In his novel, The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau develops two parallel stories. The first concerns the Duke of Auge, a member of the French aristocracy who possesses an inexplicable talent for immortality (his story begins in 1264 and ends, though not with his death, sometime in the 1960s), while the second focuses on a layabout named Cidrolin, a man who lives on a barge near Paris, and whose day consists of little more than filling time between siestas. The connection between these two characters is that each, in their sleep, dreams he is the other.

There is much that may be plucked from The Blue Flowers—-in the novel’s “Afterword,” Vivian Kogan notes “the variety of interpretations the text makes possible” (229)-—but what interests me is the way Queneau trusts his readers to relinquish their desire for certainty.

This is not a blind trust. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of The Novel, Cervantés and his descendants have trained the reading public “to take…the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths…, to have as one’s only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty…” (6-7); but Queneau depends upon this trust to an exceptional degree. He gives the reader two characters who may or may not be the same person, and at the exact moment when the “reality” of the situation is to be revealed, he subverts it by providing just enough evidence to suggest that, indeed, these two characters may or may not be the same person.

This choice to undermine the reader’s desire for unity is, perhaps, an outgrowth of the intellectual climate of the 1960s, a period that saw authors deconstructing the modes of narrative fiction and setting them out for all to see. The process of that deconstruction often manifested as an invitation to the reader to embark into the dream-state of fiction only to be rudely woken by the writer’s disingenuous use of traditional literary mechanics.

In The Blue Flowers, the reader turns each page thinking that the Duke of Auge and Cidrolin are the same person. The ambiguity the reader grapples with is not whether they are the same person, but which of the two, if either of them, is the “real” person. At the end of the novel, Queneau brings his two characters together. If he had left it at that, a reader could walk away thinking, “Okay, they weren’t the same person; they just dreamt of each other,” but Queneau doesn’t make it that easy. He reveals that both of his characters share the same name, all seven parts of it:

‘Now that we know each other, just call me Joachim.’
‘And why should I call you Joachim?’
‘Because that’s my first name.’
‘It’s mine too,’ said Cidrolin, ‘I can’t see myself using my name when I’m talking to some other fellow.’
‘Some other fellow yourself,’ retorted the Duke good-naturedly, ‘Since we’re both Joachims, call me Olinde, then, that’s my second first name.’
‘It’s mine too.’
‘I’ve got five more: Anastase Cré…’
‘…pinien Hon…’
‘…orat Irénée Mé…’
‘…déric.’ (207)

In face of such ambiguity, the reader must accept that the Duke and Cidrolin are, indeed, both the same person and not the same person. While Kogan reads into this fact a “story of fictional creation and the creation of self” (Rechsteiner, 822), it communicates nothing as much as the fact that the reader is engaged in a fiction.

By bringing the fiction of the fiction to the forefront of a text so concerned with the mode of the dream state, Queneau seems to imply that reading fiction is little more useful than dreaming.

For Queneau to trust the reader to accept this as a positive development is for him to make the most romantic leap possible. It is for Queneau to show, in the mud of the real world, still “blossoming here and there, some little blue flowers” (224).