Raymond Queneau

Career

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.

In 1950, Juliette Gréco recorded "Si tu t'imagines", a song by Joseph Kosma with lyrics by Queneau.

During this time, Queneau also acted as a translator, notably for Amos Tutuola's The 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 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. In 1960 the film adaptation directed by Louis Malle was released during the Nouvelle Vague movement. Zazie explores colloquial language as opposed to "standard" written French. The first word of the book, the alarmingly long "Doukipudonktan" is a playful phonetic transcription of "D'où qu'il pue / qu'ils puent donc tant?" – "Why does it / does he / do they stink so much?"

Before he founded 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 calculated. This was an issue during the writing of A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, also known as 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. Queneau wrote 140 lines in 10 individual sonnets that could all be taken apart and rearranged in any order. Queneau calculated that anyone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. While Queneau was completing this work, he asked mathematician François Le Lionnais for help with issues he was having, and their conversation led to a role of mathematics in literature, which led to the creation of the Oulipo. His work encouraged Jacques Lacan to pursue his pioneering work on game theory and the use of mathematics in psychoanalysis.

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. Queneau claimed this final work would prove "a hidden master of the automaton." Pressed by GF, his interlocutor, Queneau confided that the text "could never appear, but had to hide to glorify that without agency."

One of Queneau's most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man's seeing the same stranger twice in one day. It tells that short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place. An excerpt from this piece was published in 0 to 9 magazine, a 1960s publication which experimented with language and meaning-making.

Queneau's works are published by Gallimard in the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Queneau and Surrealists

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

Michel Leiris describes, in Brisées, 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 a few years younger and felt less accomplished than the other men. 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 Surrealist support of the USSR in 1926. He remained on cordial terms with André Breton, although he also 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 her sister and Queneau.

By 1930, Queneau separated himself significantly from Breton and the Surrealists. Éluard, Aragon and Breton had joined the French Communist party in 1927; Queneau did not, and instead 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.

Queneau also joined the Democratic Communist Circle founded by Boris Souvarine and took up numerous left-wing and anti-fascist causes. He defended the Popular Front in France and the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Under the Nazi occupation of France, he published in many left-wing journals associated with the Resistance. After World War II, Queneau continued to lend his support left-wing manifestos and petitions, and condemned McCarthyism and anti-communist persecution in Greece.

He wrote more scientific than literary reviews: on Pavlov, 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 writing passages on Engels and a mathematical dialectic for Bataille's article, "A critique of the foundations of Hegelian dialectic."

Legacy and honors

• 1951, elected to the Académie Goncourt
• 1952, elected to the Académie de l'humour
• 1955–57, invited to jury of the Cannes Film Festival

In other art

• Zazie dans le métro (1960), released as film adaptation
• 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).
• A typographic interpretation of the German version of Exercices de Style, "Stilübungen – visuelle Interpretationen" Archived 12 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine by the graphic designer Marcus Kraft, was published in 2006.
• Spanish-Canadian composer José Evangelista wrote the song cycle "Exercises de style" setting texts from Queneau's titular book in 1997.