Le Drôle de roman: l’œuvre du rire chez Marcel Aymé, Albert Cohen et Raymond Queneau (review)

Unlike in Britain, the USA, or Central Europe, France’s serious comic writers are thin on the ground, possibly owing to the residual corseted snobbery of French poetics, which tends to erect an unhelpful polarity between the serious and the comic. Mathieu Bélisle seeks to evade this straitjacket by his concept of ‘le drôle de roman’; not an exclusively comic novel, but rather a funny-old, a strange novel. He places all three writers of his choosing in the Rabelais tradition, for many the grandfather of all thoughtful comic writing. Firstly, Marcel Aymé divided his efforts between plays and novels, and favoured a simplistic dichotomy between each. For him, the theatre is marked by stasis (stylized typecasting), and novels by restlessness and blurring of closure. For his part, Raymond Queneau inserted many theatrical or cinematic scenes in his novels; he blended the two genres fruitfully in Le Vol d’Icare, mainly composed of reciprocal repartees. Albert Cohen wrote virtually no dramas, but dialogue dominates his verbose fictions. He is, besides, the most blatant of the trio in treating all human behaviour as performance, all social doings as theatre (and théâtre de boulevard at that). It could be his extensive experience as an international civil servant that pushes his people on stage. Though Jewish, Cohen appears less well equipped than his numberless American coreligionists (Roth, Malamud, Bellow for starters) to meld comedy and pointedness of thinking. His hero, Mangeclous, so nicknamed because as a child he once swallowed a dozen screws to alleviate his ravenous hunger, is, to borrow Walt Whitman’s word, a multitude, a conglomerate of contradictory types. As, Bélisle comments (p. 81), he is ‘à l’état d’incomplétude’. It is a pity that Bélisle selects the least gripping of Queneau’s fictions (Gueule de pierre), in which Queneau was most in thrall to theoretical sociology. In general, Bélisle focuses on the novels best suited to his overall purpose: the tracking of le sacré, or what remains of it — its variations and perversions. He argues that le sacré does not vanish altogether in the trio’s writings, but rather is relegated to a ground-level survival amid much mockery. A branch of it, le merveilleux (worshipped by the Surrealists) attracts some astute analysis of Aymé’s fantasy works (for example, La Jument verte, La Vouivre). Another focus is the presence of collective, community laughter (although Bélisle might remember more often that definitions of humour are like a slippery bar of soap in a communal tub). He does find, however, that such gang hilarity can be, like lynching, murderous in intent, even if the intention frequently backfires. Throughout, Bélisle exploits a very wide frame of reference, whether of creative or critical works. A recurrent fault, however, is that he talks much of the time as if his three (rabid individualists) formed some kind of trinity. Still, this continuously interesting and very well articulated study ends with a heartfelt attack on those critics and readers who refuse to take comedy, humour, or fantasy seriously. I’ll drink to that.