![]() ![]() ![]() This paper examines Huxley’s and Houellebecq’s texts produced during the periods of their voluntary exiles in France and Ireland, focusing on their depictions of the increasingly mobile and polarised worlds of global capitalism in the 1930s and the early 21st century. ![]() Huxley’s growing interest in the working classes from the industrial North and Houellebecq’s mobilisation of the long-forgotten France profonde, suggest their emerging concerns for the conditions of disadvantaged classes in their home countries. While French rural areas might have inspired in Huxley a certain nostalgia for the pre-industrialised English countryside, Irish Catholicism (although contrasted with neo-liberal measures “enforced more swiftly than other countries”) only reinforced Houellebecq’s aversion to an increasingly ‘traditionless’ contemporary France. Their adoptive countries thus serve not as inspiration for an entirely novel thematic, but rather as points of reference for an objective depiction of the conditions in the accelerated world which they both chose to leave. Despite Huxley’s political position of “m’en fichisme” and Houellebecq’s continuous rejection of any political commitment, both of them during these periods of ‘exile’ observe the changes in the modern world and write about them – Huxley mainly in his essays, while Houellebecq in his novel The Map and the Territory, written on a secluded West of Ireland island, gives an account of 21st-century globalised France. ![]() However, their works from these periods suggest that the worlds they had left behind still overwhelmingly obsessed them. Similarly, Houellebecq leaves France in 2000 in search of the wild Celtic landscapes - “with a light-alive, almost physical-that it is hard to believe can truly exist here on Earth”, as he notes. ��F.�c�8\���Z=G
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December 2022
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