Exercises in Style (2 page)

Queneau did in fact “put some philosophical dissertation into spoken
French”—Descartes’
Discours de la Méthode.
At least, he
says that it was with this idea in mind that he started to write “something which
later became a novel called
le Chiendent.”
I won’t say anything
about the correspondence between it and
le Chiendent
now, but this novel,
le Chiendent,
is one of the easiest to read of all Queneau’s novels,
and also one of the most touching and thought-provoking. It is also almost farcically
funny in parts.

This research into language is, of course, carried on in the
Exercices.
You get plenty of variations of the way different people
actually speak—casual, noble, slang, feminine, etc. But you may have noticed that
the exercise on p. 129 starts like this:

JO UN VE UR MI RS SU DI AP RL TE (that’s in French, by the way. The English translation naturally
looks quite different:

ED ON TO AY RD WA ID SM YO DA HE

Now please don’t think that I’m going to
try to persuade you that this is Queneau’s idea of how anyone speaks French. You
can’t really discover 99 different ways of speaking one language. Well, perhaps
you can, but you don’t find them in the
Exercices.
I have analysed the 99
variations into roughly 7 different groups. The first—different types of speech.
Next, different types of written prose. These include the style of a publisher’s
blurb, of an official letter, the “philosophic” style, and so on. Then there
are 5 different poetry styles, and 8 exercises which are character sketches through
language—reactionary, biased, abusive, etc. Fifthly there is a large group which
experiments with different grammatical and rhetorical forms; sixthly, those which come
more or less under the heading of
jargon,
and lastly, all sorts of odds and
ends whose classification I’m still arguing about. This group includes the one
quoted above, which is called:
permutations by groups of 2,
3, 4
and
5
letters.
Under
jargon
you get, for instance, one variation which
tells the story in mathematical terms, one using as many botanical terms as possible,
one using greek roots to make new words, and one in dog latin.

All this could be so clever that it could be quite ghastly and perfectly
unreadable. But in fact I saw somewhere that
Exercices de Style
is
Queneau’s best seller among the French public. I have already intimated that
however serious his purpose, Queneau is much more likely to write a farce than a
pedantic treatise. His purpose here, in the
Exercices,
is, I think, a profound
exploration into the possibilities of language. It is an experiment in the philosophy of
language. He pushes language around in a multiplicity of directions to see what will
happen. As he is a virtuoso of language and likes to amuse himself and
his readers, he pushes it a bit further than might appear necessary—he
exaggerates the various styles into a reductio ad absurdum—ad lib., ad inf., and
sometimes. —the final joke—ad nauseam.

I am saying a lot about what
I
think, but Queneau himself has had
something to say about it. In a published conversation with Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes,
he says: “In
les Exercices de Style,
I started from a real incident, and
in the first place I told it 12 times in different ways. Then a year later I did another
12, and finally there were 99. People have tried to see it as an attempt to demolish
literature—that was not at all my intention. In any case my intention was merely
to produce some exercises; the finished product may possibly act as a kind of
rust-remover to literature, help to rid it of some of its scabs. If I have been able to
contribute a little to this, then I am very proud, especially if I have done it without
boring the reader too much.”

That Queneau
has
done this without boring the reader
at
all,
is perhaps the most amazing thing about his book. Imagine how boring it
might have been—99 times the same story, and a story which has no point, anyway! I
have spent more than a year, off and on, on the English version of the
Exercices,
but I haven’t yet found any boredom attached to it. The
more I go into each variation, the more I see in it. And the point about the original
story having
no
point, is one of
the
points of the book. So much
knowledge and comment on life is put into this pointless story. It’s also
important that it should be the same story all the time. Anybody can—and
automatically does—describe different things in different ways. You don’t
speak poetically to the man in the ticket office at Victoria when you want to ask him
for “two third
returns, Brighton.” Nor, as Jesperson
points out, do you say to him: “Would you please sell me two third-class tickets
from London to Brighton and back again, and I will pay you the usual fare for such
tickets.” Queneau’s tour-de-force lies in the fact that the simplicity and
banality of the material he starts from gives birth to so much.

This brings me to the last thing I want to say, which is about the English
version. Queneau told me that the
Exercices
was one of his books which he would
like to be translated—(he didn’t suggest by whom). At the time I thought he
was crazy. I thought that the book was an experiment with the French language as such,
and therefore as untranslatable as the smell of garlic in the Paris metro. But I was
wrong. In the same way as the story
as such
doesn’t matter, the
particular language it is written in doesn’t matter as such. Perhaps the book is
an exercise in communication patterns, whatever their linguistic sounds. And it seems to
me that Queneau’s attitude of enquiry and examination can, and perhaps
should?—be applied to every language, and that is what I have tried to achieve
with the English version.

B. W.

^*
Based on a talk given in the
Gaberbocchus Common Room on April 1st 1958.

^*
The Trojan Horse & At the Edge of the Forest.
Gaberbocchus

otation

In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord
instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with
it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing
next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling
tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to
it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare
Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get
an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at
the lapels) and why.

ouble
ntry

Towards the middle of the day and at midday I happened to be on and got
on to the platform and the balcony at the back of an S-line and of a
Contrescarpe-Champerret bus and passenger transport vehicle which was packed and to all
intents and purposes full. I saw and noticed a young man and an old adolescent who was
rather ridiculous and pretty grotesque; thin neck and skinny windpipe, string and cord
round his hat and tile. After a scrimmage and scuffle he says and states in a lachrymose
and snivelling voice and tone that his neighbour and fellow-traveller is deliberately
trying and doing his utmost to push him and obtrude
himself on him
every time anyone gets off and makes an exit. This having been declared and having
spoken he rushes headlong and wends his way towards a vacant and a free place and
seat.

Two hours after and a-hundred-and-twenty minutes later, I meet him and
see him again in the Cour de Rome and in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He is with and
in the company of a friend and pal who is advising and urging him to have a button and
vegetable ivory disc added and sewn on to his overcoat and mantle.

itotes

Some of us were travelling together. A young man, who didn’t look very intelligent, spoke to the man next to him for a few moments, then he went and sat down. Two hours later I met him again; he was with a friend and was talking about clothes.

etaphorically