The novels by Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint examined thus far share an abiding interest in big-picture constructions, as assembled from the pictures displayed on television screens, seen in the panoramas we might view from elevated perspectives, or felt in moments intensely lived. Houellebecq employs the conventions of fiction and mobilizes the authority of maps to convincingly stage such a big picture, delivering a commanding, if pessimistic, view of French society and of modernity writ large. Delaume, on the other hand, deconstructs a big picture that has been staged elsewhere, namely in Coca-Colanizing television studios. In novels by Salvayre and Toussaint, big pictures were simultaneously staged (by Salvayre's Tobold and Toussaint's narrator) and then deconstructed (by Salvayre's narrator and Toussaint's Marie).

Read together, these novels remind us that, as Bruno Latour phrases it, every ‘Big Picture’ is, in fact, ‘just that: a picture.’ With this in mind, ‘the question can be raised: in which movie theatre, in which exhibit gallery is it shown? Through which optics is it projected? To which audience is it addressed?’ (Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, 187). Such questions must be asked in the face of the proliferation of the ‘official images of globalization’ that, for Marc Augé, ‘flood’ the ‘screens’ of ‘consumer-viewers,’ who ‘take [them in] several hours a day every day.’ In the essay ‘Planetary Landscapes,’ Augé describes the characteristics of this ‘official image,’ one that shows us ‘a world that is, indeed, global,’ but, even more so, ‘one that is fluid.’ He cites familiar images such as jumbo jets ‘effortlessly taking off into the skies,’ or ‘helicopter shots of brightly-lit American cities’ (112): in short, a utopian globalized world of ‘transparency, flexibility, continuity, movement’ (113, my italics). For Augé, the Big (happy) Picture constructed in such images is the ‘great tale of liberalism’ (113), and this tale fills the void left by the absence of ‘utopia’ and other grand narratives in the postmodern world, while simultaneously hiding the ‘darker side’ of globalization, that of ‘archaisms, blockages, and paralyses’ (113). Such is the lot of the less developed and less privileged populations of the world, at whose expense that brighter side of globalization is increasingly won, as the compound growth principle of global capitalism comes to be increasingly at odds with the limited resources of today's world.