Raymond Queneau’s Œuvres complètes de Sally Mara

This chapter follows the development of Raymond Queneau’s works published under the pseudonym (or auteur supposé) of Sally Mara, including her journal intime, at a time when diary-writing and the writing subject itself were out of favour with the literary avant-garde. A novel published in 1947 attributed to Sally Mara, followed by her Journal intime (1950) and her Œuvres complètes (1962), draw on Gide’s experiments with diary-writing, but comically expose the formal processes by which an author-figure and literary œuvre are constructed. This is often done by creating conflict between the several authorial figures involved (Queneau, Mara, and the fictional editor Michel Presle), and by processes of metalepsis (the transgresssion of boundaries in a narrative framework). Yet the works do not reduce the author-figure to an entirely textual, discursive phenomenon, disconnected from reality, and they tend to endorse a reader’s curiosity about the ‘real’ author.