Reading Order
Exercices de styleExercices de style Reading Order
Exercices de style (Exercises in Style, 1947) by Raymond Queneau is one of the most formally rigorous literary experiments of the twentieth century — a single trivial incident (a young man with a ridiculous hat on a Paris bus) retold in 99 different styles, from official letter to alexandrine verse to dream to onomatopoeia to retrograde. The work is simultaneously a formal demonstration (the same content in different forms is 99 different things), a satire of literary styles (the parody styles are acute), and a writing manual. It has been translated into over 30 languages, performed on stage, and used as a university writing textbook. Queneau wrote Exercices de style during the German Occupation, when he was also founding (with Jean Paulhan) the literary review that would become the Nouvelle Revue Française after the Liberation. The work anticipates the OuLiPo program (formal constraint as the generative mechanism of literature) that Queneau would develop with François Le Lionnais from 1960. The Barbara Wright English translation (1958) is itself a remarkable feat — many of the 99 exercises depend on features of French that have no English equivalent, and Wright found English equivalents for all of them.
Where to start
Read Exercices de style in one sitting — the cumulative effect of the 99 styles on the same incident is the point, and reading them over several days loses the contrast. Then read Zazie dans le métro (1959) for the full carnivalesque novel that demonstrates the same linguistic freedom at length; and Les Fleurs bleues (1965) for the gentler, more lyrical Queneau.
Complete Exercices de style Book List
- 1Buy
Exercices de style
Raymond Queneau·1947·Start here — read in one sitting; the 99 styles on the same incident; the cleanest formal demonstration of OuLiPo principles - 2Buy
Zazie dans le métro
Raymond Queneau·1959·The major novel — the same linguistic freedom at length; the carnivalesque Paris; Zazie's profane commentary on everything; read after Exercices - 3Buy
Les Fleurs bleues
Raymond Queneau·1965·The Blue Flowers — the gentle later novel; two figures from different centuries meeting in dreams; Queneau's most lyrical and most accessible work - 4Buy
Cent mille milliards de poèmes
Raymond Queneau·1961·A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems — 10 sonnets with interchangeable lines; the OuLiPo formal extreme; the combinatoric book as physical object - 5Buy
Pierrot mon ami
Raymond Queneau·1942·Queneau's most realistic novel — a young man in an amusement park; the Occupation period; the gentler register that Les Fleurs bleues later develops
Exercices de style — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the incident in Exercices de style?
The incident is completely trivial: a young man with a long neck and a ridiculous hat is on an overcrowded Paris bus (the S line, now the 84). He argues briefly with another passenger, claiming the passenger is deliberately stepping on his feet. He then finds a seat. Two hours later, the same young man is seen at the Saint-Lazare station with a friend, who is advising him to add a button to the lapel of his overcoat. That is the entire content. In 99 different styles, this non-event is transformed into 99 completely different literary objects: a dream, an alexandrine poem, a telegram, a philosophical treatise, a retrograde narrative, a parable, a vulgarity, a botanical description. The point is that form is not a container for content but is itself a form of content.
How was the English translation made?
The Barbara Wright English translation (Exercises in Style, 1958) is one of the most admired feats of literary translation of the twentieth century. Many of Queneau's 99 exercises depend on features of French that have no English equivalent — the distinction between tu and vous, specific French rhetorical or bureaucratic styles, French phonetic features, French slang. Wright found English equivalents for all 99: where Queneau has a 'Paysan' exercise based on French rural dialect, Wright has a 'Cockney' exercise; where Queneau has specific French bureaucratic styles, Wright found their English equivalents. The English translation is sometimes funnier than the French because Wright's equivalents are more extreme than Queneau's originals.
What is the connection between Exercices de style and music?
Queneau explicitly modeled Exercices de style on the musical practice of exercises and variations — the musician's technical exercises (scales, arpeggios, Czerny studies) and the theme-and-variations form. Just as Beethoven can take a trivial theme (the Diabelli waltz) and write 33 variations on it that reveal the full range of his formal imagination, Queneau takes a trivial incident and produces 99 variations that reveal the full range of French literary styles. The musical analogy is confirmed by the composition (in French, both 'exercices de style' in music and in literature use the same phrase) and by several of the individual exercises, which use musical forms (fugue, ode, sonnet in the musical sense).
How has Exercices de style been performed?
Exercices de style has been performed on stage many times — in France, Britain, and the United States — usually as a one-person or two-person show in which a performer reads or performs selected exercises with theatrical elaboration. The most famous stage adaptation was by Jean-Michel Ribes (1990) at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, which played for several seasons and toured internationally. The theatrical form works because the contrast between the exercises — the same incident in completely different registers — is inherently dramatic, and the cumulative effect of seeing the same trivial event transformed again and again is both comic and philosophically striking.
What other languages has Exercices de style been translated into?
Exercices de style has been translated into over 30 languages, and each translation raises the same fundamental challenge: the exercises that depend on specific features of French must be replaced by exercises that depend on equivalent features of the target language. In Italian, in German, in Japanese, the translators have had to replace French exercises with nationally specific ones. The book has therefore generated a tradition of national literary self-examination: what are the specific stylistic registers, the bureaucratic styles, the regional dialects, the comic possibilities of this particular language? In this way, Queneau's formal experiment became a comparative literature exercise in global translation.
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