Raymond Queneau
{{Short description|French novelist and poet (1903–1976)}}
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{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2020}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Raymond Queneau
| image = Raymond Queneau photo.jpg
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| birth_name =
| birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1903|02|21}}
| birth_place = Le Havre, France
| death_date = {{death date and age|df=yes|1976|10|25|1903|02|21}}
| death_place = Paris, France
| occupation = Novelist, poet
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| education = University of Paris
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| spouse = Janine Kahn
| signature = SignatureQueneau.jpg
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Raymond Queneau ({{IPAc-en|k|ə|ˈ|n|oʊ}}; {{IPA|fr|ʁɛmɔ̃ kəno|lang}}; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor{{Cite book|title=Cyclopedia of World Authors|last=Magill|first=Frank|publisher=Salem Press|year=1997|location=California|pages=1660}} and co-founder and president of Oulipo{{Cite book|title=Oulipo Compedium|last=Mathews|first=Harry|publisher=Atlas Press|year=1998|isbn=1-900565-18-8|location=London|pages=14}} ({{lang|fr|Ouvroir de littérature potentielle}}), notable for his wit and cynical humour.
Biography
Queneau was born at 47, rue Thiers (now Avenue René-Coty), Le Havre, Seine-Inférieure, the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot. After studying in Le Havre, Queneau moved to Paris in 1920 and received his first baccalauréat in 1925 for philosophy from the University of Paris. Queneau performed military service as a zouave in Algeria and Morocco during the years 1925–26.
{{Cite book
|title=Raymond Queneau
|url=https://archive.org/details/raymondqueneau0000thih
|url-access=registration
|last=Thiher
|first=Allen
|publisher=Twayne Publisher
|year=1985
|location=Boston |pages=[https://archive.org/details/raymondqueneau0000thih/page/2 2]
|isbn=9780805766134
}}
During the 1920s and 1930s Queneau took odd jobs for income such as bank teller, tutor, translator and some writing in a column entitled, {{lang|fr|"Connaissez-vous Paris?"}} ('Do you know Paris?') for the daily, L'Intransigeant.
He married Janine Kahn (1903–1972) in 1928 after returning to Paris from his first military service.{{Cite web|title=Janine Queneau (1903–1972)|url=https://data.bnf.fr/fr/11032009/janine_queneau/|access-date=2021-10-28|website=data.bnf.fr|language=fr}} Kahn was the sister-in-law of André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement. In 1934 they had a son, Jean-Marie, who became a painter.{{Cite book|last=Magill|first=Frank Northen|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V2wYAAAAIAAJ|title=Cyclopedia of World Authors II|date=1989|publisher=Salem Press|isbn=978-0-89356-516-9|language=en}}
Queneau was drafted in August 1939 and served in small provincial towns before his promotion to corporal just before being demobilized in 1940. After a prolific career of writing, editing and critique, Queneau died on 25 October 1976. He is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne outside Paris.
Career
Queneau spent much of his life working for the Gallimard publishing house, where he began as a reader in 1938. He later rose to be general secretary and eventually became director of l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956. During some of this time, he also taught at l'École Nouvelle de Neuilly. He entered the Collège de 'Pataphysique in 1950, where he became Satrap.
In 1950, Juliette Gréco recorded "Si tu t'imagines", a song by Joseph Kosma with lyrics by Queneau.
During this time, Queneau also acted as a translator, notably for Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard ({{lang|fr|L'Ivrogne dans la brousse}}) in 1953. Additionally, he edited and published Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Queneau had been a student of Kojève during the 1930s and was, during this period, also close to writer Georges Bataille.
As an author, Queneau came to general attention in France with the publication in 1959 of his novel Zazie dans le métro. In 1960 the film adaptation directed by Louis Malle was released during the Nouvelle Vague movement. Zazie explores colloquial language as opposed to "standard" written French. The first word of the book, the alarmingly long "Doukipudonktan" is a playful phonetic transcription of "D'où qu'il pue / qu'ils puent donc tant?" – "Why does it / does he / do they stink so much?"
Before he founded the {{lang|fr|Ouvroir de littérature potentielle}} (Oulipo) in 1960, Queneau was attracted to mathematics as a source of inspiration. He became a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948. In Queneau's mind, elements of a text, including seemingly trivial details such as the number of chapters, were things that had to be predetermined, perhaps calculated. This was an issue during the writing of A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, also known as 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. Queneau wrote 140 lines in 10 individual sonnets that could all be taken apart and rearranged in any order. Queneau calculated that anyone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. While Queneau was completing this work, he asked mathematician François Le Lionnais for help with issues he was having, and their conversation led to a role of mathematics in literature, which led to the creation of the Oulipo. His work encouraged Jacques Lacan to pursue his pioneering work on game theory and the use of mathematics in psychoanalysis."The
Number Thirteen and the Logical Form of Suspicion"
A later work, {{lang|fr|Les fondements de la littérature d'après David Hilbert}} (1976), alludes to the mathematician David Hilbert, and attempts to explore the foundations of literature by quasi-mathematical derivations from textual axioms. Queneau claimed this final work would prove "a hidden master of the automaton." Pressed by GF, his interlocutor, Queneau confided that the text "could never appear, but had to hide to glorify that without agency."
One of Queneau's most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man's seeing the same stranger twice in one day. It tells that short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place. An excerpt from this piece was published in 0 to 9 magazine, a 1960s publication which experimented with language and meaning-making.
The works of Raymond Queneau are published by Gallimard in the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.