-
Introduction
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 INTRODUCTION although it’s been pure agony ever since, this book began in a moment of bliss. As part of my research for an earlier study, I had gone to the Centre de documentation Raymond Queneau in Verviers, Belgium, to look through Queneau’s manuscripts; I didn’t quite know what I was hoping to find in those pages, but I fully expected to find something, some bouquet of citations that would prove useful for my project, and so I did. There is much in Queneau ’s manuscripts that can be put to constructive interpretive use—variants, outlines, and notes from the author to himself, for instance, very convenient for supporting or enlivening one’s interpretations—but my moment of bliss had little to do with such scholarly aims. Rather, what filled me with joy were the hours I spent lost in a far less productive pursuit, a jubilant immersion in manuscript passages not really related to what I was looking for, passages that depart in some significant way from the substance of a given novel as it was finally published, pages devoted to episodes that do not actually occur in the text, or that occur so differently as to constitute an entirely different sort of event. It’s a dizzying experience: you turn a page, innocently you begin to read, and all at once you find yourself in a world unknown, recognizable as belonging to the novel but at the same time alien 2 introduction to it, and suddenly it’s just as if you were reading the novel itself, laughing and marveling like the very first time. Nothing could be more wrong than to spurn that delight in the name of dispassionate analysis, and so I gave myself over unreservedly to the experience , reading these pages just as I might read any novel, purely for the joy of it, for the delight of seeing things happen, of hearing a voice that speaks to me, of losing myself. And lose myself I did, for hours at a time. Whatever useful knowledge came from my stay in Verviers, it is those pages that I remember most fondly, for two reasons. First, they offered me “more Queneau” to read. I thought I’d seen all there was to see of his novels, but no: there was, I now happily discovered, more, and for a fan of Queneau that can only come as tremendously welcome news. More than that, however, I was elated by the teasingly different view of Queneau’s novels that these manuscript pages gave me. I thought I knew what happened in those books, who the characters were, what they did, but here I found other things happening, the familiar characters still recognizable but changed, their actions sometimes troublingly out of character, and this filled me with gleeful perplexity. In W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Georges Perec writes movingly of the joy of rereading, of returning to Dumas’s Vingt ans après, for instance, to find that the remembered details are still “just where they belong” (192), that the world (of the novel, and perhaps beyond ) hasn’t changed, that stability and permanence are still, after all, possible. Perec has his own overpowering reasons for longing after that permanence, of course, but I’m convinced that the joy he describes here is universal. Equally universal, however, and equally heady, is that sort of joy’s precise opposite, the joy of seeing a world we think we know and finding it changed, unfamiliar, somewhat unsettling. I often dream I’ve found a room in my house [54.165.122.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:16 GMT) introduction 3 that I’d never noticed before; this discovery, and the subsequent exploration, fill me with fascinated happiness. I felt the same powerful emotions on discovering those unexpected manuscript passages . Encountering a book I loved with the remembered details not “just where they belong” gave me a palpable shock, and with it a frisson of exultant delight. And perhaps more than delight. Imagine you have a very good friend, one whom you think you know so well that nothing he or she might do could possibly surprise you. Now imagine that you were somehow given the secret power to observe this friend’s actions even when you’re apart, and that you found him or her performing actions unlike those your long acquaintance has led you to expect—not shocking actions, necessarily, but simply different ones. That insight...