Curiosités de Raymond Queneau: de l' 'Encyclopédie des Sciences inexactes' aux jeux de la création romanesque (review)

The late Evert van der Starre, one of the most astute of Queneau's commentators, provides in this short but packed study close readings of selected fiction, poems, essays, articles and diaries, not pedantically but, in the best sense, comprehensively. Before undertaking the editorship of the Pléiade encyclopaedia for Gallimard, Queneau had shown hostility to H. G. Wells's project of a world encyclopaedia. In the 1930s, Queneau had himself assembled an Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes, devoted to nineteenth-century fous littéraires, which he partly inserted into his novel Les Enfants du limon, as no publisher would touch his total monstrosity. Ency-clopaedias clearly demand broad-mindedness. Van der Starre quotes the wise words from Le Chiendent, about wedding guests opening up to strangers. Unsnobbishly, Queneau compares this banal passage from egocentrism to polycentrism with Copernicus' revolutionary astronomy. He was using the English term 'broadminded' already in 1922, when he first donned spectacles. The diary he kept from teenhood onwards, fruitfully mined by van der Starre, records this quiet ambition: 'Un jour, j'essaierai de noter tout'. Van der Starre focuses on the tug between continuity and discontinuity in diary-keeping. The apparently unbroken production belt of a diary in fact engenders dispersion: we may live from day to day, but we have to stagger and shape our understanding of this heterogeneous material. Queneau wittily transmogrified the Heraclitean flux into 'You never plonk your plates of meat twice into the same briny'. Van der Starre stresses the need for many diarists to reread foregoing entries, in the search for a continuum, be it that of ignorance or doubt. He courteously criticizes those Quenaquatiques who seek to turn Queneau into some kind of Christian-without-God, by reason of the frequent mentions in his Journal of the mystic Orientalist René Guénon. To this end, he quotes some self-damning, quasi-papal statements by Guénon, and is not alone in wondering why the writer we love seems to have been besotted with him. All he can suggest is the attraction of opposites.

Behind all this lies curiosity, which may have killed the cat but animates humans. It can obviously take good or bad forms (Mme Cloche's in Le Chiendent is blatantly sadistic). The word itself betokens an object, as in 'cabinet of curiosities', or an attitude towards it or the wider world. Libido sciendi can be simply libido, or nosy-parkerism. Whereas the Ancients and the Moderns valued the exploratory nature of inquisitiveness, Christianity as so often was the person of colour in the woodpile. Although Queneau was always aware that his bulimic readings drew him uncomfortably close to the pathetic Autodidact of Sartre's La Nausée, he persevered. Tolerance, an active ingredient in curiosity, can be dynamic or lazy, but is surely preferable to incuriosity. Van der Starre observes that Queneau's protagonists, like their author, are none too keen on being the objects of others' prying; they have an existential reflex for privacy, which leads to evasiveness. I recall Queneau's cartoon of a dog barking literally up the wrong tree, while Queneau's disembodied head floats free like the Cheshire Cat's smile. He is notorious for repeatedly saying, in best 'Pataphysical mode, that the opposite of any statement is also true. Born in Le Havre, he favoured la réponse de Normand. The variant, sexual curiosity, dominates his jubilant OEuvres complètes de Sally Mara, where the Irish heroine's incomplete command of French idiom makes this novel truly erotic — some killjoys would say pruriently pornographic. Van der Starre segues convincingly from encyclopae-dias to games, both ruled by variant forms of curiosity. Queneau once spoke of his 'soucis d'ordre arithmomaniaque', with which he experimented in several novels. He had therefore his own...