From Rouaud's polemical denunciations of ‘modern’ scientific literature to Volodine's weird post-exotic dystopias, these different modes of engagement with genre fiction and notions of literary return reveal radically dissimilar ways of conceptualizing literary history and politicizing the literary. At the beginning of this book, I suggested that the paradigmatic account of the return to the story was provided by the writer Daniele Sallenave, who embraced a break with the nouveau roman and the aesthetics of intransitivity. Rather than return to Sallenave's argument, which has been quoted and reformulated many times over the years, I would propose that it is another conception of return, one that is never quoted today, that helps us think through the trajectory of this study. That conception of return is bathmological, and it is outlined in Renaud Camus's response to La Quinzaine Littéraire's questionnaire about the ‘end of the avant-gardes’ and the ‘return to the story.’ To the question of whether there had been a liberation from ‘theory’ and a return to the story, Camus replied that this characterization of return risked creating significant misunderstandings: