page_title: Raymond Queneau
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Raymond Queneau / Career
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Portrait de Raymond Queneau Satrape
context_page_description: Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo, notable for his wit and cynical humour.
context_section_description: Queneau spent much of his life working for the Gallimard publishing house, where he began as a reader in 1938. He later rose to be general secretary and eventually became director of l'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade in 1956. During some of this time, he also taught at l'École Nouvelle de Neuilly. He entered the Collège de ‘Pataphysique in 1950, where he became Satrap.
  During this time, Queneau also acted as a translator, notably for Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (L'Ivrogne dans la brousse) in 1953. Additionally, he edited and published Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Queneau had been a student of Kojève during the 1930s and was, during this period, also close to writer Georges Bataille.
  As an author, Queneau came to general attention in France with the publication in 1959 of his novel Zazie dans le métro.  In 1960 the film adaptation directed by Louis Malle was released during the Nouvelle Vague movement. Zazie explores colloquial language as opposed to "standard" written French. The first word of the book, the alarmingly long "Doukipudonktan" is a phonetic transcription of "D'où qu'ils puent donc tant?" – "From where do they stink so much?".
  Juliette Gréco popularized the song "Si tu t'imagines", a song by Joseph Kosma, with lyrics by Queneau.
  Before he founded the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Oulipo) in 1960, Queneau was attracted to mathematics as a source of inspiration. He became a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948. In Queneau's mind, elements of a text, including seemingly trivial details such as the number of chapters, were things that had to be predetermined, perhaps calculated. This was an issue during the writing of A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, also known as, 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. Queneau wrote 140 lines in 10 individual sonnets that could all be taken apart and rearranged in any order. Queneau calculated that anyone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to finish it. While Queneau was completing this work, he asked mathematician François Le Lionnais for help with issues he was having, and their conversation led to a role of mathematics in literature, which led to the creation of the Oulipo.
  A later work, Les fondements de la littérature d'après David Hilbert (1976), alludes to the mathematician David Hilbert, and attempts to explore the foundations of literature by quasi-mathematical derivations from textual axioms. Queneau claimed this final work would prove "a hidden master of the automaton." Pressed by GF, his interlocutor, Queneau confided that the text "could never appear, but had to hide to glorify that without agency." A conference on the matter will be held in Coral Gables, FL.
  One of Queneau's most influential works is Exercises in Style, which tells the simple story of a man's seeing the same stranger twice in one day.  It tells that short story in 99 different ways, demonstrating the tremendous variety of styles in which storytelling can take place.  A graphical story adaptation of the book's concept, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, was published by the American Matt Madden in 2005.
  The works of Raymond Queneau are published by Gallimard in the collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
  Queneau is buried with his parents in the old cemetery of Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne outside Paris.
caption: Effigy of Raymond Queneau, Satrap of Collège de ‘Pataphysique, by Jean-Max Albert Rt
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