The Skin of Dreams is Raymond Queneau’s book about daydreaming multiple lives into existence. It is Queneau’s dance across that diaphanous membrane separating the waking real and imagined fantastical.
Since boyhood, Jacques L’Aumône, the story’s lead character, has loved the “pictures” at his local theater. As he takes in the films, he not only empathizes with but clearly sees himself as inhabiting the role of the cinematic hero made real; performing the same actions, achieving the same greatness as the star on screen seemingly as it’s happening. In the realm of Jacques’ own mind, he is a simultaneous creation; he’s the star of his life, his own universe, as well as that of others portrayed on-screen.
And these daydreams don’t end when the curtain closes, or even after Jacques has left the theater. They smoothly seep into his waking consciousness for stretches of time afterwards, and seem imperceptibly woven into the grain of his daily existence. Across the passage of many years, by turns in stunning rotation, he transfigures from cowboy-hero to intrepid explorer within many realms, including scientific inventor and jazz horn-player mid-wowing a captive audience (“He was playing a sweet brass solo with his nose when the alarm went off.”)
The story is a phantasmagoria spun along the mind-axis of both Queneau and Jacques L’Aumône, both fascinated by the potentials of cinema beginning in childhood, both of whose wildly immersive mind-constructions blur the edges of dreams into lucid waking life.
In Queneau’s hands, we’re treated to a story told with reflective parallels, brilliant plays on language—across dictions and dictionaries, expressions and turns of phrase which expand our feeling for words tweaked-and-made-new. These are all hallmarks of Queneau’s writing; a crystallized facet of one manifestation of play Queneau insists is central to both art and mathematics.
This kind of play was explored, within self-imposed limits, by the group he co-founded in 1960, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature). restyled as OuLiPo. It was comprised of a collection of mathematicians and writers, including Italo
Calvino and George Perec. They explored the inventive possibilities to emerge through the recycling, remixing, or reimagining of discrete pieces of information or ideas gleaned through archival study. New forms of story structure and narrative could emerge when forced to follow certain mathematical patterns. Or by the removal of a certain letter from one’s keyboard throughout the whole of the story.
Another pillar central to both Queneau’s work and to that of the OuLiPo: humor. In The Skin of Dreams, humor comes in many forms. It can emerge through the use of alternate or unexpected meanings of the same word which can stand for an array of differing particulars.
Or from phonetic spelling, reflecting one of the ever-changing moods of the main character, for instance: “He most certainly wasn’t going to spend long blubbering like that over the past, like a child abandoned by his widdle mommy.” (This followed a realization of all the dream occupations which had preoccupied him—taking a page from Queneau here—as a child, to no effect. “His mind paraded before him all the embryos of social entities that he had non-realized, like miniatures of perfectly formed fetuses…captain in the Royal Netherlands army,
plant manager, attaché to the embassy in Peking, banker, clown (famous), painter (famous), archivist-paleographer, midshipman (aboard the last tall ship), racing cyclist (winner of the Tour d’Europe…”)
Humor is also found within the dark absurdity of certain kinds of striving: formally studying the habits of the louse, contemplating training them to perform.
Another kind of humor, or, at the very least, wink to the reader: employing the same phrase or idea related to a certain subject, in one case (again) that of the louse, uttered by different characters within their seemingly discrete worlds across the novel. In the louse example, apparently unrelated or very tenuously-connected characters repeat for their audience/the reader the frustrations they encounter when trying to rid themselves of head lice.
Frantic pursuit of its ravishing star. This pulls the focus of his daydreams from conquering a Mt. Everest of bests across estimable occupations to those of the heart. When the romance with the traveling troupe star, briefly real, fizzles, he moves on, again. With theaid of a childhood friend with whom he is—yet again— in amorous attraction, he takes various movie roles as an extra, moving on to other still-minor roles. These are like bit- part-rehearsals on the way to his finding real love in work and off-stage (whichever stage this may be, in whichever stage of his life/career we may find him). At times, the contents and activities of his passions, too, seem a dream.
Meanwhile his acting gigs continue, and those early-won boxing skills come in handy. Since childhood, Jacques seemed to operate under a clear illusion (based on certain of his actual skills) that he was destined for greatness. But it is only when things within him shift, when he challenges his own ego and takes on an extreme form of humility, that he lands on his way to actually becoming great. This transmutation occurs while living the life of a starving artist with much-lowered expectations. Despite himself, with the advent of talking movies, his good looks, ability to inhabit any dreamed role, and romantic enthusiasm serve him well—as do those prizefighting skills. He becomes a Hollywood matinee idol, particularly in Westerns, reflecting back on his childhood enthusiasm for the genre.
By the end, Jacques L’Aumône’s dreams have translated into a new expansive reality. The roughly circular nature of this aspect of the story (dreams as life, dreams extinguished, dreams made real) is a nod to Queneau’s enthusiasm for Hegel’s ideas on circular thought. Another aspect of this story may be a kind of nod to Hegel: Perhaps Jacques broke the unwinnable cycle of being forever locked in a “circle of purely subjective representations” by changing his goal. Potentially by turning his gaze from the acquisition of power to the desperation of love, dragged along its many iterations and aftermaths, Jacques’ real-life chosen occupation becomes more in line with his dream destination.
Loufifi des Cigales sees a young Jacques L’Aumône just after his first (that the reader sees) experience at the cinema early on in the narrative. By the book’s end he accompanies Jacques’ own—by now abandoned—child to the same cinema. The wheel turns again. (Again hearkening back to Hegel). Jacques’ young son shows signs of the effusive dreamery displayed by his father, whom he does not recognize as the Hollywood star of the film they are watching (titled The Skin of Dreams, no less). While Jacques’ family wonders what has become of the man, Des Cigales becomes the story’s messenger, ultimately closing the tale by pulling back the curtain on what has become of Jacques.
Queneau once declared, “The novel must resemble an onion. The interior layers constitute a novel, episode or fragment, all of which are equally potential” (Note an onion is approximately a three-dimensional circle, a shape which guides the story in many ways).
A floral-robed, heart-sundered, smack-addicted poet named Louis-Philippe , or ”Loufifi” des Cigales, is introduced in the beginning of the story. We see him through the point ofview of a young maid named Lulu Doumer, who, like Queneau himself, is from the Le Havre region (in her case from a small town nearby). The discussion between these two and a second maid with a strong colloquial accent from Pontoise (a suburb of Paris) seems like an introduction into a certain world told through the lens of des Cigales or Doumier. But: it’s just a warm-up. Des Cigales then walks into a conversation with the father of Jacques L’Aumône. Separated by a chapter break, the center of the story re-aligns (as happens from time to time) to that of the L’Aumône household. But even that story is short-lived. After a few-page exchange in which L’Aumône’s young son briefly appears, nearly the entirety of the rest of the tale takes place within the mind of that son, Jacques. Or: it is for us to decide, what takes places within Jacques’ daydreams, and what occurs within his waking reality. Which ”minor characters” within the story are real, which are
specious?
Queneau himself put it best, describing dreams as “that solitary Hollywood of which each person, each night, requires a varied spectacle of which he (the each person) is simultaneously the script writer, director, actor, cameraman and usher.”
Queneau also masterfully folds in elements from Jacques’ childhood, disappearing a character or theme only to bring it back in elaboration later in the narrative. This narrative structure underscores the overarching circular shape suffusing the novel. One of these characters, Loufifi des Cigales, re-emerges at the story’s end to play a much different role than he did at its beginning. He moves from central to supporting
character, one who eventually reveals the true story of the actual central character, Jacques L’Aumône. Also approaching the story’s end: Jacques meets, chats and dances with (following the circular theme they “do a few turns around the floor”) then marries the young maid we recognize from the beginning of the story, Lulu Doumer, Within the contents of their initial conversation is the realization that they both know des
Cigales. (Lulu speaks of his dope-sickness—in the story referred to as an “existential illness.” Jacques relates that he “almost cured him. Back when I was a veterinary engineer.”)
As he grows into manhood, Jacques L’Aumône become an (actual) amateur prizefighter; a scientist/engineer with no abilities (working on lice, one of the themes—here as there—which is brought up as half horror/ half joke throughout); a father and husband. None of these roles seem to satisfy Jacques as a full-time pursuit:
“He loathed the very idea of specialization, along with lengthy careers that leave their mark on you and give you wrinkles.”
He abandons his former life (or lives) to quite literally join a kind of circus—a traveling theater troupe—in romques’ new reality.
Des Cigales does this by reading, for the original L’Aumône household, which now includes Jacques’ abandoned wife and son, an interview with one “James Charity” (Jacques’ Hollywood name) in a cinema guide. This ”James Charity” shares an astounding number of oddly specific local ties and similarities with their own Jacques. He also shares the outlines of his “roundabout” path to stardom. Still, they can’t piece
together the connections we are able to see. (The closest guess arrives via Jacques’ own son, Michou: “Hey, she’s called L’Aumône. Like Me. Like Poppa.”) It seems they’ll never know that dreams carried their son, father, and husband away, to a love it is clear he is meant for.
As with his much-taught Exercises in Style, Queneau introduces to the reader new ways of telling a story with repetitions, deviations, and surprise overlaps.
