Vernon Subutex and Julien Sorel: Urban Trajectories and Contemporary Realisms

Many critics have drawn parallels between Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex and Balzac’s La Comédie humaine on account of their panoramic representations of society, their representative characters and their portrayal of the urban life of their times. While these parallels are apt, both on the level of form and content, this article seeks to move beyond the rapprochement between Balzac and Despentes to offer a rethinking of the trilogy through another nineteenth-century writer: Stendhal. This article reads the eponymous character of Vernon Subutex in terms of Julien Sorel’s urban trajectory first by considering Despentes’s work as a panoply of Parisian society, then by reading the trilogy through the lens of Stendhal’s realism, and finally by arguing that Despentes has developed a particular approach to realism throughout her work and that this innovation comes to the fore in Vernon Subutex. This article offers a re-reading of Vernon Subutex by comparing the trajectories of Vernon and Julien and then moves scholarship on Despentes forward by advancing a new approach to her work. In the end, it argues that Despentes transforms understandings of realism into a relentlessly contemporary phenomenon, moving beyond the work of writers of littérature urbaine and taking full advantage of intermediality to create a paratext aimed at a wide spectrum of readers.