It seems a caprice to pick out a single entry in Queneau’s iconic Exercises in Style. However, for the sake of sticking to format, I choose ‘Awkward’, which begins “I’m not used to writing. I dunno. I’d quite like to write a tragedy or a sonnet or an ode, but there’s the rules. They put me off. They weren’t made for amateurs. All this is already pretty badly written.”
Exercises in Style introduced me (indirectly) to Oulipo and the idea of Oulipian writing. Much like Barthelme’s The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace, it astounded me. It wasn’t just a new (to me) way of writing, it was writing for an entirely new set of reasons.
New York poet Mike Silverton puts it this way: “If the superficial dazzles, depth need not apply.”
As Barthelme was to do, Queneau directs the reader’s attention away from a linear notion of narrative and towards other possibilities for play. It is quite true that no reading of Exercises in Style could ever alight on character development or (odious phrase) emotional depth. But not to discern a beauty in it would be a form of blindness, I think.
There’s an analogy to be drawn between the intellectual attractions of music in the Western tradition—its themes and developments, motifs, its suspensions and resolutions—and the trance-inducing effect of those other musics which rely most heavily on repetition or drone.
The premise and structure of Exercises in Style allow for the possibility of dipping in, reading it piecemeal. I’d urge the reader to read it as they would a novel, cover to cover. Altered state.
First published by Gallimard Editions in 1947. First translated for Gaberbocchus Press in 1958. Now available as a New Directions paperback
A Personal Anthology 