Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Queneau

Queneau is taking a swing at a lazy split-screen way of telling the past: either you treat history as a big impersonal machine and drop “characters” into it like props, or you inflate one person’s biography until it stands in for an era. His line is less nostalgic than diagnostic. It names a lost craft move - the ability to shuttle between the intimate and the structural without letting either become alibi.

The “double aspect” matters because it refuses two comforting myths at once. One myth says individuals don’t matter; history just happens and people are decorations. The other says the Great Man is history, full stop, and the messy world becomes background radiation. Queneau’s phrasing (“gotten away from”) suggests modern narrative has drifted into specialization: historians flatten personality into data; novelists privatize experience into psychology. In both cases, the reader is denied the friction where meaning is made - the way a life can snag on an event and reconfigure it, or the way an event can colonize a life and turn private choices into public symptoms.

Contextually, this fits Queneau’s mid-century temperament: a poet-novelist suspicious of “serious” realism and also wary of heroic mythmaking. The line reads like a manifesto for the kind of hybrid storytelling his circle (and later, Oulipo-adjacent experiments) kept probing: history as a set of constraints, biography as a set of formal problems. The subtext is a challenge to writers and historians alike: stop choosing between the panoramic and the particular. Make them argue on the page.