Jacques l’Aumône and Walter Mitty are twin sons of different mothers. Both men escape from what they consider dull lives by fantasizing themselves in extraordinary situations. Their two creators, however, took very different approaches to their subjects. Thurber mined Mitty’s situation for its comic power, the absurdity of the contrast between the milk toasty Mitty (whose wife literally feeds him milk toast) and the dangerous adventures he imagines himself in.
Queneau, on the other hand, attempted to integrate James Joyce, surrealists like Andre Breton and Boris Vian, and French and American pulp fiction into the world of his hero. When we first meet Jacques l’Aumône (l’aumône being French for alms or charity), he’s the teenaged son of a hosery manufacturer living in Rueil, a suburb of Paris that must be associated with shrunken lives and stifling boredom (the original French title was Loin de Rueil or Far from Rueil. Watching a western with one of his friends, Jacques — called Jackie by his parents — does more than become involved with the film. He transmogrifies into the film:
Jacques and Lucas held on to their seats with two hands as if they were on that mount they saw there before them, inverse and planimetrical. Thus they are shown the mane of the soliped and the breeches of the booted one, and then they are shown the pistols in the belt of the breeches-wearer, and after that they arc shown the powerfully circular thorax of the bearer of fire-arms, and finally they are shown the mug of the guy, a dashing buck, a burly fellow for whom men’s lives were of no more account than a louse’s, and Jackie is in nowise astonished to recognize in him Jacques l’Aumone.
A founding father of the Oulipo movement, Queneau once described himself as a rat who constructed mazes from which he planned to escape — which is an apt way of summarizing what he does for Jacques l’Aumône in The Skin of Dreams.
But anyone who’s read a bit of Queneau knows that what sets him apart from the surrealists and other Oulipians is his simple humanity. So, Jacques doesn’t just indulge in escapism. He also projects himself into other lives — walks a mile in other men’s shoes, as the saying goes. When he encounters the husband of his building’s concierge, for example, a man who’s down on his luck and somewhat out of his head with illness, the same transformation that put him in the saddle up on screen in the cinema takes place:
He then perceived with a fresh eye the whole course of his life, behind him: his happy childhood, his mad ambitions, his bitter disappointments, his career as a bureaucrat, his expulsion for negligence, his marriage to a bag, and finally, after many increasingly unbrilliant trades, that of janitor, an old canker putting an end to this sad life, ugh! alas! To complete the resemblance he shook his hands like old dead leaves that a gentle rainy November wind does not yet wish to tear from the tree that bears them. Jacques found pleasure in this situation, after all perhaps he himself would never attain a joy comparable to that which he bad in his role of a decayed Cerberus endlessly stuttering those words “Things riding high, my way, really riding high”, all the more so since the other, contemplating himself in this human mirror, smiled widely and began shaking even more violently, as if insisting on the profound meaning of his inconsistent babbling.
Queneau was inspired by Joyce’s manipulation of words, both the simple collages like snotgreen sea and wavewhite wedded words in Ulysses to the splicings and graftings of Finegans Wake (schutschum and tragoady). Which makes him a challenge for any translator. H. J. Kaplan, a novelist himself (and later press secretary for the U.S. delegation to the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese), fares well if perhaps a bit stiffly with Queneau’s wordplay. But even the most ham-fisted translator can’t interfere too badly when working with a writer so obviously enjoying his wordplay:
He was examining little bits of doryphoras through the microscope, for the problem was to increase the efficiency of the Baponot Doryphovore [a pesticide manufactured by Jacques’ employer], the insufficiency of which in the business of doryphorotrucidation was beginning to be known among all the farmers of the region.
An anastrepha doryphoros, by the way, is a fruit fly, but mouche des fruits is far too mundane for Queneau’s purposes.
Jacques’ talent for assimilating into the things he sees evolves to such a degree that eventually, it takes over Queneau’s book itself. Near the end, an American movie comes to Rueil’s local cinema. It stars James Charity (see above) and turns out to be both the actor’s autobiography and the synthesis of all of Jacques’ past fantasies:
He is seen to appear now as an explorer, now as an inventor, now as a boxer, now as a thief. He makes an excursion to the land of the Borgeiros, particularly wild Indians. At San Culebra del Porco he meets a young actress, Lulu L’Aumone. Both will go to Hollywood to get a look at what can be done there. And very quickly comes success, glory, triumph. James ends by marrying Lulu L’Aumone and while he kisses her on the mouth he signs (with his free hand) a royal contract for his polyglot talking picture The Skin of Dreams.
Queneau was a mathematician by training, and it’s likely that he studied differential geometry, which is one of the more mind-warping fields of math, since it deals with how spaces of X dimensions are mapped into spaces of Y dimensions — or, if you will, how one reality transforms into another. The Skin of Dreams is something of an experiment in differential geometry in fiction. And having studied differential geometry myself, I promise you: reading The Skin of Dreams is not only a realistic simulation of that particular form of mathematics, but a lot more fun.