Politics & Power Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s line is a deliberately sideways compliment: it flatters America by claiming Homer’s epic already “contains” it, then undercuts that claim by noting how unhistorical the fit really is. Calling The Odyssey “the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established” reframes the poem as a national origin myth for a country that, in Queneau’s mid-century view, still defined itself by motion: exploration, risk, improvisation, the romance of the open road. Odysseus becomes less a Bronze Age king than a prototype of the restless striver, the person who can’t stop narrating himself into the next horizon.

The barb sits in the second clause: “and even so it is detached from the historical side.” Queneau is flagging the way America often prefers the epic outline to the archive. The Odyssey offers shipwrecks, monsters, temptations, homecomings - a clean, symbolic itinerary that turns struggle into plot. History, by contrast, is messier: conquest, labor, slavery, policy, paperwork. Epic makes identity feel earned through adventure; history forces you to account for what was taken, who paid, and what got erased.

As a poet associated with French intellectual life and the Oulipo orbit, Queneau is also teasing the very machinery of mythmaking. He’s pointing to how cultures borrow “classics” as prestige scaffolding, then retrofit them into self-portraits. The quote works because it’s both a seductive analogy and a warning: if you read yourself as Odysseus, you may never have to read yourself as a historical actor.