Exercices de style Reading Order

Exercices de style (Exercises in Style, 1947) by Raymond Queneau is the founding demonstration of the Oulipo method avant la lettre — written fourteen years before Queneau and François Le Lionnais founded the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. The book takes a single trivial incident — a man on a Paris bus sees a passenger with a long neck and a hat with a plait, who quarrels with another passenger about a seat; later that day he sees the same man being told by a friend to sew an extra button onto his overcoat — and retells it ninety-nine times in ninety-nine different styles: sonnet, alexandrines, official letter, meteorological report, mathematical, retrograde, zoological, telegraphic, haiku, and so on. Each retelling uses the constraint of a new register or form to transform the material entirely: the events are the same, but each version reveals how completely style determines content, how the form of saying creates what is said. Exercices de style is simultaneously a tour de force of comic virtuosity, a systematic demonstration that there is no neutral style (all writing is in some style, and every style is a constraint), and a pocket textbook of French literary rhetoric — reading it, readers encounter every register from the colloquial to the Homeric. Barbara Wright's English translation (Exercises in Style) reproduces all ninety-nine exercises with ingenuity equal to Queneau's original.