by Louis Betty
After my third glass I came close to suggesting we leave together, go and fuck in some office; on the desk or on the carpet, it didn’t matter; I was feeling up to making the necessary gestures. But I kept my mouth shut; and anyway I don’t think she’d have accepted; or else I’d have first had to put my arm around her waist, say she was beautiful, brush her lips in a tender kiss. There was no way out, for sure. I briefly excused myself and went to throw up in the toilets. (45)
During the narrator’s absence, Catherine returns to the party and is seen “listening [ . . . ] docilely” (45) to one of the ministry’s theoreticians: “She’d managed, in short, to regain control; perhaps it was all to the good, for her” (45).
Lechardoy’s ugliness is a precursor to that of Raphaël Tisserand. Houellebecq describes Tisserand’s futility in matters of seduction and sex in the most categorical terms. While on a train from Paris to Rouen to begin teaching his software courses, the narrator remarks apropos of his partner: “Vaguely Mediterranean in type, he is certainly rather fat [ . . . ] added to which his baldness is coming along nicely [ . . . ]. He has the exact appearance of a buffalo toad—thick, gross, heavy, deformed features, the very opposite of handsome. His shiny acned skin seems to permanently exude a greasy fluid. He wears bifocal glasses, because he’s extremely near-sighted to boot” (54). As the story moves forward, the narrator several times witnesses Tisserand’s failure to draw the slightest interest from the women he attempts to seduce. After drinking too much one evening at a bar full of students, Tisserand is “totally haggard. Wordlessly he lets me pay the bill, wordlessly he follows me as I make for the door. He’s stooped, huddled; he’s ashamed of himself, hates himself, wishes he were dead” (64). Tisserand’s despair reaches such depths that during a night out at a dance club on the Atlantic coast, the narrator tries to convince his colleague to murder two adolescents who have left the discotheque to fornicate on the beach. Speaking about women in general, the narrator enjoins Tisserand,
It’s not their beauty [that is most precious about them], I can tell you that much; it isn’t their vagina either, nor even their love; because all these disappear with life itself. And from now on you can possess their life. Launch yourself on a career of murder this very evening [ . . . ]. When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife [ . . . ] then you will truly be the master; then will you possess them body and soul [ . . . ]. A knife, Raphaël, is a powerful ally. (116–17)
Things take a turn toward the burlesque, however, and instead of stabbing his potential victims, Tisserand ends up masturbating as the woman fellates the man: “I turned back, I walked between the dunes. I could have killed them; they were oblivious to everything, they didn’t even know I was there. I masturbated. I had no wish to kill them; blood changes nothing” (120). Tisserand then speeds off back to Paris, only to be killed along the way when his car is crushed by a big rig: “I was never to see Tisserand again; he was killed in his car that night, on his return trip to Paris [ . . . ]. His 205 GTI collided head-on with a lorry that had pulled out into the middle of the carriageway. He died instantly, just before dawn” (120). At twenty-eight years old, Tisserand has ended his life a virgin. The novel reports the news of his death so abruptly that the reader cannot help recalling Houellebecq’s description of Lovecraft’s universe, where the “deaths of his heroes have no meaning,” and “[d]eath brings no appeasement”—all of it “evoking only the dismemberment of marionettes.” Houellebecq writes: “Around ten we learn of the death of Tisserand. A call from the family which a secretary passes on to the whole staff. We will receive, she says, a formal announcement later. I can’t really believe it; it’s too nightmarish for words. But no, it’s all true” (129).
However nightmarish the tale of Raphaël Tisserand may be, Houellebecq nonetheless reserves the bulk of his rhetorical violence for Brigitte Bardot, an obese adolescent with “no girlfriends” and “obviously no boyfriends” who is “completely alone” in her sixth-form class (87). Bardot appears in the somewhat bizarre context of the narrator’s animal fictions, specifically in a work entitled Dialogues Between a Dachshund and a Poodle (83), wherein one of the dogs “is reading aloud, to his companion, a manuscript found in the roll-top desk of his young master” (83–84). The canine narrator tells of Bardot,
Brigitte Bardot was truly repulsive. First of all she was extremely fat, a porker and even a super-porker, with abundant rolls of fat gracelessly disposed at the intersections of her obese body. Yet had she followed a slimming diet of the most frightening severity for twenty-five years her fate would not have been markedly improved. Because her skin was blotchy, puffy and acned. And her face was wide, flat and round, with little deep-set eyes, and straggly, lusterless hair. Indeed, the comparison with a sow forced itself on everyone. (87)
All is not lost for Bardot, however, for the writer of the manuscript appears to take pity on her—a pity mixed, naturally, with a sort of zoological fascination that is typically Houellebecquian: “Her hormonal mechanisms must have functioned normally, there’s no reason to suppose otherwise. And then? Does that suffice for having erotic fantasies? Did she imagine masculine hands lingering between the folds of her obese belly? Descending as far as her sexual parts? I turn to medicine and medicine can afford me no answer. There are many things concerning Bardot that I have not managed to elucidate. I have tried” (87–88).
In an attempt to discover those answers that medicine apparently cannot afford, the story’s narrator takes to talking with Bardot during class—nothing resembling a conversation, but rather requests for explanations about math problems, for example, and “all this with great prudence” (88–89). He even goes so far as to “touch her hand, in a seemingly accidental way,” to which Brigitte reacts “as if to an electric shock,” and the effect produced is “rather impressive” (89). Things continue in this way for a few weeks, and “the culminating point of our relations was attained just before Christmas, when I again accompanied her to her train [ . . . ]. That evening, in the middle of the platform, I kissed her on the cheek” (89). But fearing he has been spotted by another student, the narrator stops speaking to Brigitte after the Christmas holidays. He then reflects that “dating Bardot would have demanded a moral strength far superior to the one I could [ . . . ] pride myself on. Because not only was she ugly but she was plain nasty. Goaded on by sexual liberation [ . . . ] she couldn’t make appeal to some ethical notion of virginity, obviously. On top of that she was too intelligent and too lucid to account for her state as being a product of “Judeo-Christian influence [ . . . ]. All means of evasion were thus closed to her” (89–90). The narrator is not unaware of the cruel nature of his experiment with Bardot—an experiment that seems to have been aimed not so much at comforting her, but rather at accounting for the existence of her otherwise normal human consciousness within such an aberrantly repugnant physical form. He explains:
In the end I am not terribly proud of this story. The whole thing was too manifestly ludicrous to be devoid of cruelty. For example I recall myself greeting her one morning with these words, “Oh, you have a new dress, Brigitte.” It was really repulsive, even if true; because the fact is amazing but nonetheless real: she’d changed her dress. I even remember one time when she’d put a ribbon in her hair: Oh my God! a calf’s head decorated with chopped parsley, more like. I implore her pardon in the name of all humanity. (90)
One would have an easy enough time reproaching such descriptions for their cruelty, and, were it not for the fact that the absolute, irremediable, and even imponderable ugliness of a character like Bardot might seem comic in its excess and incongruity, such rhetorical insensitivity would likely fail to dismay only the most cynical of readers. The journalist Marie-Françoise Colombani, whom Houellebecq quotes in Public Enemies, writes apropos of Platform, “You have to keep telling yourself it isn’t true, life isn’t like this, that it’s like some horrid story you might tell children[;] you have to read this book the way we play at scaring ourselves”
(Houellebecq and Lévy 2011, 275). Colombani’s remark goes right to the heart of materialist horror: however terse and “realist” in tone Houellebecq’s novels might be, such realism is in fact a cleverly wrought delivery mechanism for disproportionate and surreal horror.
It is helpful to consider, for the sake of argument, the numerous and rather obvious objections to the claim that Houellebecq’s fiction should be assimilated to a kind of “social realism” tracking the demise of moral and spiritual values in a secular, late capitalist West.1 For example, while the ugliness of a creature like Tisserand is certainly believable enough (and one cannot help feeling legitimate pity when he describes himself as “a shrink-wrapped chicken leg on a supermarket shelf”; 98), many readers no doubt have difficulty accepting the notion that characters like Tisserand, Lechardoy, and Bardot would be forced to endure the sexual pauperization that Houellebecq’s novels take to be their lot. In Whatever, Tisserand is concerned with trying to seduce young—college- or even high-school-aged—girls, who are young enough that they may be prone to reject him for reasons other than his appearance. Never does Houellebecq mention the possibility that Tisserand might date someone his own age or someone of his own looks; his sexual failures come off as the result not so much of universal rejection, but rather of his feverish attempts to play out of his league. Why not have Tisserand date Catherine Lechardoy, for example? Surely these two would not be so repulsed by each other that they would in all instances refuse each other’s intimacy. Experience does not confirm Whatever’s thesis about sexual pauperization. The great majority of people do eventually find a bedmate; the person may not be particularly attractive—he or she might even be “plain nasty,” as Houellebecq writes of Bardot—but the fact that such people exist indicates that a set of equally unprepossessing parents conspired to conceive them. Understood most cynically, Whatever’s theory of sexual pauperization represents a complaint by average-looking, somewhat aging men about their inability to gain sexual favors from nubile adolescents. The novel’s main thesis, read in a certain light, winds up sounding like a declaration of erotic snobbery proffered by those unwilling to lower standards to which they themselves no longer, or never did, live up.
A similar complaint appears in Platform, a novel that condemns a putative “erotic laxity” on the part of contemporary Europeans. Houellebecq writes,
Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that’s what westerners don’t know how to do anymore. They’ve completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural [ . . . ]. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that, we’re obsessed with health and hygiene. These are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love. (2002, 174–75)
Some validity certainly exists in these observations. It would be hard to deny, for example, that the proliferation of pornography, especially through the Internet, has produced, or at least suggested, physical standards that may not have applied in the past. Likewise, experience shows that with an increase in sexual partners, relationships, and other liaisons, the ability to feel sentimental abandon tends to decrease. People become wary of being rejected, sick of suffering, and the adolescent tendency to throw oneself heart and soul at a person is very naturally replaced by a more cautious approach. To the extent that individual liberty can lead to sexual profligacy, one can reasonably infer some link between the acute consciousness of our individual existence and a reluctance to place ourselves in a state of dependency vis-à-vis a romantic partner.
Difficult, however, to countenance in this passage is the hardly veiled insinuation that contemporary Westerners are somehow no longer enjoying having sex with each other. Such a claim seems wholly out of line with common sense: good or bad sex depends mostly on the person with whom one engages in it, not on the civilization to which one belongs. Even more important to note is that the sexual ideal that Houellebecq’s novels enshrine—in which lovers abandon themselves to each other’s affections—is less an indictment of Western sexual mores and more a championing of a very adolescent vision of romantic experience. The ability to throw caution to the wind in matters of romance is the luxury of those who have not suffered rejection, deceit, or betrayal, and while one might be jealous of those who remain in such a state of naïveté, the inevitability of its being shattered leads one more often than not to feelings of pity at the thought of lost innocence. Houellebecq’s fiction does not consider that the experience of amorous disappointment might lead to a person’s psychological maturation, and with that the possibility of founding a future relationship on something more stable than mere sentimental abandon. Rather, Houellebecq offers a vision of the romantic in which “love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for illusion, as an aptitude for epitomizing the whole of the other sex in a single loved being rarely resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two” (2011, 113); that is, disappointment, temporary cynicism, and experimentation render a person not the wiser for the wear, but instead permanently incapable of love. It is a horrifying statement; certainly, most sexually mature people have lost, or simply curtailed out of the wisdom of repeated experience, that capacity for abandon that Houellebecq identifies as necessary for “love.”
Many of Houellebecq’s theses thus fail to bear scrutiny, rendering problematic the claims that Houellebecq’s fiction is, as John McCann has argued, a “reflection of the social and economic reality of contemporary life” (2011, 1). This is not to say that Houellebecq is not deeply contemporary; the trouble, rather, is that Houellebecq’s modus operandi as a novelist is experimental rather than realist (realism being understood here in the ontological rather than stylistic sense), and thus the interest in evaluating his work lies in whether the results of the experiment are intelligible in contemporary terms, not whether they describe contemporary conditions. The cases of Tisserand, Lechardoy, and Bardot, for example, ought at the very least lead one to reflect on the injustices that matter seems arbitrarily to inflict on human beings, as well as on the ways in which modern liberalism and its propaganda arm, advertising, insists on and thereby inflates these natural injustices. Likewise, Michel’s tirade against Western sexuality in Platform, however implausible in many ways, stirs up important questions about the relationships among individualism, narcissism, sexuality, and the changes in sexual values that followed the upheaval of the 1960s. So long as the reader agrees to play by the rules of his experiment, Houellebecq has much to say about the dangers of unfettered scientism, secularization, the commodification of sexuality, and the narcissism that may grow out of excessive individualism. Whatever exaggeration or error may be involved in these renderings is beside the point. What matters is whether the results of the experiment are convincing within the parameters laid forth. That is, the results need not be culturally accurate; they need only be culturally intelligible, and the careful reader will separate truth from falsity, insight from excess.
For the remainder of this chapter, I explore the origins of the concept of “materialist horror” as Houellebecq wields it, first by drawing several parallels between Lovecraft’s texts and Houellebecq’s, and then by examining a link with Blaise Pascal, whom Houellebecq has often cited as an influence. The connection with Lovecraft becomes apparent through a consideration of the theme of humanity’s insignificance in the greater cosmic scheme; the relation with Pascal emerges through an examination of the authors’ shared sensitivity to the terror of the infinite.
Lovecraft, Pascal, Houellebecq
The American horror fiction writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft is today best known for his creation of the Cthulhu mythos, a series of weird stories, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow Out of Time, which have inspired the artist H. R. Giger and the imagery of the Alien film series; global heavy metal icon Metallica; and contemporary horror fiction writers, including Stephen K
ing. Lovecraft, a highborn New Englander who died poor and unrecognized in 1937, was a famous misanthrope, and his cycle of Cthulhu stories demonstrates a sensitivity to the insignificance of humanity’s place in the universe that few modern writers have matched. The Shadow Out of Time, for example, a tale in which a New England professor named Peaslee trades bodies with a Yithian and is sent millions of years into the past to live among this erstwhile race, reveals an eons-old cosmology of innumerable galactic civilizations compared with which human life appears only as an afterthought. Lovecraft writes,
After man there would be a mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—to another stopping-place in the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing its horror filled core, before the utter end. (2009, 288–89)
The Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi offers a summary of Lovecraftian cosmology: “Lovecraft, in a major departure from the previous horror tradition [ . . . ] would emphasize the insignificance of humanity in a universe that appears to be boundless both in space and time. He would do this chiefly by the depiction of immense entities—called ‘gods’ by human beings who cannot comprehend such creatures except by appeals to a deity—from the farthest depths of space” (2008, xi). Cthulhu, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth—readers of Lovecraft will recognize these names as the horrible, inhuman superbeings that lie just beyond the reaches of known time and space, awaiting the proper invocations and magical utterances in order to loose their fury on humankind. Confronted with these blasphemous entities, Lovecraft’s characters—a series of invariably dour male academicians—dangle on the cusp of madness, unable completely to accept yet also unable to deny the enormity of the terrible cosmic mysteries they have glimpsed. “I shall never sleep calmly again,” confesses the protagonist of “The Call of Cthulhu,” Francis Wayland Thurston, after having come nearly face to face with Cthulhu through the harrowing account of a Norwegian ship captain, “when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favored by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air” (Lovecraft 2008, 375).