In novels by Michel Houellebecq and Chloé Delaume, we have seen the French experience of globalization depicted as the passive consumption of televised images—a matter of watching the world go by without actively participating in it or grasping its reality. Unlike the isolated narrators of Houellebecq and Delaume, those we encounter in the novels that will be the subject of Part II will leave the comforts of home, setting themselves adrift in economic and geopolitical centers of the world economy: metropolitan centers of China, in Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Fuir [Running Away] (2005), and Manhattan in Lydie Salvayre's Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique [Portrait of the Writer as a Domesticated Animal] (2007). And these settings are much more than traditional fictional backdrops. Toussaint depicts in Fuir a China he himself experienced—‘j’ai été la chercher, je l’ai puisée à la source pour la mettre dans mon livre’ [I went seeking it out, I drew it from the source and placed it into my book] (‘Écrire, c’est fuir,’ 177)—and Salvayre's Portrait is based upon a real-life relationship Salvayre had with a businessman, in whose company ‘j’ai appris un monde … les commerces juteux, les “négos” ne visant que la guerre, les marchés qui se mangent eux-mêmes’ [‘I learned about a world … lucrative trades, negotiations aimed directly at war, markets that collapse all on their own’] (Portrait, 208; 197). Could these intrepid novels hold the key to getting beyond the facile fictions of the screen and construing via more direct participation a truer big-picture portrait of the world today, situating, as they go, the place of France—and that of literature itself—within that world?

Invitees, along with Alain Fleischer, of the Bibliothèque nationale de France's Cercle littéraire of November 30, 2009, Lydie Salvayre and Jean-Philippe Toussaint discussed the concept of flight. Referring to her novel BW, which had just been released, Salvayre describes her intrepid protagonist's need to be able to ‘partir sans raison’ [leave without a reason], to ‘partir pour partir’ [leave for the sake of leaving]. To be able to ‘fuir’ [flee], but without this word's typical ‘connotation péjorative’ [pejorative connotation]. Rather, for Salvayre, her protagonist flees to ‘ouvrir l’espace’ [open space], to ‘aller ailleurs’ [go elsewhere], to ‘traverser les choses’ [live through things] (Adler and Racine, ‘Alain Fleischer, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint’).