Raymond Queneau's 1916 Easter Rising: On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes as (Post-)Historical Novel

This article seeks to recontextualize Raymond Queneau's novel about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes (1947), as a reflection on history and an experiment in the writing of the historical novel. Long viewed essentially as a parody of American hard-boiled fiction and/or as an hommage to James Joyce, Queneau's novel takes on a different resonance when set in relation to the account of the historical novel given by the critic Georg Lukács and the theory of the end of history developed by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève. By manipulating the parameters of the traditional historical novel as identified by Lukács and engaging sceptically with the paradoxes of Kojève's vision of history, Queneau produces an unorthodox form of historical fiction that anticipates subsequent developments in the genre in the postcolonial era.