Who is Michel Houellebecq and why are people saying such terrible things about him?
The
accurate and subsequently accepted definition of abstract concepts, both new
and existing, has long been an essential part of the mechanics of philosophy,
with theoretical positions forming the basis of future reasoned debate. It’s a
dirty business, but someone has to do it. Take, for instance, the subtle
semantic differences between the words life and existence. How
can we adequately express the varying shades of meaning, whether metonymically
or metaphorically, between the two? Life, other than when it signifies a
long and indefinite period of incarceration, seems to be associated with
positive connotations of enjoyment and experience, whereas more passive associations
of merely surviving, often in straitened circumstances, are linked to existence.
Essentially, perhaps, the two words are under consideration contiguous to the
terms doing and being, as they are understood in the
philosophical domain.
In
the current era, I would suggest that the terms life and existence
may be best illustrated by the Government’s restriction and almost decimation
of personal freedom, by means of what has come to be known as “the lockdown.”
It is not my purpose to consider the medical or ideological validity of such
actions in this piece, though it is essential to mention that the contradictory
statements and actions of the Prime Minister and his associates suggest that if
Britain were to become a Police State, then the most appropriate constabulary
to wield executive power would be the Keystone Kops.
Rather,
I refer to this curtailment of liberty as a way of showing that life is
poetic in its vibrancy, while existence is unending, monochrome and
prosaic.
This
leads me to the question whether it is even possible to exist under lockdown
for as much as another 18 months, denied the opportunity to live as social
beings: unable to visit pubs or restaurants, to watch or play sports (the
inevitable cancellation of the 2020 recreational cricket season hurts me
grievously), or even to associate with family and friends. If the alternative
is to risk a second wave of infection from COVID-19, then it seems that the joy
to be found in life may be worth the risk of death, to avoid the
privations of existence.
When
the only legal exceptions to house arrest are trips to the shop or the Michael
Gove endorsed exercise hour, the task of filling the hours from one day to the
next becomes almost as important as the chosen tasks themselves. Aside from
unnecessarily long sleeps and the excessive consumption of alcohol, those of us
cursed by a restive intellect require more active diversions than the passive
consumption of television or films. Music can act as either a passive or an
active diversion, depending on the level of concentration the listener brings
to the activity, though the most fulfilling activities for me involve the twin
disciplines of reading and writing and this piece will contain writing that is
a reflection on the reading I have been consumed by since the outbreak of this
virus became the sole subject of public debate.
Over
the past two months, I have read, in random order, all eight of the published
novels by the French author, Michel Houellebecq. What was born out of intrigue
has matured into an obsession that has recently seen me begin to investigate
Houellebecq’s more recondite activities as a singer and rapper, as well as the
somewhat recherche non-fiction elements of his craft. It is relevant to note
that the next publication of his work, translated into English, will be his musings
On Schopenhauer, due out on May 15th. With the publication of
the latest books by Roddy Doyle, David Peace and Harry Pearson, all being
delayed for a minimum of six months, Houellebecq’s philosophical considerations
have now assumed greater importance than I could have imagined at the start of
this year.
Why
Houellebecq? Good question. Serendipity would probably be the most honest
answer. An email from Waterstone’s alerted me to the fact I had a
tenner’s credit on an old loyalty card. This scheme was ending, so I needed to
use it or lose it. Around the same time, while farting around on the internet,
researching the Hitchens brothers for a piece that never got written, I came
across references to Houellebecq as being as much of a contrarian as the late
Christopher, though obviously ideologically very different. Intrigued by this,
I took my voucher to Waterstone’s and bought my first Houellebecq, on the basis
it was the only one of his priced at £9.99. Thus, my journey began with La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and The Territory). Subsequently, I ploughed through, in the following order
: Soumission, Sérotonine, Lanzarote, Extension du Domaine
de la Lutte, La Possibilité d'une Ile, Platforme and Les Particules élémentaires.
Despite my use of the original French titles above, I
read the books in English, so my thanks go out to the translators: Gavin Bowd,
Paul Hammond, Lorin Stein, Shaun Whiteside and Frank Wynne. As regards the
books themselves, I will address them in chronological order and refer to them
by their translated titles, other than Houellebecq’s first two novels. The
facile and lazy Whatever does not do justice to the complexity and
importance of his first novel Extension du Domaine de
la Lutte, so I will use the original title, not out of pretension, but
for reasons of accuracy. It also inspired the title of this blog, though
with a sense of regret that Houellebecq isn’t German as I could have named this
piece Sein Kampf. Similarly, I regard Atomised as glib and
excessively informal rendering of Les Particules élémentaires, so I will
use the American title of the novel, The Elementary Particles, instead.
What follows is a series of observations related to the collected works
of Houellebecq, though it is important to provide some context to his work and
the world it sprang from.
In each and every novel, Houellebecq creates a different
but instantly recognizable personal and public dystopia, set either in the
current era or in the future. The persistent feature of the narrative voice in
each novel is the repeated insistence that it is only the reader who views
these portrayals of dysfunctional societies in a negative fashion. Despite persistent
allegations of an Islamophobic world view, which I will seek to refute later,
Houellebecq is intent on representing society as he sees it, as demonstrated by
the quotation from his poem Unreconciled that prefaces this piece. Consequently,
as a self-identified misanthropic cynic, he contends he is presenting the world
as he sees it when he describes the inevitable breakdown of human relations;
work is always unrewarding, except in financial terms, families are toxic, property and material goods are only of
interest as functional objects and, perhaps most crucially, romantic
relationships are doomed, witness the tragic deaths of Michel and Bruno’s life
partners in The
Elementary Particles,
or Valérie in Platform. However, it should be noted that the most
affecting death in all of Houellebecq’s novels, which include his own murder in
The Map and The Territory, is that of the unconditionally loving pet dog
Fox in The Possibility of an Island.
The
only satisfaction in Houellebecq’s world is found in personal sexual
gratification, where the presence of another human being is purely as a
vehicle, if not a receptacle, of the narrator’s requirements. All emotion and
human connection are absent; sex is transactional like all other purchases in
this world. Ironically, the uncommitted and disconnected Houellebecq shows more
than superficial similarities with the emotionless Mersault of part one of L’Etranger.
Yet Houellebecq is, perhaps mischievously, uncritical of such a state of
affairs, repeatedly asserting that because this is how life is, we are
powerless to change things, even if wishing to do so was desirable.
Houellebecq
was born on the island of Réunion in either 1956 or 1958. The product of a
chaotically dysfunctional family, where his parents were largely absent from
his upbringing and subsequently uninterested in his progress as a human being,
he explains the confusion over his birthdate as the product of his deeply
unreliable mother forging a replacement birth certificate to allow him to
attend school two years early, thus absolving her of any responsibility for
looking after him. This demonstrates the beginning of the highly troubled
relationship between the two that reached its apogee in 2008 when his mother
published her account of events in his formative years, while engaging in a
very public spat.
After
school, Houellebecq attended agricultural college rather than university, which
has effectively enabled him to play up to the stereotype of the gauche
outsider, rather than a member of the French intellectual elite who were
educated at one of les grandes écoles and published his first poems in
1985. His first book was an analysis of H. P. Lovecraft, Against the World,
Against Life, but it is with the appearance of his debut novel Extension du Domaine de la Lutte in 1994 that
Houellebecq’s importance as a writer becomes apparent.
In
his late 30s and working as a computer administrator for the National Assembly,
Houellebecq initially appeared as an unlikely spearhead for any new cultural
movement, when fame was thrust upon him after Extension
du Domaine de la Lutte became not just a literary
phenomenon, but a philosophical one, admittedly within the rarefied world of
French scholarship, in terms of the message the book appeared to transmit. A
nameless, bored computer programmer from the faceless Parisian banlieus
is seconded to visit small towns, for the purpose of delivering IT software
courses to local civil servants, who have neither the aptitude nor interest to
take on board what he is telling them. He is accompanied by a work colleague he
despises, who spends his leisure time attempting to lose his virginity aged 28,
while the narrator gets incoherently drunk. Eventually the work colleague kills
himself in a drunken car crash and the narrator, acerbic, misanthropic and
dissociated to the end, returns to his original job just before Christmas,
which he refers to as December 25th.
To attempt to restrict the intellectual parameters of
this work by imposing the title Whatever on it, is a kind of
anti-intellectual vandalism that has not been seen since the era of the
Luddites. Extension du Domaine de la Lutte creates the world in which
Houellebecq continues to inhabit; unsuccessful, defeated middle-aged men living
in squat apartments among swathes of faceless, grey apartment blocks in the
exurbs of a version of Paris utterly at odds with the romance and glamour of
most literary representations. It is existence rather than life. Even
George Orwell invested a sense of hedonism in his depictions of Parisian
poverty in the late 1920s. Houellebecq’s version of Paris can be compared to
Bukowski’s take on 1950s and 1960s Los Angeles; Hollywood and Sunset Strip are
utterly absent from his narrative, which is centred on the interior of a sorting
office, dive bars and low-rent apartments. Houellebecq’s characters are not bon
viveurs or epicures; their diet almost exclusively consists of top of the
range microwav meals from neighbourhood mini supermarkets, while the daily
routine of getting drunk is just what they do after work, when they’re not
jacking off to pornography. Again, this hints at Houellebecq’s other similarities
with Charles Bukowski. In the same way that Bukowski bases his main character,
Henry Chinaski, on an idealised or expanded version of himself, the first
person narrator in six of Houellebecq’s works of fiction can be seen a
representation of the author, to a greater or lesser extent.
Houellebecq’s
second novel, Les
Particules Élémentaires published in the
English-speaking world with the brutal and inadequate title Atomised in
the UK, and the vastly superior The Elementary Particles in
the USA, was a breakthrough, bringing him national and eventually international
fame, as well as provoking controversy for its intricate mix of social commentary and passages of graphic
depictions of sexual acts, written in a consciously anti-erotic style. Written
in the third person, the book narrates the fate of two half-brothers: Michel
Djerzinski, who became a prominent biologist, highly successful as a scientist
but utterly withdrawn and depressed, and Bruno Clément, a French teacher,
deeply disturbed and obsessed by sex.
The
brothers’ lives are not treated consecutively or concurrently, but
elliptically. Bruno retreats to a psychiatric hospital after the death of his
life partner and drops out of the book, while Michel responds to the death of
the woman who loved him for almost 30 years by taking a job in a research
laboratory on the very edge of the Wild Atlantic Way, in Clifden, County
Galway. Here, as we learn in postscript, Djerzinski engineers human DNA in a
way that turns the species into immortal neo-humans. Unlike
many of his later works, in which he has been accused of peddling Islamophobia,
misogyny or racism, the main criticism of Les Particules Élémentaires is that it is a manifesto for eugenics.
Plainly, this is not the case; the novel mainly focuses on metaphoric
representations of the dual sides of human nature, in a kind of Jekyll and Hyde
way. The difference being that neither the sensual hedonism of Bruno nor the
scientific detachment of Michel offers any protection against the inevitable
passage of time and the unbending pressure of society’s requirements.
It
would be more accurate to describe Houellebecq’s next work, Lanzarote,
as a novella, as it only extends to 84 pages. This is not to underestimate its
importance, as the ideas within provide much of the plot and ideas contained in
both Platform and The Possibility of an Island. Houellebecq
touches upon sex tourism, with detailed, dispassionate descriptions of graphic
sexual acts involving a German lesbian couple who, in a telling minor aside,
the narrator fails to contact on returning home, having inaccurately recorded
their telephone number. The other character, a slightly pathetic, lonely and
defeated Belgian, leaves the island without warning after completely failing to
impress the endless series of women he has failed to seduce. The narrator is
surprised to see the Belgian on the television news, revealed as part of
massive child sexual abuse case that involves a sinister quasi-religious cult,
which is loosely based on the Raelians. Lanzarote may be a minor work,
but Houellebecq’s later career points to its relevance.
Certainly, his next novel, Platform, is a ruthless
and excoriating take on tourism in general and sex tourism in particular. It is
unique among Houellebecq’s works in its deliberately comic depictions of a
gauche and socially inadequate set of tourists, including the narrator
describing his holiday attire of a Radiohead t-shirt and long shorts as
being proof of how “pathetic” he is. The fact that the repeated depictions of
sex acts with prostitutes do not provoke reactions of disgust in the reader,
suggesting that the commodification of all personal relationships affects us
all. The real point of contention in this novel are the numerous voices who
have accused Houellebecq of rampant Islamophobia in this novel, and in his
later work, Submission.
The question of the actual existence of Islamophobia is
one that can be answered only with reference to the specific social and
cultural conditions of particular counties. In England, as opposed to Britain,
the continued prevalence of a dominant Oxbridge elite that retains control of
the Law, the Press, Parliament, the Military and most of the top Universities,
has enabled a narrative based on the attitudes that became ingrained after the
Glorious Revolution and were reinforced by the Empire, to retain cultural
control. The Church of England, as an institution, has little if any influence
on the morals and ethics of the ordinary populace, but the many tentacled hydra
of the British Upper Classes, extends its influential power over all aspects of
society. Any belief that is not the Anglican Communion is regarded as, by definition, morally
and intellectually inferior. This mindset continues to stigmatise all other
religions. Non-conformism is the faith of the Valleys and the coalfields.
Catholicism is the amoral refuge of drunken, violent Irishmen. Judaism has not
gained a better press since Shylock’s day. Other non-Christian faiths are the
preserve of savages and slaves. Islam is seen as the modern Catholicism; the preserve
of violent insurgents, dedicated to the destruction of Britain. Islamophobia is
therefore an institutional prejudice, harboured and encouraged by those who maintain
the legal, cultural and financial infrastructure of society. This is not the
case in France.
Despite assumptive British ignorance to the contrary,
France has not effectively been a Catholic country since 1789. The refreshingly
anti-clerical nature of the Revolution was demonstrated by the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that stated “Every citizen may,
accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom,” though this was followed by
the ominous caveat that each citizen “shall be responsible for such abuses of
this freedom as shall be defined by law.” Following the execution of Louis XVI
in January 1793, the dechristianisation of France gathered pace, as the ideas
of the Enlightenment took hold. Despite the Reign of Terror and the efforts of
Napoleon, the seeds of atheism took hold in France. In 2005, 45% of French
citizens identified as atheists; while this figure had dipped to 29% in 2015, a
further 62% regarded themselves as non-religious. The only reason religion has
not died in France is the arrival of Francophone African citizens, who have
both maintained a residual level of Catholicism and created an exponential
growth in the number of French Muslims.
Significantly,
many of those arriving in France have taken low-paid jobs and moved into the
poor-quality housing of the outer banlieus in Paris and other major
towns, creating ghettoization in the very areas Houellebecq situated his
disaffected and disenfranchised characters earlier in his career. Without a
doubt, Houellebecq has been responsible for provocative and inflammatory
comments on Islam, but unlike the utterings of the barely literate Marine La
Pen or the coarse bigotry of the Far Right in England, his words should be seen
not as sloganeering, but as a part of the general public discourse that
repeatedly shows he is a product of the French culture of anti-clericalism and
semi Socratic outpourings on vaguely formed theories. In short, Houellebecq has often participated
in the typically French philosophical activity of thinking out loud, and in
public, where he is asking himself the hard questions and challenging others to
answer for him.
From
provocative opinions, to provocative artistry, Hoellebecq moved on to the
challenging Possibility of an Island. The book contains three different
narrators (Daniel 1, Daniel 24 and Daniel 25), the latter two being neo-human
clones who live thousands of years in the future, in a post-apocalyptic, arid
landscape, populated by a few thousand “savages,” as well as the anatomically
perfect and hyper-resilient, cloned neo humans. The latter narrators, at the
point of creation, have the full biography of Mark 1, a bitter, cynical and
deeply offensive Jewish stand-up comedian from the turn of the millennium, who was
cloned by an Elohimite acquaintance, to study and internalise. The Elohimites
are based on the Raelian cult, who spend their entire time seeming to worship
alien life who they expect to land on Lanzarote and fleecing gullible
billionaires for all their wealth.
Unfortunately,
the book doesn’t really work for the first half; possibly because Daniel 1 is
so unpleasant. However, once we realise Daniel 1’s narrative is the
biographical account all subsequent Daniels are required to study, the
structure begins to make sense. Daniel 25 leaves his home in what used to be
Barcelona, to walk to Lanzarote, following an event called “the Great
Drying-Up” as the book is by turns poignant and affecting, but never less than
fascinating. It is undoubtedly Houellebecq’s most experimental, though least
successful, work.
In
The Map and The Territory, a photographer becomes fabulously wealthy by taking
pictures of French Ordnance survey maps and expanding the photos to incredible
sizes, producing beautiful and unsettling effects. One of his devotees is the
character of Houellebecq, at that time resident in Ireland, who agrees to write
the text of the catalogue for another show. Unfortunately, Houellebecq is
unexpectedly and brutally murdered. Perhaps the most intriguing innovation is
the use of large sections of Wikipedia, used without comment as descriptions in
the book. The effect is intentionally comedic, as the absolute and utter lack
of opinion in these mundane passages becomes almost surreal with the repetition
of this bland style of reportage. This fits with the consciously distant third
person narrator, to make it Houellebecq’s most obviously stylish novel to date,
but it pales into insignificance when compared to the profoundly cerebral Submission,
which was ironically launched the day of the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
Set
in 2022 amidst a backdrop of an imagined domestic political crisis, whereby the
Front National are deadlocked with the Muslim Brotherhood in a French
presidential election, Submission is undoubtedly the most stylishly
written of all Houellebecq’s novels. A possible explanation for this is that
the narrator, Francois, is a professor of literature at Université de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle. Though while he is eloquent, measured and conservative in
his expression, this is seen as a weakness because he is unable to speak up or
speak out in dangerous, unpredictable times. Indeed, Francois is the first of
Houellebecq’s protagonists to begin his tale in late middle age, rather than
during his putative mid life crisis. Unsurprisingly, Francois views himself as
a failure in his personal and professional lives, no longer able to maintain a
relationship nor produce academic work of merit. However, this is not simply a
story of angst among the aged; it is a subtle exploration of morality and
betrayal.
Unlike
in various interviews, or through the words of his narrators in Lanzarote and
Platform, Houellebecq does not denounce Islam at all in Submission;
instead the transformation of bourgeois, academic, intellectual France, and
especially the capital, into an Islamic Republic under Sharia Law is described
in restrained terms. When the entire professoriate is summarily
dismissed, it is made clear they will be employed again, if they convert to
Islam. The inducement to do so is not a monetary one, but the promise of a
15-year-old Arab girl as a trophy bride. Under French law, while a girl of 15
is still a minor, she is able to give consent to sex. Typically, Francois fails to adhere to any
principles, which makes the reader more judgemental in tone than his previous
actions deserve. Again though,
Houellebecq’s novel springs from the anti-clerical, questioning culture of
French intellectualism, where ruthless ambition is seen as a more serious
character flaw than the sexual abuse of underage girls. Undoubtedly, Submission
is a difficult and at times painful read, but it asks essential questions of
our society. Hence, its impact upon French consciousness is significantly
greater than in other countries who have a differing cultural narrative and
discourse.
In
contrast, Houellebecq’s latest novel, Serotonin, contains some of his
most gratuitously offensive and vacuous writing, specifically uncomfortable
references to his former girlfriend’s pornographic film career, where she
specializes in group sex with dogs. The ludicrously named narrator, Florent-Claude
Labrouste, is a depressed, middle-aged civil servant, who has a pointless job
that involves trying to promote cheese from Normandy in France. Having decided
he has failed in life (we’ve been here before…), he decides to simply
disappear, ending up resident in a holiday cottage owned by a friend of his
from agricultural college days, Aymeric. He is an alcoholic whose farm is on
the verge of bankruptcy. After his family desert him, he attempts to start a
rural insurrection against government policies, but instead shoots himself when
confrontation with the authorities grows near. His senseless death provokes
nothing in Florent-Claude, other than a decision to move back to Paris and live
in a hotel, in obscurity.
The
plot may appear to be both transparent and risible, but Houellebecq’s
experience in constructing such novels of regret and disappointment has honed
his craft. We genuinely pity the narrator’s plight and can almost sympathise at
his insane plan to win back a former girlfriend by killing her son, though
thankfully he decides against such a course of action. Undoubtedly, Houellebecq
is now firmly in the grip of his own late middle age crisis. His twin influences
of pessimism and social conservatism mean his novelistic concerns are
narrowing, but with the trade off that his writing has become forensically
detailed and curiously affecting. Is this enough to compensate for his lack of
a sense of wonder? A younger reader than I would need to answer that.
Of
course, while this may be the end of Houellebecq’s fictional journey so far,
there are other items out there and, armed with the zeal of an obsessive
completist, I ventured through Ebay and Discogs in search of
obscure artefacts. At the time of writing, Houellebecq’s paean to HP Lovecraft,
Against the World, Against Life, has yet to be delivered, though I have
made my way through two other books. Firstly, Public Enemies is the entire
2008 correspondence about ethics, moral, politics and society that Houellebecq
enjoyed with the notable French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy. Across 300
semi-enlightening pages, they play a kind of ideological ping pong, introducing
more and more preposterous theories and showing off their literary and cultural
knowledge, rather in the manner of small, precocious children throwing a hissy
fit because nobody is paying them any attention. It is, frankly, an inessential
purchase. The same cannot be said of Unreconciled, a selection of Houellebecq’s
poetry, translated into English. In the main, other than regular diversions
into provocative showboating, such as My Dad was a solitary and barbarous
cunt, Houellebecq’s poetry is a series of terse, epigrammatic observations
on the human condition. It must be conceded that in most instances, endless
screeds of short, depressive homilies to decay, failure and loneliness do not
provide any great philosophical insights, though there are the occasional
passages of truly persuasive writing, such as -:
“We
may not live, but we get old all the same
And
nothing changes, nothing. Neither summer, nor things.”
Finally, there is the question of Houellebecq’s musical adventures.
His first effort, Le Sens du Combat (1996), was the recitation of some
early poems over a musical backing provided by the composer Jean-Jacques Birgé.
As the cheapest version I found online was £147, I decided I could live without
it. I am also living without Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance (2007), Houellebecq’s
most recent recording, again in collaboration with Birgé, as it is stuck in the
post with the Lovecraft book; don’t worry I will return to them in due course.
I am delighted to say that I have taken possession of Houellebecq’s 2000
recording, Presence Humaine and I’m very glad to have done so.
Houellebecq
doesn’t sing; instead he solemnly declaims his poetry in a voice that is
sometimes sombre, but oftentimes contemptuous, over a mid-70s style jazz rock backing
band who sound like Brand X on lithium for the first seven tracks. The last
three see him accompanied by a kind of cerebral synthpop backing that sounds
like an enthusiastic amateur with a yen for Blancmange or Yazoo. As someone
with a decent comprehension of written French, but only a rudimentary knowledge
of the spoken version, I am more at home with the sleeve than the libretto
(stop it!), in terms of comprehension. It is difficult to connect with the
package either in isolation or totality. However, there are two superior cuts
that hit the mark; when the band pick up the pace and start to drive, while
Houellebecq breaks off from his bad impersonation of Bryan Ferry on A Song
for Europe, to spit bile on the opening title track and the final ensemble
number, Plein été. These tracks justify the purchase, thankfully for a
tenner and not £147.
So,
while I await the delivery of a final book and CD, I mark the days off the
calendar until On Schopenhauer is published. Once that is out of the way, I may
allow myself to move on, though each subsequent Houellebecq novel will certainly
prick my attention, pausing only at this point to say he isn’t a French
literary messiah, but just another very naughty post-modernist boy.
