Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  This tumbling together of high and low might, at first, appear as a kind of skilfully wrought intertextuality pointing up the interrelatedness of contemporary life but it is, as I will argue in this book, an inventory of the compacted texture of everyday life that, Houellebecq suggests, has been evacuated of distinction and fatally colonized by the rationalizing nexus of exchange. If distinction is in decline, it is because all has been reduced to a state of similitude in a commercial open market in which everything is subject to the dissolution of symbolic meaning. This thesis is summed up in Rester vivant et autres textes (1991), a collection of essays that acts as a useful counterpart to the novels and, in several places, is often indistinguishable from them in both theme and tone. The ideas in this collection resonate strikingly with Baudrillard’s thinking in his 1968 work The System of Objects where he writes that the goal of the consumer society is the imposition of a bland ‘uniformula’, a ‘profound monotony’, that constitutes ‘a devolution in the bliss of the consuming masses’, achieved through the ‘functionalization of the consumer and the psychological monopolization of all need … ’.18 This uniformity of everyday life imposed through consumption invokes a sense of devolved bliss, which is no bliss at all, is an idea that permeates all of Houellebecq’s work. Bliss, ecstasy, the sublime – all are subsumed into the material of exchange and ‘any true, fine sociological distinctions of the Proustian kind have today been replaced’ by the ‘sober, crystal-clear formulae’ of a quantifying commodification. It seems anomalous then, Houellebecq muses, ‘that the parameters of sexual exchange should still remain tied to lyrical, impressionistic, and highly unreliable descriptions’.19 Houellebecq’s characters cannot function in such a world stripped of lyricism, or one governed by the banal dynamics of exchange. Le monde houellebecquien, then, is one of radical disenchantment.

  Contoured by an overwhelming feeling of acedia, and a sense that any possibility of mythic or symbolic transcendence in life has been irrevocably lost, Houellebecq’s novels are inhabited, as we shall see, by protagonists who can neither understand nor enjoy the alienating ‘sex and shopping’ world of consumption around them. Beginning with the caustic precision of Whatever in which the unnamed narrator finds the world in which he lives to be profoundly alienating, even mysteriously so, each of Houellebecq’s characters, in many ways all the same character, fail either to understand or enjoy the spoils of the consumer society, experiencing ‘lifestyle’ choices, leisure opportunities and sexual freedom as acutely agonizing. As I argue here, his novels are populated by the failed subjects of late capitalism; failures because they are unable to take even the most fleeting pleasure in the infantilizing festival of commodity consumption. With few kinship ties and working long hours, Houellebecquian characters (if they can even be properly called that) live alone in a quotidian round of ready meals, sexual disappointment, and mail order catalogues. Economically affluent, they are often erotic paupers, their lives marked either by desultory onanism interspersed with inconsistent sexual encounters or by failed attempts at sexual love. His protagonists live insignificantly and move indifferently within an environment so systematically reified that the quintessence of freedom is now defined as the ability to order a ‘guaranteed delivery of hot food at a given hour’.20 The reduction of the idea of freedom to a simple choice between one act of consumption and another is unequivocally blamed, as I will consider in detail, on the generation of ’68.

  In France, Houellebecq’s work has been considered scandalously controversial for its unapologetically dogged indictment of the generation of 1968 and for what he sees as the wholesale failure of its radical social and cultural politics. His novels blame the soixante-huitards, and feminists in particular, for the decline of organized religion, the destruction of the nuclear family and the rise of a narcissistic individualism that has come to define Western society. Moreover, Houellebecq argues that not only did the radical politics of ’68 fail to bring about lasting social and sexual changes, but they actually facilitated the progress of a more tenacious version of consumer capitalism that drew much of its energy from the very same individualism promulgated by the soixante-huitards. In this view then, subversive theories of commodity fetishism thrown up by post-’68 Marxist thought and the complex psychoanalytical model of the Freudian–Lacanian desiring subject are now used to sell soft furnishings and package holidays, thus opening up ever-proliferating avenues of consumption, making possible the niche marketing of affective capitalism. Writing at a point when the last of the ’68 French thinkers – Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida, Bourdieu, Blanchot, Baudrillard – have died, Houellebecq’s work seems to mark these deaths in, what might be called, ‘post-theoretical’ novels that exemplify a certain strain of reactionary thinking known as la pensée anti-’68 (anti-’68 thought). Rejecting the linguistically inflected preoccupations of post-structuralism and the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, Houellebecq’s novels are, in many ways, curiously old-fashioned romans à theses that have, at heart, a concern with that rather baggy notion, the human condition. Characterized by a quasi-Comtianism that is brusquely dismissive of the sacrosanct generation of ’68, the supremacy of ‘high’ French critical theory is swept aside in his work as he ridicules the linguistically fixated cultural turn of post-structuralism and its post-Nietzschean obsession with difference, textuality and sexual politics – as we shall see, while Houellebecq’s work is full of sex, it is completely indifferent to gender.

  In many ways his work testifies to the failure of the post-’68 avant garde project to integrate culture and life in an effort to counter the disenchantment and loss of vitality inherent in modernity as le monde houellebecquien is characterized by a despairing disenchantment in which everyday life, what Henri Lefebvre terms the ‘fragmented activities’ of eating, dwelling and dressing, has lost any possibility of revolutionary autocritique. The potentially ‘marvellous’ or ‘mythic’ texture of what Lefebvre calls the ‘social text’ of the everyday has been annihilated in le monde houellebecquien and all we are really left with in his novels, after the dark humour, the sex and the forensic perusal of the blasted spaces of the everyday, is the possibility of retreat, withdrawal and silence.21 Suggesting that there is no longer a point from which any affirmative political or intellectual resistance is possible, Houellebecq mercilessly lampoons the soixante-huitards for their allegiance to Freudo-Marxist ‘high’ theories, singling out psychoanalysis for particular derision, along with the work of Derrida and Foucault. If theory is dead then irony is equally ineffectual. It too has been recuperated by capital, transformed into eminently profitable transgression. The salving potential of ironic laughter is finally unworkable in Houellebecq’s novels: ‘… humour doesn’t do anything at all’.22 Overall, then, the view of ’68 as a moment that smoothed the way for the more potent forces of biopolitical neoliberalism places Houellebecq on both the left and the right as this is a thesis that, in different ways, appeals to both conservative and progressive agendas and, as such, characterizes him as a rouge-brun or Left-Conservative writer.23

  What is it in particular, then, that has made Houellebecq’s work resonate so intensely with reading publics and literary critics? The shock of graphic sexual description or eccentric narrative form cannot alone account for its exceptional popular and critical success and notoriety as contemporary French fiction has certainly been no less pornographic or anti-novelistic than Houellebecq’s. Both Catherine Breillat and Catherine Millet have articulated ideas around sex and sexuality that are at least as, if not substantially more, ‘pornographic’ than those in Atomised and Platform. Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2002) focuses almost entirely on sexual activity. Labelled ‘sick’ by Le Monde, Virginie Despentes’ 1999 novel Baise-moi is a staggeringly violent sexual odyssey, unflinchingly recounting scenes of rape and murder, that was subsequently turned into a film. In French art-house cinema, sexual explicitness had become, if not quite ubiquitous, then certainly less rare with three controversially se
xually graphic films realized in the space of two years, for example Breillat’s Romance (1999), Despentes’ and Coralie Trinh Thi’s film version of Baise-moi (2000) and Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002).24 Similarly, Houellebecq’s focus on alienation, both sexual and social, was by no means a unique phenomenon in French fiction of 1990s. Marie Darrieussecq and Igeor Gran have written powerfully of the profound cultural, sexual and social alienation and the loss of national particularity in fin de siècle/pre-millennial France. Elsewhere, contemporaries of Houellebecq, Amélie Nothomb, Jean Echenoz, Christine Angot, Maurice Dantec and Michel Rio have all offered similarly bleak, controversial portraits of modern life. Indeed in 1998, the year when Les Particules éleméntaires was published, there was anything but a dearth of controversial novelists and it was certainly true that at the time of its publication ‘there was nothing in the novel, either thematically or descriptively, that cannot also be found in other works’.25 And yet it is Houellebecq’s writing that has ignited such intense responses, the likes of which have not been witnessed in France since Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

  Atomised and Houellebecq’s other novels considered here offer such a compelling yet contentious response to the culture of late capitalism not simply because they up the pornographic stakes whilst mixing in some misogyny and racism to épater, if not the bourgeoisie than the leftist critical establishments in France, but because, as noted above, they do not seem to distance themselves sufficiently from their object of enquiry and, further, refuse to come down on one ideological side or another; a refusal exacerbated by the presence of Houellebecq in the media. Far from the death of the author, it seems to matter very much when the author, the living, chain-smoking, rapping, interview-giving, maternally rejected, ‘real’ Michel Houellebecq appears on television and categorically refuses to defend himself against the charges of anti-feminism and anti-Islam, preferring rather, to fan the flames of controversy by often elaborating on these in some detail. Houellebecq has been, at least in his earlier career, the opposite of a recluse, courting public attention through the media and regularly talking at length about his work on TV, radio and in the print media; he is, what is called in French, mediatisé, a term which awkwardly translates as thoroughly represented by all forms of media. His public image has a separate, yet intimately connected, relationship to his writing as time and again Houellebecq, the author, stands accused of holding the views expressed in his novels, thus returning us to Barthes’s famous pronouncement that a literary work is ‘always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the author “confiding in us”’.26 Houellebecq’s image, that of the doleful, politically ambivalent dépressif, circulates powerfully in the interpretative economy of his work and, as such, is inextricably caught up in its reception. The French editions of many of his novels show not an anonymous woman in her underwear on the cover, but Houellebecq himself, plastic shopping bag gloomily wedged in the crook of his arm, scowling and smoking, his cigarette precariously balanced between the third and fourth fingers, instantly joining the pantheon of iconographic French intellectual smokers. This, of course, perpetuates the ongoing confusion of author with text and with character – most of his novels feature a character called Michel whose biographical details are strikingly close to those of the ‘author’ and in La Carte et le territoire, one of the characters is named Houellebecq.

  My arguments in this book begin with the controversies around the publication of first Atomised and then Platform.27 In France, the publication of the former saw Houellebecq simultaneously praised and vilified; hailed both as a Camus for the ‘internet generation’ and as the new Louis Ferdinand Céline. Chapter 1, ‘Reception: Notes on Two Scandals’, traces the trajectory of the reception of these novels in the popular and literary press. I examine the charges of ideological misbehaviour that were levelled against him by his colleagues and certain sections of the press and also how his work has been read as symptomatic of a fallen France, une France tombée, part of a more pervasive rhetoric of déclinisme both in France and abroad. Looking at literary reviews and magazines, websites, newspapers and magazines in both English-speaking and French contexts, this chapter examines the main tendencies in the popular reception of his work and focuses in particular on what has become known as ‘l’affaire Houellebecq’ in 1999 and on the race-hate trial after the publication of Platform in which Houellebecq stood accused of insulting Islam.

  Chapter 2 examines the overarching hypothesis running through all of the novels considered here; namely, that market principles of commodification and exchange have come to determine and define the entire life world and that neoliberalism, with its subjectifying biopolitical powers, has extended the reach of reification into the every intimate and affective domain of human life. This, then, is what Houllebecq calls the extension of the domain of the struggle. Drawing on a body of critical work on neoliberalism, particularly Luc Boltanksi and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, Maurizio Lazaretto, David Harvey, Wendy Brown, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work in Empire, I first trace the development of neoliberalism in the post-Cold War era in a more general economic sense in order to follow its transformation into late capitalist post-Fordism that both precedes and overlaps with what we now call neoliberalism. Using Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and biopower that suggest that the extension of state power is effected through ostensibly non-ideological means, this chapter looks at the subjectifying mechanisms of neoliberalism that has in its sights not just the transformation of labour practices and patterns of consumption but the total colonization of everyday life into privatized interest and enterprise producing not citizens but the super-rational figure of homo œconomicus.

  Isolated white, middle class, middle-aged males, economically comfortable but existentially and sexually besieged, Houellebecq’s characters live in a society no longer shaped by religion, kinship or the consolations of culture or philosophy but by economic, scientific and technological imperatives. Indifferently shuffling around in this neoliberal world where moral freedom is defined by choice of consumption and everything is available to be consumed, Houellebecq’s characters singularly fail to achieve the requisite attachment to their own surplus value. Indifferent to the advantages of free enterprise, flexible working patterns and private ownership, they are set adrift in the networks of social, cultural and sexual deregulation. Chapter 1 considers the ways in which all his characters are flawed or bad subjects of neoliberalism who flounder and finally malfunction within a system that permits no alternative, no outside, to the regime of the production and circulation of commodities.

  One of the enduring ‘scandals’ of Houellebecq’s work in France is his relentlessly negative depiction of the spirit of ’68. Examining the trajectory of anti-’68 thought (la pensée anti-’68) in French culture beginning in the 1980s, Chapter 1, ‘Liquidating the Sixties’, argues that the novels examined here form part of a wider political and cultural discourse of a ‘turn to the right’, droitisation, that disregards any progressive achievements that came out of the radical politics of ’68. Houellebecq argues that with their emphasis on anti-humanism, narcissistic individualism and above all desire, the soixante-huitards merely smoothed the way for capitalism’s incursion into the private and affective domains. I look here at the ways in which his work singles out feminism for particular opprobrium, blaming it for encouraging a damaging moral relativism that proved to be ruinous not only for the family unit but also for relations between men and women. Reading Atomised and Platform, this chapter explores Houellebecq’s proposition that ’68’s emphasis on sexual liberation has led us towards Sade rather than Rousseau and has rendered us incapable of either love or compassion.

  Continuing to examine some of the concerns of the previous chapter, Chapter 5 looks at the ubiquity of sex in Houellebecq’s novels and argues that it functions in his work as the correlative for ideas about the extension of neoliberal economic pri
nciples into affective human life. In a world radically desymbolized by the language of capital, of investment and exchange, sex is simply another transaction in which the lover is less a site of intimate relationality than part of a circuit of self-interest. The realm of the erotic has thus been rendered as banally commodified as shopping or tourism. His characters are becoming insensible to intimacy yet are saturated with the possibilities of unattainable sexual ecstasy. Sex is, believes Houellebecq, sociologically determined and, accordingly he provides a sketch of the changing sexual mores in post-’68 France, suggesting that sex now operates above all, as a second system of social and economic differentiation. Tracing the divergent responses to this system through the stories of Michel and Bruno, I examine the libertine versus the acetic response to the changed valency of sex under neoliberalism. I also consider here the reductio ad absurdum of Platform’s ‘modest proposal’ that suggests that sex tourism in the Third World is the logical outcome of the commercialization of sex.

  Each of Houellebecq’s novels considered thus far (Whatever, Atomised and Platform) examines what happens when economic logic is extended to the private and affective domain and the subsequent suffering that occurs when human feelings and all aspects of human life are reduced to the status of an object. The final chapter, ‘The End of Affect’, considers the ways in which this state of affairs is managed, not by any social or political or anthropological means, but through a rationally applied scientific solution. The flicker of hope, albeit a faint one, that a solution might be found for the problem of sex, is wholly absent from The Possibility of an Island. Beginning where Atomised leaves off, this novel appears to give up altogether on the contingency and potentiality of human life and proposes a purely technical solution to the problem of human suffering. This produces a post-theological and post-human world in which the rational determinism of technology is sovereign and the need for sexual and ontological difference has been overcome.