Raymond Queneau was a poet and writer whose intense interest in mathematics flavored many of his works. He cofounded an artistic group called Ouvroir de litterature potentielle (Oulipo--Workshop of Potential Literature) that still influences artists by imposing mathematical rules as game-like constraints on the generation of text. Some of Queneau's best-known works are Exercises de style (Exercises in Style) and the popular novel Zazie dans le Metro (1959), which director Louis Malle made into a movie in 1960. Many critics believe Queneau was one of the most important authors of the mid-20th century.
The son of hat-makers, Queneau was born in La Havre, France on February 21, 1903. He was reportedly fascinated by mathematics from an early age. Queneau attended the city's elementary and secondary schools, graduating in 1920, and in 1921 began studying at the University of Paris. This was roughly the start of his surrealist period, when he revealed a black sense of humor, became obsessed with death, and began ridiculing authority. He remained at the university until 1925, when (despite increasingly bad asthma attacks) he entered the military.
After a two-year tour of duty in Algeria and Morocco, Queneau returned to Paris in 1927 to study philosophy, although he also spent a lot of time studying mathematics with books by Emile Borel and Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor. He found a job in Paris and in his spare time began spending time with artists in the famous rue du Chateau, who were surrealists and had come to be known as dissidents. However, despite his initial affinity with the surrealists, he would soon dissociate himself from the movement because of their systematic rejection of scientific knowledge and reason. In 1930, Queneau began researching at the National Library for a project that he called "les fous litteraires" ("literary madmen"). According to Queneau, these were writers who had advanced what the mainstream considered eccentric theories about various aspects of reality. By 1934 his work had resulted in the 700-page Encyclopedia of the Inexact Sciences, which was promptly rejected by two publishing houses.
Meanwhile, Queneau had been busy with other projects as well. From 1931 to 1934 he wrote reviews for the left-wing Le critique social, and in 1933 he published his first novel, Le Chiendent (The Bark Tree) after an inspirational trip to Greece. Also at this time, Queneau began a period of psychoanalysis that would last at least six years. During the remainder of the decade he wrote Guele de Pierre (1934); Les Derniers Jours (The Last Days) (1936); his popular novel Odile (1937); a "novel-in-verse" and what would become his most famous poem, Chêne et chien (Oak and Dog) (1937); the novel Les Enfants du Limon (1938); and Un Rude Hiver (1939). From 1936 to 1938 Queneau worked as a reporter for a publication called The Intransigent. He then landed a job as a reader at the prestigious New French Review.
During World War II, Queneau wrote more than ever, and afterward found that he had acquired a reputation in the literary world. This was mainly due to the success of Exercises in Style (1947), but also to the active role he had taken in many artistic media, including film and radio. In 1950, he joined the College de Pataphysique, a group of writers and intellectuals dedicated to the science of imaginary solutions, particularly concentrating on exceptions to natural law. His 1950 poem "Petite cosmogenie portative" ("A Small, Portable Cosmogeny") shows the influence of the school, as it describes the creation of the universe in a kind of scientific-alchemical language. Soon after joining the school, Queneau took on another project as well--editing the gigantic, multivolume Encyclopedie de la Pleiade, a scholarly collection of past and present classical authors. Despite the difficulty of this uncharacteristically "serious" job, he was eager to do it; even since childhood, when he had written a catalog for his local library, Queneau had been preoccupied with ways to organize information. By 1955 he was the publication's director, and finished the task in 1956. Later that year, Queneau agreed to edit the results of a literary survey ("For an Ideal Library") asking respondents to vote for the most 100 important books of all time. His own additions included many mathematics classics as well as books by Albert Einstein and John von Neumann's Theory of Games.
Queneau founded Oulipo with a literary friend as a subgroup within the College du Pataphysique in 1960. During their monthly meetings, Oulipo members would pose themselves writing challenges. These stemmed mainly from Queneau's love of mathematics, which by then had become focused on game theory, number theory, combinatorics, and set theory. Another Oulipo-inspired work was his 1961 Cent Mille Millards de Poemes, a book of 10 sonnets each of whose 14 lines is printed on a single strip. Detaching and mixing the strips allows a theoretical potential of 1014 different poems. Queneau's 1963 book Borders is a collection of many of his math-based writings. His other major publications in the 1960s were the novel The Blue Flowers and a trilogy of poems.
Queneau died in Paris on October 25, 1976. He and his wife, a relative of pioneering surrealist André Breton, were married in 1928 and had one son.
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