Queneau et les formes intranquilles de la modernité. 1917–1938: lectures du récit anglo-saxon des xix e–xx esiècles (review)

Queneau executed a kind of Lobster Quadrille with the English language, ‘la langue de Chexpire’. He visited England and the USA once each, and came at our lingo mainly via Hollywood dialogue and anglophone literature. In addition, he translated a goodly number of English and American texts. As for crossbreeding, apart from Iris Murdoch (Under the Net), I can think of little impact by Queneau on Anglo-Saxon literature. The other way round: he read very widely in this corpus, sometimes professionally, when he became a lecteur d’anglais at Gallimard in 1938 (hence the cut-off point in the subtitle), and sometimes for his own private ends. For instance, he read Conrad and Henry James assiduously, if mainly for questions of technique: varying viewpoints, and highly conscious plotting. With Lewis Carroll, Queneau’s renowned concertina-words (the ‘DOUKIPUDONKTAN’ of Zazie dans le Métro) are close kin to the reverend’s portmanteaux, such as ‘frumious’. James Joyce was probably the greatest influence or inspiration for Queneau, especially in his zestful Les Œuvres complètes de Sally Mara. Queneau stropped his brain on Joycean pastiche, which he admitted was plentifully labour-intensive. Lisa Bergheaud’s patient and comprehensive trawl (often a real dragnet) through this whole question involves her, ineluctably, in huge name-dropping. She is a very attentive reader. Yet I am not sure that she ever quite escapes the constricting idea that comparing one writer with another or several mainly means locating similarities between them. Surely any writer worth his or her salt is pleased to find other writers different from him-/herself. How, otherwise, would any learning take place? The more Bergheaud likens Queneau to other modernists, the more idiosyncratic, sui generis, he appears. Her refrain is that literary modernism was in search of a new realism (fragmented, unreliable) that would combat the (alleged) referential illusion of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel. She stresses the lability of Queneau’s protagonists. Her magic words are: anxiety, unstable, and cognates. While finding such aesthetic angst operating in Queneau’s fiction, she remains fully alert to the linguistic jubilation equally active there. All characters are obviously made of words, but Queneau’s supremely so. Language (and this is one of its glories) can never be really abstract. If the physical referent in characterization is skimped, we end up not with abstraction, but with a dynamically verbal universe. Barthes once observed that the satire in Zazie scratches but does not lacerate. For her part, Bergheaud declares (p. 432): ‘Nous avons toujours dit inquiétude, menace, déstabilisation, et non destruction, anéantissement.’ So many academic theorists want to feel, like Hemingway’s lucky heroine, the ground move beneath them. Her (doctoral) oversupply of examples tempts the reader to mutter that the lady doth protest too much. At the same time, she notes accurately the crucial role of repetition in Queneau’s prose — that trope that he once defined as one of the most fragrant flowers of rhetoric. In all, she is highly alert to the experimentalist, the ludician, in Queneau, and to the rigorous structure that holds this sometime mathematician together. Throughout, Bergheaud reveals something of the bulimic reading of her chosen author, and shares his readiness to wriggle out of cultural corsets.