Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by Christy Wampole (review)
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In this insightful and engaging book, Christy Wampole explores what she calls degenerative realism, a kind of literary realism that emphasizes deterioration and decay in its representation of contemporary life. Produced by white (but not necessarily old) men, degenerative realism is not a literary movement. It is a manner characterizing novelists like Frédéric Beigbeder, Michel Houellebecq, or Yann Moix. Using mimetic techniques, though not exclusively, these writers evoke a present-day (French or Western) world unable to overcome such perceived dangers as demographic decline, radical Islam, feminism, and a reality infected by spurious information. In notably lucid and penetrating pages, Wampole details how the anxieties induced by demography and its presumed links with sexuality, immigration, and the changing social place of women constitute a useful frame for the depiction of an "Occident émasculé" (28). Moreover, she considers the ways in which the internet has altered the literary condition. She underlines how, in their attempt to figure the contemporary world, to generate an "effet d'immédiat" (2), and to address the quandaries born of a post-truth media environment, the practitioners of degenerative realism follow many of the precepts and adopt many of the methods of journalism in general and of New Journalism in particular. She also underlines how, although degenerative realist novels use features associated with the roman à thèse (including polemical treatises, for example, and explicitly ideological discourses), they ultimately differ from it because they are too disenchanted and apathetic to promote any thesis forcefully. Wampole does much more. For instance, she ponders the demise of the Minitel, specifies the characteristics of littérature pamphlétaire, and examines some of the possible implications for fiction of an era where truthiness, alternative facts, fake news, or, to rely on an old-fashioned term, lies, become the norm. Furthermore, she provides interesting discussions of such novels as: Michel Houellebecq's Soumission (2015), which depicts the transformation of France into an Islamic state; Aurélien Bellanger's La théorie de l'information (2012), which presents various aspects of technological developments and describes the Minitel's fortunes and misfortunes; Jean Raspail's Le camp des saints (1972), an exemplary thesis novel that is very popular among white nationalists and that foregrounds many of the concerns, apprehensions, and fears prominent in degenerative realism. Above all, perhaps, Wampole's thoughtful study succeeds in getting the reader (this reader!) to reflect upon many questions, general and particular. What is one to make of Myriam in Soumission and how much attention should one pay to the Camusian resonances of Bellanger's protagonist, Pascal Ertanger? What is the difference between a roman à thèse and a roman engagé? What role, if any, does degenerative realism play in contemporary American or European literature and what role will it possibly play? Degenerative Realism is a thought-provoking and valuable piece of work. [End Page 245]
