Raymond Queneau

• 1. Introduction

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  Raymond Queneau once calculated that a reader working through his book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, around the clock every day without stopping, would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. That number is not a joke. It is not a provocation. It is a precise mathematical fact that Queneau worked out himself, and it tells you almost everything about who he was. Here was a man who wrote 140 lines across ten sonnets, designed so that any line could replace any other, producing a combinatorial explosion of verse that would outlast the sun. And yet he was also the man who spent years working as a bank teller, a tutor, a translator, a hackwriter for a daily newspaper column called "Connaissez-vous Paris?" What drove a person from those odd jobs to the outer edges of what literature could even mean? That question runs through everything Queneau left behind.

• 2. Le Havre to Paris

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  Queneau was born on the 21st of February 1903 at 47, rue Thiers in Le Havre, the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. The street has since been renamed Avenue René-Coty. He carried his father's name as a middle name. After his schooling in Le Havre, he moved to Paris in 1920 and completed his first baccalauréat in philosophy from the University of Paris in 1925. His military service followed immediately, as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during 1925 and 1926. When he returned to Paris, he took whatever work he could find. The hackwriting column for L'Intransigeant, the translation work, the tutoring sessions: these were the years before a clear vocation had announced itself. In 1928 he married Janine Kahn, whose birth year matched his own, 1903. She happened to be the sister-in-law of André Breton, a coincidence that would shape the next decade of Queneau's literary life in ways neither of them could have anticipated.

• 3. Among the Surrealists

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  Michel Leiris recorded in his book Brisées exactly how he first encountered Queneau in 1924, while vacationing in Nemours with André Masson, Armand Salacrou, and Juan Gris. A mutual friend named Roland Tual had met Queneau on a train from Le Havre and simply brought him along. Leiris remembered that the young Queneau felt less accomplished than the others and did not make a strong impression that day. The real friendship began a couple of years later, when they met again at the Café Certa near L'Opera, a regular gathering place for Surrealists. On that occasion, a conversation about Eastern philosophy revealed what Leiris called a quiet superiority and erudite thoughtfulness in Queneau. The two men became close while writing together for Bataille's journal Documents. Queneau's relationship with Breton was cordial but never wholehearted. He had questioned Surrealist support for the USSR as early as 1926. He refused to follow Breton's demand that followers cut ties with his former companion Simone Kahn after the two separated, partly because Simone was his own wife's sister. Janine, Queneau, and Simone sometimes traveled around France together during the year Breton left her.

• 4. Breaking With Breton

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  By 1930 Queneau had moved decisively away from Breton's orbit. While Éluard, Aragon, and Breton joined the French Communist Party in 1927, Queneau declined. Instead, he added his name to Un Cadavre, a vehemently anti-Breton pamphlet published in 1930 and co-written with Bataille, Leiris, Prévert, Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Baron, J.-A. Boiffard, Robert Desnos, Georges Limbour, Max Morise, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, and Roger Vitrac. He joined Boris Souvarine's Democratic Communist Circle and attached himself to a range of left-wing and anti-fascist causes: defending the Popular Front, supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, publishing in Resistance journals during the Nazi occupation. After the war he continued signing left-wing manifestos, condemned McCarthyism, and protested anti-communist persecution in Greece. His intellectual affinities ran as much toward science as toward politics. He wrote more scientific reviews than literary ones, covering Pavlov and Vernadsky, from whom he absorbed a circular theory of the sciences. He also contributed passages on Engels and mathematical dialectic to Bataille's article on the foundations of Hegelian thought. It was during this same period that he became a close associate of writer Georges Bataille.

• 5. Gallimard and the Pléiade

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  Queneau joined the Gallimard publishing house as a reader in 1938 and would remain tied to the firm for the rest of his working life. He rose through the house to become general secretary and eventually took the directorship of l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956. During part of that span he also taught at l'École Nouvelle de Neuilly. In 1950, the same year he entered the Collège de 'Pataphysique and was made a Satrap, he saw a different kind of contribution go public: Juliette Gréco recorded "Si tu t'imagines," a song by Joseph Kosma using Queneau's lyrics. His translation work continued alongside the editorial responsibilities. In 1953 he translated Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard into French as L'Ivrogne dans la brousse. He had also edited and published Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; Queneau had been Kojève's student in the 1930s, and the experience left a lasting philosophical mark. His works were published by Gallimard under the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection.

• 6. Language as Game

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  Queneau came to wide attention in France with Zazie dans le métro, published in 1959. Louis Malle adapted it for film the following year, during the Nouvelle Vague movement. The novel is a sustained experiment in colloquial French, set against the grain of standard written prose. Its first word, the improbable "Doukipudonktan," is a phonetic rendering of the spoken phrase "D'où qu'il pue / qu'ils puent donc tant?" meaning something like "Why does he / do they stink so much?" That opener captures Queneau's method: written language recorded as it is actually heard, with all its elisions and compressions intact. His Exercises in Style takes a different angle on the same obsession. The book presents a single unremarkable incident, a man noticing the same stranger twice in one day, told in 99 separate ways. An excerpt appeared in the 1960s publication 0 to 9, a magazine devoted to experiments in language and meaning. Queneau's attraction to mathematics as a structural principle fed directly into his fiction. He had become a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948, and believed that elements of a text, including seemingly trivial choices like the number of chapters, had to be predetermined and possibly calculated. This conviction, not just a preference but a compositional requirement, set the stage for the most consequential conversation of his career.

• 7. Oulipo and Its Aftermath

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  While completing A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Queneau turned to mathematician François Le Lionnais for help with problems he was working through. That exchange about mathematics and literary structure led the two of them to co-found the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, known as Oulipo, in 1960. The group treated formal constraints, rules imposed before writing begins, as a source of creative possibility rather than limitation. Queneau served as its president. His influence reached further than the group itself. His work encouraged Jacques Lacan to pursue what became pioneering work on game theory and the application of mathematics to psychoanalysis. His final book, Les fondements de la littérature d'après David Hilbert, published in 1976, drew on the mathematician David Hilbert's methods to probe the foundations of literature through quasi-mathematical derivations from textual axioms. Queneau described its central aim as proving "a hidden master of the automaton." When pressed by his interlocutor GF, he said the text "could never appear, but had to hide to glorify that without agency." Queneau died on the 25th of October 1976, having taken last rites. He is buried alongside his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne. In 1951 he had been elected to the Académie Goncourt; in 1952 to the Académie de l'humour; and between 1955 and 1957 he sat on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival. That last detail, a committed literary mathematician helping to judge cinema, fits the man exactly.