Décalage Permanent

This chapter turns to Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Fuir [Running Away] (Prix Médicis, 2005), which takes place in the overcrowded and fever-pitched territories of industrial hubs of Shanghai and Beijing of the 2000s. There, even Toussaint’s perennially laconic narrator finds himself caught up in the frenzy and panic of the compressed space-time of impending catastrophe that prevails. Toussaint’s narrator, like a postmodern Angel of (the end of) History, following the example of his muse Marie, discovers in an epiphany that ‘adequation’ with a world cast into the accelerated flight of globalization is not harmonious like its cartographic or commercial representations, but, rather, chaotic, always already beyond itself; true adequation with such a world turns out to be, paradoxically, a permanent state of décalage. This chapter reads Fuir in light of Bruno Latour’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Angel of History. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance and after-effects of Toussaint’s narrator’s epiphany in Fuir for the subsequent novels in the Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte (MMMM) tetralogy.

Planetary Ambitions

This chapter reads Lydie Salvayre's Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique (2007). In this novel, Salvayre’s anxieties about allowing oneself—and even herself as author—to be domesticated by the logic of global capitalism are condensed into the pathological relationship between her narrator avatar (who incarnates politically-engaged literature) and the satirical Jim Tobold, the richest man on the planet and ‘uncontested champion of globalization’—a character who, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to Donald Trump. Tobold sees the world at the level of the master, corporate map, from which he can make boardroom decisions in perfect disregard for their harmful, ground-level side effects. This chapter revisits and further explores Bruno Latour on cartographic megalomania, and draws on Fredric Jameson on cognitive mapping, and David Harvey on the self-defeating contradictions of the infinite expansion paradigm of capitalism in a world of increasingly finite resources. Moreover, it develops the Salvaryean notion of the paralipomenon, offering a new perspective on Salvayre’s underlying (engaged) literary strategy, one that, by focusing on the seemingly insignificant details of a hegemonic discourse—such as that of free-market capitalism—reveals its inherent contradictions and flaws.

Conclusion

The Conclusion summarizes the most prominent aspects of the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism, as these have been encountered in the corpus. It draws parallels between these and current events—including U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate, and his creation of a Space Force. It draws the conclusion that French novels written in the second decade of the new millennium—post-2008-recession, perhaps—become increasingly dystopian, as they move away from the personal existential crises of protagonists finding themselves awkwardly lost in translation toward portraits of societies at large facing more palpably existential threats (financial collapse, war). Indeed, a host of more recent novels depict the near-future demise of the Fifth Republic, if not of France (as a nation) itself. However, these near-future dystopian versions of France also become the occasion for social awakenings and revolution. This is demonstrated by a brief reading of Marie Darriuessecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts (2017).

Asymmetrical Tactics

Chapter Seven, ‘Asymmetrical Tactics,’ reads Jean Rolin’s Ormuz [Hormuz] (Prix de la langue française, 2013), a novel taking place in the Strait of Hormuz, gateway onto the Persian Gulf. In this oil-rich, high-stakes territory, center stage is taken by international commercial, political, and military positionings for power, while, behind the scenes, war and oil spills invisibly affect the local ecologies where people, animals, and plants (Rolin is attentive to all of these) carve out their lives. Rolin employs a set of asymmetrical literary tactics that allow him to re-center his chosen environments around their most peripheral elements in order to reveal the unseen underside of modernity’s decor. Idiosyncratic micro- and macro-features of his prose, from digressive sentence structure to eccentric plot premises and a dual narrative perspective allow Rolin’s novel to make room for expansions of various kinds. As such, the present-day territory he scrutinizes becomes a haunting confluence of places, times, and possibilities, revealing not only how the local and the global mutually involve one another, but also how the present moment retains its past and foretells its possible futures. This chapter reads Rolin in light of Edward Casey’s writings upon edges, environments, and the ‘topologics’ of place.

Sense of Planet

Chapter Eight, ‘Sense of Planet,’ reads Marie Darrieussecq’s Le pays (2005), whose narrator is fascinated with geography and constantly ponders her place on this planet. Whereas the cartographic nature of traditional, typically masculine, geographical thinking radically divides the subject from the world by reducing the former to a two-dimensional representation, Darrieussecq’s narrator’s geographical musings begin with a simple fact that explodes the two-dimensional: ‘But the world is a sphere.’ Pregnancy provides a mise en abyme situating her as contained within but also containing a world. Darrieussecq establishes a liminal space of narration that ultimately resists what is for Peter Sloterdijk the ‘basic neurosis of Western civilization’ at the source of today’s spatial crisis: namely, the necessity to ‘have to dream of a subject that watches, names and owns everything, without letting anything contain, appoint or own it.’ Le pays defies this paradigm of globe-alizing encompassing mastery, insisting on sphericity and volume, producing senses of place that are as placental as they are planetary. This chapter reads Darrieussecq in light of Sloterdijk’s theories on spheres of belonging and Ursula K. Heise’s notion of sense of planet.

Deep Dérive

Chapter Six, ‘Deep Dérive,’ explores Philippe Vasset’s La conjuration [The Conjuration] (2013). Vasset’s novel depicts a Paris now fully governed by logics of capitalist urban planning and spectacle. Vasset’s would-be psychogeographer narrator suffers existential crisis in such conditions. For him, the city has reduced its users to the role of those ‘computer-generated nobodies’ who appear in the proudly displayed images of future shopping centers. However, he founds a cult that develops, to mystical proportions, the art of anonymity, until they are able to penetrate undetected into even the most high-security skyscrapers of La Défense. In the ultimate psychogeographical space-hack, the cult is thus able to ‘abolish at will the frontier between public space and private property.’ As they circulate like ‘a school of fish’ through the urban fabric, they would experience the city in all its infinite nuance. However, as their ‘powers’ grow, abstraction and eschatology ultimately depict them as having lost touch with the territory. Their true, ironic, apotheosis comes when they fully resemble those ‘computer-generated nobodies’ that had fascinated the narrator early on. Vasset’s novel is read in the light of Situationist notions of the city and Bruno Latour’s writings on panoptica and oligoptica.

Dérive psychose géographique

This chapter reads Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévision [I Live in the Television] (2006), a novel that directly confronts the reader with the hegemony of commercial visual media in everyday life. Delaume takes as a starting point former TF1 CEO Patrick Le Lay’s assertion that television exists in order to ‘sell to Coca Cola…available human brain time.’ Delaume subjects herself to 22 months of constant television viewing, documenting—and attempting to resist—such effects upon her mind and body. By amplifying the everyday activity of television watching to the point of hyperbole, Delaume takes us from the ‘metanoia’ of having the polished world delivered to you on the screen, to the ‘paranoia’ and ‘dérive psychose géographique’ [drifting geographical psychosis] that results from television’s worst de-localizing and de-socializing effects. This chapter draws upon Paul Virilio’s media theory and Delaume’s own musings upon map and territory—which draw upon Deleuze and Guattari—to reveal the processes by which commercial visual media deprives its viewers of the cognitive distance vis-à-vis reality needed to forge existential territory. Delaume’s ludic novel goes to great lengths to restore this distance, and exposes the political and phallocratic regime behind television’s imposed logics in the process.

Absolute Clarity

This chapter examines Michel Houellebecq’s La carte et le territoire [The Map and the Territory] (2010). In this Prix Goncourt-garnering novel, we see the world through the eyes of artist Jed Martin, who—like his cartography-inspired work—gazes upon the world with an ‘absolute clarity’ of vision. For Houellebecq’s protagonist, the map is ‘more interesting’ than the territory, but cartography is not the only visual paradigm lending its authority to his constructed gaze. I take Jed Martin’s mysterious and overlooked admission that he is above all a ‘television viewer’ as a starting point for an interrogation of the high-definition visual and rhetorical dynamics of Houellebecq’s prose. Ultimately, in this novel, in which Michelin the mapmaker becomes Michelin TV, and in which descriptions of landscapes read like commercials for automobiles, I propose that the true ‘television viewer’ is in fact Houellebecq’s ideal reader. This chapter mobilizes Bruno Latour on cartographic megalomania, Paul Virilio on visual media, and Antoine Compagnon on the Antimodern, delivering a new perspective on Houellebecq’s literary aesthetic.

Introduction

The Introduction sets out the terrain of the book by signifying a key historical turning point in postwar France (and the West more generally): the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. The effects of this crisis are felt as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. The chapter proposes an initial synthesis of key notions from important thinkers of postmodernity and globalization—including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, and Bruno Latour —in order to develop the parameters of this crisis, which notably entails the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging. It makes the claim that such preoccupations constitute a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel, illustrating this with a brief reading of Jean Rolin’s Les événements [The Events] (2015). Finally, it presents overviews of each chapter, introducing the corpus of eight novels that will be the subject of the book: novels by Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq.

A Tale of Two Frances

This chapter reads Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015-17), a comédie inhumaine that depicts a deeply divided—increasingly neoliberal and reactionary—France. Despentes, in a rather utopian vein, would heal those divisions, staging a collective social awakening. As such, the trilogy is symptomatic of a trend one encounters in a swath of recent French novels, in which a sudden refusal of the neoliberal socio-political order ignites revolutionary movements. A key element of these novels (including Despentes’s) is the representing of a post-Mitterrand France for whom society is marked by la précarité [precarity]. Vernon Subutex must fall through the cracks of society and become homeless in order to, in a surprising reversal, encounter new, utopian, and borderline-mystical social possibilities. I uncover the internal contradictions of this reversal, however, noting that such contradictions are also symptomatic of that recent utopian novelistic impulse that must imagine another world at all costs. This chapter reads Despentes’s depiction of a divided, pre- and post-‘Charlie Hebdo’ France in the light of Emmanuel Todd’s Qui est Charlie: Sociologie d’une crise religieuse ? [Who Is Charlie?: Xenophobia and the New Middle Class], as well as via a reading of Despentes’s own writings on gender and society.