Raymond Queneau.

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Lot n° 252
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Raymond Queneau.
Notes on James Joyce. No place or date [before 1939]. Autograph manuscript of 29 leaves of various sizes, mostly in-4, mounted on advanced tabs: stiff royal blue iridescent calf boards, semicircular fasteners of same royal blue iridescent calf with brown iridescent calf border, embossed "small squares", stitching on two royal blue iridescent calf strips embossed "small squares", royal blue iridescent calf spine embossed "small squares", lavender blue nubuck lining, black paper endpapers (J. de Gonet, 2003). Interesting autograph notes by Raymond Queneau entirely dedicated to the work of James Joyce. They refer to his literary reconversion in the 1930s. The future Oulipian had left the Surrealist group in 1929, turned away from its cult of creative spontaneity to "fall into the novelistic bath with Le Chiendent" (Conversation with Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes). Anglo-Saxon literature, and in particular James Joyce, played a key role in this conversion. Thus he acknowledged his debt to the author of Ulysses in an article on the Technique of the Novel published in 1937. Queneau thus celebrates the classicist rigour from the Joycean example: "It is this taste for form, this attachment to classicism (in the sense of a mastery through awareness of literary procedures), which led him to create the Oulipo in 1960 with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, and thus opened it to collective writing" (Alain Schaffner in Oulipo, BnF, 2014). Of the 29 autograph pages, 15 refer to Finnegan's Wake, still bearing its provisional title Work in Progress, 8 to Ulysses. Most of them are notes on readings with quotations from a few sources. Queneau makes an inventory of themes, places and characters, as well as looking at Joyce's influences, such as the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico, whose work forms the basis of Finnegan's Wake, or Jonathan Swift. The sources quoted are mainly English, starting with Our Exagmination, the defence of Work in Progress by some of the finest writers of the time, published by Sylvia Beach in 1929. For the rest, it is secondary literature such as James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses by Budgen or the study devoted by Edmund Wilson to Work in Progress, both published in 1931. The set also contains statements and diagrams close to the Oulipian approach: two diagrams of a purely statistical nature, six statements of pages with quotations of sentence snippets as well as the famous diagram of Ulysses elaborated by the author and published by Stuart Gilbert in his study of the novel. This diagram was requested by Queneau from a correspondent named Moré on a Biscottes Baclé lottery ticket. One page is devoted to Joyce's biography based on Simone Téry's L'Ile des bardes. One page was written on a NRF service sheet. Raymond Queneau joined the reading committee of the publisher Gallimard in 1938. At the end, there is a bound article on Finnegan's Wake by Georges Pelorson, a friend of Queneau, in the Revue de Paris in 1949. Lovely binding in iridescent calf by Jean de Gonet. We thank Fabienne Le Bars, author of the catalogue of Jean de Gonet's work (in progress), for the description of the binding.
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