The Bark Tree by Raymond Queneau

First published:Le Chiendent, 1933 (English translation, 1968)

Type of work: Antistory

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: The outskirts of Paris

Principal Characters:

• Mme Cloche, a lecherous, meddling matron who gives poor advice on many subjects
• Bebe Toutout, a malicious and violent dwarf dedicated to evil
• Old Taupe, a miser who lives in a hut beside a suburban chemical factory and sells junk
• Ernestine, a young waitress who marries Old Taupe and hopes that he has hidden a fortune somewhere
• Etienne Marcel, an officeworker who is nearly run over one day while en route to his place of employment, the Audit Bank
• Theo, a badly behaved child with a depraved interest in women
• Pierre Le Grand, a cab driver and amateur philosopher
• Narcense, an unemployed saxophone player and would-be writer
• Saturnin Belhotel, the keeper of a cheap hotel

The Novel

Raymond Queneau’s The Bark Tree is among the first antinovels and,as such, neither attempts to tell a carefully plotted story with beginning,middle, and end, nor strives to be coherent. In addition, it does not include well-developed characters or offer readers any moral or philosophical conclusion about life. The Bark Tree should be considered as an energetic, vibrant assault on convention, in which people are either things or real human beings. In many ways, the novel is a sustained joke about the random, precarious lives people lead and the ever-present threat of chaos and destruction with which they learn to live. Queneau, like James Joyce, uses language of his own invention and street slang to make more vivid what he has to say. By avoiding refined speech, he lets the characters be themselves: ordinary workers living in an ordinary suburb of a modern city.

Instead of providing a well-constructed plot, Queneau gives the reader a number of actions which may not be related. Etienne Marcel’s narrow escape from death is observed by Pierre Le Grand, who informs Saturnin Belhotel, who tells others. Meanwhile, Mme Cloche sees a rope with a noose tied at its end in a garden and wonders who left it there. Mme Pigeonnier flirts with the boy, Theo, while Etienne has a nightmare in which his mother wears a beard to serve boiled eggs. Yet Etienne does think about the rope (which he also saw) and wonders whether someone has tried to hang little Theo or a dog.

Throughout the novel, seemingly unrelated events somehow become connected, if only tenuously, by the links the characters forge between those events in their minds. Though their lives become accidently intertwined, the characters take an interest in what happens to one another, even though that interest is neither keen nor lasting. Queneau’s people like to conjecture about others and to reconstruct events happening to others in order to pass the time and avoid ennui.

In their search to quell boredom the characters thrive on sensation. For example, when Ernestine, a poor waitress, marries Old Taupe, an equally penniless junk dealer of repulsive habits, the event causes much amusement and gossip for Mme Cloche and her fellows. They hope that, after marrying Old Taupe, Ernestine will find that he has stuffed thousands of franc notes under his mattress or in a tin can. Yet when no money has been uncovered, Ernestine’s “friends” quickly lose interest in her. Only on her deathbed does Ernestine regain their attention, but after she dies, they go out in search of new gossip. Old Taupe’s death is a nonevent and is completely ignored because it offers no surprises; he was only useful as a foil to Ernestine, and after her death, he becomes a bore. In the end, his hut is unceremoniously dismantled and burned, just as his body is tossed into a pauper’s grave and forgotten.

Ultimately, the barren lives of Queneau’s characters, their search for thrills, their love of novelties, and their selfishness lead them to indulge in the biggest thrill of all: war. At the end of the novel, an absurd war breaks out between the French and a group called the Etruscans. A motley collection of frenzied, yet purposeless, assaults and counterassaults, the war lurches on, until it degenerates into total farce as the eight remaining French soldiers surrender to a demoralized thirty surviving Etruscans. This war—which began because Queen Orlini of the Etruscans became angry with Anatole, King of the French, over a game of bezique—ends because that seems to be the thing to do. After all the bloodshed, the battlefield nightmare, the diseases of the trenches, and the massive trauma occasioned by the killing, it is apparent to the survivors that the conflict meant nothing. In fact, the French hold a banquet to celebrate the war’s end, and the participants drunkenly banter with Mme Cloche about the weather and her love life.

At the end of The Bark Tree, Etienne and Mme Cloche separate after an argument about needing to relive life near a town, much like the one mentioned at the beginning of the novel, where flattened people go through only the motions of living. Thus, Queneau, while writing a novel seemingly devoid of structure, creates a plot in which the beginning and end flow into each other. In this merciless universe, Queneau appears to say, madness and violence will build until another absurd conflict arises. This slaughter will lead to a cessation of hostilities, which in turn will lead to truce, peace, and building resentment, which will lead again to war, ad nauseam.

The Characters

Etienne is the most frequently mentioned character in The Bark Tree. His near brush with death helps him turn from puppet into person; he provides valuable commentary on the predicaments of the other characters; and he survives until the end of the book, when most of the others have vanished. Like the others, he is a common sort of person who does not cause events but to whom things happen. He attempts to make sense out of the meaningless events that form his life yet never manages to do so. Friends such as the innkeeper, Saturnin, and Mme Cloche simply confuse him further with their eccentric explanations of circumstances. As one of society’s “little people,” he finds himself at the mercy of others, especially the King of France, who involves the French in the absurd war. One of the sole survivors of the war, Etienne has no idea why he was spared, nor does he understand why the war ended: It has happened, he has survived, and now he will leave for home.

Pierre is another important character, but he is far more aware of the discontinuity of life around him. Instead of dwelling upon such inconsequential items as potato peelers and ducks (the stuff of Etienne’s musings), Pierre thinks about the nature of reality and decides that it is irrational. In fact, Pierre is the one who notices that the little banker, Etienne, undergoes a transformation from nonentity to person after the near accident which left another person dead. Pierre’s artistic power of observation allows Etienne to become a true, rounded character. As he watches Etienne in the train car, the cab driver imagines the banker changing from a flat cutout to a moving, breathing creation—his own. By doing so, Pierre takes the place of Queneau,his own creator.

Bebe Toutout, unlike Etienne and Pierre, is repulsive. A wizened dwarf, he tries to make others unhappy and thrives on their confusion and fear. Among other things, he is a child molester, swindler, braggart, liar, pornographer, and thug. As an agent of evil, he makes an already unstable world even more unpredictable.

Mme Cloche, the gossipmonger, is another negative character, one whose life is given over to lewd thoughts and bawdy jokes. She pushes young Ernestine into marriage with Old Taupe, hoping somehow to benefit from the fortune she is sure Ernestine will find in Old Taupe’s mattress. When Ernestine marries the ugly miser and discovers that there is no hidden treasure, Mme Cloche maliciously nags the girl about her “folly,” As the girl lies dying, Mme Cloche gives her only ten minutes in which to tell her life story.

Like Mme Cloche and Bebe, young Theo is an agent of destruction. A boy whom Saturnin would like to hang, Theo is a constant irritant to most of the novel’s characters, as he lusts after older women, tortures animals, and steals. This young menace stirs up the others with his antics, if nothing else providing them with an incentive to forget temporarily their boredom.

Ernestine is a foil to Bebe, Theo, Mme Cloche, and the other, minor negative characters in The Bark Tree, for she is innocent, caring, and sensitive. She alone elicits compassion from the other characters, when she dies at such an early age. Her soliloquy, in which she talks about the random things which made up her life and about how disposable she is, resonates throughout The Bark Tree. Her anguish and sensitivity, as well as her acute self-awareness, make her a kind of modern martyr who suffers a meaningless death after living a pathetically brief and absurd life. The memory of her death stays with the friends present at the time.

Critical Context

The Bark Tree was Queneau’s first and most influential novel. It has become well-known as the forerunner of the modern avant-garde novel and as one of the first works to use random events, minimal structure, and experimental language. His other works include Un Rude Hiver (1939; A Hard Winter, 1948), Pierrot mon ami (1942; Pierrot, 1950), Le Dimanche de la vie (1952; The Sunday of Life, 1976), and Zazie dans le metro (1959; Zazie in the Metro, 1960). Queneau also wrote a parody of traditional literary forms entitled Exercices de style (1947; Excercises in Style, 1958).

The wild humor of The Bark Tree is found in all Queneau’s work. He delighted in manipulating language, reforming it to create new words or reshaping words to take on new forms, and The Bark Tree was his first attempt at achieving a break with literary convention and the French novelistic tradition.

Queneau also carefully hid any structure so as to give the reader, at first glance, a sense that The Bark Tree is formless, a collage of often unrelated elements. In so doing, he imitated the patterns and rhythms of life. Thus, all of his later works bear the stamp of seeming aimlessness found in The Bark Tree because Queneau believed that no one can reduce reality to a formula. Yet there is structure in Queneau’s novels, hidden though it is: Events are connected to other events, however tenuously, and people’s lives impinge upon the lives of others.

Queneau’s characters helped change the twentieth century novel. They are at once both cardboard cutouts and memorable personages, aimless and strangely meaningful. The figures are not realistic, for they are not developed as fully as were the characters of Charles Dickens or Fyodor Dostoevski. More type than individual, the Queneau character nevertheless is a vibrant creation, full of life and enthusiasm.

Bibliography

Guicharnaud, Jacques. Raymond Queneau, 1965.

Mercier, Vivian. The New Novel from Queneau to Pinget, 1971.

Shorley, Christopher. Queneau’s Fiction, 1985.

Thiher, Allen. Raymond Queneau, 1985.