Politics & Power Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s line flatters and punctures in the same breath: it borrows the gravitas of Homer only to relocate it, slyly, into the modern political workshop where nations get made. Calling something “a very great Iliad” is deliberately overlarge. The Iliad is the canonical war poem, a monument to heroic violence and collective memory. Queneau’s ellipsis does the real work, a wink that says: you know what I’m about to compare this to, and you also know the comparison is a bit absurd.

The intent isn’t to claim that some contemporary text literally matches Homer; it’s to expose how nationhood is narrated into existence. Nations don’t just arise from borders and laws; they need an epic storyline: founding trauma, glorious sacrifice, a roster of exemplary figures, enemies rendered archetypal. By framing “the creation of a nation” as epic material, Queneau points to the aesthetic labor behind politics: myths drafted, slogans polished, history edited for coherence. The subtext is skeptical, even faintly cynical, about the genre conventions that make collective identity feel inevitable. If a nation requires an Iliad, then “origin” is already a performance.

Context matters: Queneau wrote in a France still digesting two world wars, when national narratives were both weapon and bandage. As a poet associated with modernist play and linguistic experimentation, he’s alert to how language manufactures reality. The line reads like a reminder that epic is not just literature; it’s a technology of belonging, with all the seductions and dangers that implies.