Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

In Queneau's mind elements of a text including seemingly trivial details such as the number of chapters were things that had to be predetermined perhaps calculated. He became a member of la Société Mathématique de France in 1948. Additionally he edited and publiRaymond Queneaud Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.