Les Fleurs bleues (R. Queneau)

• Main Author: Séverine Manhaval
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université du Sud Toulon-Var 1999-01-01
• Series: Babel : Littératures Plurielles
• Subjects: Noah; idiolect; oneiric; orality; neologism; neo-Babelian
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/babel/1462
• ISSN: 1277-7897; 2263-4746

The novel Les Fleurs bleues, which was published in 1965, is an invitation to a fascinating journey into the time and space dimensions of languages, an odyssey into the heart of the Babelian problematics which it publicizes. Queneau plays upon linguistic particularities, idiosyncrasies and syntaxes within a historical and cosmopolitan perspective, and creates a new Esperanto for the novel: the « neo-Babelian ». All languages pervade and correspond with one another. Each of them brings its own contribution to the language of the book and together, they progressively unveil the scientific and philosophical extensions of the latter. Thus does Queneau elaborate his own linguistic and literary system, in the experimental arch of the novel, where the future language is in gestation.As he takes up Noah's torch, the writer takes his readers on a crossing the deluge in which dream and reality are intermingled, as well as humour and nostalgia for the one original language, or the virtuosity of style and rigour of composition. The novel dismantles the geographical and historical borderlines and thus transforms Noah into a new figure of the artist, who saves and rebuilds the Verb, and praises the infinite potentiality of language. Its aesthetics is grounded on the dialectic of constraint and freedom, deconstruction and reconstruction, based on a lively and scathing style. The storywriter, the poet and the mathematician meet and put their wisdom in common in this complex and bewildering novel, the roman à clef of a deep and original linguistic experiment.