by Ben Jeffery
Yet the best reason to read Houellebecq is that his work produces the scandalously rare impression of being relevant, of connecting to how life is, rather than how it might be if there were more adventures. Pessimism is unfalsifiable, of course, which is what makes it so often insipid. If someone is genuinely determined to look on the gloomy side of life there is no turning them about – the ‘honesty’ of a depressive realist is sapping and tedious in that way. All of Houellebecq’s narrators present themselves as hard-headed men willing to speak unpleasant truths (explicitly, in The Possibility of an Island, where Daniel comments: ‘On the intellectual level I was in reality slightly above average… I was just very honest, and therein lay my distinction; I was, in relation to the current norms of mankind, almost unbelievably honest’), but their stories would be banal if their author wasn’t deft enough to make them plausible – that is, realistic. And it is hard, finally, to evade the conclusion that one big reason for Houellebecq’s success is that enough people really do identify with these books; that they put into words things that people think and want to hear, but are either unable to articulate or unwilling to admit to. It’s not a pleasant thought.
***
In Atomised – the story of Bruno and Michel, two socially isolated half-brothers – tremendous pleasure is taken skewering neohippies and New Age mystics of all kinds. A thwarted hedonist, the 40-year-old Bruno spends a dismal fortnight holidaying in the Lieu du Changement, a semi-commune founded in 1975 with the aim ‘of providing a place where like-minded people could spend the summer months living according to the principles they espoused.’ It was ‘intended that this haven of humanist and democratic feeling would create synergies, facilitate the meeting of minds and, in particular, as one of the founding members put it, provide an opportunity to “get your rocks off”.’ By the time Bruno visits in the late Nineties the Lieu du Changement has become miserable, a microcosm for one of Houellebecq’s central themes – the cruelty and exclusion of the Sixties’ sexual revolution. For the clientele of the Lieu, as ‘they began to age, the cult of the body, which they had done so much to promote, simply filled them with disgust for their own bodies – a disgust they could see mirrored in the gaze of others… Dedicated exclusively to sexual liberation and desire, the Lieu naturally became a place of desperation and bitterness.’ By the mid-Eighties the commune had become a corporate business, supplementing its promise of sexual liberty with quasi-religious workshops and esoteric disciplines. ‘Tantric Zen, which combined vanity, mysticism and frottage, flourished.’
Bad luck in sex, the marginalisation of anyone who fails to be erotically desirable, is the backbone of Houellebecq’s oeuvre. Whatever, the most overtly philosophical novel, is narrated by an unnamed computer technician (a job that Houellebecq held before he made his living as a writer) on a business trip training provincial civil servants how to use their new equipment. His companion is another young technician, Raphaël Tisserand. ‘The problem with Raphaël Tisserand – the foundation of his personality, indeed – is that he is extremely ugly. So ugly that his appearance repels women, and he never gets to sleep with them.’ The two men travel from town to town, retiring to bars and nightclubs after work, where Raphaël, affluent, but a total flop as a sexual commodity, meets progressively terrible frustrations. The issue, as the narrator diagnoses, is one of simple sexual economics: his colleague cannot offer anything on the marketplace. ‘Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market”. … In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.’ Lacking charm and resembling a toad wrapped in cellophane, Raphaël has nothing he can trade. Characters that suffer because of their biological make-up, the life-sentence imposed by being undesirable, or the delayed punishment of aging, recur. Sex, we are told, is life’s only real motive. If you are disqualified, or ‘past it’, then you will suffer unto death: ‘All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything.’
It is fair to say that Houellebecq doesn’t shy away from what the author David Foster Wallace called ‘the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair’.2 In fact Houellebecq can seem astonishingly naïve on the subject of sex, as though the pornographic is the only sort of fantasy he is unable to expose. In The Possibility of an Island, as in Platform, as in Atomised, whenever the hitherto alienated and frustrated hero finally finds his satisfaction – however fragile it may leave him, emotionally – the act is always phenomenal. No dispiriting failures to perform; no STDs or pregnancies; lots of excitingly acrobatic varieties and combinations; head-melting orgasms – everything exactly as advertised. ‘Adolescent’ is the word (really: a mixture of cynicism, erotic fantasising, vulgarity, and self-pity – how much more like a teenage boy could it get?). In mitigation, it’s not as though Houellebecq isn’t aware of this. His novels feed off a malaise about what it means to be adult, if anything beyond procreation. The vanguard of the Sixties and the sexual revolution were children refusing to grow up, idolising youth and freedom against traditional conceptions of responsibility. Atomised may shoot plenty of venom at their mythology, but Houellebecq’s generation and all subsequent generations have inherited the idea that there is something vaguely bogus about maturity. ‘I don’t subscribe to the theory we only become truly adult when our parents die;’ begins Platform, ‘we never become truly adult.’ Throughout, Houellebecq’s fiction denigrates or omits one of the most basic forms of adult responsibility there is: parenthood. The narrator of Platform, viewing his father’s coffin, tells us ‘unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of his life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. “You had kids, you fucker…” I said spiritedly, “you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.” Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit.’ Atomised is a catalogue of bad parents and rotten children, one of the heroines dies trying to conceive, and – as in The Possibility of an Island – a hero candidly admits the neglect of his son:
I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will be meaningless – the world will be completely different. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then his life is reduced to the sum of his own experience – past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless. Women are different, because they never get past the need to have someone to love – which is certainly not true of men. … Kids are a trap, they are the enemy – you have to pay for them all your life – and they outlive you.
***
Raphaël Tisserand is killed in a car-accident, driving home in the mists on Christmas Eve. At his funeral: ‘A few words were pronounced on the sadness of such a death and of the difficulty of driving in fog, people went back to work, and that was that.’ But for the narrator of Whatever, who until then had taken a cold (if not gruesomely manipulative) attitude toward his partner, the news of Tisserand’s death sparks a mental breakdown. After checking himself into a psychiatric hospital, the hero is confronted by a female counsellor who chastises him for speaking in overly abstract, sociological terms. His effort at self-analysis emerges: ‘But I don’t understand, basically, how people manage to go on living. I get the impression everybody must be unhappy; we live in such a simple world you understand. There’s a system based on domination, money and fear [and there’s a] system based on seduction and sex. And that’s it. Is it really possible to live and believe that there’s
nothing else?’ Afterwards, he asks the counsellor if she would sleep with him. She refuses.
It is not that Houellebecq is a reactionary writer exactly. For example, it is never suggested that religious faith is the solution to his character’s dilemmas; the books are all resolutely atheist. The only places in which traditional religion makes a significant appearance are a subplot of Whatever – a Catholic priest, an old acquaintance of the narrator’s, loses his faith over a failed affair with a young nurse – and at the climax of Platform in the form of Islamic terrorists.3 In any case, as noted, Houellebecq’s heroes are generally no less deviant than the sad revellers of the Lieu de Changement. What the sexual revolution stands for, rather, is the triumph of philosophical materialism: the world-view that erases the supernatural, making it impossible to believe in God and, at its logical conclusion, eradicating the possibility of communion altogether. The starkest material truth, after all, seems to be that we are all ultimately alone inside our skin, ‘elementary particles’. In Houellebecq’s fiction, the real brutality of post-Sixties sexual economics is that it is based on fact: that it is, in its way, progressive. One way of putting it is that in our enlightenment we are able to see ourselves as merely creatures, rather than God’s creatures, and nature as purposeless matter, rather than divine plan. Humans are just animals, and, unsurprisingly, that knowledge gives precedence to biological impulse; to strength, health and beauty over weakness, infirmity and repulsiveness – and it makes self-interest paramount. Houellebecq’s men find themselves incapable of considering anything but themselves, but they also apprehend, with some horror, the essential unsustainability of individualism. Living with nothing other than your own desires and urges makes their frustrations (increasingly awful and unavoidable as you age) tortuous – and the prospect of death is unmanageable. ‘Contemporary consciousness is no longer equipped to deal with our mortality. More than at any time or in any civilisation, human beings are obsessed with aging. Each individual has a simple view of the future: a time will come when the sum of pleasures that life has left to offer is outweighed by the sum of pain (one can actually feel the meter ticking, and it ticks inevitably towards the end). This weighing up of pleasure and pain which, sooner or later, everyone is forced to make, leads logically, at a certain age, to suicide.’ It is, to paraphrase Houellebecq on a different topic, an insoluble condition, but not really a complicated one.
‘Old age; there was not a new blossoming at the end of the road, but a bundle of frustrations and sufferings, at first insignificant, then very quickly unbearable…’ Even The Possibility of an Island, as bad as it is, achieves a kind of demonic power thanks to the intensity of its will to communicate the slide of bodily decay, ‘the sadness of physical decrepitude, of the gradual loss of all that gave life meaning and joy’:
Not only did the old not have the right to fuck… rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too – like sexuality, like pleasure, like love – seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilising the interest of young people was disqualified in advance, basically old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional and more and more narrowly limited.
Esther, the narrator’s 22-year-old mistress, never strikes the reader as much like an actual person, but the hero’s desperation as their romance comes to an end – an end that he does not think he will survive – is palpable to the point of suffocation. You want to put the book down for air. It might be the paradigmatic scene in Houellebecq’s fiction: the unbelievably desirable, sexually complicit Esther, source of incredible erotic ecstasies (and what’s more: ‘never with us had there been a question of using a condom, the subject had simply not been touched on’), described as compassionate and gentle by the narrator even though, bizarrely, he says that she could also not be expected ‘to do any kind of favour for anyone’ – an object of crippling love who does not love Daniel back, and finally abandons him without regret. Truly a fantasy woman, the fantasy inflated to absurd proportions for the sake of brute dramatic effect. Daniel is too old and soft for Esther and her friends, and they are too strong and free for him. ‘I was wandering among them like some kind of prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains.’ Love is not a lie in Houellebecq’s fiction, it is ‘immense and admirable’, the nearest thing there is to true communion, but in the end it is just another part of a battle you cannot help but lose. Houellebecq is hardly above mining sentiment on this score. Both Platform and Atomised strike a vein of classic romantic tragedy. Bruno’s vacation in the Lieu is saved when he meets Christiane, a 40-year-old whose eyes ‘were blue and a little sad’, who travels to the Lieu for the sex rather than the mysticism. ‘The whole spiritual thing makes the pick-up lines seem less brutal’, she admits, but is unreservedly cynical about its value otherwise:
I know what the veterans of ’sixty-eight are like when they hit forty, I’m practically one myself. They have cobwebs in their cunts and they grow old alone. Talk to them for five minutes and you’ll see that they don’t believe in any of this bullshit about chakras and crystal healing and light vibrations. They force themselves to believe it and sometimes they do for an hour or two… but then the workshop’s over and they’re still ugly, still ageing, still alone. So they cry for a bit – have you noticed? They do a lot of crying here.
In spite of his maladjustment and her damage, Bruno and Christiane find tenderness with one another. As their relationship progresses, Bruno’s bleak worldview (‘second-rate Neitzscheanism’, he calls it) begins to thaw. The two fall in love. During a happy week together in Paris: ‘They took a taxi to Les Halles and ate in an all-night brasserie. Bruno had rollmop herrings as a starter. “Now,” he thought, “anything is possible.” He had hardly done so when he realised that he was wrong.’ What he thinks of is not a rival lover or external interference, but the course of nature, the implacable reality of separation and decline. The end that Bruno and Chistiane’s affair eventually comes to, wrenching as it is, is only an accelerated version of the fate of all affairs: sooner or later the body fails. ‘Though the possibilities were endless in his imagination… in reality his body was in a slow process of decay; Christiane’s body was too. Despite the nights when they were as one, each remained trapped in individual consciousness and separate flesh. Rollmop herrings were clearly not the solution, but then again, had he chosen sea bass with fennel it would have been no different.’ The burden of materialism, and by extension atheism, is that it is less – not more – able to manage suffering and evil than religiousness. Nature is indifferent to human interest, cold and amoral without a God to make it good. What remains once the divine or supernatural is eliminated is not a life devoid of meaning but a life whose meaning is essentially dependent on bodily function: health, pleasure and physical ability. By nature, those things expire, and the hardships of being a vulnerable, fearful, mortal human thing are left bare. It’s no accident that once the Lieu de Changement’s business began to sag (as its customers’ bodies sagged) the Zen workshops arrived.
Houellebecq’s individualism is after Bataille’s maxim: an idea taken to its most terrible point. Thus the rejection of the family, which seems like one of the clearest fault-lines in Houellebecq’s honesty (because how many parents never find honest joys in parenthood?), is consistent at least insofar as it makes self-interest – that ‘iron-law’ – the clear and dominant thing. The island alluded to in the title of The Possibility of an Island is love, conceived as a haven and a release from one’s individuality. But it is always just an illusion of release, never a real possibility. Nonetheless, one is compelled by it. The revelation for Daniel is not that people are selfish, predatory animals (he affects to know this already) but how useless his cynicism has been. He loves Esther helplessly; he ‘fell for it’ all the same, and suffered the consequences. At its conclusion, Possibility traces the idea of love as a merging of two souls back to Plato. W
andering through a post-apocalyptic Spain, a remote descendant of Daniel’s finds a fragment from the dialogue Symposium where Aristophanes is explaining his theory of love as a miraculous meeting between two mortal halves:
I remembered perfectly what happens next [remarks Daniel’s descendent after reading the fragment]: Hephaestos the blacksmith appeared to the two mortals ‘while they were sleeping together’, proposing to melt them and weld them together, ‘so that from two they become only one, and that after their death, down there, in Hades, they will no longer be two, but one, having died a common death’. I remembered especially the final sentences: ‘And the reason for this is that our former nature was such that we formed a complete whole. It is the desire and pursuit of this whole that we call love.’