Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reality Bites

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00295132-9354043

1945-8509

Annabel L. Kim,

Political Theory and Influence

There are few nations that have as fraught or closely entangled a relationship with each other as do the United States and France. From its very beginning, the United States has competed with France for recognition as the exceptional, conceptual, universalist center of the world. France, with its Enlightenment, would like to claim credit for the invention of human rights, while the United States would like to claim credit as having perfected the practice of freedom (our penchant for mass incarceration aside). The French have always viewed Americans with an ambivalent mix of admiration and animosity stemming from the ease with which the United States has exported its language, cultural products, and ideology to the Hexagon. America's bad objects range from Hollywood blockbusters and the widespread use of English in lieu of homegrown French words to identity politics, which threatens to fracture the French body politic through political correctness.It would be easy to see the United States as also having exported a lack of regard for reality and facts and a pernicious erosion of the truth via the circulation of fake news, alternative facts, and QAnon type conspiracy theory networks that have dramatically continued the work of severing our tenuous tether to reality, something that had already been effected under George W. Bush and his administration's spectacular gaslighting of the American people to justify the Iraq war.Christy Wampole, in Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First Century France, through what could be called a literary history of the present, shows that France's own increasing detachment from reality isn't simply an American import but is in fact as homegrown as its 246 different kinds of cheese. According to Wampole, “the dominant literary mode in readerly and scholarly circles” focuses on literature that, in both its creation and evaluation, is animated by “an acknowledgment and even a welcoming of permanent global connectivity and various forms of social leveling and recalibration that characterize the new millennium so far” (5). This literature positions itself as capacious, open to difference, cognizant of the literary merits of persons who are not the white Frenchmen who have historically and until recently dominated the French literary prize system. This literature recognizes minoritarian writers such as Virginie Despentes (working class, lesbian, woman), Leïla Slimani (Franco-Moroccan, woman), Kamel Daoud (Algerian), Marie Ndiaye (Black, woman), Alain Mabanckou (Black, African diaspora), all of whom are laureates of prestigious French literary prizes. This literature fits into a narrative of progress. This literature is precisely what Wampole turns away from.Wampole has identified a different current that runs through contemporary French literature, one that responds to a vision of progress with one of decline. Composed of white men who no longer believe in a future for France, this corpus exchanges traditional realism's mimetic promise of depicting the world as it is—something that provides its producers and consumers with a reassuring sense of control—against the darker promise to show that the only reality one can represent is a failing one. The world, and accordingly, the real, is in a terminal state of decay and deterioration, and the means to represent it—literature—is similarly afflicted.As Wampole lays out in the introduction, the contemporary French literary landscape is one that mirrors the political one, which has seen the rise to prominence of reactionary handwringers such as Eric Zemmour, Alain Finkelkraut, and Pascal Brueckner, to name a few notable talking heads who make their living by proclaiming the decline of France as a nation, culture, and people due to the incursion of minorities and minoritarian principles such as feminism and intersectionality. This “collective cultural exhaustion” (4) and depression is not new, and Wampole points throughout the book to the nineteenth century as an important precedent for the kind of ennui, anxiety, and angst that permeate contemporary French déclinisme. The twenty-first-century situation mirrors uncannily fin-de-siècle France, with its perpetual fears of decline and degeneration following the loss of the Franco-Prussian war, which was chalked up to France's declining birthrate and made pronatalism a matter of national survival: without lots of new babies, it seemed like France might actually disappear. In fin-de-siècle France, Frenchmen felt like they were losing, threatened by both external enemies and internal ones, such as uppity women wearing bloomers, going to feminist congresses, and attempting to organize for reproductive autonomy and suffrage—to overthrow the proper order of things. In other words, the white Frenchman faced the threat of being decentered, displaced from his privileged, central position as the referent for the abstract citizen foundational to French universalism.This feeling of vulnerability is one that afflicts many white Frenchmen today, whose anxieties resonate with those expressed by nineteenth-century forebears such as Léon Bloy and Émile Zola. But what distinguishes twenty-first-century literature from, say, Zola's degeneration-obsessed realism is the way writers today are working “in an age in which reality and truth have become negotiable” (4). Realism in an age where reality can no longer hold up is necessarily different from the realism of an earlier moment where reality had the kind of solidity that could give rise to Auguste Comte's positivism. This new realism—akin to a radioactive substance, coming undone even as we are in the middle of writing or reading it—is degenerative realism: a realism that depicts the breakdown of reality, globally, and the breakdown of France, locally.It will come as little surprise that the persons who feel like they are losing out socially, politically, culturally, in a moment where the culture wars, in France as in the United States, are swinging left, are the white men being told to make room and change their ways. Wampole is able to maintain an impressive equanimity in the face of a rather odious cast of literary characters—misogynists such as Frédéric Beigbeder, Michel Houellebecq, and Yann Moix; Aurélien Bellanger, a Balzac and Houellebecq wannabe; and Jean Raspail, favorite author of Stephen Bannon. Wampole applies a seemingly dispassionate regard to her corpus, allowing its texts to speak for themselves. Initially, I found myself wishing that Wampole would let her reader in more on her personal evaluations of the texts, beyond an early admission in the introduction that she is “an idealist by nature” and found her corpus to be “demoralizing” and discomfiting (27). Retrospectively, Wampole's strategy strikes me as an effective one that allows these texts to condemn themselves, to self-destruct in much the same manner as the worlds that these authors are convinced are ending. Wampole's measured tone makes even more arresting those moments where frustration with her authors breaks through, in memorable sentences such as, “If France really is dying, it is taking its sweet damn time doing so” (44).Wampole's most interesting move in writing this book is, however, to refuse to allow degenerative realism to be the sole purview of reactionary authors such as the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph. Rather than make degenerative realism a literary movement—or, rather, a literary moment—that has some kind of ideological coherence, Wampole has included in the corpus authors such as Philippe Vasset and Jean Rolin, who are like progressive water to Houellebecq's oil. What is at stake in degenerative realism is more than the fragile egos of reactionary white men nostalgic for a pre–politically correct (read, Americanized) France: the erosion of our relation to reality is one that transcends ideology. As Wampole shows, reality, through the evolution of our mediatic technologies—journalism, the internet, social media—has shifted for all. All are implicated in this breakdown of reality, not just the conspiracy theorists, but also those who are able to see the conspiracies for what they are.Over the course of four chapters, Wampole works out the different shapes that degenerative realism assumes so that the reader emerges from the work equipped to suss out other examples of degenerative realism beyond those treated by her. In this regard, a good alternative title to Wampole's work would be A Field Guide to Degenerative Realism in the Twenty-First Century. If I leave out references to France or literature from this alternative title, it is because the characteristics that Wampole analyzes and draws our attention to are ones that circulate globally, outside France, and transcend the bounds of literature to inform the ways we narrate our extra-literary worlds. In a media ecology where we are all compelled to fabricate virtual versions of ourselves and to negotiate that fine line between reality, truth, and fiction, and in a moment where climate catastrophe and mass extinction is our not-so-far-away horizon, we are each, in our own way, degenerative realists, even if our motives might not align in any way with Wampole's writers.Chapter 1, “Demography and Survival in Twenty-First-Century France,” works carefully through the nineteenth-century antecedents of contemporary degenerative realism, focusing on demography, which, as a social science, is animated by a certain optimistic belief in empiricism and data—in reality. Wampole draws striking parallels between the demographic anxieties of fin-de-siècle France and contemporary France in the new millennium. Demography takes on the role of prophecy and novels by Houellebecq, Beigbeder, Moix, and Charles Robinson imagine what this “secular apocalypse” (33)—driven by a demographic determinism brought about by, on the one hand, the increasing number of non-white bodies living in France as a result of immigration, and, on the other hand, the rise of feminism and its purported transformation of sex into something dead, non-reproductive—looks like. The emblematic figure of this era of demographic dread? Emasculated man, himself standing in for a “neutered nation” (56) standing in for a neutered West. An important driving force, then, of degenerative realism would be castration anxiety, both literal and figurative, individual and collective.Chapter 2, “Endarkenment from the Minitel to the Internet,” examines the networks and conduits through which discourse circulates. Wampole begins with a history of the Minitel—a proto-internet developed by the French state in the 1980s that ultimately lost the information race to the United States's invention of the World Wide Web—and shows how the Minitel, as an information network that predates the internet by a decade, was already the site for a rapid, viral spread of disinformation, as confirmed by early experiments that purposely disseminated false information. Before the internet became the space where conspiracy theories and false information proliferate, with disastrous political consequences, France's Minitel was already changing the public's relation to truth and reality. Wampole examines this changing relation as narrated in novels by Bellanger, Vasset, and Antoine Bello, which all, in different ways, point to the circulation of information via networks like the internet and Minitel as the driving force for the breakdown of reality. If the “healthy membrane between real and invented worlds” (84) has broken down, it is because of the speed with which technologies like the Minitel and internet allow for fictions to spread and implant themselves in our quotidian as the real.Chapters 3 and 4 both address what Wampole calls “real-time realism” to describe the way Wampole's corpus produces, beyond Roland Barthes's famous reality effect, an “immediacy effect” (123). As Wampole puts it, “the temporal urgency of both journalistic writing and the pamphlet is subsumed into the degenerative realist novel” (122). The temporality of these novels is “real time”—stories unfolding in the moment itself, as manifested, spectacularly, in Houellebecq's Submission, a tale of an Islamic takeover of France, being released the very same day as the 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo. Wampole takes on Raspail's infamous The Camp of the Saints as a precursor to the twenty-first-century texts examined throughout these two chapters—works by Alexis Jenni, Yannick Haenel, Houellebecq, Beigbeder, Vasset, Rolin—as Raspail combines, as do these works, journalistic technique with the ideological force and immediacy of pamphleteering.The book concludes by casting degenerative realism as a successor of nineteenth-century realism whose “most interesting and radical innovation . . . is the destabilization of reality” (188) and by arguing for reading other national literary traditions through the lens of degenerative realism. The narrative of decline and decay, and the deterioration of the real, is, as we know all too well, a global phenomenon.I am persuaded by Wampole's elaboration of a uniquely twenty-first-century temporality of immediacy and breakneck speed, but wish we might have slowed down to spend more time on the twentieth century. The parallels Wampole draws between twenty-first-century degenerative realism and its “nineteenth-century forebears” (188) are striking and convincing and allow the readers to see degenerative realism in its longue durée. However, we jump straight from the fin-de-siècle, from Zola's naturalism and Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadence to the twenty-first-century avatars of French discontent, bypassing the twentieth-century literary references that leap out in my mind as logical points of comparison: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the New Novel. The twentieth century isn't absent, by any means—Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and François Mauriac figure—but when it comes to writers who are actively writing to grapple with reality and the enterprise of realism, it is Céline and the New Novelists, not these reactionary, Catholic, arrière-garde writers,1 who seem to be a natural part of realism's evolution from its nineteenth-century form to its contemporary one. Céline was, in his ugly turn toward fascism and anti-Semitism, also a pamphleteer and his novels are diatribes against a decaying and doomed world. The New Novel—briefly acknowledged in Wampole's account of French realism's trajectory (24)—attempted to innovate realism in the depressed moment of a postwar France grappling, along with the rest of the world, with a humanity shattered by the Shoah. Their often mind-numbingly dull descriptions (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet's infamous deconstruction of a tomato) were attempts to decenter the human in their accounts of the real and could be described as a concerted effort to produce a realism that registered the real degeneration of humanity manifested by an apocalyptic world war. Including these points of comparison wouldn't change or contradict Wampole's argument but could serve to show how the twenty-first century, in French literature, is not simply an extension of the twentieth, but constitutes some real points of innovation and departure, raising the interesting question of how and why the twentieth century prepares a twenty-first-century return to the nineteenth.Wampole's Degenerative Realism uncomfortably but salutarily draws our attention to the underbelly of the literature of progress that scholars of French studies prefer to read. In carefully teasing out the relations and resonances between our contemporary political landscape and what is transpiring on the literary landscape, Wampole shows how it is degenerative realism, with its dark, mostly unsavory texts, that is best positioned to force us out of our own illusions into examining the fictions that we pass off as realities in our lives. Becoming attuned to degenerative realism cannot help but change the way we read everything else, and in this regard, Wampole has produced a work that is deeply generative.