The Sunday of Life by Raymond Queneau

First published:Le Dimanche de la vie, 1951 (English translation, 1976)

Type of work: Domestic comedy

Time of work: The late 1930’s and early 1940’s

Locale: Paris

Principal Characters:

• Valentin Bru, an army private
• Julia, his wife, a shopkeeper
• Chantal, her sister
• Paul Batragra, Chantal’s husband

The Novel

Raymond Queneau’s The Sunday of Life is a bright, cheery work that looks with an ironic distance on the small foibles of ordinary people. The title is taken from a celebrated phrase in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s discussion of Dutch painting, in which the philosopher speculates that because of their innocence and cheerful spirit, the peasants in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting must be close to the Ideal. Queneau seems to share this belief, which keeps the often-mordant humor of the work from becoming a negative judgment on his simple characters.

The novel opens in a popular quarter of Paris, where “popular” signals a working-class orientation and lack of sophistication. Two sisters, Julia and Chantal, are viewing the street scene from the window of their mother’s haberdashery. Chantal is happily married to Paul Batragra, but Julia’s sharp tongue and shrewish nature have kept her from finding a suitable match, and she is now in her mid-to-late thirties. When they see a handsome soldier walking down the street, Chantal teases her sister that she should marry him. Unknown to Private Valentin Bru, the machinations are already set in motion that will lead to his marriage with Julia.

First, Chantal makes the necessary inquiries at Valentin’s regimental headquarters. Having learned his name and where he is stationed, her husband, Paul, begins the next round of inquiries by tracking Valentin to his favorite cafe where he is always to be seen drinking vin blanc gomme. After a long conversation, his head spinning with repeated drinks offered by Paul, Valentin agrees to marry Julia. Valentin’s commanding officer agrees to his temporary discharge, and, together with Julia, he helps to run the haberdashery after their marriage. The couple runs into a problem immediately as to whether they can neglect the family business long enough to take a honeymoon. Together they deliberate:

No, of course, not, said Valentin. You see, then, said Julia. And yet, said Valentin, and yet it’s obligatory, a honeymoon....Maybe we could put the honeymoon off until our next vacation, suggested Valentin. And when will we take the vacation, then? Julia objected. And he had no answer to that.

They ended up by adopting the only possible solution, the one and only, to wit that Valentin would go on the honeymoon alone.

Julia makes elaborate plans and packs his suitcase for him, but Valentin, in his timid simplicity, makes a mess of the itinerary. In fact, he never leaves Paris, loses his suitcase, and has various amusing encounters with taxi drivers, barmen, and prostitutes.

Luckily, the next thing he knows, Valentin comes upon a funeral, which happens to be that of his mother-in-law, so he is reunited with his wife and family. This surprise reunion gives a happy cast to the otherwise sad proceedings, so the two couples decide to have a post funeral dinner celebration. At the dinner, however, Valentin has to face one of his worst fears—raw shellfish—because the others insist on having champagne and oysters. They notice that he is not participating in the feast, and Valentin defends himself by saying that the oysters are still alive:

“They’re only just alive,” said Paul.

“They’re just as alive as you and me,” said Valentin.

“Funny comparisons you make,” said Julia.

“It’s true, though,” said Valentin. “An oyster, it’s a living creature. Just as much as I am. Zno difference. Zonly one difference: between the living and the dead.”

“You aren’t very tactful,” said Chantal.

Here the reader cannot help but be struck by Queneau’s characteristic humor, which often succeeds in bringing up obliquely other, weightier, matters.

When they return to their conjugal life, Julia takes up a side profession as a fortune-teller, under the name of Madame Saphir. Her income helps to offset the drop in business which they experience in the haberdashery. Valentin takes advantage of the lull in business to take a trip to Germany to explore his ancestral heritage. He returns disappointed, however, since the tour, organized in Paris, has as its primary goal visiting the sites of Napoleon Bonaparte’s battles. When he returns to work in the shop, Valentin uses his sharp ear for gossip in order to collect information for Madame Saphir.With this aid, the fortune-telling business more than makes up for the shop’s lack of trade.

When Julia suffers a stroke and is confined to bed, it appears that the fortune-telling business will come to an end. Valentin, however, steps in and assumes the role of Madame Saphir. With his strange brand of simple wisdom, Valentin is actually more successful than his wife, and Madame Saphir’s fame spreads. With the growing climate of war that presages the outbreak of World War II, however, Madame Saphir’s prophecies grow increasingly bleak. Her business is closed for good when Valentin is re-mobilized at the outbreak of the war. Captured and made a prisoner of war,Valentin is released when the hostilities end, and through her usual resourcefulness, Julia is able to locate his regiment once again. When she sees him at last, he is helping some women refugees to climb into the window of a crowded train: “Julia choked with laughter: it was so as to get his hand on their behinds.” Whatever befalls these characters, in Queneau’s world of humorous distance and irony, one can always be sure that somewhere, someone is having a good time just the same.

The Characters

Valentin is a classic Queneau character. His simplicity of spirit is such that he agrees to marry a woman fifteen years his senior, whom he has never seen. Because of practical considerations, he takes the subsequent “honeymoon” by himself and yet never reaches his destination because of a series of adventures. Valentin thinks that when a prostitute invites him to her room, she is merely being friendly, and he gets into more trouble as a result. He is the perfect comic character, cheerfully oblivious to the confusion that he sows around him.

On the other hand, Valentin’s simplicity is a sort of wisdom. His fear of eating oysters leads him to reflect on the nature of life and death. His total lack of jingoistic patriotism keeps him from falling into the war hysteria that surrounds him, and his insight into a variety of human situations makes him a very successful fortune-teller when he takes over for his wife. Valentin spreads mirth around him wherever he goes, but it is always humor with a kernel of profound truth.

Julia is sharp-tongued and extremely quick in her witty repartee. She spends most of the book making puns and verbal allusions with her sister Chantal that comment in an incisive way on the petty faults of her fellow humans. Luckily for Valentin, most of her humor is over his head. Together, the two of them, when they discuss a question or problem, almost invariably arrive at the most outrageous conclusions or solutions. Although Julia’s quick thinking resolves many tricky situations, her schemes always seem to create more.

Chantal and Paul are essentially foils for Valentin and Julia, a more or less normal complement to the other couple’s quirky unpredictability. They aid Julia in her original design on Valentin but end up resenting the fact that Chantal’s mother leaves the haberdashery to Valentin. All through the story, they are too dull to comprehend the deeper sympathy that Valentin evokes in others. Chantal is a good match for Julia’s quick wit, and Paul is a good partner for Valentin, though only a touch less simple than his brother-in-law is.

Critical Context

The Sunday of Life is Raymond Queneau’s thirteenth novel, but it was the first of his works to enjoy an overwhelming public acceptance. Along with Zazie dans le metro (1959; Zazie in the Metro, 1960), it marked a change in Queneau’s novelistic career away from the somber and often-pessimistic atmosphere of his early work and toward a more sunny and cheerful approach. Queneau also wrote the script for the screen adaptation by Claude Chabrol, which enjoyed wide popular success.

Queneau was a leading figure in the French literary world for more than forty years. From his early works, which owe their existence in part to his collaboration with the Surrealist movement, and the works in his middle career such as The Sunday of Life, which were more popular in orientation, to his meditative and philosophical later works, Queneau remained a writer fascinated with the materiality of language. More than any other writer of his century perhaps, he was responsible for the acceptance in France of wordplay and slang into the realm of serious literature. In many ways, his work anticipated the experimentalism of the New Novel movement of the 1960’s.

The Sunday of Life is arguably Queneau’s most cheerful work. Essentially a domestic comedy, the novel shows that a work with a light tone that treats simple characters can nevertheless raise important questions about language and show how the language people use reveals their implicit metaphysical thinking. As with all Queneau’s work, The Sunday of Life is an important example of how ordinary life, through the scrutiny of language, can be made to yield an extraordinary richness.

Bibliography

Bree, Germaine, and Margaret Guiton. An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus, 1957.

Cobb, Richard. Raymond Queneau, 1976.

Guicharnaud, Jacques. Raymond Queneau, 1965.

Shorley, Christopher. Queneau’s Fiction, 1985.

Thiher, Allen. Raymond Queneau, 1985.