Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau’s line treats The Odyssey less like an adventure serial and more like a personality test administered by the ancient world. Odysseus doesn’t “develop character” in the tidy, Victorian sense; he gets sandblasted by experience until whatever is essential either coheres or disappears. That’s the sly precision here: “acquires” and “affirms and recovers” sit side by side, implying two competing models of the self. One says identity is made, built from encounters, accidents, temptations. The other says identity is already there, merely lost in the noise of survival and then reclaimed.

As a poet with a modernist’s suspicion of stable narratives, Queneau is also winking at the way classics get sold to us. We like Odysseus as the prototype of the individual: cunning, improvisational, always narrating himself out of trouble. Queneau suggests the real drama is internal continuity under pressure. Circe, the Cyclops, the Sirens: these are not just monsters and set pieces but stress tests for whether a person remains legible to himself when the world keeps changing the rules.

The context matters: writing from a 20th-century Europe that watched identities get remade by war, bureaucracy, and mass culture, Queneau reads Homer as a manual for psychological survival. Homecoming isn’t primarily geographic; it’s the moment the self becomes recognizable again. The irony is that you only “recover” a personality by risking its dissolution. That’s why the epic still works: it flatters our belief in an inner core while admitting how easily it can be rewritten.