"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"
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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.
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 |
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