Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s line lands like a sly compliment with a warning label: Joyce pulled off a “magical act” with Ulysses, and everyone after has been living in the draft shadow of that spell. Calling it magic is doing double duty. It elevates Joyce beyond mere technique into the realm of the conjurer, the artist who makes an impossible structure feel inevitable. At the same time, it hints at a trick you can’t responsibly keep repeating. Once the rabbit is out, the audience starts staring at the sleeve.

The phrase “perhaps we are getting away from it” carries Queneau’s characteristic ambivalence about modernism’s great monuments. It’s not simple fatigue or iconoclasm; it’s the sense that the post-Joyce avant-garde risks turning revelation into routine. Ulysses didn’t just expand what the novel could hold - it made difficulty and formal daring into cultural capital. Queneau, a poet-novelist with one foot in experiment and the other in popular forms, is alert to how breakthroughs harden into etiquette: the book everyone must nod at, the method everyone must cite, the complexity everyone must perform.

Context matters: Queneau comes out of the interwar French scene that absorbed Joyce as both liberation and burden, with Surrealism, later Oulipo, all wrestling with rules, chance, and constraint. His “getting away” isn’t a retreat from innovation so much as a refusal to be hypnotized by one masterpiece’s gravity. The subtext is liberating: honor the miracle, then change the weather.