a great debut novel

The list of great debut novels is short – although some of them are the greatest of novels. Don Quixote might be considered a debut in two ways – it is the debut of the modern novel, and a debut novel. There’s Dead Souls, the Pickwick Papers, Madam Bovary, Decline and Fall, The Sun Also Rises, V.

There’s also Chiendent, Queneau’s first novel, which has been translated as Barking Tree or Witchgrass. Americans are more familiar with crabgrass, which holds the same place in our lawn mythology as chiendent in France. The principle of the weed – of the invasion of an alien thing that is much like the real thing – in this case grass – but somehow not is a beautiful structural metaphor for what Queneau was doing. My own novel, Made a Few Mistakes, boosted one of Queneau’s brilliancies – the idea that falsehoods can take life and motive power, moving people to do absurd things under false premises. An idea that is put into a literally Cartesian framework in Chiendent, as a plain clerk, traveling in his usual routine in a metro from work to his half built suburban home, has an actual thought. That is, he notices something in a store window that he has walked past hundreds of times. In that moment, he begins to take on substance – which is noticed by a sort of flaneur, an authorial stand-in, who sees him literally becoming “rounder” . And as our clerk, named, sadly enough, Etienne Marcel – which happens to be the name of our own street, once it gets past Beaubourg, an existential coincidence I never dreamed would happen the first time I read this novel – continues to think, he continues to substantify, rather like an a Cartesian eucharist. A silhouette becomes a person.

The silhouette to person transformation would be a high concept gimmick save for the fact that the novel is also about an entire slice of Parisian life, from flaneurs to petty crooks, from anonymous letters and stalkers to Marcel’s odious step-son, Théo, a sort of Rimbaud gone to seed early. Queneau’s novel was published in 1935, under the impulse of his break with the surrealists and his reading of Ulysses. Ulysses was that rare novel that seeded others, much as punk bands formed from members of the audiences that watched the Sex Pistols. There’s Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Queneau – and this list is just off the top of my head.

Of them all, I think it was Queneau who thought hardest about how to construct a novel – and among this crew, he is the only one who saw how funny Joyce is. The French have a great sense of farce – unappreciated I think in the Anglo world, save for the Anglo appreciation of Molière – and Queneau is an expert farceur, without the sometimes heavy breathing, the Playboy jokiness, of Labiche. His coincidences hit because you don’t really see how these events are going to collide. Especially in as much as he views events like a mathematician – Queneau, like Musil, was a trained mathematician, a rarity among novelists or among fucking anything – I mean, how many math postgraduates do you know? So for Queneau, the distribution of coincidences is held to a rigorous schemata, the base of which is a sort of Cartesian algebra.

Descartes is known for having reduced geometry to algebra – or at least made that a program. His calcul géométrique would have made Descartes a famous figure in intellectual history outside of his Meditations and Discourse on Method. Similarly, the algebra of character positions, within the framework of the Parisian world of things in motion, produces a number of collisions which are prefigured by the “channels” or vectors involved – the circulation of traffic, of letters, of vacationers, of clients in bistros, etc. - but not totally determined from the point of view of any one character. This is the limit of thought, so to speak, which Etienne, as he substativizes, bumps into. Of that which one cannot calculate, one cannot think clearly. Hence, the opposition between the thought and the bump.

Farce is characteristically about sex and money. They are inherently farcical because they are the object of our most ardent calculations – and farce is nothing if not calculated – and yet in the world of farce, as in the real world, we often miscalculate. In fact, miscalculation is heir to farce’s premise, since sex and money are also wildcards, jokers in the pack.
Farce, it turns out, is an excellent way to approach the city. Queneau’s work – Chiendent, Pierrot mon ami, Loin de Rueil, le Dimanche de la vie, and Zazie dans le metro – is an extended study of Paris, from Parisian pronunciation to Parisian working class quarters to popular amusements – which is one of the great novelistic undertakings of the twentieth century to my mind. It has not been as influential as Celine, but it is as funny – when Celine is funny – and without the meanness that creeps into Celine as he became more of a monster.

So, for a good time - go out and read Queneau!