Resounding Fantasies: Music as a Tool of Social Critique in the 20th-21st-century French Novel

Abstract

This project presents an ensemble of case studies in the French and Francophone novel where music and musicality of various types continues to be evoked throughout literary modernity as a figura, as a force through which the (re)negotiation or (re)regulation of the relationship between the individual and the social whole is imagined. I draw attention to how, especially at historical moments of intensely perceived vulnerability––conflict, population shifts, cultural drift, or erasure—music is represented in the novel as if having the power to legitimatize what is real, challenge the alternative, or to denounce one’s place in an unwished-for social landscape. For the numerous instances in which these representations of music are routinely imagined as being able to make and remake the world, I propose an understanding of them as a ritualistic practice, vis-à-vis the novel. Through an unorthodox grouping of fiction authors spanning different political affiliations, genders, nationalities, and sexualities, I show the emergence of a pervasive discursive fascination with the power of music that in and of itself can be more accurately understood as a fascination with power. In Chapter 1, I examine how Charles Maurras’s decision to represent his relationship with his own disability—deafness—both indebts him and liberates him through the formation of an aesthetic that significantly overlaps with his nationalism, his xenophobia, and his view of the essence of France as being something inherently Latin or Classical in nature. In Chapter 2, I show how Pascal Quignard and Claude Louis-Combet cultivate a view of music as concealing some primordial core or point of inhuman origin that motivates a withdrawal away from society as a way to counter the consolidation of concept. In Chapter 3, I show how music is represented for Renaud Camus, Richard Millet, and Jean Raspail as a type of persona ficta both extremely vulnerable to and yet somehow resistant enough to testify against the alleged tides of an impending genocide of the modern Western White man as per the conspiracist Replacement Theory. In Chapter 4, I uncover how Assia Djebar, Nancy Huston, and Virginie Despentes construe musicality as operating above and against conventional understandings of ‘music,’ as a force that can facilitate alternative modalities of transmission that do not rely on the notion of the center. To make sense of these diverse case studies in all their points of irreducible difference alongside their shared commitment to engaging with music as a powerful tool, I use the term recoil: a ritualistic way of writing about music reactively, in order to imagine the polis’s re-regulation through fiction that can connote both a backlash force or a type of protective withdrawal. Considering this heterogenous assemblage of authors through the lens of recoil reveals something consistent about the state of contemporary French and Francophone fiction: that it does, in fact, still have the capacity for change-making to the extent that it continues to occupy new corners of our minds and thus inflect our perception of unresolved social and civic stances such as engagement, the limits of hospitality, and the assertions of universalism.