QUENEAU-BRETON. CROSSED PATHS
par Valeria Chiore
June 10, 2016
Queneau-Breton. Crossed Paths
Introduction
Crossing
Paris, July 28, 1928: Raymond Queneau marries Janine Kahn, Breton's sister-in-law, after having gone almost secretly with her to the French Riviera.
The Queneau-Breton crossing, born from 1924, seems to be definitively closed.
In a certain measure, all familiar, it's true. But there are, obviously, different implications between Queneau and Breton, that we would like to approach now. They characterize a philosophical, artistic and intellectual parabola that deserves our attention.
The crossed paths that intertwine between them – from the beginning of the twenties, and then in the period 1924-1930, and finally during all the thirties, beyond the familiar aspects, are indeed dense, rich, seductive, and they have made Queneau, out of respect for Breton, a heteroclite and rebellious surrealist1.
To this seduction we want to submit ourselves, following its intimate articulations, fascination (1919-1924), encounter (1924-1930), rebellion (the Thirties), analyzing, from time to time, the elements of analogy, rupture, contiguity.
1. Fascination
The Pre-surrealist Period (1919-1924)
Queneau is born surrealist, from the moment when, barely twenty years old, he meets Breton, Leiris, Masson, who introduce him to their artistic and intellectual milieu. A very lively milieu, which the young Queneau frequents with some timidity, marked by studies of music and philosophy (his childhood in Le Havre with Honegger; his studies at the Sorbonne).
A student in Paris, at the beginning of the twenties, he becomes passionate – at the Sorbonne, Faculty of Letters and Faculty of Sciences – about authors such as Leibniz and Proust, Guénon and Boutroux; or, still, more diverse themes that cleave his sky with the seductive force of meteorites: the unconscious, Freudian theme, but not only Freudian; the dream, a universe in its own right; chance and necessity; the world of Fantômas and Magritte; the universe of Soupault, Leiris and Breton.
The encounter with Breton imposes itself, in this context, with the force of an ineluctable necessity: if Breton had not existed, along Queneau's existence, one would have had to invent him.
Breton was, at this time, the collector of all novelty, and surrealism drew, for the young Raymond, a fabulous world, in which he would spend his twenties, between 1920 and 1929, until matured, following new encounters, his anti-Bretonian rebellion.
What delights Queneau, in the Breton universe? What are the elements of fascination that capture this young timid and discreet genius?
The unconscious, the dream and chance, we said: everything that escapes the reality principle, to clear and distinct ideas, to the principium individuationis: everything that withdraws from modernity, projecting itself towards the contemporary, often beyond the contemporary; everything that, in relation to the real, poses itself as a bracketing of reality: a function of the unreal, an ultra-realism, a sur-realism.
It is not by chance that he begins to note, from 1921, his dreams, that he proposes to copy in his Journal2.
Or, still, that he begins to envisage suggestions that lead him towards the surrealist aura, such as, as Claude Debon emphasizes, "dissolution of a derealized world, call to dream, obsession with time, human misery, urban landscapes, and already this distance of the writer that engenders humor3…".
And finally, comes the time of an elusive anxiety that, recorded in a lucid Self-Portrait in 1923, leads him quite naturally towards other frontiers.
The virtue that attracts me most – he says – is universality; the genius with whom I sympathize most is Leibniz. But I do not know how to discover the side of the mind – the detail – that is proper to me. Mystical accidents and crises of despair; concern with metaphysics; desire for sciences (mathematics), erudition (bibliography, history), languages (cosmopolitanism); taste for travel, for the other and the diverse; love of the real, poetry, daily life, objects. /anxiety of the total, concern for the complete, the whole, the perfect sum. /vision of the particular, of the point of which one does not speak, of the special of which one does not care, etc. /irritability, susceptibility. Various periods. /Enormous imagination (embarrassing): I imagine everything I want, in all genres, on all sorts of subjects; I can invent stories on anything; I create individuals, peoples, events, books, cities. /Obviously I ignore painting, sport, love of women, humility, virtue, sentimentality, commerce, banking, industry, agriculture, army, navy, cooking, fishing, hunting, several thousand languages or dialects; I know neither how to swim, nor dance, nor ride a bicycle, etc.4.
Universality and particular and special details, mystics and despair, mathematical sciences, historical and bibliographical erudition, and, above all, an enormous and embarrassing imagination call for a new horizon of meaning.
The times are ripe for the encounter.
2. The Encounter
The Surrealist Period (1924-1930)
…And the encounter occurs, in autumn 1924, through the knowledge and frequentation of Leiris (known in July 1924), Soupault (November 8), and, finally, Breton (November 12).
During this period, Queneau frequents the Central Bureau of Surrealist Research, inaugurated on October 11, 1924, 15 rue de Grenelle (general secretary Francis Gérard), or still the Certa and Cyrano cafés, meeting places for movement members.
Here is born his surrealist vocation, an attitude that articulates itself during the following years, in reality a handful of years, useful, however, for placing its seal on an entire constellation of themes and arguments, marked by the young Queneau's active participation in several surrealist initiatives, from the Declaration of January 27, 1925, to collaboration with La Révolution surréaliste (n° 3 and 5, 1925; 9 and 10, 1927; 11, 1928), passing through friendship with the rue du Château group (Prévert, Tanguy, Marcel Duhamel); participation in the Vieux Colombier brawl; visits to surrealist exhibitions.
This is the case, in 1927, of the first Tanguy Exhibition (Yves Tanguy and objects from America, Galerie surréaliste, 16 rue Jacques-Callot); of the Arp Exhibition; of Exquisite Corpses; or still, in 1928, of the Man Ray Exhibition; or finally, alongside these exhibitions, of the Méliès Gala, Salle Pleyel, December 16, 1929.
All this, with the sole interruption of 1926, the year of flags and regiments, when he will have to respond to the call to arms [in Algeria and Morocco, among others, where he notes, in "Death Essay" (reflections on the possibilities of existence):
[...]/Now – in me, I believe I must remark two sorts of possibilities of individual order. /1° possibilities of poetic and revolutionary order/2° possibilities of erudite and critical order"]. An interruption nevertheless significant, as Debon emphasizes, since this year coincides with the practice of excellent exclusions ("Hardly has Queneau met the surrealists – notes Debon – that he must distance himself from them to undergo the ordeal of military service. When he returns, the group has evolved. The crisis has erupted as early as 1926 and exclusions have begun. The precise analysis of his poems between 1924 and 1930 must take account of these facts. Can one not already discover in the poem "The Archipelago," which dates from 1928, an attack against A. Breton, armed with his shovel and his hacksaw, in a text that has already broken with automatic writing?5).
All this, until June 6, 1929, when he quarrels with Breton, inaugurating, from this date, a new slice of life, cadenced by new friendships, by new horizons.
A continuous and dense liaison, obviously, borrowed from a community of themes, spirit, choices and intellectual style.
Themes and choices contained either in the already cited magazines, first of all La Révolution surréaliste6, or in "Surrealist Texts," the brief texts, almost all unpublished, collected for the first time in the first volume of the Complete Works edited by Claude Debon at Gallimard in 1989 (which will henceforth be our bibliographical references)7.
a. La Révolution surréaliste
La Révolution surréaliste, first of all, which represents the scenario in which the young Queneau's thought is exercised during the years between 1925 and 1928, through several texts, often written by several hands with Breton and the others.
This is the case, in 1925, of Dream, which expresses his first reflections on the world of dream and imagination8; or of Revolution First and Always, which, signed by several surrealists, exalts a concrete revolutionary spirit, capable of confronting the current events of the time, from the Peace of Brest-Litovsk – totally approved, to the Rif War – rejected, everywhere energetically expressing its mistrust with respect to the concept of "homeland" ("given that – he says – for us France does not exist")9.
It is still the case, in 1927, of Hand off love, a collective text of moral character, in defense of Charlie Chaplin attacked by American decency leagues who defended his wife who had accused him in the divorce act [the signatories exalt Chaplin as a genius victim of current morality ("Genius serves to signify to the world the moral truth, which universal stupidity obscures and attempts to annihilate")]10; or of The Ivory Tower, a dreamy poem ("Once again twilight has dispersed in the night/After having written on the walls NO DREAMING")11.
It is finally the case, in 1928, of several texts, among which The Dialogue in 1928, a rapid exchange of questions-answers among the surrealists (Queneau dialogues here with Marcel Noll)12; a Report on the sessions of research on sexuality, a confrontation in several voices without prejudice around a free and polymorphous sexuality13; a report on the exhibition, at the Galerie surréaliste, of De Chirico, accused of having betrayed, in his latest works, his original sense of mystery ("A beard has grown on his forehead, an old copyist's beard, a dirty old renegade's beard, a dirty old pale old man's beard")14.
b. Surrealist Texts
All unpublished, except the first two (Dream and Surrealist Text), the Surrealist Texts, written between 1924 and 1928 and published in the first volume of the Complete Works edited by Claude Debon, fill a gap in the Queneau Edition, revealing to us – beyond the first appearance of phonetic and quasi-automatic writing, verbal games, free associations, the so-called neo-French language (Kathareousa, Demotiki) later rejected (Errata corrige, 1970) – a young intellectual passionate about freedom and dreams, seduced by the fascination of the marvelous and the disturbing, captivated by astronomical and geological phenomena, delighted by numerical symbols, unprecedented gestures and strange acts, which announce the advent of literary madmen, or, finally, by cinema, which will mark in his life, from the Forties, a real turn.
The encounter with the surrealists in 1924 – maintains Debon – triggers a revolution in Queneau's writing. To the wise composition of previous poems succeeds the liberation of verses and images15.
And it is precisely liberation and dream, revolution and cinema, the main themes of these texts.
Freedom, first of all, exalted with libertarian, transgressive, anti-sociological accents, quite surrealist:
Freedom! Freedom! You sufficed, a hundred and fifty years ago, to throw France over all Europe; it is true that then it was still more equality, reason that animated the revolutionary armies. But now, Freedom, we want you entire […] How I despise these sociologists who have made of freedom an infamous simulacrum. They have transformed it into a puppet for political meetings, into a new oppression, into a formula engraved above schools, barracks and prisons […] One stammers endlessly about freedom of conscience, but of the freedom to express one's thought there is never question, if not to limit and destroy it […] Let us therefore speak of the freedom of the mind and its liberation"16.
Freedom, therefore, as a revolutionary process of liberation, liberation of the mind, sung by the young Queneau with accents that echo surrealism, that precede Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari and the rebellious theses of the coming anti-psychiatry, that make the young Queneau a revolutionary and visionary spirit:
The man who professes psychology at the Collège de France, this lousy institution, characterizes the psychasthenic mental state by "the incapacity to experience an exact feeling in relation to the present situation"" – notes Queneau. But, in his opinion, "this incapacity, this 'loss of the feeling of the real' […] that the psychiatrist finds in his patients, it is in truth the first symptoms of the liberation of the mind17.
And here, then, in favor of this liberation, against classical psychology and psychiatry (he cites Pierre Janet, 1859-1947), the poets, Gide and Valéry, The Vatican Cellars and Monsieur Teste ("The gratuitous acts of which Gide spoke, the mysterious revelations of M. Teste"), which announce, in his opinion, the omens of a radical transformation:
The liberation of the mind is not a label of a literary movement, it is a challenge to present life, a call to unknown forces, the basis of perpetual Revolution […] We bring to these brutes [ordinary men] fire, disorder and anarchy […] When will he liberate this bird that he broods in his hands, delicious and magnetic, and whose plumage sings at night to sweeten the destiny of the stars?18
And, alongside freedom, the dream, the irruption of the marvelous (this "obsessing ghost that slips away and imposes itself, malicious and burlesque, that I sometimes encounter to my great astonishment"19), which exercises, in his opinion, an irreducible force of liberation:
Dreams have always been for me not simply a fugitive nocturnal event, but mirages and encouragements to resist all social vexations and oppressions […] Each time I can find trace of dream, in whatever work it may be, I am ready for all concessions. The marvelous, whether of scientific, literary, religious origin, has always captivated me. For, at each victory of imagination over the real, one of the links that hold our mind detaches and falls. Liberation begins and already one perceives its formidable consequences20.
Not to mention, obviously, cinema, which, fundamental in surrealist aesthetics, becomes in these first texts the object of a veritable eulogy:
Cinema is not only a Sunday distraction nor an occasion for aesthetic dissertations. We have found in it a new enchantment. The marvelous that delivers us from physical necessities develops in unexpected ways along the so-called comic films which are in reality astonishing works moving solely in an unreal domain21.
This is the case of legendary Far Wests, vampire machinations, Charlie Chaplin comedies, but also of Buster Keaton ("who more than another has shown us that American burlesque film tended towards fairy tale"), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And Queneau concludes:
To our imagination cinema has given satisfactions as great as those of narcotics. In the armchairs of the Ciné-Opéra, of Max Linder, of the American Theater we have lived new hours of dream22.
Freedom and liberation, dream and cinema: strong and clear interests that already announce themselves in these short texts.
Texts that pose themselves as a veritable "reservoir of the imaginary23," welcoming all the suggestions typical of the surrealist universe, and which will later become the objects of Queneau's most original production: taste for the disturbing and for paradox, propensity for literary madmen, attention to numerical symbols, love for bestiaries, the sea, crystals.
This is the case of the character named Fissure, "who eats his eyes every evening," which reminds us of Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (what will become das Unheimliche, the disturbing of Nietzsche and Freud)24; or, still, of the tale The Regulars of the Stock Exchange, composed in October 1925, rich in numerical combinations that announce Sticks, Numbers and Letters ("Technique of the Novel")25; or of his particular affection for all astronomical and geological phenomena, which preludes to The Portable Little Cosmogony26; or of his interest in unprecedented gestures, or strange acts, which announce his future work on literary madmen27; and, in sum, all the themes and centers of surrealist interest enumerated in these pages:
Oceanic fetishes, psychoanalysis, communism, automatic writing, ghosts, the Marquis de Sade, revolution, love, strange paintings, manifestos and manifestations, cinema. Song of brainlessness, Songs of Maldoror, Hegel, Charlie Chaplin, Fantômas!28.
Not to mention the first forms of appearance of the already cited phonetic spelling29.
Surrealism finally poses itself as a source of inspiration for the young Queneau who later, in an interview given to Noel Arnaud in 1948, to the question "Do you consider that surrealism has served to elaborate (to impose) a new conception of poetry, of its role?", responds: "Yes, surrealism has allowed a new conception of poetry; in a very confused way, but it is the first attempt since classical aesthetics: it has unveiled the confounding character of poetry30".
And yet surrealism, and above all the totalizing figure of Breton, is destined to become excessively obsessing for Queneau, for this genius thirsty for knowledge and freedom, who does not accept the indications, prescriptions, dogmas, or well the expulsions that Breton begins to make at the end of the twenties.
The rebellion is preparing. And, with it, a veritable rupture. A rupture that bears a name: Georges Bataille.
3. The Rebellion
Crossed Paths (the Thirties)
Proud adversary of the pope of surrealism during the period straddling the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties, Bataille indeed marks the rupture between Queneau and Breton. And yet, tireless animator of an entire constellation of magazines – the ephemeral and rebellious magazines of the interwar period (which will gather around themselves the best spirits of France, the most lively, the most engaged, allowing them to meet, confront, cross) – he will weave a network of contacts that will favor to a certain extent the resumption of crossings between the two32.
Bataille and his magazines, ephemeral and rebellious, will represent, therefore, at the same time, both an element of rupture and an element of liaison between Queneau and Breton, configuring themselves as a new domain for their crossed paths.
a. Bataille as an Element of Rupture between Queneau and Breton
It will be Bataille, indeed, at the beginning of the thirties, who will divert the rebellious Queneau from Breton, at the time of his attack against surrealism ("Dédé," A Corpse, 1930)33.
It will be Bataille, still, the one with whom Queneau will collaborate on the magazines Documents (1929-31) and La Critique sociale (see the article Critique of the Foundations of Hegelian Dialectics, n° 5, March 1932, signed by Bataille, but conceived with Queneau)34.
And it will then be Bataille, the one with whom he will successively follow the lessons on Hegelian Phenomenology of Spirit professed by Alexandre Kojève at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in 1933-193935.
And it will finally be Bataille; the one with whom, in the same period, Queneau will dream of the project aiming at literary madmen which will result in The Children of Clay (1938) [a dream – a project – which will be taken up later, during his lifetime, in Sticks, Numbers and Letters, 1950, and in Literary and Heteroclite Madmen, Bizarre, n° 4, 1956, to be finally realized, posthumously, in 2002, by Gallimard (the same publisher who had initially refused it!!!), in At the Confines of Darkness. The Literary Madmen]36.
Let's start with "Dédé," a short poem in verse, vitriolic, "Dédé" is part of A Corpse (1930), a violent pamphlet against Breton, signed, among others, by Bataille, Leiris, Vitrac, Limbour, Desnos, Baron, Carpentier, Prévert, in response to the "purification of surrealism" carried out by Breton in the "Second Manifesto" (La Révolution surréaliste, December 15, 1929), which marked a turning point in the history of the movement and in Queneau's own intellectual history who, from then on, abandoned surrealism37.
Passing through Documents, magazine in which Queneau publishes What a life!, review of an English work, taken up in Sticks, Numbers and Letters38, and through La Critique sociale of Boris Souvarine (1931-1933), with whom Queneau shares the experience of the Democratic Communist Circle and for whose magazine he conceives, with Bataille, the article Critique of the Foundations of Hegelian Dialectics39 (in parentheses, Queneau himself declared some perplexities before such an enterprise "I hardly have sufficient knowledge to make a figure of a Marxist," Journal, October 9, 1931; and, on his part, Boris Souvarine will retain the memory of a candid political young man, of a "humorist of rather libertarian mentality")40.
Leading to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where they (Queneau and Bataille) know Puech, Koyré and Kojève, who introduce them respectively to the reading of the history of religions (gnosis and Manichaeism) and to the knowledge of Hegelian Phenomenology (Kojève's lessons, collected by Roger Caillois, will be edited by Queneau himself, at Gallimard, in 1947, under the title Introduction to the Reading of Hegel).
Not to mention the "literary madmen," these illustrious unknowns, who, intertwining madness and genius, deeply seduce both (the interest shown by Queneau is not at all accidental, in this period, with respect to Lacan)41.
b. Bataille as an Element of the New Queneau-Breton Liaison
And yet, Bataille (with whom – attention! – Queneau will break in 1934, to reconcile with him in 193942), in the moment when he poses himself as anti-Breton, will successively redraw the links of contiguity between Queneau and Breton, from the middle of the Thirties, when he will collaborate again with the pope of surrealism43.
The rebellion will then inscribe itself in a vaster margin of proximity between the two, resulting in it, to a certain extent, softened.
This will be the case once again of the magazines, from Minotaure (1933-39), to the new series of Documents (1934), until Contre-Attaque (1935-36) and Acéphale (1936-39) and its complex constellation of magazine, sect, college, encyclopedia (Encyclopédie Da Costa). Not to mention his own magazine, Volontés, founded by Raymond Queneau with, among others, Georges Pelorson and Henry Miller at the end of 193744.
The happy season of interwar magazines, coinciding with the beginnings of the Popular Front government and borrowed from the intellectual context of political and aesthetic tensions among the avant-gardes of the thirties – artists, writers, scientists and philosophers – who, in the moment when they mark the rupture between Queneau and Breton, also sign the contours of a new possible alliance.
The happy season of magazines, which proposed the exalting experience of a group of young free and genial spirits, who crossed on the scabrous terrain marked by Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (in the shadow of Dionysos, of the death of God and of unhappy consciousness); traversed by the new disciplines of sociology, anthropology and ethnology; troubled by Sade; fulgurated by the sulphurous phosphorus of the surrealists.
Paradoxical and scandalous spirits who, while the whole world was preparing to plunge into the abyss of War, did not hesitate to launch themselves towards new horizons, at the crossroads of several intellectual domains, drawing a world of tightrope walkers of the pen and thought, seduced by art and writing, reflection and poetry.
Minotaure (1933-39), magazine which, in the original intention of the publisher Albert Skira, should have been directed by Breton and which, after his uncertainties, will initially be directed by Tériade, while Breton will figure among the collaborators until 1937, when, in December, he will accept to be part of the Editorial Committee45.
Documents, and also Documents 34, which will be devoted, thanks to Breton, to surrealism (Breton, Surrealist Intervention)46.
Contre-Attaque (1935-36), founded on October 7, 1935 as a "Union of Struggle of Revolutionary Intellectuals," close to Boris Souvarine's Democratic Communist Circle, animated by Georges Bataille (who detests Breton since the Second Manifesto of Surrealism) and frequented by Breton until 1936 and until the "surfascist" Bataillean declarations. And, alongside "Contre-Attaque," but separated from it, "Acéphale," Bataille and Klossowski's "parallel" magazine, which was interested no longer in politics, but exclusively in religion and sacred in anti-Christian and quite Nietzschean sense, well represented by the College of Sociology: Breton excluded, the magazine will remain in any case linked to the pope of surrealism through André Masson, who will collaborate constantly47.
Volontés, finally, in which Queneau writes several articles, between 1938 and 1940, often in polemic with Breton, "pursuing – as Van der Starre maintains – the polemic engaged against the surrealists and specifying his aesthetic choices"48.