74
PARTISAN REVIEW
remind us that we are still
in
the land of Rabelais. The latest of them,
Loin de Dueil,
has a character, a lecherous minor poet, who is subject to
attacks of a hitherto unknown disease, which Queneau calls
Ontalgia!
L e Paris que vous aimates
n'est pas celui que nous aimons
et nous nous dirigeons sans hate
vers celui que nous oublierons
Topographies! itineraires!
derives
a
travers la ville!
souvenirs des anciens horaires!
que la memoire est difficile
..
Books like
Loin de Rueil
and Queneau's thin volume of poems,
Les ,Ziaux
(from which I have quoted the above lines), return art to
its
rewarding gratuitousness, its position as an end, an exemplary record
of man's audacious and marvelous imposition of order on the world.
H.
J.
KAPLAN
