Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

"One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey"

Raymond Queneau, Poet

About this Quote

A provocation dressed up as taxonomy: Queneau is daring you to believe in literary family trees while quietly mocking the comfort they provide. By splitting “all works of fiction” into Iliad-children and Odyssey-children, he offers a binary so sweeping it can’t be literally true, which is exactly the point. Classification here isn’t pedantry; it’s a playful weapon against the modern urge to treat art as infinitely novel and untraceable. He’s reminding us that innovation often arrives wearing antique clothes.

The subtext hinges on what those epics represent. The Iliad is siege, friction, the heat of conflict contained in a narrow arena; it’s about pressure-cooker inevitability, characters trapped in a moral and martial machine. The Odyssey is movement, disguise, narrative elasticity; it’s about survival through improvisation, identity as something you perform and revise. Put differently: plot as collision versus plot as journey. Queneau’s line flatters readers with a simple lens, then forces them to test it, argue with it, break it, and in the breaking, see patterns they’d missed.

Context matters: Queneau, a poet and a key figure around Oulipo, spent a career treating literature as both serious inheritance and inventive game. His constraint-based experiments don’t reject tradition; they metabolize it. So this “either/or” isn’t a prison, it’s a creative prompt. Choose your ancestor, and you’ve already chosen what kind of story you’re telling: the one that tightens the noose, or the one that keeps slipping it.

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Topic	Writing
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About the Author

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

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