What Future for a Europe of the Past? Myth, Memory, and the Map of Time in the Work of Jean Raspail and Georgi Gospodinov

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay engages with two novels about European memory, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973 in French, English trans. Norman Shapiro, 2011 best-seller after being recommended by Marine le Pen) and Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2020 in Bulgarian, English trans. Angela Rodel, 2023 winner of the International Booker Prize). The novels dramatize the sense of European crisis as the choice of “a Europe of the past” driven by “a critical deficit of future,” but they differ fundamentally in the ways they portray “Europe” and the possible ways out of its current predicament. While Time Shelter concerns itself with the European Union’s legitimacy crisis, exacerbated by the proliferation of neonationalisms that it understands through the conceit of an epidemic of memory disorders, The Camp of the Saints imagines a migratory apocalypse leading to the end of the West. The essay argues that Raspail’s and Gospodinov’s novels help readers parse out the dangers of myths about national and racial communities, shedding light on the ideological uses of memory in competing versions of the past, hence of Europe’s future.