This passage contains all of Queneau: his practice is to place himself constantly on the two contemporary dimensions of art (as technique) and play, against the backdrop of his radical epistemological pessimism. This is a paradigm which as far as he is concerned is equally suited to science and literature: hence the ease he displays in moving from one field to the other, and in containing them both in a single discourse.
We must not forget, however, that the 1938 article, cited above, ‘What is Art?’ opened with a denunciation of the bad influence on literature of any ‘scientific’ pretension; nor that Queneau had a place of honour (‘Transcendent Satrap’) in the ‘Collège de Pataphysique’, the group formed by Alfred Jarry’s disciples, which in the spirit of that master, makes fun of scientific language turning it into caricature. (‘Pataphysics’ is defined as the ‘science of imaginary solutions’.) In short we could say of Queneau what he himself said of Flaubert, talking of Bouvard et Pécuchet: ‘Flaubert is for science only insofar as it is sceptical, restrained, methodical, prudent, human. He hates the dogmatists, the metaphysicists, the philosophers.’
In his prefatory essay to Bouvard et Pécuchet (1947), the result of years of study of this encyclopedic novel, Queneau expresses his sympathy for the two pathetic autodidacts, those researchers of the absolute in knowledge, and highlights Flaubert’s shifts in attitude towards his book and its heroes. Without the peremptoriness of his youthful outbursts, but with that tone of discretion and pragmatism which would be characteristic of his maturity, Queneau identifies with the later Flaubert and seems to recognise in this book his own odyssey across ‘false knowledge’ and ‘not concluding’, in his search for the circularity of wisdom, guided by the methodological compass of his scepticism. (It is here that Queneau enunciates his idea of The Odyssey and The Bad as the two alternatives in literature: ‘every great work of literature is either an Iliad or an Odyssey.’)
Between Homer, ‘the father of all literature and all scepticism’, and Flaubert who understood that scepticism and science are identical, Queneau accords positions of honour, first of all to Petronius, whom he considers as a contemporary and brother, then to Rabelais, ‘who in spite of the chaotic appearance of his work, knows where he is going and directs his giants towards their final Trine without being crushed by it’, and finally to Boileau. That the father of French classicism should figure in this list, that his Art poétique should be considered by Queneau ‘one of the greatest masterpieces in French literature’, should not surprise us, if we think on the one hand of classical literature’s ideal as awareness of the rules to follow, and on the other of his thematic and linguistic modernity. Boileau’s Le Lutrin ‘brings the epic to an end, completes Don Quixote, ushers in the novel in French and is a forerunner both of Candide and Bouvard et Pécuchet’.5
Amongst the moderns, in Queneau’s Parnassus, we find Proust and Joyce. In the former it is the ‘architecture’ of La Recherche which interests him most of all, from the time when he was campaigning for the ‘well constructed work’ (see Volontés, 12 (1938)). The latter is seen as a ‘classical author’ in whom ‘everything is determined, both the overall structure and the episodes, though nothing shows any sign of constraint’.
Although always ready to recognise his debt towards the classics, Queneau certainly did not stint in his interest in obscure and neglected authors. The very first academic work which he embarked on in his youth had been a piece of research on ‘fous littéraires’ (literary madmen), ‘heterodox’ authors, those considered mad by official culture: inventors of philosophical systems belonging to no school at all, of models of the universe devoid of any logic and of poetic universes lying outside any stylistic classification. Through a selection of such texts Queneau wanted to put together an Encyclopedia of Inexact Sciences; but no publisher would consider the project and the author ended up using the material in his novel Les Enfants du limon (The Children of Clay).
On the aims (and disappointments) of this research, one should look at what Queneau wrote when introducing his only ‘discovery’ in this field, a discovery upheld by him subsequently as well: the precursor of science-fiction, De Fontenai. But his enthusiasm for the ‘heterodox’ has always stayed with him, whether it is the sixth-century grammarian Virgil of Toulouse, the eighteenth-century author of futuristic epics J.-B. Grainville, or Edouard Chanal, an unwitting French precursor of Lewis Carroll.
From the same family, certainly, is the utopian writer Charles Fourier, in whom Queneau took an interest on several occasions. One of these essays analyses the bizarre calculations of his ‘series’ which are the basis of the social projects in Fourier’s Harmony. Queneau’s intention here was to prove that Engels, when he put Fourier’s ‘mathematical epic’ on the same level as Hegel’s ‘dialectical epic’, was thinking of the Utopian Charles not of his contemporary Joseph Fourier, the famous mathematician. After piling up proof after proof in support of his thesis, he concludes that perhaps his thesis does not stand up after all and that Engels really was talking about Joseph. This is a typical Queneau gesture: he is not so much interested in the triumph of his thesis, as in recognising a logic and consistency even in the most paradoxical argument. And we then find ourselves naturally thinking that Engels (on whom he wrote another essay) was also seen by Queneau as a genius of the same type as Fourier: an encyclopedic bricoleur or doodler, a foolhardy inventor of universal systems which he constructs with all the cultural materials he has at his disposal. And what about Hegel then? What attracts Queneau to Hegel to the point where he is prepared to spend years attending and then editing Kojève’s lectures? What is significant is that in the same years Queneau also followed H. C. Puech’s courses on Gnosticism and Manicheism at the École des Hautes Etudes. (And did Bataille, anyway, during the period of his friendship with Queneau, not perhaps see Hegelianism as a new version of the dualistic cosmogonies of the Gnostics?)
In all these experiences Queneau’s attitude is that of the explorer of imaginary universes, carefully picking up their most paradoxical details with the amused eye of the Pataphysicist, but without cutting himself off from the possibility of noticing amongst all this a glimmer of genuine poetry or genuine knowledge. It is with this same spirit, then, that he set out to discover ‘literary madmen’ and to immerse himself in Gnosticism and Hegelian philosophy acting as both friend and disciple of two illustrious masters of Parisian academic culture.
It is no accident that the starting point for Queneau’s (as well as Bataille’s) interest in Hegel was his Philosophy of Nature (Queneau showing a particular interest in possible mathematical formulations of it); in short, in what comes before history. And if what Bataille was interested in was always the irrepressible role of the negative, Queneau would aim decisively at an openly declared point of arrival: the overcoming of history, what happens after history. This is already enough to remind us how far removed the image of Hegel is according to his French commentators, and Kojève in particular, from the image of Hegel that has circulated in Italy for over a century now, whether in its idealist or Marxist incarnations, and also from the image endorsed by that side of German culture which has spread and continues to circulate most widely in Italy. If for Italians Hegel will always remain the philosopher of the spirit of history, what Queneau the pupil of Kojève seeks in him is the road that leads to the end of history, and to the arrival at wisdom. This is the motif that André Kojève himself will underline in Queneau’s fiction, suggesting a philosophical reading of three of his novels: Pierrot mon ami (Pierrot), Loin de Rueil (The Skin of Dreams), and Le Dimanche de la vie (The Sunday of Life) (in Critique, 60 (May 1952)).
The three ‘wisdom novels’ were written during the Second World War, in the grim years of the German Occupation of France. (The fact that those years, which were lived through as though they were a parenthesis, were also years of extraordinary creative activity for French culture, is a phenomenon which does not seem to have received the attention it deserves.) In a period like that the emerg
ence from history appears to be the only point of arrival one can have, since ‘history is the science of man’s unhappiness’. This is the definition given by Queneau at the start of a curious little treatise also written at that time (but only published in 1966): line Histoire modèle (A Model History). This was a proposal to make history ‘scientific’, by applying to it an elementary mechanism of causes and effects. As long as we are dealing with ‘mathematical models of simple worlds’ the attempt can be said to be successful; but ‘it is difficult to make historical phenomena referring to more complex societies fit into that grid’, as Ruggiero Romano points out in his introduction to the Italian edition.6
Let us go back to Queneau’s principal objective, that of introducing a bit of order and logic into a universe which is totally devoid of those qualities. How can one succeed in doing this except by ‘emerging from history’? This would be the theme of the second last novel published by Queneau: Les Fleurs bleues (The Blue Flowers). It opens with the heartfelt exclamation uttered by a character who is a prisoner of history: ‘ “All this fusstory,” said the Duke of Auge, “all this fusstory for a few puns and anachronisms: hardly worth it at all. Can we never find a way out?” ’
The two ways of looking at history’s pattern, from the perspective of the future or the past, meet and overlay each other in The Blue Flowers: is history that which has as its point of arrival Cidrolin, an ex-convict who lazes about on a barge moored on the Seine? or is it one of Cidrolin’s dreams, a projection of his unconscious in order to fill a past which has been suppressed from his memory?
In The Blue Flowers Queneau makes fun of history, denying its progress and reducing it to the substance of daily existence; in A Model History he had tried to turn it into algebra, to make it submit to a system of axioms, to remove it from empirical reality. We could say that these are two processes which are antithetical but which are perfectly complementary, though of a different mathematical sign, and as such represent the two poles between which Queneau’s researches move.
On closer examination, the operations which Queneau carries out on history correspond exactly to those he effects on language: in his battle for ‘le néo-français’ he debunks the literary language’s claims to immutability in order to bring it closer to the truth of the spoken language; in his (itinerant but always faithful) love affair with mathematics he repeatedly tends to experiment with arithmetical and algebraic approaches to language and literary creativity. ȘTo deal with language as though it were reducible to mathematical formulae’ was how another mathematical poet, Jacques Roubaud,7 defined the principal preoccupation of the man who proposed an analysis of language through algebraic matrices,8 who studied the mathematical structure of the sestina in Arnaut Daniel and its possible developments,9 and who promoted the activities of the ‘Oulipo’. In tact it was in this spirit that he became co-founder in 1960 of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (abbreviation: ‘Oulipo’), along with the man who would be his closest friend in his final years, the mathematician and chess expert François Le Lionnais, a delightful personality, a wise eccentric of endless inventions which were always half-way between rationality and paradox, between experiment and play.
Similarly with Queneau’s inventions it has always been difficult to draw the line between serious experiment and play. We can make out the two poles I mentioned earlier: on the one hand the run of giving an unusual linguistic treatment to a given theme, on the other the run of a rigorous formalisation applied to poetic invention. (Both trends are a nod in the direction of Mallarmé that is typical of Queneau and which stands out from all the tributes paid to that master in the course of the century, because it preserves his basically ironic essence.)
In that first trend we find: a versified autobiography (Chêne et chien), in which it is above all the metrical virtuosity that provides the most exhilarating effects; Petite Cosmogonie portative, whose declared aim is to put the most rebarbative scientific neologisms into the idiom of poetic verse; and of course the work which is probably his masterpiece, precisely because of the total simplicity of its programme, Exercices de style, where a totally banal anecdote reported in different styles produces highly diverse literary texts. Instances of the other trend are: his love for metrical forms as generators of poetic content, his ambition to be the inventor of a new poetic structure (like the one put forward in his final book of verse, Morale élémentaire, 1975), as well as, of course, the infernal machine of the Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961). In either trend, in short, the objective is the multiplication or ramification or proliferation of possible works starting out from an abstract formulation.
Jacques Roubaud writes: ’For Queneau the producer of mathematical ideas, his favourite field is that of combinatory systems: combinatory systems come from a very ancient tradition, almost as ancient as Western mathematics. The analysis of Cent mille milliards de poèmes from this perspective will allow us to place this book in the context of the shift from pure mathematics to mathematics as literature. Let us remind ourselves of its principle: he writes ten sonnets, each with the same rhymes. The grammatical structure of each is such that, without forcing it, each line in each “base” sonnet is exchangeable with every other line in the same position in each sonnet. There will thus be, for each line of any new sonnet, ten possible independent choices. Since there are fourteen lines in a sonnet, there will be virtually 1014 sonnets, in other words one hundred million million poems.
‘ … Let us try, by analogy, to do something similar with one single Baudelaire sonnet: for instance by replacing one line with another (either from the same sonnet or a different one), respecting what the sonnet “does” (its structure). We will come up against difficulties primarily of a syntactic nature, against which Queneau had immuned himself in advance (and it is for that reason that his structure is “free”). But, and this is what the Cent mille milliards teach us, against the constraints of semantic probability, the sonnet structure creates, virtually, from one sonnet all sonnets that are possible through substitutions which respect the structure.’
Structure is freedom, it produces the text and at the same time the possibility of all virtual texts that can replace it. This is the novelty that resides in the idea of ‘potential’ multiplicity, implicit in his promotion of a literature that develops from the constraints which literature itself selects and imposes on itself. It has to be said that in the ‘Oulipo’ method it is the quality of these rules, their ingenuity and elegance that counts in the first place; if the results, the works obtained in this way, are immediately of equal quality, ingenuity and elegance, so much the better, but whatever the outcome, the resultant work is only one example of the potential which can be achieved only by going through the narrow gateway of these rules. This automatic mechanism through which the text is generated from the rules of the game, is the opposite of the surrealist automatic mechanism which appeals to chance or the unconscious, in other words entrusts the text to influences over which there is no control, and which we can only passively obey. Every example of a text constructed according to precise rules opens up the ‘potential’ multiplicity of all the texts which can be virtually written according to these rules, and of all the virtual readings possible of such texts.
As Queneau had already declared in one of his first formulations of his poetics: ‘There are forms of the novel which impose on its subject matter all the virtues of Number/ by developing ’a structure which transmits to such works the last glimmers of universal light or the last echoes of the Harmony of the World/
‘Last glimmers’, notice: the Harmony of the World appears in Queneau’s oeuvre from a remote distance, in the same way as it can be glimpsed by the drinkers who stare at their glass of pernod with their elbows on the zinc counter. The ‘virtues of Number’ seem to impose their own brightness on them especially when they manage to appear transparently through the dense corporality of living people, with their unpredictable moods, with the phenomena emitted by their twisted mouths, with thei
r zigzag logic, in that tragic meeting of the individual’s dimensions with those of the universe, which can only be expressed through giggles or sneers or jeers or bursts of convulsive laughter, and at best through full-throated hilarity, people dying with laughter, laughter on a Homeric scale …
[1981]
Notes
1 In John Cruikshank (ed.), The Novelist as Philosopher: Studies in French Fiction 1935-60 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 79-101.