The place occupied today by Raymond Queneau in the history of French letters was secured for him relatively late. For a long time he was thought of as a minor figure, a mere entertainer, cultivating a clever, unclassifiable style of parody in narrative fiction aimed at low middle-class tastes. By the early 1950s it became obvious that his public image was undergoing a rapid transformation. Ironically, his first major success came about not with Le Chiendent, his first literary accomplishment considered today also his best, but fourteen years later, with Exercices de style (1947), which was adapted for a music-hall show and performed by the Freres Jacques in Paris. At the time he died, in 1976, at the age of seventy-three, the register of his published work included some twenty titles of novels and short fiction, several volumes of verse, translations of English and American literature, and hundreds of articles, prefaces, and book reviews on a range of subjects that has since ranked him as one of France's most prodigious polymaths and clearly as one of the major actors on the scene of France's recent cultural history. Queneau has been called the Rabelais of the twentieth century by some, the James Joyce of France by others. He has also been likened to Jarry and Lewis Carroll, to Raymond Roussel and Borges. Although one of the pioneers of the surrealist movement, Raymond Queneau broke with Andre Breton in 1929 and later renounced repeatedly most of the positions he himself helped formulate in the first surrealist manifestos. Fashionable trends like existentialism, structuralism, or the new novel also left him unimpressed and, at least in some respects, his preoccupation with the nature of language transcends them all. His