Chapter One 1. Translation Ancient values! Ancient truths! Such are the clichés hatched in studious evenings. He's a young man--in bygone days, they say, hard-working and learned and wealthy. His name, no one knows why, is Christian Stobel. His childhood and first flush of youth are even less known to us than his fetal life. But a day comes when conversion fulfills him. A new integration reveals some new function. A fortuitous encounter, an act of chance have changed habits that had seemed forever confirmed; and a journey confirms his anxiety. 2. Port Having no taste at the moment for any sort of study, Christian Stobel went to Le Havre. He lives in a hotel on the rue Racine, where women's corpses are sometimes found, and where men arrange to meet. He writes antiopes. The overwhelming smell of the tarred sails delights him as much as the rectilinear length of the lines. He seeks an adventure; he doesn't find one--due to his inexperience; and then, he doesn't have a lot of imagination either. 3. Bohemians One day as he's wandering in the countryside surrounding this city, tired from a long walk, he sits down and gazes at the small valley and hill facing him. In the distance, gypsies appear on the luminous road coming out of the depths of the woods. Four caravans move toward the coolness of the valley. Men arc walking alongside, but they are still only black shapes, like block capitals. Imbued with the light of the sun, they vanish into a new darkness, crossing the market town curled up at the bottom of the valley and along the road, like an old white cat, then appear, again, more defined, at the near bend in the road. The troupe passes, imbuing the ground with the sweat of their feet--the men, bronzed and brawny, the women, tattered and torn, children, carriages, horses. "We come from all lands and we're going to Saintes-Maries de la Mer where we meet every year. Nomads of the enigma, we trail our mystery across the unastonished countrysides and the fluid towns. Transfigured by our ambulations, we live with contempt for the immobile and the memory of gigantic, metallic green snakes." At the bend in the road, they disappear. Stobel gets up and leaves. He returns to Paris. Some discussions with an enigmatic metaphysician suggest uncountable possibilities to him. Following which, he abandons studies, family, friends, Paris, then France. Comrades! My dear friends, don't you find that this Stobel is quite the diaphanous, quite the translucid character? He passes by and already no one can remember anything more of him; and as for me, I'd prefer anything else to these naive stories I'm relating to you. 4. Memory On the ship, Stobel was shelling some orange pips. He was thinking: "Nights of isles. Nights of coasts. Nights of cliffs, if only I had loved the dormer windows of old tumbledown cottages, the lust of exotic dances and the geometry of machines! All our love affairs of eighteen are over. I hauled my bewildered silences along the roads strewn with ancient prejudices. The cracks in the wall no longer let their tones pass through. The cross has darkened on the detour routes. The everlasting flowers leave for other tombs." 5. Music Just like the undefined swarming of the numberless multitudes of the Orient, like the great mass of inexhaustible peoples, like the infinitude of crowds, sources of races, fountains of invasions--diverse patterns superimpose themselves on the principal rhythm, some expressing killings and complicated lusts, others the calm of the Sages and the cosmic charity of the Ascetics. Paintings--in which rain and the perspectives of mountains symbolize the Infinite--argued with their calligraphed design. The music was still continuing its multiple rhythms, in which all individuality seemed to lose itself. How can one remain someone before the antiquity of these Ancestors, the infinitude of their wisdom, the multitude of individuals. One must lose oneself! One must be one with Tradition, Race, the ancient Earth, and the ineluctable Principles. 6. Cinema On the shores abandoned by insalubrious crabs, the thought of ill-fated destinies bustles about the mossy rocks, which the waves have modeled into hilarious and phallic shapes, no doubt intended to make the bathing girls muse in their swimsuits: blue, red, green, yellow, black, or white, all in accordance with the destinies guiding their lives--or the color of their lovers' ties. If Stobel wanders along the beach, amid the eccentric or photogenic bathing girls in their swimsuits, it is not that the desire for women torments him, nor that the climate enchants him. He is only there to fulfill the destiny that he set for himself, and, before leaving, he contemplates the mossy rocks with their phallic shapes, the thighs and buttocks of the bathing girls, the sand, gray, white, or bronze depending on which direction the sun is leaning, and the sea where the mermaids, dead for so long, seem to awaken to the wind of destinies suitable for the Pacific Ocean. 7. Navigation Three continents have wearied him--and now he is on the lookout for a yacht to the South Sea Islands. He never managed to flee from himself. The earth isn't that big--whatever they may say. And reaching Manila, first sign of the Orient, Stobel understood how wandering had only served to bring him back to places he already knew. Even if he had run off to the forests of South America or the steppes of Siberia, he would always end up finding something he had already fled. He was thinking in this manner, seated on a deckchair upon his yacht. He gazed at this tropical land and this sea that reminded him that he had already passed through not far from there, when he had traveled from Singapore to Hong Kong. His mind is surrounded. One can only follow curved lines on the earth's sphere that, when extended, always meet. At this point on the earth, he comes up against the already seen. He doesn't want to return to former experiences. He cannot bow again before the everlasting and disconcerting civilizations of the Orient. He believes he has gone round the world, explored all civilizations, all thoughts (just about). He doesn't want to return, he doesn't want to stay. "My will and my wealth gave me things, I guided my destiny and now my will comes up against itself. May things be hereforth the masters of myself! May I depend on possible circumstances!" At Palembang, there's a bar for sale. Stobel buys it. He disperses the remains of his fortune and makes a gift of his yacht to the captain, who has since been selling holothurians to the mandarin epicures of Shanghai. One can imagine him becoming an opium smoker, alcoholic or ataxic, or having a wife and kids who will go to school in Melbourne, or else converting to the Catholic religion. All that is of no importance. Anyway, this story is quite tedious. It's a good thing it's finished. Whether you like it or not, I couldn't care less. Excerpted from STORIES & REMARKS by Raymond Queneau. Copyright (c) 2000 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
