The Sunday of Life

 

It happens, occasionally, that an author can be argued into the canon – as for instance the case of Virginia Woolf, who was ignored by the mostly male canon-makers of the 50s and 60s, since her genius as an artist went against their grain. Feminism helped, of course. But genius will out.

Mostly, though, an argument is a holding operation, a way of waiting for attention to shift.

This is how I feel about Raymond Queneau. I first encountered Queneau in Barbara Wright’s translation of Chiendent, englished as Bark Tree, and now as Witchgrass. Now, if you haven’t read it, stop reading my nonsense and read it!

I think it was first issued by New Directions. It was at some point in 1974 bought by the Decatur Public Library in Decatur Georgia and checked out for two weeks by a local goofball, me, who brought it home and read it will sitting at a picnic table on a porch.

Since then, I’ve learned French, and I read Queneau in Queneauin, his version of French. I have a few Pleiade editions in my library – among them are all Queneau’s novels. I’ve often wondered, why is this guy not better known?

Of course, there is a cult around him. Italo Calvino. Georges Perec. The Dalkey press people who run the Review of Contemporary Fiction. But among the literati who know the names of Queneau’s contemporaries, Bataille Breton Malraux Sartre Camus Blanchot Beauvoir, Queneau gets the short end.

Pity.

I’m re-rereading The Sunday of Life (which was translated by the indefatigable Barbara Wright and published by New Directions) because I’ve been thinking of ordinary life within a reactionary age – the age of White Terror. The setting of the novel is France in the popular front era, 1937-1939, but Queneau wrote it in 25 days in 1951 – having lived through the Occupation, in part in Paris, in part in Limoges. From the viewpoint of 1951, one knew what the ultra-right in France, and the often feckless Left, were dancing towards.

But these political events occur,in the book, as it were overhead.

The very title references a history that is philosophical, not political – or not political in terms of left and right. The title comes from a passage in Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics, from the section on painting, where the Berlin sage contrasts the Italian school of renaissance painting and the Flemish.

“This painting [Flemish] has developed unsurpassably, on the one hand, a through and through living characterization in the greatest truth of which art is capable; and, on the other hand, the magic and enchantment of light, illumination, and colouring in general, in pictures of battle and military life, in scenes in the tavern, in weddings and other merry-making of peasants, in portraying domestic affairs, in portraits and objects in nature such as landscapes, animals, flowers, etc. And when it proceeds from the insignificant and accidental to peasant life, even to crudity and vulgarity, these scenes appear so completely penetrated by a naive cheerfulness and jollity that the real subject-matter is not vulgarity, which is just vulgar and vicious, but this cheerfulness and naïveté. For this reason we have before us no vulgar feelings and passions but peasant life and the down-to-earth life of the lower classes which is cheerful, roguish, and comic. In this very heedless boisterousness there lies the ideal feature: it is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base.”

A hard lesson to hold on to in 1951, when the evil and base were in your nostrils.

Queneau had gotten his Hegel from Alesander Kojéve’s Lectures on Hegel, which he sat through next to Bataille (who, Queneau said, sometimes fell asleep). And we get our Kojéve through the book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which was “assembled” from the notes that Queneau took of the seminars. I think Queneau was a very intrusive editor in that book, which was all to the good as far as its coherence goes.

The Sunday of Life is about the marriage of an owner of a mercer’s shop, Julia Segovia, to a soldier, Valentin Bru, and how that affected her family and Brû. On the simplest level, this is what this comic masterpiece (to lay it on blurb thick) is about.

So, contestant number one, I can hear the game show host in your soul ask, what is sooooo special about The Sunday of Life?

I’m just going to mention one thing, a small thing, that keys us into the larger things that Queneau brings to the novel.

We all know that the novelist is a bit like a hostess throwing a party. And just like a good hostess, the novelist gives us the names of the playing characters, most of the time. The novelist might vary this with an unnamed I narrator, but mostly the name tags are firmly in place. Fred Raskolnikov, sitting behind the punchbowl with his long beard thrown across his shoulders, is going to be Fred Raskolnikov doing this or that, axing his pawnbroker or visiting a brothel, until the end.

But as we know from going to parties and in general life, life itself, names don’t stick on like that. In a large family, a rookery with many kids all screaming for food, the parents often call the kids by the names of the other kids. This happens. Moreover, in life, even among our friends, we sometimes get the family name wrong, mispronouncing it, or semi-forgetting it.

This is not a thing novelists normally play with. But Queneau does. The character of Paul Britouillat, fore instance, Brû’s brother in law, goes through enormous changes that go along with him being a bit of a dipsomaniac, a big eared schemer, and a French functionary in the department of weights and measures. Sometimes he is called Bredega, sometimes Butaya, sometimes Brodouga, etc. He is a most unmemorable player, but he is made memorable by the routine that shows how unmemorable he is.

It is a subtle thing, but there is, here, a good humor that is uncommon in a French novel that is basically farcical. Celine, who also dealt with the small and ordinary, never finds the Sunday of Life among them – their schemes are rotten. Only the sex is good.

Queneau, however, brings off the almost impossible: a happy novel that uses routines rather like his contemporary, Abbot and Costello, in their Whose on First playlet.

This is not ordinary life in escape mode, as in Wodehouse, but ordinary life viewed, as it were, on the ground level, the level we live and gossip and tell funny stories about each other in.

And I like that.