Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

"Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

About this Quote

Queneau is taking a sly swipe at the prestige novel’s favorite magic trick: dress up a small domestic drama in big History, then hope the costume does the emotional labor. The barb lands because he grants the novelists their competence first - “well-defined, precise characters” - and then undercuts the payoff: their stories are “sometimes of mediocre interest.” It’s an insult disguised as a craft note. You can engineer a character down to the millimeter and still end up with a life that doesn’t grip.

The sharper point is structural. When he says the historical context “remains secondary in spite of everything,” he’s exposing a hierarchy that many writers pretend to overturn. War, revolution, fascism, the crash - these can become décor, a legitimizing backdrop that flatters the narrative with importance while staying safely non-disruptive. History is allowed to loom, but not to deform the protagonist’s psychology in uncomfortable ways or to challenge the novel’s private, character-first moral economy.

Coming from Queneau - a poet-novelist tied to French modernism and later the Oulipo spirit - this reads like a manifesto for formal and imaginative honesty. If you invoke History, it can’t be a wallpaper of bayonets and banners; it has to be an active force that changes what stories are tellable and how language behaves. Otherwise you get the worst of both worlds: meticulous individuals moving through monumental events as if nothing really happens.

Quote Details

Topic	Writing
Source	Help us find the source
Cite

More Quotes by Raymond Add to List

About the Author

Raymond Queneau (February 21, 1903 - October 25, 1976) was a Poet from France.

18 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

"However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned"

Helen Dunmore, Poet

"But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it"

Diane Johnson, Novelist

"A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, Novelist

"The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is"

Ruth Park, Author

"The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place"

Rose Tremain, Novelist

"It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity"

Ferdinand Christian Baur, Theologian

"The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero"

Mary McCarthy, Author

"The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel"

Norman Spinrad, Author

"Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out"

Sandra Cisneros, Author

"Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory"

Irwin Shaw, Novelist

"The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary"

Henry Miller, Writer

Henry Miller

"I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character"

Nora Roberts, Author

Nora Roberts

"The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters"

Salvatore Quasimodo, Author

"Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all"

Theodore Sturgeon, Writer

"Good writers are of necessity rare"

George Henry Lewes, Philosopher

George Henry Lewes

"Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present"

Edmond De Goncourt, Writer

"Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message"

Jerry B. Jenkins, Novelist

Jerry B. Jenkins

"I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics"

Richard Attenborough, Actor