The idea of a "revolutionary" Raymond Queneau is difficult to imagine. Not that he should be seen as an opponent of social progress (he shows himself close to the humble and sensitive to their vicissitudes); not that he should be counted among the well-meaning (he is very frankly on the opposite side); he is neither lukewarm nor timid, but he is discreet and self-effacing. A "revolutionary" is hard to conceive without a dose of provocation, aggressiveness, militancy, vehemence; in Queneau, none of that. Yet he signed it, Queneau, the August 1925 proclamation 1 denouncing the colonial war of Spain and France allied to pursue Abd El Krim in the Rif mountains, and this proclamation was entitled The Revolution First and Always. So? Youthful unconsciousness and fervor? Braggadocio? Inadvertence?

Nothing of the sort: a philosophy graduate, the twenty-two-year-old Queneau conceived himself, wanted to be a partisan of revolution, the one that had just swept away imperial power in Russia to implant socialism on the former territory of the tsars: no other revolution could rival that of October at the time.

Revolutionary, that's understood, but what kind of revolution? Is it the one described by Marx and Engels in outlining the broad phases of proletariat development, [retracing] the history of civil war, more or less latent, that works through current society until the hour when this war breaks out into open revolution, and where the proletariat founds its domination through the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. 2

Queneau will provide, during his time under the colors, the indispensable reflection around the notion of "revolution" and all the implications of such upheaval in terms of social, human, and moral cost. He cannot subscribe to a movement that would require a bloodbath to change life. In the opinion of the enlisted surrealist that is Raymond Queneau, it is however indispensable to put an end to the institutions, privileges, and selfishness that led to the war, which the zouave conceives as an absolute scandal. He would need to discover what simple and non-violent action would suffice to produce, in post-conflict France and all things being equal, a complete and essential revolution. The surrealist revolution is certainly the answer, but what, exactly, does it consist of?

A recent and thorough study of Guillaume Apollinaire's play Les Mamelles de Tirésias led me to reflect on the term "surrealist" with which the poet qualifies his drama. In cultural matters, realism is understood as a literary and artistic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. Its representatives estimated that the artist, painter or novelist, should imitate reality as faithfully as possible, represent the real without idealizing it. It was to this phenomenon that Guillaume Apollinaire was thinking when, with Pierre Albert-Birot's complicity, he chose to subtitle his play "surrealist drama." He explains it in the following terms:

Here we attempt to infuse a new spirit into the theater
A joy a voluptuousness a virtue
To replace this pessimism over a century old
Which is very old for something so boring
[…]
Not for the sole purpose
Of photographing what is called a slice of life
But to make life itself emerge in all its truth
For the play must be a complete universe 3

Words that confirm Apollinaire's intention to depict reality as faithfully as possible and without idealizing it, according to the aims of realism, but to do so superlatively. Now, surrealism, as understood by the three soldiers on leave (Aragon, Breton and Soupault) who attended the drama on June 24, 1917, constitutes indeed an attempt to add (sur-) a supplement of [dream, fervor, enthusiasm, exaltation, color, poetry…] to everyday reality (-realism): to change life, to pull it upward.

Between 1925 and 1929, Queneau's name appears at the head of no poetry pamphlet nor at the bottom of any painting, but he signed many texts (articles, dream accounts, reviews) published by La Révolution surréaliste and aligned himself with the various political, social, and cultural proclamations of which the movement was prodigal: he was an active and convinced surrealist.

Since we are here discussing the "languages" of surrealism, a small historical detour is necessary. From the Bolsheviks' arrival to power 1918, the Russian language had been largely reformed, several rare letters making duplicates had been replaced by the most common sign; the hard sign at the end of masculine words in the nominative singular was suppressed. From 1919, Europe redivided by the treaties of Versailles and almost all the communes of the southwestern suburbs of Paris is animated by initiatives forgotten these days. In 1919-1920, the resurrection of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) as well as Poland and Finland leads to the officialization of their respective idioms, hitherto drowned in the Russian empire; the same goes for Czech, Slovak and South Slavic languages (Yugoslav) freed from the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Ottoman empire. The Irish Free State, from 1920, intends to rebroadcast Irish throughout the island. Barely arrived in power 1922, Stalin himself, in the vastness of the USSR, imposes that all local languages, Siberian dialects, Caucasian dialects and so on be surveyed, transcribed in Cyrillic alphabet and provided with grammars, lexicons, dictionaries. A little later, in 1928, Kemal Ata Turk requires that the Latin alphabet become the vehicle of Anatolian (vulgar Turkish), in place of the Arabic alphabet.

Since 1925, with the surrealist group, then outside it from 1929, Queneau was seeking the idea, seeking this revolutionary solution capable of changing life. This search had led him "to the confines of darkness" (his expression) in pursuit of the chimerical deviants who had produced literary work. Sterile quest as far as revolution is concerned; quest whose best results will give him material to compose Les Enfants du Limon, in 1938. When, in the company of his wife Janine, Queneau arrives in Greece in the summer of 1932, the eastern part of Europe buzzes with all the linguistic initiatives mentioned above, but the Hellenic kingdom is for its part prey to diglossia. The katharevousa or "pure" language is, at the time, the only one taught in schools, and demotic, the language of the people (everyone has recognized the radical "demo-" in demotic), is the language that everyone spoke. The matter will only be resolved in 1976 (!) by the adoption of demotic as the official national language. You all know for example that red wine was labeled "οἶνος ἐρυθρός" and pronounced "κόκκινο κρασι": can you imagine?

In Greece, Queneau began by getting lost in supposed translations, from English (he had brought An Experiment with Time, by John W. Dunne 4, for translation purposes), from seventeenth-century French (he will confess that he was tempted to translate Le Discours de la méthode, by René Descartes, into "contemporary French"), but by his own admission, let himself "fall into the novelistic bath 5." This notion of "translation" from French three centuries old to that which people speak today, this Greek diglossia whose fierce and foolish fatuity he measures (culture, science, are reserved for the "zelites" as they say these days) make their little way in his head.

The linguistic upheaval around France has not moved the members of the surrealist group in the least, convinced "like everyone else" of French supremacy in all domains (Whatever the church or chapel, France is its eldest daughter, forever). The existence of ramifications of surrealism in numerous countries, notably nations just recently constituted like Czechoslovakia, is taken by the French as a manifestation of allegiance to the "genius" (others say "universality") of their language.

On reflection, and retrospectively, the surrealist movement is very French, and even, very Parisian. Its members have all applied themselves sufficiently at school, whatever the final level reached, to experience no difficulty in using the most correct spelling even when their writing is strictly "automatic." The surrealists express themselves in exactly the same language as Loti, Barrès and France, written French strictly subject to the most academic prescriptions because, if it were otherwise, the daring metaphors would be barely comprehensible and would lend themselves to accusations of incoherence or clumsiness; I will give later an example of this kind of interpretation. The movement, in its literary acceptance which soon took precedence over all other potentialities, fits into the momentum aroused for three quarters of a century by Gautier, Bloy, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Jarry, Jacob and Apollinaire of liberation of metaphor and banalization of the absurd. There is no question of bringing revolution to the heart of language itself: peace to spelling, peace to vocabulary and long life to syntax.

For his part, Queneau cannot pretend to ignore the linguistic phenomena around him. It follows that in his eyes, the use of French as it is written does not go without saying. He was able to measure, between autumn 1914 and late 1918, the difference between the Inn'gliche for zeu baccalauréat and what the Tommies of the expeditionary corps babbled in transit through Le Havre; he attempted to initiate himself to various dead or living idioms (hieroglyphic Egyptian, Hittite, Arabic…); he was "good" in Latin and ancient Greek during his humanities; subsequently, he read Le Langage 6 by Joseph Vendryès and meditated on its lessons, but also, he began to practice Joyce as early as 1922 7 by reading The Portrait Of the Artist As a Young Man, then the French translation of Ulysses on publication in 1929. Finally, he read Guénon and, through his intermediary, became acquainted with the very long Chinese scriptural tradition and the reforms that accompanied it.

The first characters appear in -1530, three thousand years before the Edict of Villers-Côtterets. In -212 (year of the capture of Syracuse by Roman troops) for example, Li Si, first minister of Qin Shihuang, accomplished a radical reform of Chinese writing and made its tracings obligatory. The destruction of ancient writings was ordered, even if it meant executing their owners in case of recalcitrance. The emperor being an adept of Taoism, he took advantage of it to persecute Confucians. The sancang, Li Si's character catalog, contained three thousand three hundred characters whose form was imposed throughout the empire. Subsequently, quite regularly, improvements to writing occurred, the most recent having been ordered by Mao Zedong: taking Qin Shihuang as an explicit example, the Great Helmsman also massacred a few scholars who were suspected of trying to oppose his reforms. In China, writing reforms and library burnings are each time founding acts in the political sense of the term.

Since we have just been talking about burning books, let it be recalled here that not only did Adolf Hitler make himself ignominiously guilty of this kind of exaction, but just before him, the "moral (!)" American and British authorities judged it useful to consign Ulysses to the flames. This to emphasize, to those who would not be convinced, that writing, the book, literature, poetry are of an insubordinate, insurrectionary, even – and here we are – revolutionary nature.

Observing that the most vehement audacities of the surrealists in matters of poetry have, on the life that needs to be changed, only a barely feeble influence, not to say negligible, Queneau envisages, from 1937 (this is how he presents the thing) a reform of written French so extensive that it amounts to a refoundation. When, several years later, his scheme reaches the public (the small public of Parisian critics…), it unleashes their vituperations. The body of the offense lies in the simple words that I deliver to you on the screen Haro on Queneau!

The first cause of indignation against Queneau's proposal comes from the confidence that its author seems to profess in the discernment of French speakers and readers. The latter, in life, risk operating an invaluable – or tragic – amalgam between a vessel for funerary use or the material of which this receptacle is made, a flatworm or nematode invertebrate, a preposition of direction, a constitutive element of poetry, a nuance of the visible spectrum and a heraldic fur. Fortunately, the Acadéfraise has put good order to it: each time a Frenchman pronounces the sound [vèr], he spells it mentally to be sure of saying what he claims to say. Queneau supposes, and one measures by this yardstick the degree of presumption of the supposition, that the reader of any text would be able, without the assistance of academic spelling, to understand for example that [vèr], in "Le Rayon vert," designates neither a -foot, nor a -of-earth, nor an -eight-footed, nor a coat of arms background, nor a direction, but a paradise, a gallant, a -of-gray, a fire, a meadow in short, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum of wavelength between five hundred and five hundred and fifty nanometers. You will tell me that "Le Rayon," which serves as context, calls for the spectrum, which is radiation. Good. But "Pantoufle de verre," eh? There are even pedantic exegetes who argue that it would not be silicon oxide but heraldic furniture support: feet in shields… You murmur: "surrealist metaphor"? Yes, in bursts: here we are.

In Queneau's proposal to substitute a néofräsè for traditionally spelled French, the second element of extravagance, pardon, of scandal, consists in asking the French to renounce mandarinate. Now, this institution, although occult, is very solidly implanted, especially among the "of stock"

putting spelling to all words,
a very good spelling 8

who pride themselves on their mastery of the written language compared to the failings of the "others": the upstarts, the dunces, the left-behind, the workers, the bumpkins, the underdeveloped, the migrants: all fools in three letters for ignoring the nuance between cuisseau and cuissot. Spelling allows one to immediately distinguish the poor, the shabby, the zonard from the junomme-très-bien. The diploma will change nothing: non-conformity to the conventions of the Acadéfraise suffices. This becomes less true these days, but until 1970-1980, it was still the rule. Now, the cunning distinguisher between good and poor spelling is the very one that André Breton condemns because he

has not had, at least once, the desire to put an end […] to the little system of debasement and cretinization in force 9 […]

An example drawn from Queneau will make the thing more explicit. Let there be a concierge named Saturnin Belhôtel. This man, for reasons as honorable as anyone's, wishes to be both a writer and a philosopher. He writes the first sentence of his work:

L'ouazo sang vola 10.

There is no need to continue: the surrealist image (for it is one, and a beautiful one!) is concealed, destroyed, botched by the imperialist spelling that does not admit the theft of vital fluid by the flyer but requires the latter to take flight, because that's how it is and not otherwise. If, let's say, Desnos or Péret had written the sentence, no one would have ventured to doubt that the blood had been stolen. But, since the novelist puts a concierge on stage and in this word there is cierge, then it can only be a calamitous ignorance of spelling. Surrealist, one may well have read Ducasse and approved the proposition according to which

Poetry must be made by all. Not by one 11,

the sentence remains a pious wish, one of those good intentions with which hell is paved. Queneau doesn't hear it that way.

However, neither a rationalization of spelling to make it more conform to what is spoken, nor a leveling of the written to put an end to the elitism of the privileged constitutes the essential of Queneau's quest in matters of written language. These two propositions nevertheless have a solid social component that could not displease those surrealists who embraced Stalinism with fervor, nor those who will soon reach the shores of the literary profession in what it has most conformist.

Queneau proposes, with his refoundation of written language, a change of life that would begin by considerably improving that of children, of schoolchildren. However desirous they were of changing life, the surrealists attempted nothing to modify the fate of the little ones and little girls. Queneau, on the other hand, is concerned about it: he has described his childhood in Chêne et Chien; he has narrated the wanderings of Théo Nautile's adolescence in Le Chiendent and above all, he has brought to the forefront the child Zazie. Young oak or dog schoolboy from Le Havre, solitary high school student powerfully crushed with boredom by his environment of the Magnific Vista subdivision, country girl discovering Paris have all three undergone the curses of the school condition. Children, we too have all been through it: we have deployed enormous efforts to learn spelling; our instructors have spared neither insults, nor humiliations, nor punishments to inculcate it in us. And then, even the best-intentioned parents inflict in their turn on their offspring the affronts of spelling. Let's take up again the example of the six avatars of [vèr]: verre ver vers vert vers vair. Inexorably the perverse spirit of the teachers, whose main concern consists in "making the kids shit" as Zazie so justly denounces 12, has pushed them to give lessons of confusion under the pretext of "homonyms," mixed, so that the chaos is more ample, with "synonyms." Those who have managed to get by (with the help of parents, most often) can aspire to a future as minister; the others will make excellent laborers. The surrealists, and even the Stalinists among them, have not noted this aspect of social discrimination of written language, and have understood even less the advantage they could draw from a flagrant transgression of national diglossia.

The third characteristic of néofräsè is the one that most interested Queneau and most enraged his detractors: néofräsè is "funny." In all rigor, this aspect of the language proposed by Queneau is the least surrealist: without being nightcaps like so many of their brothers of the pen, the surrealists have not particularly shone through the humor of their writings. Need we recall that Jacques Prévert, great user of drollery, mockery, burlesque, ineffable in short of comic in general was expelled from the movement in 1929? It is not impossible to smile, even sometimes to laugh frankly at the reading of André Breton, but these episodes are rare and their author's ambition is certainly not to generalize such dispositions. Dalí is extravagant, yes, but takes seriously even in his most advanced delusions. I admit I don't know the other members of the group well enough to distinguish the laughers among them. Queneau, for his part, took from the start the side of laughing at it and holds to it without interruption.

Why is there no surrealist comic? Why do the multiple languages of surrealism not include a funny branch? It is true that French poetry has hardly, traditionally, a comic component, except for parodic or bawdy texts. Heirs, whatever they say, much more of the symbolists and romantics than of Lautréamont or Jarry, the surrealists have remained in the solemn. As much as Lautréamont and Jarry know how to manifest verve, as much as those who claim to be from them are parsimonious with it to the point of abstinence.

For having tried the implementation of a profoundly reformed spelling, transcribing the verbal tics and improprieties of the ordinary oral language of the contemporary porters of the Port-aux-Foins, Queneau discovered the vis comica of the thing and took advantage of it. He even made it one of his favorite tools in his stylistic panoply. Incidentally, one writes vis comica and pronounces, in hexagonal, umwr.

It would be unbecoming to confuse Queneau's néofräsè with, on the one hand, Dubuffet's jargon or André Martel's paralloïdre and on the other hand with what I have just designated as "hexagonal." The latter, a learned and snobbish derivative of French, consists in the uninterrupted chaining of prefabricated phrases sprinkled with expressions with Anglo-Saxon pretensions. The vocabulary, assimilable to a professional lexicon, is very limited. Hexagonal is in common use on the radio; politicians of all stripes practice it with rare dexterity. Its meteorological and sporting diverticula use the same common fund, with some specific turns. This language is the apical summit of what the surrealists detested: a "non-stop" concatenation of worn-out metaphors become clichés of the genre "after having reviewed his copy, X…, until now candidate l'eau-coste, pulled his pin from the game to enter the court of the great: result of the races, there's no photo, he is qualified to participate in the primary."

Published in the middle of the last century, Jean Dubuffet's jargon texts 13 certainly constitute an attempt of very Quenian aspect. These excesses are a bit ahead of Queneau's most flagrant audacities. Céline, to whom Dubuffet presented his jargon for approval, would have said to have judged "ya du labeur" – which their author did not take as a compliment and certainly was not one. Céline is mentioned by Queneau in his investigations around the transcription of what is spoken, if only to emphasize that the appearance of naturalness, of authenticity, required enormously "labeur" that it was then necessary to conceal. The reconstituted natural must seem natural to be natural.

The regent André Martel has for his part invented a poetic language for his own use, which he calls paralloïdre. It is neither an attempt to speak prole (as one may fear Dubuffet used) nor a reform proposal, but an adaptation of French to a shimmering, a lability, an unctuousness that are lacking in ordinary language. Martel uses janotisms, telescopings, concretions. The objective is in no way to imitate any spoken language, but an immediate expressiveness of the written. Paralloïdre requires, for better understanding, that one declaim the text, the latter then makes its melody, its euphony, flare up, while simultaneously titillating several possible acceptations of its invented words (hence the expression of shimmering used above). Neither in its intention, nor in its use (no one has used paralloïdre since his papapafol died), does the poetic language of Martelandre compare to Queneau's néofräsè.

I do not ignore the multiple proposals of super-languages with poetic aims 14 (that of "Le Grand Combat," by Henri Michaux 15, notably) that have been formulated here and there, but they are less familiar to me than Dubuffetian jargon or paralloïdre: I doubt, in any case, that they compare to néofräsè.

Queneau laid out the guiding lines of the latter in 1937, in a text that remained unpublished until the 1950s 16: the coincidence between the dates of Dubuffet's jargon and this publication deserves to be emphasized. Likewise, the conversations between Queneau and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes on the deficiencies of written French took place in 1950, while a more extensive and theoretical presentation on néofräsè was given by Queneau at the Sorbonne in 1955. All this, even the initial conception in 1937 of a refoundation of French on the basis of everyday speech, is largely posterior to the rupture between Queneau and surrealism.
And yet…
If the objective consists in "changing life" – the expression is found, in these very terms, in Breton, in Péret (reference and reverence made to Rimbaud) – if there is reason to find the secret of a language whose elements cease[…] to behave like wrecks on the surface of a dead sea, as Breton writes in Du surréalisme en ses œuvres vives 17, then Queneau's idea takes on the appearance of a fundamental approach, of a very first step in this direction. For finally, writing a o u circumflex t and pronouncing "w" surely belongs to the wreck on the surface of a dead sea, or words have no meaning.

The pamphlets in jargon exist; the booklets in paralloïdre also exist, but there's a good bet that the longest set of texts written in néofräsè has just scrolled before your eyes to illustrate my remarks. Illustrate, well illustrate, as are the manuals for the use of schoolchildren since it is demonstrated that a good drawing is worth more than a long speech. You have no luck: you also have the long speech. The demonstration offered by these illustrations is not as gratuitous as it appears: those among you who made the effort to try to read found themselves in the situation of one learning to decipher, initial stage before reading the mother tongue or a foreign language. Now, once deciphered, certainly, it's French. Simultaneously, you experienced the coding aspect that the written takes on, since its referent, the spoken language, is external. The transcription I present is not fundamentally different from the one you are accustomed to, it's just another code, a simplified code. In internalizing it, you have forgotten that spelling is also a code. Some may even have noted that the coding mode I adopted differs slightly from the way Queneau goes about it. These differences, simple details, originate from the necessary adaptation of néofräsè to an ordinary computer keyboard, in azerty version. I also recognize that I went directly to the second stage envisaged by Queneau, the one that is the most exhaustive and radical.

It remains nonetheless that evidently, Queneau deprived himself of a fine future as a literary madman by not publishing in néofräsè either a novel, or a tale, or even one or two pages of demonstration (what he did with his "Translation into Joycian"). The Quenophile must console himself with the sole "Doukipudonktan ?" It is on this monophasic pentasyllable that my efforts will concentrate, in conclusion of my talk. I leave aside the numerous other telescopings of the same order, because "Doukipudonktan ?" is emblematic of the way Queneau diverted both his refoundational idea and his revolutionary aspirations in favor of his writer's virtuosity. It is through this incipit that the scandal came about; it is through it that the revolution could have begun.

I remember having already described the following scene, but I experience such pleasure in evoking it that I will present it again, with all the details.

A very well meussieu, one of those who put spelling to all words, a very good spelling, François Mauriac for example, finds on his desk a volume of the Collection Blanche of the NRF/Gallimard. The cover announces: Raymond Queneau (our man frowns: he doesn't dare think: "All the sewers are in nature," because, well-meaning, he only thinks in conformist French)/ Zazie dans le métro/ novel. Fortunately that he is not published by Gaston Gallimard! Finally (sigh), he opens, arrives at the beginning and

Doukipudonktan ?

explodes right in his… physiognomy; he staggers like one who would have had his belly at the height of the cannon. Everything, everything, absolutely everything in him revolts: his class prejudices, his values of the right and center, his bourgeois Bordeaux cru superiority complex (not everyone can be premier cru classé), his professional Christianity, his accomplished humanities, his Mérimée dictation without fault, his eternal "good" mention, his first-class travels, his Gaullist fervor, his twenty-second armchair at the Acadéfraise (the armchair of cops), up to his repressed homosexuality, everything I tell you, everything in him does only one turn. And they dare call that "novel," like the precious studies of provincial turpitudes, exquisite texts like corpses that our man lays! He can neither articulate nor even conceive "gnia d'quoi se la prendre et se la mordre," because in any case, the means fail him.

I recapitulate and explain. Queneau uses it, with his initial monophasic pentasyllable, as the potaches' contest and Jarry their fellow student used when they made Father Ubu utter, in the first act, first scene too, first word, THE word. From then on in Zazie dans le métro as in Ubu roi, the subsequent audacities, scattered in the text, act as reminders of the inaugural enormity, as rhymes so to speak, although nowhere in the novel is the primitive formula repeated (in opposition to the zazic clausula, whose role is that of refrain, human counterpart of the reiterated verses of the parrot Laverdure). The disturbance (in the case of academicians, the indisposition) caused by uncle Gabriel's interrogation requires that the reader stick to the letter, that he decipher instead of scanning in cursive fashion, if by chance Queneau had hidden other monsters of this kind in his text. One conceives well, under these conditions, why Queneau did not write EVERYTHING in néofräsè: he noted quite rightly that

Unfoua kon sra zabitué, saira tousel,

and it follows that the important thing is that the reader does not become accustomed.

Under these conditions, the use of the irruptions of néofräsè in certain novels (and in some poems) of Queneau belongs not to the manifesto for a refoundation of written French, but rather (and here surrealism resurges) to a sort of metaphor, a metaphor beyond traditional metaphor. Queneau's idea that there is no fundamental difference between poetry and novel finds here one more demonstration. Of course, strict surrealist orthodoxy is completely opposed to this kind of notions, but all the same, if metaphor must indeed be stretched to the extreme, Queneau obtains an impressive tension.

Similar to the lightning rod that drains to itself the fulgurations of lightning, the "Doukipudonktan ?" has therefore succeeded in concentrating all the exasperated fury of all those whom Breton saw "belly at the height of the cannon" of the weapon with which one commits the simplest surrealist acts. Not a single one is missing. The most offended was certainly the band of forty, all fiercely determined to prefer, for French, embalming rather than emancipation. Queneau's stylistic intentions will be explained much later, by Jean-Charles Chabanne, during the Raymond Queneau and Languages colloquium in 1982. Unfortunately no one has been bold enough to dare in turn, in a different style, to use néofräsè.

You will allow me to retrace, very summarily, the historico-political framework in which Queneau envisaged himself as revolutionary. Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin 1922, Antonio Salazar 1932, Adolf Hitler 1933, Francisco Franco (1939, but he had made himself talked about earlier) and I know I'm omitting a few others, invade the political scene of their respective countries and of Europe in general. Democratic governments show themselves powerless to spare their peoples the fallout from the rupture between Breton and Queneau, which triggered the "Twenty-Nine crisis" on Wall Street and in the United States first, then a bit everywhere. It is then that Raymond Queneau conceives a revolutionary proposal, which would consist in nothing less than refounding written French, which could not fail to have repercussions throughout the nation and everywhere its influence extends. Such a revolution would be completely peaceful and completely upheaving, and no one can claim to know where it would stop.

Any resemblance between what I have just described and the circumstances or powerlessness observed in this second decade of the twenty-first century would be purely coincidental. As for the political program carrying refoundation of French… Dare!

    7 — V. Florence Géhéniau. Queneau analphabète / Alphabetical repertoire of his readings from 1917 to 1976. In Brussels, chez l'auteur, 1992. Queneau will only read Ulysses in the original language in↩