Literature Links
Deniable Plausibility: Michel Houellebecq's Submission as Generic Narrative
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laurent Ditmann
In French literary circles and public opinion, few recent novels have caused the same critical firestorm as Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). The novel depicts a French nation overtaken by Islam through the election of a new president representing a hypothetical Muslim party. Described as a candid statement of many French citizens’ secret fear and, as one critic stated, a gratuitous attack on Islam that “sullies those who read it,” Submission asks its reader to evaluate the plausibility of the end of French democracy as we know it. The interpretative schemes applied to the novel range from a fictional application of David Engels’ Decline, which compares the fall of European nations and that of the Roman Republic, to the prefiguration of E. Macron’s unexpected emergence. While acknowledging ideological contributions to Houellebecq’s novel, this paper focuses on another narrative model, the trope of the betrayal of France by its cultural elites akin to the fall of the Third Republic. Three years after its publication, the book resonates more with the continued French resistance to Islam, emblematized by reactions to terrorist attacks, rather than a potential, newfangled Collaboration. This presentation contends that the danger to French democracy is still on the right (with 20% of the French electorate choosing Marine le Pen) rather than on the side of some Muslim conspiracy. Submission is, therefore, closer to the dystopic genre of the cult British TV series Black Mirror, than to Julien Benda’s cogently proleptic The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927).
End of the Dragon History: Rewriting 5,000 Years of China in an Age of Global Nationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Howard Y. F. Choy
In his bestseller _Wolf Totem_, Jiang Rong rewrites 5,000 years of Chinese history in the last 50,000 characters of his 500,000-character novel. Against the grain of Confucian historiography, all dynastic ups and downs are ascribed to the presence or absence of “wolf nature.” Thus the vicissitudes of regimes are interpreted by pendular swings between lupine and sheepish spirits in a global history of national developmentalism. The author concludes his grand narrative that the Chinese people are not so much “descendants of the dragon” as “disciples of the wolf” and that nomads are the ancestors of farmers. It has been pointed out that _Wolf Totem_ is a product of an age of value vacuum and cultural crisis, when humanism retreats and science advances, when the law of the market has become a new ideology in globalization. Indeed, Jiang Rong’s extremism echoes Stalin’s social Darwinist statement about “the jungle law of capitalism” in his 1931 speech to industrial managers: “You are backward, you are weak—therefore you are wrong; hence, you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty—therefore you are right; hence, we must be wary of you.” In the wolf’s worldview, one either hunts or is hunted. Eulogizing European imperialism and Japanese militarism, Jiang Rong’s radicalism reveals his fantasy of territorialization through terrorization, which is labeled by Chinese and Western critics alike as “fascism.” This paper analyzes and contextualizes Wolf Totem in the dominant discourse of new nationalism that searches for national pride and power in the twenty-first century.
Culture Clash: How Some Contemporary Literature Resists Globalization
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martha Kuchar
Are nations and cultures at the mercy of global trends? In literature, this would seem to be the case. After all, the inherent universality of great fiction can be said to subtly diminish a text’s social and political timeliness. And for a text to be broadly successful, it has to serve the broader public. But “to serve” does not mean “to be servile.” In fact, much contemporary literature can also be seen to resist cultural globalization. I use three novels to argue this thesis. Mohsin Hamid’s Exit East, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and Yuri Herrera’s Transmigration of Bodies. Only the first of these novels was originally written in English; the other two were written in the native languages of their authors, respectively, German and Spanish. Writing for a global, though not necessarily English-speaking audience, these three novels represent a telling feature of much contemporary literature: it grapples locally while engaging globally. Through literary allusion, historical and geographical references, and cultural confrontations, these novels assert the primacy of local politics, demonstrating that specific, contextually-bound dramas create and generate global dynamics – not the other way around.
