Salonica World Lit: Classic Oulipo, She Said Gently

Classic Oulipo, She Said Gently

Theme: Paris

Queneau the Quirky. The strange and the unique. Strange and unique. Queneau the quintessential Queneauean. And the best book to read of his to experience him in all his Queneauiness is Zazie in the Metro Whyshouldwereadhimniway?
I smell a device. Yes, that's Queneau, Raymond Queneau. Queneau was friend of de vice. Instead of writing 'Queneau was a friend of the device', we write 'Queneau was a friend of the de vice' playing with phonetics and meaning. Reading Queneau is like being trapped in a literary illusion, using linguistics like a street shell game. To prove my point, check out a couple of his sentences:

And all because of the woman I encunter this morning. But just a moment, replied Trouscaillon, I can't instanter, bellicause of my uniform; Zazie has joined Laverdure in somnia.

He takes full advantage of the colloquial and sounds it out for us. From the moment our young protagonist, Zazie refers to her uncle as 'unkoo', we know we are not dealing with Parisian high society. Although there is an intellectual bent to Queneau, this book isn't heavy reading. It's a light, unconventional novel that highlights Queneau's place in French literature in a historical context. There's not much of a plot and the characters aren't exactly three dimensional. Reading Zazie in the Metro is like spending a couple of days with your loud, wacky relatives. They're fun for a weekend, but you wouldn't want to live with them. These characters are aspects of personalities - Zazie, the precocious pre-adolescent, Uncle Gabriel, the cross-dressing Uncle, Marceline, the soft-spoken girlfriend, Charles, the gruff cabdriver, etc. - but not fully developed.

This does fit quite well with the mission statement of the Oulipo which claimed such writers as Perec and Calvino; an ideology devoted to using constraints and ideas of mathematics to formulate new and inspired forms of literature. Queneau did this superbly in Exercises in Style, retelling the same story 99 different ways. So, the fragmented, chaotic and slang ridden Zazie seems more of a fun ride than a serious literary novel. But it broke ground at the time it was published, 1959, because it was a literary equivalent to the Nouvelle Vague that was taking place in French Cinema. It has the same feel as a early Godard with it's quick scene changes and it's focus on real French life through its raw depiction. We are not reading Queneau for plot or character, but more for how he takes us where he wants to go. If you want to read some heavier, more literary and staid Queneau, try The Last Sundays which I reviewed last year.

The connection with the cinema makes sense since Zazie was turned into a movie in 1960, directed by Louis Malle. And just as the French cinema was reinventing itself, so was Queneau and the Oulipo with French literature. And with this new kind of experimental literature, Queneau created a much more visual story that easily translated to the screen. And it some ways, the film version of Zazie is much more cohesive than the novel, but just as quirky.

It may take you a while to get into the language that Queneau uses, but if you need a weekend away from the normals, this is the perfect foray into the world of Raymond Queneau.

Movie Pairing: The 1960 movie of the same name. A wacky treat.
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