The Age of Return

There is perhaps nothing more representative of the mood or tone of contemporary France than an ambient cultural malaise, which expresses itself in powerful fantasies of decline or loss, as well as in powerful fantasies of rebirth or renewal. On an almost daily basis, alarmist headlines warn that the French are losing the constitutive elements of their national culture. The French are, we are told, spending less time in cafés, Americanizing in their eating and drinking habits, and reading less (though still quite a lot). The French language, long reputed to be the vessel for the limpid clarity or genius of French thought, is also now often said to be under attack: a recent front cover of the French weekly Le Point read ‘The French Language: Stop the Massacre!’ Anxieties about globalization, the post-industrial economy, migration, and immigration likewise saturate political debate and journalism. There is disagreement on the what and the why, but there is a well-documented feeling in France that something has been lost or is slipping away, and this feeling feeds an increasingly brazen nostalgic and xenophobic public discourse. From the far left to the far right, these fantasies of decline—and their correlative fantasies of rebirth—orient cultural expression and give meaning to competing social, political, and historical narratives. They also permeate, in ways both subtle and overt, contemporary French literature. On the shelves of bookstores, fictions of civil war and apocalypse—ranging from Michel Houellebecq's sensational bestseller Soumission (Submission, 2015) to more subtle novels like Jean Rolin's Les Événements (The Events, 2015)—sit next to shrill or sobering nonfictional works about social fracture and political dysfunction. Indeed, as I will argue, the very construction of the category of a contemporary era in French literature depends time and again on sweeping narratives of rupture and revitalization, which is to say, on narratives about return.