Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70

by Raymond Queneau, Jordan Stump (Translator)

The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century's most intriguing avant-garde writers Compiled from two volumes of Raymond Queneau's essays ( Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and Le Voyage en Grèce ), these selections find Queneau at his most playful and at his most serious, eloquently pleading for a certain classicism even as he reveals the roots of his own wildly original oeuvre. Ranging from the funny to the furious, they follow Queneau from modernism to postmodernism by way of countless fascinating detours, including his thoughts on language, literary fashions, myth, politics, poetry, and other writers (Faulkner, Flaubert, Hugo, and Proust). Translator Jordan Stump provides an introduction as well as explanatory notes about key figures and Queneau himself.

Genres: Essays

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Novelist, poet, and critic Raymond Queneau, was born in Le Havre in 1903, and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, and his intentionality.

Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

Reviews

[Sean Hartnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raymond Queneau has done it again. It was refreshing to read some of his critical opinions, because even when he is wrong (as most notably in the case of his hailing of "neo-french" as the future of the language), he is still (usually) interesting. Surprisingly, I found his tone and style quite similar to that of George Orwell in the latter's essays. (For reference, Orwell's "As I Please" is definitely worth reading for a similar kind of acerbity and playfulness.) Here with Queneau, however, things sometimes get very experimental, so much so that I don't have a bean of a clue what's going on. But that's probably the point.

Favourite moments: "Technique du roman", "Bouvard et Pecuchet de Gustave Flaubert", "Jacques Prévert, le bon génie" (which manages to say an awful lot of interesting things about morality and words) and "Miro ou le poète préhistorique". I also like all the silly pictogrammes and intentionally over-complicated graphs. Exactly my kind of humour.