Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  Michel Houellebecq and the

  Literature of Despair

  Also available from Bloomsbury

  Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Philippe

  Durand and Naomi Mandel

  Ethics and Desire in the Wake of Postmodernism by Graham Matthews

  Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction by Sonia Baelo-Allu

  Toni Morrison and Literary Tradition by Justine Jenny Baillie

  Salman Rushdie’s Cities by Vassilena Parashkevova

  Michel Houellebecq and the

  Literature of Despair

  By Carole Sweeney

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1Reception: Notes on Two Scandals

  2The Extension of the Domain of the Struggle: The Third Spirit of Capitalism

  3(Bad) Subjects of Neoliberalism

  4Liquidating the Sixties

  5Sex: ‘a second system’

  6The End of Affect

  Conclusion

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  This book was made possible with the kind help and cheerful assistance of many friends and colleagues at Goldsmiths, Department of English and Comparative Literature, to whom I am immensely grateful.

  Warmest thanks go to my brother and my colleague Marie-Claude Canova Green for their invaluable help with tricky translations; also to Jackie Clarke for providing me with a bracing reading list for May 1968 and to Carrie Hamilton for similar on sex tourism. Thank you to Sophie Corser for her top-notch editing skills and to Maria Lauret, Nicky Marsh and Tim Parnell for being such exacting and generous readers of my work and especially for the latter’s constant loving encouragement and forbearance.

  This book is dedicated to my family: to my new and wonderful husband, to Tom and Monique, and to the memory of my father, 1920–2012. Lastly, it is for my beloved daughter, Pascale, who has grown into an adult over the course of its writing.

  I am grateful to the following journals for their permission to reproduce earlier versions of some material in this book: Modern and Contemporary France, ‘Natural Women? Anti-Feminism and Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme’ 20:3 (2012); Journal of Modern Literature ‘“And yet some free time remains….”: Post-Fordism and Writing in Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever,’ 33.4 (2010).

  Introduction

  … there’s little point in denying that he has some profoundly fascistic tendencies […] Like Céline, he’s a right-wing misanthrope who has produced a genuinely perceptive and resonant picture of French society – obscenified and resonating.1

  In May 2000 a book appeared in British book shops with a cover featuring a half-naked woman staring dolefully into camera. Inscribed in gaudy embossed gold lettering across her naked breasts was a single word: ‘atomised’. The cover was in many ways puzzling, as the woman’s state of undress seemed to gesture to sex, or at least to some form of eroticism; but she appears uncomfortable, cold, even sullen, with her gaze turned reproachfully towards the reader. This unsettling combination of sex and dejection suggested by the cover of Michel Houellebecq’s second novel Atomised (Les Particules éleméntaires 1998) is fitting for a work that has from the outset been difficult to position aesthetically, politically and intellectually. Almost immediately, the novel made a significant commercial and critical impact but one disputed and applauded in almost equal measures as demonstrated by the division of critical opinion in Houellebecq’s native France. Both the writer and his novel attracted front page news and Houellebecq began to appear frequently on television, mumbling his way through interviews, head down, cigarette clamped between middle and ring finger. His physical presence did nothing to dispel the controversial reception of the novel, in fact, quite the opposite: ‘the only thing the French seem to agree on about Houellebecq’, noted a contemporary reviewer in The New York Times, ‘is that he is the first French novelist since Balzac whose work captures the social realities of contemporary life’.2 Accusations of misogyny, obscenity, eugenicism, fascism, racism, misanthropy and general intellectual delinquency levelled against the novel did little to hinder its commercial success and the freshly translated novel arrived in the Anglophone literary world complete with a long tailwind of controversy. With the exception of his first novel Whatever (1998) (Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994) which garnered slight but favourable critical attention, Houellebecq’s career as a novelist has been beset with an unusual amount of controversy, so much so that the French press gave the commotion around the publication of Atomised its very own label: l’affaire Houellebecq. Each subsequent novel, Plateforme (2001) (Platform 2002), Lanzarote (2000, 2003), La Possibilité d’une île (2005) (The Possibility of an Island 2006) and the latest, La Carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory 2011), has in turn intensified interest, both positive and negative, in his work. Positioned somewhere on a continuum between indictment and admiration, most critical reactions have largely concurred that, for better or for worse, the novels of Michel Houellebecq are the ‘most discussed literary-cultural phenomena of the past decade’ and register an important shift in France’s intellectual and political climate.3 This shift, one that is as much political as it is intellectual, is the subject of this book.

  In France, the 1998 rentrée littéraire was dominated, overwhelmed even, by the rumpus around a single novel: Les Particules éleméntaires. Le Monde devoted several front-page headlines detailing Houellebecq’s dismissal from the editorial board of the literary review Perpendiculaire for serious ideological differences with his colleagues. The ‘differences’ that troubled Perpendiculaire’s editorial board would prove to be the same as those shaping the novel’s sharply divided reception in France, as reviewers and critics rapidly separated into two distinctly opposing camps over what Atomised might represent. It was either, they claimed, a deeply reactionary, splenetic treatise that implicitly endorsed the ills of contemporary society on the one hand, or a brilliantly sharp Balzacian social satire condemning these same ills on the other. Reaction to the novel was, as Marion Van Renterghem observed in Le Monde, extensive and intense: ‘Rarely has a novel caused so much ink to flow, incited such passions, outbursts of anger and hate’.4 More than a decade on from the publication of Atomised, the critical quarrels around Houellebecq’s work have subsided somewhat but have by no means disappeared, as recently demonstrated by the pejorative comments of Tahar Ben Jalloun, a member of the Prix Goncourt jury that had just awarded Houellebecq this most prestigious of French literary prizes for his latest novel La Carte et le territoire. Unequivocal in his distaste for the novel, Jalloun derided it for its uninspired prose style, lack of imagination and a spiritually impoverished view of modern life amounting to little more, he claimed, than ‘trivial chatter on the human condition in an affected writing style that claims to be some sort of cleansing’.5 Far from being a routine spat among literary prize jurors, Jalloun’s comments made headline news in France. It is precisely the nature of this ‘chatter’ about the human condition, trivial or otherwise, that has landed Houellebecq in political and artistic trouble almost continuously since 1998. The same question seems to run through all contemporary critical and popular reception of his work in newspapers, literary reviews and magazines, from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other: is Houellebecq saying what he really means or is it a form of ironic mockery that deploys the attitude and language of its subject to mount its critique? Does he belong to a tradition of satirical writers who turn a caustic eye over their own society or is he articulating a new form of genuinely held masculine ressentiment? Either way, Houe
llebecq’s novels represent important, if highly contentious, responses to the changed climate of post-’68 France and, as such, he very quickly obtained the status of provocateur littéraire, achieved most famously by Céline and Flaubert before him.6

  I will argue in this book that critical attention, positive and otherwise, and popular success have accrued to Houellebecq’s novels in part because they can be read across the political spectrum, troubling all sides simultaneously. Putting his finger on a basic contradiction inherent in the ‘liquid times’ of late capitalism, that is the ontological tension between moral and personal freedom and the intense commodification of all human life under such conditions, Houellebecq offers a withering critique of neoliberal late capitalism that never manages to extricate itself entirely from accusations of complicity with its object of scrutiny. His fundamental concern is the encroachment of capitalism in its neoliberal biopolitical form into all areas of affective human life; a thesis made explicit early in his oeuvre in Whatever where the narrator asserts that ‘economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society’.7 The human subject is, according to Houellebecq’s work considered here, now completely permeated by the discourses and logic of exchange: ‘we live not just in a market economy, but more generally in a market society: namely, within a form of civilization in which the entirety of human relations, and equally the entirety of the relations between man and the world, are mediated via a simple numerical calculation entailing attractiveness, novelty, and value for money’.8 His work presents the subsumption of sexual desire and human intimacy into the mechanisms of quantification and exchange as simply the final stage of capitalism that transforms human attributes into commodities to be exchanged in a deregulated market. On the face of it, then, this seems like a standard leftist critique of the alienation and reification of late capitalism and as such amounts to, as some of Houellebecq’s less sympathetic critics have noted, little more than an updating of the Communist Manifesto. But, as we shall see, Houellebecq is certainly no Marxist and le monde houellebecquien, as it has come to be known, is a stubbornly un-dialectical space, which moves gradually further and further from any vital connection with the human and the social, indeed from any felt contact with the world. He identifies the intensive reshaping of the self in the language of the commodity and of transaction but finally struggles to envisage any space outside of that process where critical thinking might take place. Every last sphere of human thought and behaviour has been recuperated under the sign of exchange leaving humanity nowhere to go save for its own disappearance into a post-metaphysical desubjectivity.

  Crossing ideological positions from right to left, the form as much as the content of Houellebecq’s writing cannot easily be placed. Speaking directly to a moment in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in its own ‘modern stupid’ language, his novels can be read, on the one hand, as a reactionary response to the progressive socio-cultural movements of the twentieth century such as feminism and multi-culturalism while on the other, they seem to offer a compelling critique of the totalizing mechanism of the ‘market’ with its hitherto unparalleled influence on human life. But it is difficult to separate these things out as Houellebecq seems to refuse to condemn properly, ideologically or ethically, what, on the surface, he appears to be critiquing. His writing is thus ideologically forked, as it seems to participate in, even approve of, the very world that it purports to condemn. Narrated in the idiom of its object of enquiry, the narrative elements in Houellebecq’s novels are interposed with a series of (possibly) satirical structuring devices that are inconsistently and unevenly deployed in ways that frequently make any critical purchase on the subject matter, if not impossible, then extremely difficult. Herein, then, lies one of the most disquieting effects of his work as he manipulates, what Martin Crowley calls, a ‘wilfully scandalous deployment of cultural material’, slipping time and again between surface and depth, high and low, concern and indifference.9 Typically Houellebecq’s prose moves between the serious, the introspective and the philosophical only to deflate this with the low comedy of le monde houellebecquien: the body, supermarkets and masturbation. The socio-cultural terrain of this world is shaped by reality TV, airport novels, fast food, pornography, short-term flexible working practices and even shorter-term sexual relationships. Discontented with such a world, Houellebecq’s work suggests that if alienation is shown to be the condition of the everyday, it is the task of the novelist to show this in a correspondingly alienated language. If it is to say anything worthwhile, the novel must find its voice in the degraded cultural coinage of trash culture. Thus, the technique Houellebecq employs to show this thoroughly alienated world is to enact a banal, familiar, everyday non-literary language. Houellebecq’s writing shows little sustained interest in formalistic concerns and certainly suggests that there is no aesthetic consolation to be had from good form.

  Arguably as controversial as his provocative pronouncements on sex and race, Houellebecq’s novelistic style has both irked and impressed his critics. A detached grey-ish prose, it proceeds by way of a particularly ‘un-novelistic’ style that seems, at times, to be utterly indifferent to any aesthetic concerns. Being un-novelistic is not, of course, new to modern French literature, indeed anti-novelistic, anti-narrative writing has been the distinctive quality of the last two significant French literary movements, the nouveau roman and autofiction. Unallied to any particular literary school or movement, Houellebecq feels himself to be quite distinct from theoretically influenced writers, particularly those influenced by post-structuralism, once remarking that ‘in terms of literature, I don’t feel an affiliation with the preceding generation’.10 A patchy anti-psychological realism is the default mode of his writing in which essayistic digressions, aphoristic assertions and para-literary exposition are held together within a perfunctory frame of realist narrative, what Houellebecq describes as ‘the idea of a kind of realism’.11 Although his first novel claims that trying to tell a ‘story’ these days is simply ‘pure bullshit’, there is nonetheless a veneer of realism in which there remains a will to tell a story (in many ways, it almost always the same story) but one that wholly rejects any form of psychological depth.12 This de-psychologization is carried out in ways that are light years from the clean lines and cool detachment of the nouveau roman that purged the novel of psychological depth and any lingering residues of romanticism as part of the post-war economic and cultural entreprise de nettoyage in France. Unlike postmodernist fiction and its self-conscious concerns around microtextuality and metalanguage, Houellebecq has little, if any, time for the parodic, the intertextual, the playful, the metafictional or pastiche; offering instead a deadpan, sclerotic prose that rarely troubles itself to pursue any rigorous aesthetic (or in places, intellectual) consistency. Despite the occasional cool authorial interjections about its own status as writing, his novels are not interested in the self-conscious manoeuvres that inhabit the ‘properly’ postmodernist novel. Aware that the novel form is perhaps not best suited to contemporary conditions Houellebecq accepts the ruination of novelistic discourse, as one of his narrators observes we are ‘… a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least’.13 Consequently, with the possible exception of his first novel Whatever, there is only a nominal idea of narrative progression or sequence in each of the novels, typically involving a sexual relationship between an unattractive male protagonist and a significantly more attractive and younger woman that results in suicide, desertion, or psychosis. ‘[G]rinding pointlessly on … ’14 with little sense of development or aesthetic consideration, the plots are, at best, meagre affairs, where perfunctorily sketched characters function as ciphers for the overarching hypothesis of his writing that ‘the goal of life is missed’.15

  Unallied then, to any genre or movement in contemporary French or European literature, each of Houellebecq’s novels depicts what he calls the progressive ‘suicide of the west’. Little wonder the
n that Julian Barnes’s back-cover blurb for Atomised claims that Houellebecq’s novel ‘hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits’. Macho metaphors aside, this is a largely accurate assessment of Atomised’s flawed but grand intellectual ambition in which the novel recounts this ‘suicide’ in a text that runs an extensive gamut from philosophy, molecular science and post-industrial French history to forensically, even pornographically, detailed sex scenes, occasional ruminations on penis size and the joy of Monoprix food. To engage meaningfully with Houellebecq’s vision one needs to be able to distinguish or differentiate between the ‘low’ surface trashiness and the ‘high’ intellectual stakes of his writing as the terrain of le monde houellebecquien is one where high and low cultures and discourses collide; where a prolonged cogitation on the agnosticism of modern France glides into a discussion of the merits of a particular supermarket ready-meal; forensically detailed pornographic descriptions nestle against eschatological treatises and scientific descriptions of mitochondrial DNA. Precisely the same flat narrative voice articulates the profound joy of watching ‘pussy in motion’ in a tawdry Parisian peep show as discusses the imperative to decode the genome in evolutionary terms.16 Le monde houellebecquien is one in which Bourdieu’s notion of taste and distinction has all but disappeared, where pulp fiction, bandes dessinées, retail catalogues and teen magazines are discussed in the same breath as the theories of Max Planck, Kantian ethics, class politics in Agatha Christie novels, the decline of pig farming in Northern France, Comtian positivism and Balzac’s renowned contempt for the middle classes. Conversant with Sartre and Deleuze, Houellebecq’s characters are as likely to prefer the work of John Grisham and David Baldacci. Thrashed out in a kind of shambolic, makeshift realism, interspersed with moraliste essayistic asides producing a uniformly flat-as-a-pancake style, the narrative form of his novels has been described variously as a depressive, flat and ‘nonironical lyricism’ commensurate with its subject of existential desolation and dejection, mourning a world in which philosophy has died and with it, Houellebecq suggests, our ability to read, to parent and to love, a world ‘without expectation’.17