly after publication into a film by Louis Malle. However, underlying the humour is an extraordinary level of complexity and subtlety of thought that is exceptionally lightly worn. For example, the hero of Le Chiendent is the literal embodiment of the Cartesian dictum, "I think, therefore I am". He starts out in the novel as a shadow, but as he begins to think for himself he progresses to a two-dimensional and finally fully formed human shape.
Born in Le Havre, Queneau was an only child and, while growing up, was a devotee of popular film and comic books. As one of the truly encyclopaedic minds of the 20th century, it comes as little surprise to find that he was also fascinated by encyclopaedias, and worked his way through the Petite Larousse as a child. This combination of empathy with ordinary life combined with formidable learning is a hallmark of all of his work. After a not particularly happy childhood, he studied philosophy in Paris, worked in England and did his military service in France and Morocco. For a few years he was a member of the Surrealist group led by André Breton, but he eventually parted company with it over what he perceived to be a lack of rigour in its methods.
A spell in Greece was revelatory for him. He was particularly struck by the difference between the formal but dead classical Greek and the vibrant and sometimes vulgar modern Greek. Up to that point, French literature was largely written in a formal language quite unlike that spoken by the man in the street. Queneau proposed not a reform but the creation of a third language, a French that reflected everyday speech and which also allowed for sophistication and the application of new structures. All of his books and poetry reflect this interest, none more clearly than Exercises de Style, a simple tale retold 99 times. The modes include English written phonetically in French (shades of Myles!); geometrical; alexandrines; and permutations by groups of two, three, four and five letters. This work has been translated into many languages, by Umberto Eco among others.
Employed from 1938 by the publisher, Gallimard, as a reader of English books (he turned down a translation of Beckett's Murphy), he became its secretary-general, as well as editor of the Encyclopédia of the Pléiade, an ambitious scholarly edition of classical and scientific authors.
In 1951, Queneau joined the College de Pataphysics, a virtual academy of the "science of imaginary solutions", based on the example of writer Alfred Jarry. Marxist by nature (in the sense of Groucho rather than Karl), this was one of the great anarchist groups of literature, incuding among its members Ionesco, Prévert, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The college spawned the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), founded by Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais.
The aim of OuLiPo was to inspire new works of literature through man-made constraints, mathematical or otherwise, in the same way as the strict rules of the sonnet have given rise to some rather well-loved poetry. However, the rules were to be thought out afresh each time. One of the most spectacular early products of OuLiPo was Queneau's own 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. The core of this work is a collection of 10 sonnets, each of 14 lines with the same rhyme scheme, that are printed on big pages cut into strips. Any one line of any of the sonnets can be exchanged for any similarly numbered one of any of the others. For those who try, almost all combinations make some sort of sense.
Other members of the group included Italo Calvino and, most famously, Georges Perec, whose La Disparition was written entirely without the most common letter of the alphabet, E.
Queneau was one of the most prodigiously gifted and influential French writers and appears everywhere in French cultural life. His poem, Si tu t'imagines, was a major hit when sung by Juliette Greco; he worked with Resnais and Bunuel on films; and also held exhibitions of his paintings. Without much exaggeration, Le Monde called him "the most universal mind of our time".
Finding Queneau's books in English translation, other than Zazie dans le Métro (Penguin), requires a helpful bookseller or access to Internet shopping, as most are published in the US. The New York Review of Books has published We Are Always Too Good With Women and Witch Grass (Le Chiendent) as part of its own imprint in 2003. A word of caution, however - Barbara Wright, who has excelled in the translation of many of Queneau's books, has something of a tin ear for Irish dialogue.
All Queneau's work can be highly recommended. Apart from those already mentioned, The Blue Flowers is a brilliant fantasy jumping in 175-year intervals between the Duke of Auge in the 13th century and Cidrolin, living on a houseboat in contemporary Paris. Half of the characters in The Flight of Icarus, his final novel, are belle époque authors and the other half are their creations. For completists, Vingt Ans de Jeunesse can be found in the excellent bookshop at the Blasket Island Interpretative Centre in Dunquin.
