Bad Realism

Abstract

Christy Wampole’s Degenerative Realism opens with a provocative question: What, in a post-truth era, “is the connection between a wilting sense of reality and a wilting nation?” (1). This question clearly positions Degenerative Realism as a contribution to the growing body of scholarship on French declinology. Although, as volumes such as Laurent Demanze and Dominique Viart’s Fins de la littérature (2011) suggest, scholars of contemporary French literature have by and large been reticent to amplify or legitimize fantasies of cultural decline, Degenerative Realism gives a sobering account of the allure of declinology in French culture and of its pervasiveness in contemporary novels. Indeed, while the cover of the book shows an image of grapes afflicted with noble rot, the embittered worldview that its pages explore is in fact something like the opposite of the sweet juice of noble rot. For, as Wampole argues, at stake in this corrosive literary turn is perhaps nothing less than the breakdown of “democracy’s correlative literature, the realist novel” (23).In addition to its discussion of declinology, Degenerative Realism intervenes in the broader but less heated debate about the contemporary novel’s rejection of avant-gardist aesthetics and its return to what Wolfgang Asholt and Marc Dambre have dubbed the “normes romanesques” of narrative prose fiction. These norms are not coextensive with realism, but in France the idea of the “Balzacian novel” has long been weaponized in the paper skirmishes between novelists who, in calling themselves or others realists, define themselves within or against such norms. Though, regrettably, it had a negligible impact on subsequent literary debates, Michel Butor’s 1959 essay “Balzac et la réalité,” which laments both the modernist caricature of Balzac and the prevalence of “romanciers réactionnaires qui prétendent faire du Balzac” (79), lays out a cogent and still-relevant critique of such positions. In the 1980s and 1990s, at the turning point of what is now commonly called the contemporary period in French literature, those who touted the “end of the avant-gardes” and the “return to story” often opted for conciliatory rhetoric, suggesting that these apparently more conventional fictions, with their reaffirmed “transitivity” and concern with the real, had internalized the lessons of the “Age of Suspicion”: “[Ce retour] est plutôt un pari que fait la modernité pour assouvir le désir de fable d’une époque sans renoncer aux expériences autrefois tentées et aux soupçons largement justifiés” (Blanckeman, Mura-Brunel, and Dambre 287). In a 1989 special issue of La Quinzaine littéraire, Maurice Nadeau reassured readers that “être un nouveau Balzac, l’idée n’en viendrait à personne aujourd’hui” (4). Such provisos were certainly justifiable when it came to what we might summarily describe as the postmodernist metafiction of the period. They are less convincing today, at a time when we must account for a resurgence of right-wing realism in French literature. Michel Houellebecq—partisan of a disinhibited “Balzacian” novel occupied with the invention new stereotypes (Houellebecq 282)—is but the most prominent exemplar of this recent turn toward the cliché-driven social and civilizational narratives that Wampole analyzes.Since Wampole’s first monograph, Rootedness (2016), her scholarship has been characterized by a close attention to tropes—particularly, though not exclusively, metaphors. Like rootedness, degeneration is a powerful concept, capable of guiding aesthetic practices and critical writing, and illustrative of what Wampole elsewhere warns are the “perils of abstraction” (Wampole, “Perils”). As Wampole defines them, degenerative realist novels are maximalist, “suffused with a kind of nineteenth-century ectoplasm,” written in a style that reproduces “the nervous urgency and hyperbolism of online journalism and social media,” and dedicated to chronicling what they see as “a collective worsening of life in the contemporary moment” (1–2). Just as fundamentally, they marry “a poetics of cultural and biological degradation” with “a questioning of the nature of the real” (2). This has consequences for the coherence of the narrative and its adherence to the norms of genre: the degeneration of realism often leads these novels to conclude “with sudden departures into the mode of science fiction or dystopian horror, or with an abrupt introduction of implausible or hyperbolic elements into the story” (4). The perceptive observation that degenerative realism corresponds to a breakdown of generic codes and to a rejection of conventional endings and strategies of novelistic closure suggests the sweep of Wampole’s study and the tools that it offers for interrogating the generic hybridity, the conspicuous implausibility, and even the apparent defectiveness of a great number of contemporary French novels that might still be considered “realist.”Though the corpus examined in Degenerative Realism is eclectic, across the book’s four thematic chapters Wampole ably highlights similarities in attitude, rhetoric, thematics, and narrative structure that link writers like Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Antoine Bello, Houellebecq, Yann Moix, Jean Raspail, Jean Rolin, and Philippe Vasset. The first chapter, on demography, details the secular apocalyptic rhetoric of realist novels that structure their plots using civilizational and demographic frames. Wampole notes in particular how this emphasis on demography fosters xenophobic perspectives and corresponds to an obsession with sex and reproductive heterosexuality. As Wampole shows, the father plays a central role in these fictions of nonpaternity or broken paternal orders (15). This chapter, which is full of insights and apt observations, serves as a kind of extended introduction and indeed offers the most persuasive definition of what degenerative realism is and is trying to do. In particular, it shows how these novels are preoccupied with a suicidal self-destructive dynamic (of the kind imagined in Éric Zemmour’s polemics) that they see as leading to the collapse of Western civilization: “The force that terminates the West is not God but biological destiny, propelled by les barbares, whose population continues to swell” (33). The subsequent chapters—on “endarkment” and mystical thinking in digital culture and its novelistic correlatives, on journalistic immediacy, and on nonprescriptive, contradictory, and self-defeating rhetoric in the roman post-pamphlétaire—could be productively conceived as secondary developments or variations on the themes established in these political-realist fictions of demographic transformation and cultural degeneration. The chapter on the Minitel and the internet attends to the proliferation of new metaphors in digital culture and traces how the complexity of new technologies “invites magical thinking” (88) and breaks down barriers between fact and fiction. The chapters on journalistic immediacy and the roman post-pamphlétaire develop this observation about the blurred lines between reality, journalism, and fiction, and analyze the novelistic manifestations of this new “muddied transdisciplinarity” (122).In a few instances, the case studies in the later chapters of Degenerative Realism dilute the powerful arguments that Wampole makes in the first half of the book. Because Wampole is concerned with describing aesthetic developments that have largely taken place in the last forty or so years—and that have become particularly prevalent in the last two decades—she is careful to distinguish degenerative realism from early twentieth-century romans à thèse. However, though she persuasively outlines how the writings of Houellebecq or Moix eschew the flatly prescriptive mode of the roman à thèse, the repeated assertion that these works “take no firm ideological position” (183) minimizes how irony is cynically deployed in the populist rhetoric of the contemporary alt-right, offering plausible deniability to political content that is potentially offensive or violent. Before becoming the prophet of the “Great Replacement,” Renaud Camus wrote a theory of “bathmological” metadiscursivity, Buena Vista Park (1980), that anticipates the self-proclaimed “transgressive” anti-PC trolling that now pervades Right-populist style. Wampole’s insistence on the absence of explicit ideological “didactic content” (3) thus as times distracts from one of the most interesting things about Degenerative Realism, which is that it provides insight not only into populist rhetoric but also into more complex questions pertaining to populist style, narrative, and aesthetics. As Wampole in fact shows, these novels very much share “a set of patterns” (3) which correspond to attitudes and habits of thinking that privilege certain subjects and people while delegitimizing others (e.g., the feminists that Houellebecq dismisses as “aimables connes” [165]). While recent volumes like the deceptively titled Le Style populiste (Groupe d’études géopolitiques 2019) promise a great deal yet ultimately deliver relatively banal observations about how populists dichotomize the political field, Degenerative Realism makes a strong case for literary scholarship, for a deeper look at how these ideas style themselves, how they speak, how they persuade, how they seduce.Although at first blush it might seem a strange decision to avoid, as Wampole does, explicit commentary on authors’ avowed political orientations, this choice allows Wampole to sidestep differences in authorial biography or public persona that might obscure how “the reactionary spirit governs these worlds, where pluralism is an abomination, identity politics abhorrent, and political correctness a blow to freedom” (6). The consequence of this definition of the degenerative realist spirit is that analyzing authors who do not publicly identify as of the Right or Far Right as part of this category inevitably results in a polemical reversal that renders their fiction accidentally reactionary. Though Vasset has of late been criticized for the “metaphysical and megalomaniacal humanistic baggage” of his “quasi-utopian” imagined communities (Armstrong 164), some might take issue with the way that the concept of degenerative realism makes writers like Vasset or Rolin keep company with Beigbeder, Houellebecq, or even Raspail. Wampole is right, however, to insist that this style is not simply the by-product of an avowedly right-wing worldview, for the conspiratorial and antiestablishment rhetoric of degenerative realism evokes numerous anticapitalist fictions of the twentieth-century Left. How much of what has counted as significant in the French tradition of the countercultural polar, for example, might now also conform to the definition of degenerative realism? Degenerative realism is also, troublingly, a very tight fit for Virginie Despentes, a media-savvy novelist who is preoccupied with degeneration (“ces images toujours un peu troubles, pour quelqu’un de mon âge, d’une France qui est devenue un pays du quart-monde” [King Kong 129]), and who, in novels like Les Jolies Choses (1998), Teen Spirit (2002), and Apocalypse bébé (2010), has shown a sustained interest in bad fathers and paternal failure. Despentes’s Apocalypse bébé, which at the end of its investigation of the bleak landscape of contemporary France abruptly veers off into the genre of dystopian speculative fiction, likewise exemplifies Wampole’s point about how degenerative realism produces sudden shifts in genre and implausible endings.If we accept that degenerative realism is a concept that helps explain recent developments in the contemporary French novel, two distinctions will require further attention by literary scholars. The first concerns the aforementioned opposition between Left and Right variants degenerative realism and the extent to which the category applies beyond the corpus of male writers analyzed by Wampole. Wampole sees degenerative realism as a resolutely male phenomenon: “Male embodiment is the primary source of the anxieties described here. It is no accident that all of the narratives here were written by men. . . . It is nearly impossible to imagine an écriture féminine that would depict contemporary France in these terms” (79). The question remains, however, of whether explorations of putatively virile styles and thematics by women—for example in Despentes’s Apocalypse bébé or Marie Nimier’s Je suis un homme (2013)—belong in the degenerative realist category or speak to its limitations. Can writers like Despentes or Nimier help us imagine a degenerative realism that would be subversive rather than superficially transgressive, or are they caught in a logic that inevitably renders their work accessory to the resurgent reactionary or entropic populisms of the present time? The second distinction that bears consideration is between the degenerative realism described by Wampole and what we might call the degenerative modernism of figures like Richard Millet. For although Millet is a writer, as Wampole puts it, “in whose pamphlets all of the fears described throughout this book crystallize” (182), Millet’s literature and literary criticism evince a classic elitism far removed from the journalistic immediacy and populist stylings of degenerative realism. In a 2010 interview in Le Point where he labeled Despentes and Houellebecq “antéchrists de supermarché,” Millet reaffirmed his fidelity “aux valeurs de la verticalité, de la langue, de la pureté face au mal régnant sur le monde” (Millet and Nabe). In 2015, Millet was awarded the inaugural Prix de littérature André Gide, a fact that bespeaks the inherent tensions in that modernist value that the prize committee names “un rapport exigeant à la langue” (Prévost). To what extent is that tradition—which leads through rather than around the New Novel—now also feeding on and amplifying an imaginary of degeneration?The self-interested coining of neologisms in humanities scholarship is so widespread that it is easy to take a jaded view of a new -ism or-cene, or of an old one adorned with a new prefix or adjective. A brief glance at the kinds of affiliations and tensions—both aesthetic and political—that Wampole’s study allows us to perceive suggests, however, how productive degenerative realism might prove as a category and critical lens. All such categories necessarily have exceptions, blind spots, and contradictions, but the best allow us to make sense of the flux of cultural production, to read broad lines of development, and to locate key sites of solidarity or conflict in the cultural field. Degenerative realism is such a concept.