Raymond Queneau - The Flight of Icarus

Raymond Queneau's novel, The Flight of Icarus, opens with Hubert Lubert, writer, in a bit of a bind. Icarus has gone missing; he was there yesterday, but today, nothing. He looks all through his house, and again, nothing. Out to the street – out! – and off he goes, in search of the young man. He visits his friend Sturget, also a writer, and demands him back:

STURGET: You can see for yourself... Étienne... Victorine... Georges... they've nothing in common with your Icarus. And then there are a Durand, a Duvel and a Dupont... and a concierge whom I call – and I must say, rather drolly, I think – Pipelet.

HUBERT: You could have given him a pseudonym.

STURGET: I detest that. I only recognise real names.

HUBERT: And what if he were to adopt one, without your knowledge?

STURGET: The identity of my characters if no mystery to me.

Ah, yes. Icarus is not a friend or relation but a character in the novel Hubert is writing. He's vanished from the pages, and him only ten or fifteen pages old. Hubert suspects malice, but he isn't certain. He hires a detective, Morcol, to track the vanished character and bring him back, if possible. His description of Icarus is vague and detailed at the same time – he knows to the centimetre the character's height but isn't certain about his hair colour. He knows he lives on the Reu Bleue, but isn't sure of the number (though he suspects it's an odd number; Morcol retorts, “Which one? There are quite a lot”). Here, Hubert describes himself, and asks for help:

Hubert Lubert, a novelist by profession, by vocation, even, and I might add, of some renown. Since I am a novelist, then, I write novels. And since I write novels, I deal with characters. And now one of them has vanished. Literally. A novel I had just begun, about ten pages, fifteen at the most, and in which I had placed the highest hopes, and now the principal character, whom I had barely begun to outline, disappears. As I obviously cannot continue without him, I have come to ask you to find him for me.

Queneau's novel is, as can no doubt be ascertained from the paragraphs above, a novel concerned with literature, its creation, its process, its conceits and failures and, specifically, its troubles. The Flight of Icarus wears its erudition lightly, but well. For a novel about novels, and characters, and literature in general, it contains a remarkably concentrated story and Queneau easily sustains the high level of comedy from the first page to the last. The comic rush of the novel propels the plot and the characters along so rapidly that it's easy, should you wish, to ignore the sheer volume of writers referenced, writers talking about writing, and literature-related metaphors and similes. The Flight of Icarus, while extensively literary, is never exhausting. Queneau's comedy and aptitude for pacing and plot ensure that the novel can be appreciated purely as farce, should one so wish.

The Flight of Icarus begins conventionally, which is to say there are paragraphs, sentences, dialogue marks, and all that. But very soon – within the first page – the novel, stricken by Hubert's character having left his novel, begins to fragment, the central foundations of the novel cracking and crumbling. Queneau shifts the work to a play or a script (for Hubert hates plays), and only very occasionally does it shift back to prose. Queneau's work can be seen as a comment on the act of creating a novel, but also of reading it. The fundamentals are judged, weighed, and criticised accordingly. But let's not assume the work is a dry critical tome. Take, for example, this overly detailed explanation of how to drink absinthe:

FIRST DRINKER: Stop, idiot! (ICARUS rapidly withdraws his hand.) You don't drink it like that! I'll show you. You place the spoon on the glass in which the absinthe already reposes, and then you put a lump of sugar on the aforementioned spoon, whose singular shape will not have escaped your notice. Then, very slowly, you pour the water over the sugar lump, which will start to dissolve and, drop by drop a fecundating and sacchariferous rain will fall into the elixir and cause it to become cloudy. Once again you pour on a little water which beads, and beads, and so on, until the sugar has dissolved, but the elixir has not acquired too aqueous a consistency. Observe it, my young friend, watch the operation taking effect... an inconceivable alchemy...

And here, Icarus, after five absinthes:

I might compare absinthe to a Montgolfier. It elevates the spirit as the balloon elevates the nacelle. It transports the soul as the balloon transports the traveller. It multiplies the mirages of the imagination as the balloon multiplies one's points of view over the terrestrial sphere. It is the flux which carries dreams as the balloon allows itself to be guided by the wind. Let us drink, then, let us swim in the milky, greenish wave of disseminated oneiric images, in the company of my surrounding habitués; their faces are sinister but their absinthed hearts absent themselves along abstruse and maybe abyssine abscissae.

Queneau shows us the inherently ridiculous nature of metaphor and simile, its capacity to go only so far, and no further. Once a certain separateness of comparison is made, the true meaning of the comparison gets lost in the wash. Certainly, noticing that absinthe transports the soul in much the same manner that a balloon transports a traveller, is (or can be) a correct comparison, but really – it verges very close to the ridiculous. And then the next sentences takes it a step further, which proves to be a step too far, and the inherent absurdity of these types of comparisons is made clear. And the Queneau continues, amplifying his point over and over again.

Throughout the novel, Hubert searches for Icarus, Icarus takes up with a prostitute who becomes a bloomers-maker, Morcol finds the wrong person, Hubert goes to the Doctor (one of the funniest characters in the book) several times, the writers gather together and discuss writing with, quite cleverly, very little in terms of insight when compared to other, non-literary types, and so on. The plot hurtles forward, adding complications and additional characters every few pages. By choosing to use the tight narrative form of a script, Queneau has compressed his novel such that, in just over 150 pages, quite a lot happens.

Later still, Icarus becomes a mechanic (a great deal of time is spent discussing bicycle and more specifically, automobiles and their potential future pitfalls and problems, but also opportunities), and he collects about him the escaped refuges from other works of literature. Depending on when they have escaped, these characters are more or less well-formed. Icarus had the misfortune of being poorly described, and thus had no idea what to make of himself or his life, but some of the others have quite detailed descriptions (descriptions they are all too happy to share).

At one point, Queneau, shifting momentarily back to prose, uses two sentences, spaced a couple of lines apart, to attack the artificiality inherent in prose, no matter how good or poor it may be. Consider the following two sentences:

“A pale sunbeam attempts to pierce the clouds; it doesn't succeed.”
“The sun finally manages to rapierize the clouds that were obnubilating it.”

How many times have we read in a novel the goings on of the sun? And how many times has it really mattered? I am reminded of the remarkable opening sentence in Beckett's Murphy, which reads: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”. Now that is the way to show the sun in a new light (pardon the terrible pun; Queneau's infectious love for them rubs off) and so, too, is Queneau's. Staid and regular description, for so long a necessity in literature is not, Queneau suggests, really needed at all.

The Flight of Icarus must seem from all this like a dreadfully complex novel. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. There's so much to like that isn't specifically literature-related (as much as a novel can be non-literature-related) – the jokes, the puns, the slightly ridiculous, off-kilter feel of it all. The seriousness in which everyone reacts to what is an inherently unserious situation. The Doctor. Morcol. The writers and their arrogance. Everyone's fondness for a “finger of port wine,” or an absinthe. The writer who cares little for his critical reputation now and much for posterity, and his friend, who cares little for posterity's critical reception of his work, and everything for the critics of today. There's so much here that is funny, slightly ridiculous, and the script-like rendition of most of the novel ensures that it all speeds along. The Flight of Icarus can, and perhaps even should, be read as all this plus a meditation on the act of creation and the art of writing, but it doesn't need to be. However complex you choose to make the novel, Queneau is there alongside, providing additional layers of metaphor, referential erudition, and wit. In short, a masterpiece.

Author	Raymond Queneau
Title	The Flight of Icarus (Original Title: Le Vol d'Icare)
Translator	Barbara Wright
Nationality	French
Publisher	Oneworld Classics
Published	2009 (English, this edition); 1973 (English, first translation) 1968 (French)
Pages	161
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Amazon (FR)

See Also

List of titles by Oneworld Classics under review

Links

Links kindly provided by The Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2010

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