Why Read the Classics? (36 page)

His first novel,
Le Chiendent (The Bark-Tree)
(translated into Italian as
Il pantano
, 1947, though the title literally means ‘couch-grass’, and figuratively ‘spot of bother’), written in 1933 after the formative experience of Joyce’s
Ulysses
, was intended to be not only a linguistic and structural tour-deforce (based on a structure that was numerological and symmetrical, as well as on a catalogue of narrative genres), but also a definition of existence and thought, nothing less than a novelised commentary on Descartes’
Discourse on Method
. The novel’s action spotlights those things which are thought but not real, but which have influenced the reality of the world: a world which in itself is totally devoid of meaning.

It is in fact to challenge the endless chaos of the meaningless world that Queneau establishes the need for order in his poetics and for a truth within language. As the English critic Martin Esslin says, in an essay on Queneau:

‘Le néo-français’, inasmuch as it is an invention of a new correlation between the written and spoken word, is only one particular case of Queneau’s general need to insert into the universe ‘small areas of symmetry’, as Martin Esslin says, a sense of order which only (literary and mathematical) invention can create, given that all of reality is chaos.

This aim will remain central in Queneau’s oeuvre even when the battle for ‘le néo-français’ fades from his centre of interest. In the linguistic revolution he had found himself fighting on his own (the demons which inspired Céline turned out to be completely different) waiting for facts to prove him right. But it was the opposite that was happening: French was not evolving at all as he thought it would; even the spoken language was tending to ossify and the advent of television would determine the triumph of the learned norm over popular inventiveness. (Similarly in Italy, television has exercised a powerful unifying influence on the language,
even though Italian was characterised much more strongly than in France by the multiplicity of local dialects.) Queneau realised this and in a statement in 1970 (in
Errata corrige)
he had no hesitation in admitting the inaccuracy of theories which in any case he had for some time now ceased to promote.

Of course it must be said that Queneau’s intellectual role had never been limited to that one linguistic battle: right from the outset the front on which he campaigned was vast and complex. After he distanced himself from Breton, the members of the Surrealist diaspora to which he remained closest were Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, even though his involvement in their journals and initiatives was always rather marginal.

The first journal on which Queneau collaborated with any continuity was
La Critique sociale
, in 1930-34, again with Bataille and Leiris: this was the journal of Boris Souvarine’s Cercle Communiste Démocratique (Souvarine was a ‘dissident’
avant-la-lettre
, who was the first in the West to explain what Stalinism would be). ‘One has to recall here/ wrote Queneau some thirty years later, ‘that
La Critique sociale
, founded by Boris Souvarine, was centred round the Cercle Communiste Démocratique, which was made up of former Communist militants who either had been expelled from or were in dispute with the party; this group had been joined by another small band of former Surrealists such as Bataille, Michel Leiris, Jacques Baron and myself, who all came from a very different background.’

Queneau’s collaboration on
La Critique sociale
consisted in brief reviews, rarely to do with literature (though amongst these was one in which he invited readers to discover Raymond Roussel: ‘his imagination combines the passion of the mathematician with the rationality of a poet’). But more often they were scientific reviews (on Pavlov, and the scientist Vernadsky who would later suggest to him a circular theory of sciences; or his review—included in this Italian translation of
Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (Signs, Figures and Letters)
(Turin: Einaudi, 1981)—of the book by an artillery officer on the history of equestrian caparisons, a work greeted by Queneau as revolutionary in its historical methodology). But he also appeared in it as co-author, with Bataille, of an article ‘published’, as he will clarify later, ‘with our signatures in issue number 5 (March 1932) with the title “La critique des fondements de la dialectique hégélienne (A Critique of the Foundations of Hegelian Dialectic)”. Georges Bataille really wrote the
whole article: I only dealt with the passage on Engels and mathematical dialectic’

This work on the application of dialectic to exact sciences in Engels (which Queneau later included in the ‘Mathematics’ section of his collected essays and which appears under this heading in the Italian translation) gives only a partial account of Queneau’s quite considerable period spent studying Hegel. But this period of study can be more accurately reconstructed from something he wrote in his last years (and from which the two preceding quotations came), published in the journal
Critique
, in the issue dedicated to Georges Bataille. Here he recalls his late friend’s article, ‘Premières confrontations avec Hegel’
(Critique
, 195-196 (August-September 1966)), in which we see not only Bataille but also, and perhaps even more intensely, Queneau dealing with Hegel, a philosopher who is as alien as can be from the traditions of French thought. If Bataille read Hegel essentially to reassure himself that he was not at all Hegelian, for Queneau it was a more positive journey, in that it involved his discovery of André Kojève, and his adoption to a certain extent of Kojève’s brand of Hegelianism.

I will come back to this point later on, but for the moment suffice it to say that from 1934 to 1939 Queneau was at the Ecole des Hautes Études attending Kojève’s lectures on
The Phenomenology of the Spirit
, which he would later edit and publish.
²
Bataille recalls: ‘how many times did Queneau and I emerge drained from the tiny lecture hall: drained and exhausted … Kojève’s lectures destroyed me, ground me down, killed me ten times over.’
³
(Queneau actually, with a hint of malice, remembers his fellow student as not very assiduous and sometimes rather sleepy.)

Editing Kojève’s lectures certainly remains Queneau’s most substantial academic and editorial undertaking, though the volume does not contain any original contribution by Queneau himself. However, on this Hegelian experience we have the precious evidence of his memoir on Bataille which is also indirectly autobiographical, where we see him participating in the most sophisticated polemics of French philosophical culture in those years. Traces of these arguments can be found throughout his fiction, which often seems to demand a reading which is sensitive to the erudite researches and theories which then preoccupied Parisian academic journals and institutions, though they are all transformed into a pyrotechnic display full of clowning grimaces and somersaults. The three works,
Gueule de Pierre, Les Temps mêlées
and
Saint Glinglin
(subsequently rewritten and collected as a
trilogy under this last tide) would repay a close analysis from this perspective.

We could say that if in the 1930s Queneau took an active part in the discussions both of the literary avant-garde and of academic specialists, while maintaining that restraint and discretion which will remain his stable character traits, to find the first articulation of his own ideas we have to wait for the years immediately preceding the Second World War, when his polemical presence finds expression in
Volontés
, a journal on which he collaborates from its first issue (December 1937) to its last (whose publication was prevented by the German invasion of May 1940).

This journal, edited by Georges Pelorson (and which also had Henry Miller on its editorial board) ran for the same length of time as the Collège de Sociologie run by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Callois (and also enjoyed the participation of Kojève, Klossowski, Walter Benjamin and Hans Mayer). The debates of this group are the background to the articles in the journal, especially those by Queneau.
⁴

But Queneau’s discourse follows a line that is very much his own and which can be summed up in this quotation from an article written in 1938: ‘Another highly fallacious idea which nevertheless is very popular nowadays is the equivalence that has been established between inspiration, exploration of the subconscious and liberation; between chance, automatic reaction and freedom. Now
this
inspiration which consists in blindly obeying every single impulse is in reality a form of slavery. The classical writer composing a tragedy by observing a certain number of rules with which he is familiar is freer than the poet who writes down whatever flits through his head and is enslaved to other rules which he is not aware of.’

Leaving aside the contemporary polemic against Surrealism, here Queneau articulates a number of constants in his aesthetics and ethics: the rejection of ‘inspiration’, or romantic lyricism, of the cult of chance and automatic suggestion (Surrealism’s idols), and instead the appreciation of a work that has been constructed, finished, completed (previously he had campaigned against the poetics of the incomplete, the fragment, the sketch). Not only this: the artist must be fully aware of the aesthetic rules which his work obeys, as well as of its particular and universal meaning, its function and influence. If one thinks of Queneau’s method of writing, which appears only to follow the whims of improvisation and clowning, his theoretical ‘classicism’ might seem astonishing; and yet the text we are discussing (‘What is Art?’, along with its complementary piece, ‘More and
Less’, both written in 1938) has the status of a profession of faith which he never renounced (though the still rather youthful tone of aggression and exhortation would disappear in the later Queneau).

All the more reason, then, why we should be amazed that this anti-Surrealist polemic should lead Queneau (of all people!) to attack humour. One of his first pieces in
Volontés
is an invective against humour, which of course was linked to issues of the moment, even to contemporary mores (it is against the reductive and defensive premises of humour that he takes issue), but what counts here too is the
pars construens:
his praise for total comedy, the line that extends from Rabelais to Jarry. (Queneau would return to the topic of Breton’s
humour noir
immediately after the Second World War, to see how well it had stood up in the experience of that horror; and again in a later note, he would take account of Breton’s clarification of the moral implications of the question.)

Another recurrent target in his
Volontés
articles (and here what we need to try and square these with is his future role as encyclopedia director) was the endless mass of information which lands on top of contemporary man without forming an integral part of his existence, or being an essential necessity. (‘The identity between what one is and what one really and truly knows … the difference between what one is and what one thinks one knows but does not really know.’)

We can say, then, that Queneau’s polemics in the 1930s go in two main directions: against poetry as inspiration and against ‘false knowledge’.

Queneau’s figure as ‘encyclopedist’, ‘mathematician’ and ‘cosmologer’ has therefore to be carefully defined. His ‘wisdom’ is characterised by a need for global knowledge and at the same time by a sense of limits, and a diffidence towards any type of absolute philosophy. In his outline for the circularity of sciences which he drafts in a work written between 1943 and 1948 (from natural sciences to chemistry and physics, and from these to mathematics and logic), the general tendency of sciences towards mathematisation is reversed and mathematics is transformed when it comes into contact with the problems posed by the natural sciences. This is consequently a line that can go in either direction and therefore can turn itself into a circle, at the point where logic is proposed as a model for the functioning of human intelligence,
i£
what Piaget says is true: namely that ‘logic is the axiomatisation of thought itself’. At this point Queneau adds: ‘But logic is also an art, and turning things into rules is a game. The ideal
constructed by scientists throughout the whole of this first half of the century is a presentation of science not as knowledge but as rules and method. They offer (indefinable) notions, axioms and instructions for use, in short a system of conventions. But is this not perhaps a game just as much as chess or bridge? Before proceeding to an examination of this aspect of science, we must dwell on this point: is science knowledge, does it help us to know anything? And given that (in this article) we are dealing with mathematics, what does one know in mathematics? Precisely nothing. And there is nothing to know. We do not know the point, the number, the group, the set, the function any more than we “know” the electron, life, human behaviour. We do not know the world of functions and differential equations any more than we “know” Daily, Concrete Life on Earth. Everything we know is a method accepted (agreed) as true by the scientific community, a method which has
also
the advantage of being linked to manufacturing techniques. But this method is also a game, or more precisely what is called a
jeu d’esprit
. Hence the whole of science, in its most complete form, presents itself to us both as technique and as a game. That is to say no more and no less than the way the
other
human activity presents itself: Art.’