Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s line lands like a shrug with a blade inside it: the modern age, for all its engines and ideologies, is still running Homer’s code. Coming from a poet associated with Oulipo’s formal games and literary mischief, it’s not a conservative lament so much as a sly demolition of novelty as a cultural fetish. The joke is that we keep announcing “newness” with evangelical zeal, then return to the same old emotional hardware: pride, rage, longing, survival, the bruising costs of glory.

The Iliad and the Odyssey aren’t name-dropped as museum pieces; they’re treated as operating systems for narrative itself. One is war’s fever dream, a study of status and mortality; the other is the long hangover, the politics of homecoming, identity, and disguise. Queneau’s subtext is that modern literature (and modern life) tends to confuse new settings for new stakes. We swap spears for spreadsheets, gods for bureaucracies, and call it progress.

Context matters: a 20th-century European writer watching “history” reinvent catastrophe twice over, then watching culture rebrand itself as modern again. Against that backdrop, the line carries a weary punchline: even our horrors aren’t original. Yet it also works as a defense of art’s permanence. If nothing is “new” after Homer, the challenge isn’t invention from scratch; it’s recombination, angle, voice, form. Queneau isn’t closing the book on innovation. He’s daring writers to stop chasing novelty as a product feature and start earning it in the telling.