Exercises in Style (15 page)
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Authors: Raymond Queneau
est
Indian
*
In a bus with bags of people on, only room for two-three more, it have a
fellar with a string instead of a ribbon round he hat, and this fellar look at another
test with a loud tone in he eye and start to get on ignorant and make rab about this
test treading on he toes. The test start to laugh kiff-kiff and the fellar get in one
set of confusion, he looking poor-me-one and outing off fast for vacant seat.
Later I bounce him up, he coasting lime in the Cour de Rome, it have
another test giving him ballad, he advicing him: “You best hads get that button
moved.”
*
Replacing
Paysan
nterjectionsPsst! h’m! ah! oh! hem! ah! ha! hey! well! oh! pooh! poof! ow! oo!
ouch! hey! eh! h’m! pffft!
Well! hey! pooh! oh! h’m! right!
reciousIt was in the vicinity of a midday July. The sun had engraved itself
with a fiery needle on the many-breasted horizon. The asphalt was quivering softly,
exhaling that tender, tarry odour that gives the carcinomous ideas at once puerile and
corrosive about the origin of their malady. A bus in green and white livery, emblazoned
with an enigmatic S, came to gather from the neighbourhood of the Pare Monceau a small
and favoured batch of postulant-passengers into the moist confines of sudiferous
dissolution. On the back platform of this masterpiece of the contemporary French
automobile industry, where itinerants were packed
together like
sardines in a tin, an Incorrigible rascal who was slowly advancing towards the
commencement of his fourth decade and who was carrying between a neck of almost
serpentine length and a hat encircled by a cordelet a head as insipid as it was leaden
raised his voice to complain with an unfeigned bitterness which seemed to emanate from a
glass of gentian-bitters, or from any other liquid of similar properties, of a
phenomenon of the nature of a recurring blow or shock which in his opinion had its
origin in a
hic et nunc
present co-user of the P.P.T.B. In order to give
utterance to his lament he adopted the acid tones of a venerable vidame who gets his
hindquarters pinched in a public privy and who strange to state does not at all approve
of this compliment and is not at all that way inclined.
Later, when the sun had already descended by several degrees the
monumental stairway of its celestial parade and when I was once more causing myself to
be conveyed by another bus of the same line, I perceived the individual described above
displacing himself in a peripatetic fashion in the Cour de Rome in the company of an
individual
ejusdem farinae
who was giving him, in this locality dedicated to
automobilistic circulation, sartorial advice which hung by the
thread of a button.
nexpectedThey were sitting round a café table when
Albert joined them. René, Robert, Adolphe,
Georges and Théodore were there.
“How’s everything?” asked Robert amicably.
“All right,” said Albert.
He called the waiter.
“I’ll have a picon,” he said.
Adolphe turned towards him:
“Well, Albert, what’s new?”
“Nothing much.”
“Nice day,” said Robert.
“Bit cold,” said Adolphe.
“Oh I say, I saw something funny today,” said Albert.
“It is warm though,” said Robert.
“What?” asked René.
“In the bus, going to lunch,” replied Albert.
“What bus?”
“The S.”
“What did you see? “ asked Robert.
“I had to wait for at least three before I could get
on.”
“Not surprising at that time of day,” said Adolphe.
“Well, what did you see?” asked René.
“We were terribly squashed,” said Albert.
“Good opportunity for pinching bottoms.”
“Pooh,” said Albert. “That’s got nothing to do
with it.”
“Go on, then.”
“There was a queer sort of chap next to me.”
“What was he like?” asked René.
“Tall, skinny, with a queer sort of neck.”
“What was it like?” asked René.
“As if someone’d been having a tug of war with
it.”
“An elongation,” said Georges.
“And his hat, now I come to think of it; a queer sort of
hat.”
“What was it like?” asked René.
“Didn’t have a ribbon, but a plaited cord round
it.”
“Funny,” said Robert.
“Then again,” continued Albert, “he was the peevish
type.”
“How come?” asked René.
“He started to pick on the chap next to him.”
“How come?” asked René.
“He said he was treading on his toes.”
“On purpose?” asked Robert.
“On purpose,” said Albert.
“And then what?”
“Then what? He simply went and sat down.”
“Is that all? “asked René.
“No. Funny thing is, I saw him again two hours later.”
“Where?” asked René.
“In front of the gare Saint-Lazare.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know,” said Albert. “He was walking up
and down with a pal who was calling his attention to the fact that the button of his
overcoat was a bit too low.”
“That is in fact the advice I was giving him,” said
Theodore.
Page from Queneau’s ms.: “La fonction ∫V(2)02”
QUENEAU'S 1973 SUBSTITUTIONS
et
theory
On the S bus, let us consider the set A of
seated passengers and the set U of upright passengers. At a particular stop is
located the set P of people that are waiting. Let C be the set of passengers
that get on; this is a subset of P and is itself the union of the set C' of
passengers that remain on the platform and of the set C" of those who go
and sit down. Demonstrate that the set C" is empty.
H being the set of cool cats and {
h
} the intersection of H
and of C', reduced to a single element. Following the surjection of the
feet of
h
onto those of
y
(any element of C' that differs
from
h
), the yield is the set W of words pronounced by the element
h
. Set C" having become non-empty, demonstrate that it is
composed of the single element
h
.
Now let P' equal the set of pedestrians to be found in front of
the gare Saint-Lazare, {
h
,
h'
} the intersection of H and
of P', B being the set of buttons on the overcoat belonging to
h
,
B' the set of possible locations of said buttons according to
h'
, demonstrate that the injection of B into B' is not a
bijection.