At one point le Grand, through whose eyes we witness much of the book’s early action, says: “I am observing a man.” And his confidante replies: “You don’t say! Are you a novelist?” To which he replies: “No. A character.”
As things go on, and as still more characters and situations are introduced, many of them truly bizarre-it’s rather like those jugglers who begin with a small cane or club and end up piling chair atop chair, all of it tottering there far above them-the novel turns ever more fantastic, drifting further and further from the moorings of realistic fiction, until at last the reader is forced to abandon any pretense that he’s reading a story about “real” people or events and to admit that he is only participating in the arbitrary constructions-reflective, complex, but always arbitrary-of a writer. A sophisticated game-playing.
From one of the novel’s many discursive passages:
“People think they are doing one thing, and then they do another. They think they are making a pair of scissors, but they have made something quite different. Of course, it is a pair of scissors, it is made to cut and it cuts, but it is also something quite different.”
A character muses: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to say what that “something else” is? And that is exactly what Queneau attempts, here and in all his work: to touch on that “something else” we sense, yet never locate, in our lives.
Yet because he has a kind of horror of seriousness, it’s often at their most profound moments that his books and poems turn outrageously comic, dissolving into puns, bits of allusive and other business, vaudeville jokes, slapstick. One often thinks they are books that might have been written by an extraordinarily brilliant child.
Which brings us, quite naturally, to Zazie, a best-seller for Queneau and perhaps his most easily accessible novel.
As the book opens, murderous dwarf Bebe Overall has abducted little Zazie from the department store where her young mother was choosing fine Irish linen and has taken her into his underground lair far beneath the Paris metro lines, a place frequented by old circus performers, arthritic guitar players and legless Apache dancers, ancient socialists with Marx-like beards and tiny Trotsky spectacles. There Bebe-
Yes, Miss Mara?
I see. You may be right; perhaps in my enthusiasm I am not describing Queneau’s novel at all, but rather some alternate version, some possibility, of my own; have begun, as some colleagues might say, deconstructing it. Why don’t you tell us what actually happens in Zazie dans le metro?
Chapter Thirty-Three
I was, in a sense, singing for my supper. A latter-day minstrel show for ol’ massuh, ol’ massuh in this case being Dean Treadwell, who had chosen today-my first day back, after yesterday sheepishly calling my department chairman, apologizing for my absence so profusely that I began to stammer, and finally pleading a family emergency-to audit, as was his custom once each term with every course offered under his aegis, my class.
Miss Mara acquitted herself well, the students had actually read Zazie, and discussion was lively. One of the young men took a particular, keen delight in Zazie’s Uncle Gabriel, pitching his voice throughout the discussion in a high, thin flutter he obviously imagined similar to the uncle’s own during his performances as a female impersonator.
As the students filed out, Dean Treadwell came up to me and held out his hand.
“Fine class. Somehow you have a way of making it all real to them, making them care. I wish half of my other teachers could do that.”
“You caught me on a good day. Most others, the snoring would have distracted you.”
“Fascinating. And I never even heard of Queneau before this.”
“Three weeks ago, none of the students had either. A semester from now, most of them will have forgotten him.”
“You have a minute, Lew?”
“Actually, I have about four hours-till my seminar after lunch.”
“Walk with me, then. I’ll buy you a coffee.”
“Sure. But if the coffee’s from one of the faculty lounges, I’ll pay you not to have to drink it.”
We ambled out into the hallway and along it, heads together like two monks strolling the cloisters as they kicked Boethius back and forth.
“I don’t know how you’ll feel about this …”
I let it hang there.
“I understand from some of the faculty members, and from my wife as well, that you worked for many years as a detective.”
“Worked at it, anyway.”
Two of my students from Advanced Conversational passed us. One of them said Bonjour, the other Hey, how’s it going?
We wound up off-campus, at one of the coffeehouses that suddenly seem to be springing up everywhere in New Orleans. This one was a Tennessee Williams set: a hodgepodge of rickety ancient tables and chairs, crumbling plaster walls, windows so hazed you could safely watch eclipses through them, door open onto a dank inner patio where a three-legged cat furiously eyed all trespassers. A massive mahogany counter built directly into the tiled floor and topped with a slab of green marble dominated the room. A cork bulletin board took up most of the back wall, scaled in layers of handbills for alternative music, scribbled ads offering musical equipment for sale, notices of tutors and roommates wanted.
Like many such places in the city, it was a museum exhibit in other ways as welclass="underline" here, an unregenerate hippie in jeans, work shirt and vest, scraggly hair stuffed into a bandanna; a fifties young professional in polyester “smart” frock and bouffant hair, or facsimile beatnik with goatee, shades and beret; over there, a black man natted out in suit and impossibly wide tie dating from the forties, slicked hair close to his scalp under a wool slouch hat. People have a way of getting stuck in time here in New Orleans. Once a student fresh from New Hampshire asked “Are all these strange-looking people here for Mardi Gras?” and another student told her, “Those are the ones who live here.”
“Why did you give it up?” Treadwell asked me when we were seated over tall, untouchably hot glasses of cafe latte. “Detective work, I mean.”
“I’d tell you I found honest work instead, but you know better.”
He laughed silently, a single brief paroxysm, and looked off toward the patio. Sitting in the doorway with its stump raised for cleaning, the cat glared back at him.
“You’ve been married, haven’t you, Lewis?”
“Once, a long time ago.”
“And you had children?”
“I did. A son. He’s gone now.”
Treadwell’s eyes came back to me.
“Gone?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. But all this has to be leading up to something.”
“I was married once, when I was younger than seems possible now. It didn’t last long, and afterward, I was by myself for a long time, one of those academic bachelors who comes out of the house on his way to classes slapping dust and crumbs off his coat. I never imagined I’d live any other way. But-What’s the old saying? Life’s all conjunctions, just one thing after another?”
“More like punctuation, I think. Colons and exclamations for some, dashes for the rest.”
“One day in Victorian Life I looked up from my notes and, I still don’t know why, noticed a young woman sitting there in the front row. Older than the other students, but still young to me. And while I was looking, while the fact of her existence was slowly sinking in as I prattled on about the monarchy or somesuch, she winked at me. Not coquettishly at all, you understand, but with this amazing sense of maturity somehow, of being very much her own person … solid.