Jean Raspail, Michel Houellebecq, and Jenny Erpenbeck: Acknowledging the Barbarian Within

Authors : John Hawley

Pages : 1-18

Doi:10.26650/LITERA2019-0003

View : 20 | Download : 7

Publication Date : 2019-06-27

Article Type : Research

Abstract :This paper seeks to discuss recent sites of contestation of the implications one  assigns to migration from Africa and the Middle East to Central and Western  Europe. It will be predominantly Eurocentric in its data and analysis, dealing less  with the motivations of the migrants and the second generation, and more with the  various responses to that migration among Europeans (e.g., what are "they” doing  to "us”). The major literary texts involved in the paper will be Michel Houellebecq’s  Submission (2015), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone (2015), with initial  consideration of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973). In these encounters,  the overriding question is less "Who are these people,” than "Who are we in the face  of these others?” Despite their varying motivations, they are texts that continue to  define Europe by viewing it against the backdrop of the other. I will conclude with  a reference to two projects that seek to engage viewers/readers vicariously in the  lived experiences of particular Africans forced to flee their homes. Such empathy  elicits an aggressively negative reaction among some Europeans, a white paranoia  that foresees the extinction of a romantically imagined pure ethnically-based  culture and recalls earlier campaigns with similarly violent results.
Keywords : Migration, Nationalism, Xenophobia, France, Germany