Zazie in Wonderland: Queneau's Reply to the Realist Novel
1994; Columbia University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2688-5220
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Critical Theory
ResumoThe modern may never have had any greater enemy than the concept of reference. After a century dominated by the realist tradition--Stendhal's roman: c'est un miroir qu'on promene le long d'un chemin(1)--naturalism had became a constraint to be rebelled against by the Expressionists, Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists and others seeking to liberate their medium. These various species of antirealists and their successors were united by the belief that it was senseless, even indefensible, to hobble language by restricting its use to a description of observable phenomena. Such constraint showed a lack of curiosity, if not courage; and, after all, didn't everything expressible in words enjoy, in some sense, a real existence? Breton in the 1920s included the world of dream in his notion of absolute reality, and considered verbalizations of dream imagery realist writing. Robbe-Grillet, who championed the French new novel four decades later, wrote that the style of the constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking [...]; it is invention, invention of the world [...].(2) American authors, too, in particular John Barth and Donald Barthelme in the 1960s and 70s, proclaimed the autonomy of language and the from the naturalist tradition. The result of these experiments was to expand dramatically the scope of literature's, and the novel's, expressive potential; the reader's (and writer's) experience was no longer primarily one of recognition: it had become to a far more dramatic extent one of discovery. This literary drive for independence is visible throughout the work of Raymond Queneau. Even in his first book, Le Chiendent (1933), whose main character is seen to come into being in the opening sentences and return to nothingness in the last, Queneau was already exploring the limits and possibilities of the self-conscious literary text. The characters in one of his novels, Les Fleurs bleues (1965), exist simultaneously in more than one century. In another, Le Vol d'Icare (1968), they write novels from whose pages the characters escape so as to embark on adventures in the real world. These are more than mere literary divertissements. Queneau was trained as a philosopher, and he employed these fictional antics in the service of an ontology of the literary text which, in the pages of his novels, became an ontology of man. Nowhere in Queneau's work is this subtext more apparent than in his 1959 burlesque dans le metro, the tale of a young girl from the provinces (threshold age: she's barely pubescent) who's come to spend two days in Paris with her uncle Gabriel while her mother visits her lover. stands out among Queneau's novels for its mix of aesthetic categories: in it, he not only subverts the realist tradition by establishing a self-reflexive fictional universe, but appropriates many elements of this tradition as well. In Zazie et la litterature, Roland Barthes enumerates these features, concluding: Il y a la toute la technique du roman francais, de Stendhal a Zola, and Du point de vue de l'architecture litteraire, est un roman bien fait.(3) His discussion then centers around the methods Queneau employe to sabotage traditional forms while still propping his book on them. One can extrapolate from Barthes' essay (though he himself does not formulate this) the thesis that is indeed a highly mimetic work; its referent, however, is not the world, but rather the French from Stendhal to Zola. It is written in the form of a traditional novel. In particular, Barthes sees as a figure whose raison d'etre is to attack and destroy what he calls here (deviating from Jakobson's definition) metalanguage and describes as l'indicatif, sorte de degre zero de l'acte destine a representer le reel, non a le modifier (128); for Barthes, this metalanguage is the essence of the literature Queneau is reacting against. Zazie's weapon is the language-object or transitive speech: she prefers the imperative or optative modes, and, like Laverdure (Tu causes, tu causes, c'est tout ce que tu peux faire), ridicules (e. …
Referência(s)