Raymond Queneau's Utopian Dream Worlds

Abstract

concept which Kierkegaard also refers to as all of humanity (Traite 229): myself take Mussolini for laughs is part of an encyclopedic realism, a symptom afflicting the epistemophilic whom Queneau makes it a rule to mock. In the case of Agnes in Les enfants du limon, a suitable enough comic treatment makes this realism appear as a delusional daydream in the text. As I have shown, each comedy of so-called literary errors and self revelation entails that the reader will uncover something in the narrative beyond the apparent insouciance, something which is comically masked. The random order of events becomes paramount in this case, as a satire develops in successive daydreams that supply no linear explanation of its order. This lack of explanation is due to a narrative principle based on the periodic return of one of the two series of tyranny. So in this case accomplishment (or foiling) of the quest calls for a mythological combination by Queneau. Le Senne situates the Utopia as being beyond the realm of human experience. Here, it is the depth psychology of Utopia that becomes paramount to readers as having various mythological properties. The errors composing the comedy will, through the parallelism of the surrogate systematically over time, evoke the terrors of tyrants in genuine as well as fictional history, striking the reader's own imagination as being random. This imagery combines the individual and the collective imaginations in a cosmic mythology made from the fictional ideal. What I think is apparent is that by reformulating the original form in terms of social and individual Oedipal imagoes I have gone towards the center of a labyrinthine construction. Queneau's use of a mask is similar to the purpose Kierkegaard put to the use of pseudonyms such as Johannes de Silentio and Frater Taciturnus. His various pseudonyms permitted him to write what he claimed would be the word on the subject. Time and again, however, thanks to pseudonyms, Kierkegaard was to produce a unique and final supplement to his work. Thus I can postulate both Kierkegaard and Queneau imagining the design of a literary exercise. Writing will be a definitive formulation of a cultural ideal, the moral of the fable. Since the circular reasoning of a fictional ideal depends on the reader, the presence of a cosmic mythology represents a moral. At the same time this limitation gives a function to literary errors. By reading Utopia as only a partial or