Exercises in Style [ペーパーバック]

Queneau was a polymath, with interests and accomplishments as a novelist, poet, linguist and mathematician. Briefly a member of Andre Breton's Surrealist group, Queneau subsequently joined the "College of Pataphysics" in 1950. Pataphysics was the science of imagainary solutions, a science which originated with the poet and playwrite Alfred Jarry. The Pataphysicians were a tongue-in-cheek group of French intellectuals who didn't take themselves too seriously. At the same time, Queneau was exploring the Pataphysical, however, he was also serving as Director of the prestigious "Encyclopedie de la Pleiade", thus combining the whimsical with the serious. A decade later, Queneau was a founder of "OuLiPo" (an acronym for "Ouvroir de Litterature Poetentielle" or "Workshop for Potential Literature"). In contrast to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which gave free reign to chance and the unmediated workings of the unconscious, OuLiPo emphasized the systematic and deliberate generation of texts.

"Exercises in Style" is based upon an uninteresting and simple story, a story without any plot, a story that in itself is pointless and boring. Queneau tells this story ninety-nine times, each time using a different variation in the telling. Barbara Wright, the translator of the English edition, notes in her introduction that the variations fall into roughly seven categories. These categories include different types of speech, different types of written prose, different poetic styles, and different grammatical and rhetorical forms. Another category are variations which are told in the form of character sketches through language (e.g., reactionary, biased, abusive, etc.). Queneau, in this fashion, demonstrates the fluidity of language, the variability in the ways that language can describe reality. As one critic succinctly and correctly stated, "Exercises in Style" demonstrates "the impossibility of realism in any unitary sense."

Queneau wanted "Exercises in Style" translated into English and, unike most literary texts, this particular text loses little in translation. While Barbara Wright's translation is outstanding, she also rightly notes that "the story as such doesn't matter, [nor] does the particular language [in which] it is written." What matters, and what "Exercises in Style" brilliantly illustrates, is that a simple story can be expressed in an infinite variety of literary and linguistic styles, that the transformation of reality into language is susceptible of manifold permutations. This is the genius of Queneau's text, a genius which makes this book a minor classic of modern literature.

Certainly, having read 99 variations on a simple story, all unique, all demonstrating language's protean invention, the traditional one-voice, one tone novel will seem unsatisfactory and lazy.

I know 'Exercises in style' does lots of interesting philosophical and scientific things that are more important than Derrida etc. etc. I like the way a mode of language, simply by functioning, can completely altar a story told in another mode. if you read a story with metaphors, say, you translate the metaphors to see what the writer is 'really' saying. Because you know the story in 'Exercises', you can read the metaphors literally, and another story emerges, hilariously and subversively different from the 'original'.

'Exercises' does this throughout, with slang, poetry, rhetoric, narrative, word games, different voices etc., showing how 99 scientific classifications actually function in declassifying and decentring.

Barbara Wright, along with Scott Moncrieff, was the great translator of the 20th century, and her transposing, rather than translating, of Queneau's work from the French language into an English primer is a miracle. It is a little known fact that 'Exercises' is a detective story, with the solution fittingly revealed in the 99th chapter.