Exercises in Style Read online

  Abruptly now he veered: in a segue that could have been lightyears or a pixel blink, he found himself exo-gloved into the Saint-Lazare spectrum, the brink of the matter at hand. These pitches always nauseated Queneau, no matter how inured he should be by now to the recursion-toxicity. The button! he screamed silently. Change the button!

  Jonathan Lethem

  othing

  Into nowhere came nothing, least of all a bus. It did not come chugging up over the hill, releasing its sweet gas as it stooped down to gather passengers. Had a bus been possible—only wishful thinking would suggest it was—perhaps some discussion might be in order. Perhaps a person might be admitted into the scenario. But no bus was possible, therefore there can be no discussion. For instance, was the metal for a bus possible? Was rubber? Was it possible to have something such as plastic? We know the answer. Had leather and vinyl and glass been possible, could these materials be combined, by some imagined person with tremendous gifts—himself impossible—to compose something even resembling a bus? No. Even if these items were possible, a situation that destroys the mind to imagine, destroys the mind, and even if these items might have been willed into shape to form a bus, by people who did not exist, this bus would have floated through empty space, its wheels spinning against nothing, the passengers trapped inside bobbing over seats and smearing into windows like little fish in a bag. For there was no road and there was no place, nor was there a driver to aim this bus into the beyond. None of it could be. In fact, how was something like dirt possible, soil, stone, ore—enough of it to condense so tightly that a place like a world could form, or even some other kind of place, where things could crawl along the surface without falling off, spinning forever back into the void? It wasn’t and there couldn’t. In this bus there was no driver because there were no people—it just wasn’t possible—which means that no one could board what was not there. If such a bus had been possible, no one was born to ride it, to rub against each other in the aisle, to be carried overland on some errand elsewhere. Nor was there such a thing as clothing. Clothing was a lesser impossibility, but an impossibility nonetheless. So if people had existed, which they did not, they would have been hidden behind their own hair, simply naked and cold in the empty brown space, cowering behind their long, fine hair, floating in emulsion. Down the aisles of the bus they would not move, reaching through a veil of hair at each other, never finding a wet, warm spot upon which to rest their hand, never fingering inside each other’s sticky places. People covered in such a fine, silken layer of hair, so perfectly shielded by hair, that you could not even see their faces. It would be as if they had no faces. If there was anything, that is. And it wasn’t. It was nothing, so there can be no discussion. There was no one to jostle no one, and no one to take offense, sitting down to ride out the rest of his route, which there wasn’t, in silence. Which means that no one could appear later, to anyone. There was no later, there was no sooner. Time was not soft or slow or sweet. Time was none of these things. There was no one to meet, and if there never was, they’d have nothing to sit on, and if they never did, how could one point at the other, to indicate a missing button? His hand, which he did not have, would merely have pushed through a wall of hair, a soft wall that yielded further as he reached. If such people even existed, which they didn’t, they would be as swirls of hair deep under the ocean, swaying in place forever.

  Ben Marcus

  or zeu Frentch

  Ouann deille araounnd noune nïeu Parc Monceau ann zeu rïeu plettfôme ov a maur o laiss feul S boss (naou éitifor), Aïe peussivd a peusseunn ouise enn equestrimeli longue naique hou ouase ouaireng a sôft failt hête tremmd ouise bréde ennstaide ov rebeune. Zess enndeuvédiouol sodd-eunnli édraisst haise naïbeu ennd aquiousd haime ov deulébreutli staipeng ann haise fite aivri tahime pessendjeuse gate ôf or ann zeu boss. Botte hi zaine brôte zeu descocheunn tou a rêpede ainnde enn ordeu tou grêbe a naou aimti site.

  Tou aourze leïteu Aïe sô haime enn fronnt ov gare Saint-Lazare enn besi cannveusécheunn ouise a frainnd hou ouase eudvahiseng haime tou nêrau zeu naique aupeneng ov haise auveucaute baï hëveng somm coualéfahide téleu rése zeu op-eu botteun.

  Harry Mathews

  ontingencies

  At dinner with so-called intelligent people, during our discussion of the Marquis de Sade, I recognized a common lunacy: the fairy tale of absolute and complete freedom. People don’t know what to do with the freedom they have, I announced, and trounced off, as if insulted. Today, I took a bus, a random bus, no particular number, a white and blue bus, or pale green. No matter, it was a bus, and I took it. First I stood in line, with everyone else, a citizen of a city standing peacefully, waiting for public transport, a condition of urban life. I heard two men, no particular men, or maybe very particular men, but not to me. I took the bus, anyway. The men were discussing their office, where they seemed mad about a woman, and I listened because I could. They described her in broad terms: “She’s got big tits. . . . OMG, that ass. Shit!” I entered the bus, paid my fare, the driver said nothing, and unencumbered, except by my hopes and dreams and desires, I walked to the back of the bus, my eyes roving, checking for free seats, and there were good reasons why I kept moving, and took the seat I chose, but these are insignificant reasons except to me. I found a seat all to myself, sat down, exhaling freely, and happily, because I celebrate public buses, especially when I have my own seat next to a window, but then the two men, still exclaiming about the woman’s ass and tits, took the seats behind me. Now I felt hindered also by their bulk and hulk, as well as their boisterous voices, bellows about asses and tits, and if I hadn’t known myself as myself, if I didn’t understand the invisible boundaries in which I existed, with my freedom, I would have assaulted the men. I was bigger than both, and freer, and a black belt in karate. Before I had the chance to pummel one or both, because I was at liberty to do what I wanted, even if it meant imprisonment for a day or two, the two men stopped their bellows, and instead turned to watch two other male passengers nearly come to blows, one jostling the other for a seat. Now the three of us, the tits and ass men and myself, alarmed by this altercation, became a community of sorts. Suddenly I heard a rip, certainly a rent of some kind, which made a decided sound in the air. The man, who had jostled the first for a seat, now watched by the newly formed society of the three of us, took that prized seat. Oh, I thought, oh, and wondered what my two companions thought. It was a strange day, and one has such strange freedoms; for I could have ridden that bus the entire day—until it ended its journeys, or until the bus driver informed me that I had to get off. Any number of possibilities presented themselves to me, I could even have fought him to remain! But thinking it over, I watched all the people I had known, in a sense, on the bus, as they removed themselves from it. I was alone again with my thoughts, not bothered by anything, and, when the bus stopped near a park, one I had never visited, I leaped off violently. Again, the driver said nothing, but now I took his silence to mean assent and even understanding, and walked toward the park and into it through its wide gates, and sat down, this time at a café, where I discovered that the man who had been jostled on the bus, earlier in the day, was being advised by another to patch his overcoat, a dark brown parka, the same one he had worn on the bus. A piece of fabric hung from its hem. It may have come down during that altercation. Now I thought, he’s having an alteration, and wondered if this linguistic association occurred to him as well. Here we are, I remember thinking, in a great chain of being, and he could think whatever he wa
nted. I pretended not to notice him, naturally.

  Lynne Tillman

  eat

  Whee! Whee! The bus curled up to the curb with a mad tragic kind of screech and me and Jenny Lou get on behind a guy sporting a baggy blue suit and a blue hat with a hemp band and I can see right away he’s not hip but a square fidgeting every time someone jostles him and squirming when more people crowd into the bus but me and Jenny Lou dig being packed in with all the maids and busboys and car wash kids all the holy ones who work in the dark obsidian laundries and then someone steps on this guy’s foot and he lets out a howl like a naked coyote who’s seen the invisible night and finally I say to him be cool man and dig the scene dig all the angels here dig the holy chicks and dig the whole ride because the ride is life and then Jenny Lou who’s got the greatest knees in the world whispers to me dig it his jacket’s missing two buttons and I knew she meant that I should open my Anahata sympathy chakra to him because he’s just another cat lost in a motherless world and so I say man let’s split at the next stop and get you a tailor and he makes a fist at me and grabs the seat just left by a teenager heavy with sexdream eyes and me and Jenny Lou get off at the next stop but not before digging that the driver’s got a book of Blake’s poems stuck in his jacket pocket and me and Jenny Lou wonder about the miracle of this and wish we could have an all day all night talkie with the cat and his reading Blake and maybe others who also toot their godly horns and see angels dancing on pins but then we hitch our way to the Greyhound waiting for the bus to saintly San Fran and there’s the guy with the missing buttons grooving with the old station master with a cap over his sad eyes who’s telling him better no buttons at all than two on and two off awakening me and Jenny Lou to crash through the great screen of Maya and see the vast buttonless void that is the world, that is the world

  Frederic Tuten

  etaliterario

  I bought Exercises in Style, by Raymond Queneau, in Barcelona on October 26, 1987. I didn’t know what it was about, but I’d heard a lot about the book. Carrying my brand new copy of Exercises in Style I boarded the Number 24 bus, which went near my house. I bought a ticket from the conductor and, afraid I’d be asked to show it and unable to find it, put the ticket in my mouth. I thought that way it would be in plain sight if the inspector showed up. Halfway home, I began to flip through Exercises in Style and saw that the book recounted, in a hundred different styles, the same trivial anecdote. Trivial it might be, but the story amused me very much, probably because it took place on a bus and I was on a bus, and maybe that’s why the story stuck in my head so quickly, as if I were riding around with a shoehorn, not one for shoes, but a shoehorn for stories that take place on buses. The story was very silly, but I found it totally captivating. On a Paris bus, a young man with a felt hat and a long neck becomes angry every time people get off the bus because there is one passenger—always the same one—who takes advantage of the circumstances to step on his foot. There is a big fuss, until the complaining crybaby finds a free seat and sits down. Two hours later, we come across the same foolish young man, now in the Cour de Rome; he is sitting on a bench with a friend, no less idiotic, who is telling him: “You ought to get an extra button sewn on your overcoat.” Well, like I said, the story was very silly, but the fact that the narration started on a bus captivated me. I’d never read a story on a bus that took place in the same space. I was so fascinated that without noticing, due to the satisfaction I got from reading what could be happening on the very bus I was traveling on, I started sucking on the ticket and finally swallowed it. When the inspector arrived, it was no use telling him I’d swallowed it because of a stupid story I’d been reading that made me laugh a lot. I had to pay a huge fine.

  Enrique Vila-Matas

  Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

  JESSE BALL was a fabulist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His remarkable oeuvre, much neglected for many years, is only now seeing the light of day.

  BLAKE BUTLER’s most recent work, Nothing: A Potrait of Insomnia, was published by Harper Perennial in 2011. He is also the founder of the literary blog HTML Giant.

  CHRIS CLARKE was born in Western Canada, and is currently a Ph.D. student of French at CUNY. These are his first published translations of Raymond Queneau.

  AMELIA GRAY is the author of three works of fiction: AM/PM (Featherproof Books), Museum of the Weird (FC2), and Threats (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

  SHANE JONES is the author of three novels, most recently Daniel Fights a Hurricane, published by Penguin in 2012.

  JONATHAN LETHEM’s novels include The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and most recently Chronic City. He teaches at Pomona College.

  BEN MARCUS’s most recent novel, Flame Alphabet, was published by Knopf in 2012. He teaches at Columbia University.

  HARRY MATHEWS is the first American to be inducted into the OULIPO group. His most recent novel, My Life in CIA, was published by Dalkey Archive in 2010.

  LYNNE TILLMAN is the author of several novels and short-story collections, most recently Someday This Will Be Funny.

  FREDERIC TUTEN: Five novels, including Tintin in the New World, and a book of inter-related short stories, Self Portraits: Fictions; Norton, 2010.

  ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS is a Spanish novelist. His most recent book to be translated into English, Dublinesque, was published by New Directions in 2012.

  ANNE MCLEAN has translated three of Vila-Matas’s novels, as well as the work of Evelio Rosero and Julio Cortázar.

  Copyright © 2012 by New Directions

  Copyright © 1947. 2006, 2012 by Editions Gallimard

  Copyright © 1958, 1981 by Barbara Wright

  Copyright © 1958 by Gaberbocchus Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Christopher Gordon Clarke

  All rights reserved. Except for a brief passage quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any forms or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  New Directions would like to thank the following authors for providing this edition with these new excercises: "Instructions" by Jesse Ball, "Doppelgängers" by Blake Butler, "Viscera" by Amelia Gray, "Assistance" by Shane Jones, "Cyberpunk" by Jonathan Lethem, "Nothing" by Ben Marcus, "Fur Zeu Frentch" by Harry Mathews, "Contingency" by Lynne Tillman, "Beat" by Frederic Tuten, and "Metaliterario" by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean. These works are protected by copyright, and any request to use this material should be sent to the authors c/o New Directions.

  First published in France as Exercices de Style in 1947 by Editions Gallimard.

  Additional exercises from Raymond Queneau, Œuvres completes III, appear in English for the first time by permission of Editions Gallimards.

  The music on page 108 is by Pierre Philippe and is in his handwriting.

  The manuscript facsimile (“La fonction ∫V(2)02”) on page 184 is copyright © 2006 by Editions Gallimard and is reproduced by permission.

  Initials for the 1958 edition and the permutation of the author’s photograph are by Stefan Themerson. Initials for the new exercises are by Barbara Epler.

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP513) in 1981

  This augmented, alternative edition was published as NDP1240 in 2012.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Queneau, Raymond, 1903-1976.

  [Exercises in style. English]

  Exercises in s
tyle / Raymond Queneau ; translated by Barbara Wright.

  p. cm.

  Reissue, with additions, of Wright's 1981 translation of the 1st ed. (1947) of Exercices de style.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-8112-2088-0

  I. Wright, Barbara, 1915-2009. II. Title.

  PQ2633.U43E93 2012

  843'.914––dc22

  2012023824

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  20 19 18 17

  Also by Raymond Queneau

  from New Directions

  The Blue Flowers

  The Flight of Icarus

  The Sunday of Life