"Nel mezzo del cammin": Queneau's Enfants du Limon

Abstract

"Nel mezzo del cammin":Queneau's Enfants du Limon Ann Smock (bio) I propose to examine here, with admiration, a single novel by Raymond Queneau, Les Enfants du Limon. Its two principal elements are politics and insanity: their ways of inspiring, or exploiting, each other. Or more simply, their general resemblance. At least so it seems if one rereads the novel today. Its title—Children of the Clay, in English—suggests the other strong current running through it: the wish for a new life, and the muddy start and finish of all lives. The concatenations of politics and madness can twist unhappiness and the desire for change into grotesque shapes. Les Enfants du Limon is a crowded exhibition of such distortions. But its form suggests that its entire déroulement is a process whereby it wears itself out, uses itself up in favor of something else, something new. So, it's thinking of new life and with the idea of Lifelines in mind that I make my contribution to this collection of texts honoring Rochelle Tobias. I hope to amuse her a little, too, because Queneau is funny, and to remind her of the agitated mode of our conversations lately, during life under Trump. Finally, I mean to put into practice, on a modest scale, the proclivity for close reading that we share. Les Enfants du Limon is set between the wars in France, when fascism was on the rise. Queneau began writing it in 1930 and published it in '38. It is an extravagant combination of Dickensian genealogies, political satire, and pages and pages of archival material on nineteenthcentury French lunatics—the results of a research project Queneau undertook upon quitting the Surrealists and then didn't know what to do with. He unloaded it into Les Enfants du Limon, where it makes [End Page 697] for some very slow reading, crazy though its subject matter is. The novel includes gnostic mysticism, too, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Hegel (the master/slave relation), Goethe (a pact with the devil), and Dante (La Vita Nuova). It lays out in very broad strokes a tableau of class relations in 1930s France, with picturesque characters in each position (shopkeeper, laborer, business tycoon, banker, debutante, teacher, servant, parasite). One can take it all for a sort of puppet show with bright local color, but the entertainment is intermittently marked by some stark fact or date: the names of two Italian prisons where Mussolini stashed his enemies, for example, surface in the hazy mind of an Italian greengrocer, whose two brothers died in one or the other of them (he has forgotten which), and who is himself a refugee in La Ciotat. In the time it takes to turn a page, the February 1934 riots in Paris (fifteen people shot dead by the police) have occurred and one main character has been wiped out. Flashes of sorrow, of panic, punctuate the novel's rather festive social and political pageant. Class relations and family relations crisscross. Monsieur Jules-Jules Limon (1854–1929) founded the clan whose members—along with their servants, their suppliers, their hangers-on—provide most of the novel's characters. The web of kinship relations is complicated enough for Balzac, and the various family matters that drive the plot(s) are similarly satisfactory (money, property, marriage, remarriage, inheritance, children lost and refound). Jules-Jules Limon represents big business in the novel. He joined the telecommunications industry in the last years of the nineteenth century, when the wireless transmitter had recently been invented and the télégraphie sans fil was starting to penetrate France. He founded all the main radio stations, launched all the different brands of receivers, headed up 36 different companies—in short, "faisait suer des sous aux ondes hertziennes" (90). He married Mlle Dorothée von Cramm in 1883, and they had two children: Sophie and her much younger brother Astolphe. Sophie married Edmond de Chambernac in 1902 and had three children, Daniel, Agnès, and Noémi. After Edmond was killed at Verdun, Sophie took a second husband, le baron Salomon Hachamoth, a banker, member of the Légion d'Honneur, president of the Association des Anciens Combattants Isra...