LES EFFONDRÉS AND THE COLLAPSE OF MARKET IDEOLOGY

Like Lordon, the literary writer Mathieu Larnaudie was also watching events closely in 2008. Larnaudie's novel about the 2008 global financial crisis, Les Effondres (‘The Collapsed’, 2010) provides a series of scenes or tableaux in which his characters stop working and undergo a transvaluation. A recit spanning twenty-four chapters, Les Effondres recounts the fate of the key players involved in the crisis. Although not directly named, they are identifiable by descriptors and clues in the text. They are principally: Angela Merkel; Nicolas Sarkozy; Richard Fuld, Chairman of Lehman Brothers; Bernard Madoff, the financier whose Ponzi scheme was the biggest financial fraud in US history and who was serving a 150-year prison sentence until his recent death in April 2021; Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, a French businessman who took his own life after losing his fortune in Madoff's scheme; and Adolf Merckle, a German entrepreneur who also took his own life following losses during the crisis. In this chapter I will analyse how Larnaudie uses media images in his literary text, and how these images play a role in the crisis. In particular, I will focus on Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve (1987–2006) and generally considered an extremely influential figure in post-war US economic history, whose reputation was damaged by the crisis, when he was criticised for the unchecked growth of the subprime mortgage bubble occurring under his watch which contributed to the crash. As the title suggests, Greenspan and the other figures in the book were all in some sense ‘ruined’ by the crisis; they are, as Larnaudie remarks in an apparently throwaway comment to which I will return, the ‘saints’ of the crisis.

Les Effondres is made up of relatively short chapters that are often comprised of a single very long sentence, typically running to several pages. Larnaudie's prose is relentless in the manner in which it relates the very moment of the effondrement or collapse. As one critic argues: ‘Par la démesure de la phrase, le texte signifie la crise dans l’écriture meme, mimant en quelque sorte cette économie dématérialisée’ (‘Through the excess of the sentence, the text communicates the crisis in the writing itself, in a way mimicking the dematerialised economy’).