This review is taken from PN Review 182, Volume 34 Number 6, July - August 2008.
BLUE-TINTED TRUISMSRaymond Queneau's Elementary Morality, first published in French in 1975, shows an elderly writer who was still full of formal invention and high-spirited, if gloomy, play. In the first part of this valedictory masterpiece he invents a new form, dubbed the 'Quennet' by his Oulipo colleagues but called a lipolepse by himself: a kind of fifteen-line post-sonnet of short lines that is associative, transformative or permutational, rather than argumentative or lyrical. His model is Chinese, the method not exactly ideogrammic but oxymoronic: contradictions and impossibilities abound, and the result is an acerbic meditation on the way traditional wisdoms are couched, a unique artefact which looks like a traditional wisdom book but is actually a critique of their divination of universal orders and their relentless urgings of the hapless wisdom-seeker to submit to the authorities.
Unoccupied master
Unusual slave
Parasitic explorers Muzzled occupationsUncertain labour Infant labour
Eccentric inquest Limping occupationsOafish inventors Sinister right hands
Infertile journeys
The eagle knows how to fly
the dolphin how to swim
man how to botch things up
The sun pursues
its impassive course
regardless of the planes
high up in the skiesImprovised toolsUnpublished fables
The page you have requested is restricted to subscribers only. Please enter your username and password and click on 'Continue'.
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 282 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?
If you have forgotten your username and password, please enter the email address you used when you joined. Your login details will then be emailed to the address specified.
If you are not a subscriber and would like to enjoy the 282 issues containing over 11,400 poems, articles, reports, interviews and reviews, why not subscribe to the website today?