The biography of Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was a French writer. His work is characterized by a constant play with words and the French language.
Born in Le Havre, Raymond Queneau is a lonely and curious child to all who reads the dictionary as a novel. After studying philosophy and science, he attended the Surrealists but his first novel, Wheatgrass (1933), belongs to no literary movement. Original, construction obeys strict mathematical rules. The same sentence opens and closes the narrative, spoken language occupies an important place.
In his Exercises in Style (1947), Raymond Queneau continue to have fun with the language. He recounts an ordinary meeting on a bus 99 different ways, "Onomatopoeia" ("On the platform, pla pla pla, a bus, Teuff Teuff Teuff"), "Exclamations" ("Here Midi time! take the bus! ") and" Ode "(" On the bus / In the autobon / bus S / L'autobusson ").
In 1959, he published Zazie in the Metro. In this comic novel, he created the "Ortograf fonetik", which is phonetically transcribe the spoken language. His characters draw from the slang vocabulary, abroad and even in old French.
The following year, Queneau founded with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, OuLiPo (the Ouvroir of Potential Literature), whose goal is to create new forms of writing, using mathematics. He has perfected the "S + 7" method, with which he rewrote the Grasshopper and the Ant Jean de La Fontaine. By replacing each word of the fable by the seventh following word in the dictionary, the title becomes "Cimaise and Fraction" and the text begins with these words: "The Cimaise having Chaponne all sneezer in / snorkel strong purifying when bisaxée was greenish ... "
The work of Raymond Queneau is abundant ("This is writing that is écriveron," he said) and profoundly original. He is the author of numerous novels, but also poems, some of which have been put in song.