QUENEAU Raymond.

Autograph reading and working notes, [ca. 1930-1950]; about 600 pages in various formats, mounted on tabs on wove paper, all bound in 3 large folio volumes, brown leather spine, 3 visible stitching ribbons, brown satin-finished varnished medium boards, ebony corner strips and rivets, grey nubuck linings, folders and cases (Jean de Gonet 2002). Important set of reading notes and working notes, classified in 16 folders. We can only give here a brief overview of this veritable laboratory of Queneau's art and thought, from the 1930s onwards. 1) Green folder "Notes recopies", 290 pages in various formats (including 147 sheets of school notebook). Numerous notes refer to works published or in preparation, with unusual comments: "1) Zazie dans le métro. The title alone and a few pages from the beginning / the grandmother etc. [...] 4) X. non- or anti-psychological novel. Imagination not in the facts but in the psychology of the characters [...] "contradictory", "inexplicable" acts [...] 5) Exercises of style. Strip: the well-tempered pen. 6) Scenario on de Quincey. 7) Algebra of intervals. [...] and the Preface to B[ouvar]d and Pécuchet". Or: "Zazie in the subway. Start with the letter A / finish with Z". A page from a schoolboy's notebook contains several small drawings reminiscent of rebus with these notes: "Ex. de Style / Je suppos'a-i-èsse que vous iri-e-zède dan-én-èss lmétro". In these notes there are also a few poems, such as this one: "Un peu avant rien / De peu précédant rien / Un peu avant zéro / Quand vient le zéro / Où naissent les zéros"... Or this brief poetic tale dated "Oct. 41": "In front of his poem - a masterpiece - the poet thinks of all the children who will mumble the verses in the classroom and hate him. He burns his poem". Numerous ideas for novels, sometimes scribbled on small pieces of paper or calendar pages, are scattered throughout these notes: "La Colère d'Achille, a novel based on Homer [...] the abridged version of Gargantua / A novelist encounters a character under a false name in a novel by one of his colleagues. Or this scenario for a detective novel: "Constructing a criminal / The policeman sees a young man stealing. He watches him. A misdemeanor, no interest. Waits for him to become a criminal - even better. Prevents him from being arrested, prevents him from working, from having money. Helps him carry out a very complicated crime - the solution to which he discovers. Or again: "Hortense / erotic-mystical novel / Ego as a female character mystical friendship (with an impotent man?) She stops believing in it in fi ne". Another idea for a book announcing Georges Perec: "Lexique ô ma mémoire (dictionnaire de souvenirs)". Or: "A novel where space, time and heroes are palpable, alive"... Ironic aphorisms: "Dialectics links together. It makes continuity out of the discontinuity of the enumeration of possible cases". "It is not so much that life is not very much alive". "Woman, an animal species as different from man as a slug... Philosophical reflections: "What is a man? A medium of language on the human level, a medium of generation on the animal level. A medium of culture. So let us not represent man as one, but as a becoming. He does not exist. He only transmits. It is a function of time that only determines a point? No point. But he can increase this culture to be transmitted. Man as a continuous function"... Thoughts on literature and art: "Books on science, theology, history, etc. express themselves in values of truth; art, of fi ction. Thus the novelist tells "stories", lies, false stories whose value comes from elsewhere. However, we realize that lyric poetry also expresses truth values! It expresses the particular in truth values [...] Thus a ballad by Villon is "true". A surrealist text also wants to be true. What 'saves' the great novels (Petronius, B[ouvar]d and Péc[uche]t, Joyce, Balzac, Proust) is their truth value"... On another page: "Inability to write one's biography / Omissions and transformations / Impossibility of reconstructing one's "states of mind" - study on quotation marks"... Or again on memoirs: "Writing one's memoirs as an "application" of the laws of psychological evolution (Wallon, etc). For example: title a chapter: period of external affirmation (at 14 to 16 years of age. Id is for me 1917 to 1919); introversive moment establishing the cult of the self (±16 to ±20 years of age; id is 1919 to 1923)"... Some pages contain fragments of memoirs or diaries: "I returned to France to suffer a disappointment which I took very badly and which plunged me into despair. I got through it, more or less well. On the advice of my