‘Awkward’ by Raymond Queneau, tr. Barbara Wright

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

‘Free Verse’ by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright

I again asked the proprietor if there had been any calls for me. He shook his head. Not even from the investigator that you recommended? I asked. He flicked through a pile of notepaper. No, I’m afraid not, he said.

I took the bus out to the industrial area (to the storage warehouse, the mezzanine office). There was no answer; the door was locked.

I am sure that, on the return journey, I saw the same two men bickering over one having jostled the other. I looked at the accuser: a long neck, as if someone had been tugging at it. I looked at the overcoat he was wearing: there was no button on the lapel, no handkerchief in the breast pocket.

the bus
full
the heart
empty
the neck
long
the ribbon
plaited
the feet
flat
flat and flattened
the place
vacant
and the unexpected meeting near
the station with its thousand
extinguished lights
of the heart, of that neck, of that
ribbon, of those feet,
of the vacant place,
and of that button.

Published in Exercices de Style, Éditions Gallimard, 1947, and in English in Exercises in Style, Alma Classics, 1993

‘Exercises in Style’ by Raymond Queneau

This list is definitely taking off on an exponential weirdness curve the longer it gets. Twelve is a lot of anything.

Next turn completely about-face in the garden maze of this thing, and walk through the hedge in front of you. Before you is the same short story, told ninety-nine different ways, or ninety-nine different short stories, depending on how you look at it. Queneau’s Exercises in Style are a classic of Modernist play and they’ve been re-issued recently by New Directions. I actually think British book reviewers and fiction writers have a bit of a Modernist over-reliance, a kind of Bloomsbury fetish, and it annoys me, but I’m making a notable exception for Queneau because his concept is so incredibly precious it somehow transcends its own preciousness and comes out the other side again. Anyhow, on that other thing, I’m really sick of Joyce and Woolf and pretending that Paris is the avant garde just sort of… because? It’s not 1996 or whatever. Get over it.

There is only one person in the whole world I forgive the over-adulation of Modernism and she knows who she is.

First published as Exercices de style, Gallimard, 1947. First published in translation by Barbara Wright, Gaberbocchus Press, 1958, and retranslated since. Currently available from Alma Classics, 2013.

‘Precision’ by Raymond Queneau

I categorise Exercises in Style as a short story collection, though it defies classification. It is the retelling, ninety-nine times, each in a different style, of a seemingly unremarkable observation the narrator makes of a man seen first on a crowded bus and then, later, in front of Gare St-Lazare. I have long been fascinated by attempts at exhausting place through an ultimately unattainable total description, and this is a key textbook of that project.

First published in French as Exercises de Style in 1947 by Editions Gallimard; widely translated

‘A Story of Your Own’ by Raymond Queneau, translated by Marc Lowenthal

Once upon a time there were three little peas knocking about on the highways. When evening came, they quickly fell asleep, tired and weary.
if you want to know the rest, go to 5
if not, go to 21

When I was younger we saved tokens from Weetabix boxes to send off in exchange for Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were a real treat. I don’t remember the actual stories, although I do remember thinking it was like reading a different book each time, albeit an overtly familiar one that lead to increasingly predictable conclusions. But what I mostly think about (aside from the excessive Weetabix consumption and a kind of anti-nostalgia for the mid-80s) is the excitement of getting a new book in the post. A brand-new book, with new book smell, pristine pages, and an unbroken spine.

Most of the other books we read were from the library or from church jumble sales and charity shops. The library was a source of limitless treasure. The haphazard breadth of jumble sale and charity shop books ensured I read a wide of range of everything in no particular order, from atlases at the non-fiction end of the shelf, to Georgette Heyer Regency romances at the other. I remember on one particular occasion taking my younger brother to buy a book. We must’ve been about 12 and 10. I was responsible for looking after the two 50 pence pieces (one each) we were given as pocket money. I probably looked at the Mills & Boons but chose an Oxford or Wordsworth Classic. My brother bought a stiff hardback with a shiny dust cover by someone we had never heard of. He didn’t plan to read it. He wanted to stick the pages together then hollow it out to create a secret compartment, like the villain in From Russian With Love who smuggles a handgun inside a copy of War and Peace. (My brother was a massive James Bond fan.) The ladies behind the counter of the RSPCA shop seemed a little flustered when we went to pay. But they sold us the books and we took them home to our parents, who thought Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller was probably not the most appropriate book for a ten-year-old.

Apparently written in 1967, but first published, as ‘Conte à votre façon’, in Contes et Propos, Gallimard, 1981, published in English translation as Stories and Remarks, University of Nebraska Press, 2000