The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction

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1 COPY let me begin by assuring you that I have read Raymond Queneau’s novel Le chiendent. A strange thing to say, perhaps, but every interpretation of this work—and of any other, of course, mutatis mutandis—must begin with that simple claim. In a work of literary criticism, this affirmation no doubt goes without saying (I would never dream of opening a serious scholarly study with those words); still, explicit or implicit, the affirmation must be there, masking, in its obviousness, the oddly refractory question of what it is referring to. When I say “Le chiendent ,” what am I talking about? “The book, the text,” might come the impatient reply, but I’m not sure much is gained by replacing one shorthand term for the object with another. More meaningful than this response itself, then, is the dismissive tone in which I think it would likely be delivered, for that irritation eloquently expresses a manifest truth: we take the notion of “what the text is” essentially for granted. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t; if we’ve read the book, we know what it is, and no doubt we have more important questions to ponder than that. Still, a question does not cease to exist merely because it needn’t be posed, and I’d like to pose it now, as a beginning, because I believe that the curiously difficult problem of defining what the text is offers us a first, and 19 20 copy fundamental, notion of this or any novel’s strange existence—and the strangeness of a novel’s existence is precisely what I hope to show in these pages. To that end, let’s try a small experiment. If I say to you “Le chiendent” (or the title of any other novel you’ve read, of course), you will find flooding into your mind a certain idea or notion, a certain vision or understanding or conception. Think for a moment : what do you see? Probably not a specific collection of words, although a few of the novel’s phrases or stylistic mannerisms may pop into your mind after a moment. Nor, I would venture to guess, a particular bound volume, though that image too may materialize at some point, by association (in my case, I do eventually see the image of my own battered paperback copy, but only eventually ). Nor, I think, will your first thought be of a generic volume, a sort of default mental picture of Le chiendent-the-published-book, though once again you may at some point conjure up such an image (I can easily see the book with the standard Gallimard cover, but that’s not the first impression that comes to me). What I first think of, and what I would venture to guess you first think of as well, is something that can’t exactly be pictured, and can only partially be described. It’s a sort of global apperception, half seen, half sensed, of a string—longer or shorter, more or less fragmented or continuous—of events: in the case of this particular novel, Étienne and the rubber ducks, his visit to the friterie, Ernestine’s death, the Gallo-Etruscan war, and so on, in no particular order, perhaps even all at the same time. Along with those events, far more vaguely, I sense the way in which they are told to us—not so much the words used to narrate them as the tone underlying those words, the narrator’s attitude, the novel’s ironic stance. On hearing or speaking that title, then, I have in my mind a sort of essence-of-Le chiendent: a set of actions, a certain atmosphere, a certain tone, everything (but in a sketchy form, partial, as if min- copy 21 iaturized) that I have experienced in reading the novel, a quick compendium of things that make that book what it is, independent of the text’s actual words and of any image of that work as a published volume, real or imaginary. In other words, the image I summon up on hearing that title is not exactly a book, nor a set of sentences, but rather a certain number of things that happen, and the manner in which those events are conveyed to us. Of course, the idea that one reader will summon up may well differ from the next reader’s, and...