My arguments do not set out to endorse or contradict any one critical position on Houellebecq’s work; they aim rather to trace a thematic arc across the four novels that demonstrates a movement away from the affective lifeworld of thinking, feeling and acting in a human way. This trajectory is, I will argue, one of despair at the human condition as whichever way one views his writing, that is, as sincere or satirical, it finally fails to imagine anything other than participation in or withdrawal from the world it describes.
Notes
1Theo Tait, ‘Gorilla with Mobile Phone’, London Review of Books, 28, 3, 9 February 2006, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n03/tit01.html [accessed 18 January 2011].
2Emily Eakin, ‘Le Provocateur’, The New York Times Magazine, 10 September 2000, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000910mag-houellebecq.html [accessed 18 June 2011].
3Keith Reader, The Abject Object: Avatars of the Phallus in Contemporary French Theory, Literature and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2006), 105.
4Marian Van Renterghem, ‘Le Procès Houellebecq’, Le Monde, 8 November 1998.
5Emmanuel Hect, ‘Ben Jalloun flingue Houellebecq’, L’Express, 20 August 2010, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/ben-jelloun-flingue-houellebecq_913745.html [accessed 5 March 2011].
6See Ruth Cruickshank, Fin de Millénaire French Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 115–22.
7Whatever, 99.
8Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant et autres textes (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1991), 43.
9Martin Crowley, ‘Houellebecq: The Wreckage of Liberation’, Romance Studies, 20.1 (2002), 17–28, 18.
10Marc Weitzmann, ‘L’entretien des Inrocks’, Les Inrockuptibles 16 (April 1996), 56–9, 57.
11Whatever, 12.
12Ibid., 14.
13Ibid., 40.
14Crowley, Martin, ‘Low Resistance’, On Bathos, Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls, (eds) (London: Continuum, 2010), 148–64, 149.
15Whatever, 14.
16Platform, 17.
17Svend Brinkmann, ‘Literature as Qualitative Inquiry: The Novelist as Researcher’, Qualitative Inquiry, 15, 8 (2009), 1376–94, 1387.
18Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 14–15.
19Rester vivant, 33.
20Whatever, 39.
21Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 3 (London: Verso, 1991), 10.
22Atomised, 349.
23Rouge-brun is a French term that describes the meeting point of right and left politics.
24See Lisa Downing, ‘French Cinema’s New Sexual Revolution: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre’, French Cultural Studies, 15. 3 (2004), 265–80.
25William Cloonan, ‘Literary Scandal, Fin du Siècle, and the Novel in 1999’, The French Review, 74. 1 (2000), 14–30, 14.
26Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image–Music–Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 142–8, 143.
27I will refer throughout to English translations of Houellebecq’s work, using some translations of my own where indicated.
1
Reception: Notes on Two Scandals
… in practice I speak on behalf of nothing very much.
Michel Houellebecq
… whenever the French talk about Houellebecq, I always feel certain that they mean something else.
Mark Lilla1
Born Michel Thomas in La Réunion on 26 February in either 1956 or 1958 – the year of birth is disputed by his estranged mother – Houellebecq is a child of the immediate post-’68 moment assertion. Undoubtedly bullied by older boys at his boarding school under the policy of autogestion that was integral to the post-’68 educational reforms, he suffered first-hand the effects of cultural and structural liberalization and, in many ways, his upbringing was almost perfectly exemplary of what he has described as the selfish narcissism of the generation of ’68. His anaesthesiologist mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, and mountain guide father, René Thomas, very quickly separated after his birth and ‘soon lost all interest in his existence’, sending their young son off to live with his maternal grandparents in Algeria then to boarding school in Meaux, France. In 1961, Michel moved to France to live with his paternal grandparents, first in rural Yonne until he was 12, and then moving to Crécy-en-Brie. These early experiences of his grandmother’s cooking, the stability of the French rural way of life and the pastoral freedom of the countryside form an important part of Houellebecq’s imagined French past, as does the traumatic experience of parental abandonment. He claims not to have a single picture of himself as a child. Significantly, Houellebecq would take his paternal grandmother’s name in a doubly symbolic act that affiliated him with the grandparental generation and simultaneously spurned the post-war generation to which his parents belonged. The tale of family dysfunction does not end there, however. Enraged by the thinly-disguised portrayal of her as the feckless Janine in Atomised, his mother wrote a damning indictment of her son in a book called L’Innocente (2008) asking her rather startled audience during her book tour, ‘Who hasn’t called their son a sorry little prick?’ Who indeed?
After obtaining a degree in agricultural engineering from the Institut Agronomique Paris–Grignon, Houellebecq spent some time unemployed during which he was hospitalized for depression, eventually finding work as a computer programmer at the Assemblée Nationale. He married at the age of 24, but the marriage lasted only briefly, producing a son in 1981 of whom Houellebecq has rarely, if ever, spoken. It was during these longer periods of unemployment in the 1980s that he began writing, setting up his own literary magazine Karamazov. In 1985, encouraged by the writer Michel Bulteau, his first published poems appeared in the Nouvelle Revue de Paris and he soon became part of the editorial board of the journal Digraphe directed by Jean Ristat. In 1991, with Bulteau’s continuing encouragement, he published his first literary critical work, an eccentric piece that is part science fiction, part essay, H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le monde: contre la vie/H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), for the series Infrequentables. Taking unpaid leave from his programming job at the Ministry of Agriculture, Houellebecq worked on his first collection of poetry Rester vivant, méthode (To Stay Alive: Method) published in 1991. In 1992, a collection of poems, La Poursuite du bonheur (The Pursuit of Happiness) won the Prix Tristan Tzara. A further collection, Le Sens du combat (The Art of Struggle), won the Prix Flore in 1996. More poetry followed in 1999 with the publication of Renaissance, a collection that met with modest critical success. It was not, however, until the publication of Les Particules éleméntaires in 1998 that Houellebecq gained widespread critical recognition. Awarded the prestigious Irish IMPAC prize in 2002, this was the novel that ignited the phenomenal succès de scandale that moved out of Houellebecq’s native France into the Anglophone literary landscape.
Critically applauded but not commercially successful, Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, was published to positive, if inconspicuous, reviews in France where it sold a respectable 16,000 copies. Translated into English by the somewhat mystifying, not to say off-putting, single word Whatever,2 this slim novel was published by Serpent’s Tail Press in 1998. Moving between litotic black humour and bathetic acedia, Whatever initiated what has become known as le monde houellebecquien. Evacuated of its post-war exceptionalism, France is represented as an ‘every-nation’, no longer a particular cultural or intellectual space but a blandly homogenized Western topography in which literature, culture, food and drink retain no inherently distinctive national qualities. In this homogenous space Houellebecq’s depressive protagonists are sexually impoverished but financially comfortable, living with grim resignation in the mid-level managerial ranks of the burgeoning information economy and beleaguered at every turn by the increasing subsumption of all areas of everyday life into the principles of exchange. Merely adumbrated in Whatever, this scenario is one which will be repeated and elaborated upon in more detail in both Atomised a
nd Platform.
Houellebecq’s second novel Les Particules éleméntaires (1998) was quickly translated into English and published in 2000 as Atomised in Britain and, with the more literal translation of The Elementary Particles, in the United States. Translated into more than 20 languages, the novel had substantial commercial success in 25 countries worldwide but sold most copies in Britain, the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. Extending the thesis of the relationship between the economic, sexual and affective seen in embryonic form in Whatever, Atomised traces the lives of parentally abandoned half-brothers Bruno and Michel, whose passage to madness and suicide via two different paths takes in the broad historical sweep of post-1945 France and the altered social and cultural configurations of family, economics and sexuality in the post-’68 era. Examining the extension of consumer capitalism into all areas of contemporary life, most particularly into the sexual and affective domain, Atomised roundly lambasts the soixante-huitards for their encouragement of narcissistic individualism and suggests that there are only two responses to the world that they have created and encouraged: hedonistic libertinism or ascetic retreat. Both responses end in a similarly tragic fashion for Michel and Bruno as the novel moves into the generic terrain of science fiction, a mode that Houellebecq will more fully explore in his fifth novel, The Possibility of an Island. Both this novel and Atomised suggest that the transformation of human intimacy into a rationalized productive space within late capitalism can only be ‘saved’ by the biotechnical solution of cloning. The eschatological utopian/dystopian solution presented at the novel’s end is that of a cloned post-humanity free from the contingency and disappointment of desire.
With high sales figures and considerable exposure in the popular media, Atomised’s unusually mixed critical reception would intensify with the publication in 2001 of Houellebecq’s next novel, Plateforme, published in English as Platform in 2002. Arguably an even more controversial work than Atomised, Platform continues to a large extent the ideas presented in its predecessor, suggesting that the solution to the encroachment of the materialist ethos into the sexual domain is to extend this logic even further by setting up a demand and supply relationship between the West and the Third World. On the face of it, this might be taken as a satirical treatment of contemporary Western society and its commercialization of sex. It was not, however, the depiction of sex for sale that turned out to be controversial but several comments made in the novel on the subject of Islam which caught public attention and dramatically intensified the maelstrom of controversy around Houellebecq. Compounding these comments in an interview with Lire, Houellebecq declared that Islam was ‘the stupidest religion’ and ‘a dangerous religion right from the start’, concluding the interview by saying: ‘All one can wish for is that it (capitalism) will rapidly triumph. Materialism is a lesser evil. Its values are despicable, but less destructive, less cruel than those of Islam.’3 Unsurprisingly perhaps, these remarks provoked outrage among Muslim groups in France and he was duly taken to court in September 2002 where he stood accused of ‘incitement to religious and racial hatred’. Choosing to defend himself, Houellebecq not only refused to retract his statement but defiantly reiterated his sentiments: ‘All I said is that their religion is stupid’. He was finally acquitted with the judge declaring that what he had written in Platform had been directed against the religion of Islam and not its followers.
Another, shorter, work, Lanzarote, was published in 2000 and translated into English in 2004. A slender piece of work in all senses, it repeats and mixes elements of both Whatever and Platform but is lacking in the urgency or conviction of either. A depressive, middle-aged urban professional sets off on his travels on which he finds sexual adventure with two German lesbians on a deserted beach. In between highly implausible sexual bouts with Babs and Pam, the central character comes up with some half-baked truths about national characteristics such as ‘Belgians are extremely scatological’, ‘the Englishman is not motivated by a keen appetite for discovery’ and the Italian partiality for ‘a cute ass’.4 As a whole, the book has the air of a stopgap project, frequently repeating ideas from the two earlier works with little by way of progression or development. In many ways, it is as if Raphael Tisserand – the sexually unsuccessful character from Whatever – survives the car crash that kills him off in that novel, returns to Paris and takes a fin de siècle winter holiday in the Canary Islands.
Houellebecq’s third novel La Possibilité d’une île (2005) translated as The Possibility of an Island was published in English in the same year; the rapidity of the translation a marker of Houellebecq’s popularity in the Anglophone world. Effectively resuming where Atomised left off, the novel is both a reiteration and an extension of earlier ideas around sex, ageing and the impossibility of ‘love’ in our time, now more fully embedded in an explicitly science fiction genre. Through the figure of the Daniel1, a provocative postmodernist comedian whose shows are entitled We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts and Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler), Houellebecq broaches the emptiness of post-Nietzschean transgressive culture which is, he believes, the sour inheritance of May ’68. Possessing an arguably bleaker and more despairing vision than his previous novels, The Possibility of an Island depicts an apocalyptic vision of cloning in which all desire and affect has been expunged from human life and where the post-human entities – neohumans – live in isolated, monadic compounds communicating only by means of a virtual network. Despite its desolate eschatological vision and dismissal of any political or ethical solution to the alienation of the subject, the novel attracted very little critical or ideological indignation, giving the impression that critics and readers alike had become more or less inured to this writer-provocateur’s output.5
Reception
Reviewing Michel Houellebecq’s third novel Platform in the London Review of Books, Theo Tait provides a useful schema in which he categorizes the reception of his work.6 Referring principally, but not exclusively, to the writer’s reception in his native France, Tait identifies two broad categories of reaction. The first of these is a kind of exhilarated reception in which Houellebecq is heralded not simply as a cantankerous chronicler of the contemporary world but as no less than a ‘visionary diagnostician’, a view that has arisen largely from his apparently ‘prophetic’ depiction in Platform of an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist attack on a Thai beach published in French two years before the Bali bombings.7 This impression of authorial prescience was enhanced further by the fact that Platform was published in English just weeks before the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, and, according to at least one account, Houellebecq’s editor was actually completing a press release ‘designed to pacify French Muslims’ when news broke of the attack on the Twin Towers.8 Despite their fortuitous relation to his novels, these two historical events served to create the perception of Houellebecq as a kind of soothsaying presence on the literary scene. Also lending weight to this category of reception was the representation of human cloning in his second novel, Atomised. Published two years before the last chromosome in the Human Genome project was finally deciphered, the novel discussed in some detail the technicalities involved in genetic human cloning, an account which was, according to at least one reviewer in a scientific journal, an accurate ‘foretaste of the profound ways that molecular biology and genetic engineering will dominate the philosophical and ethical discourse of the next century’.9 And finally, his most recent novel, the Prix Goncourt winning The Map and the Territory, has been praised for its prognostic depiction of the financial crisis that followed soon after the 2008 stock market crash, a crisis that was merely imminent at the time of writing. ‘So is he’, asks one of Houellebecq’s reviewers, ‘a prophet?’10
A second category of reception, overlapping significantly with the first, is one in which Houellebecq is regarded as one of a few living writers able to tap into a politically bleak zeitgeist in which his view of the human condition, politically, cul
turally and sexually, is regarded as giving voice to some ‘unspeakable’ prejudices for a large number of embattled Western Europeans, predominantly in France, Britain, Holland and Germany where his success has been greatest. Writing of Houellebecq’s role as the ‘new Rushdie’ after he was taken to court for inciting religious hatred, Salman Rushdie himself observes that ‘Platform is a novel to go to if you want to understand the France beyond the liberal intelligentsia, the France that gave the left such a bloody nose in the last presidential election, and whose discontents and prejudices the extreme right was able to exploit’.11 Houellebecq, then, has been hailed as an ambassador for a cultural and political populism that seems, at every moment, to teeter perilously on the verge of reactionary backlash. His work certainly seems to articulate the ressentiment of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, a ‘low masculine anger’ executed in a volley, not just of ‘political incorrectness’ (a nebulous term at best) but also of philosophical and intellectual incorrectness too.12 In a prose style that is as banally flat as it is captivating, he writes of badly dressed and unattractive loners; of men who masturbate frequently but who can’t find sex; men who blame their inability to find erotic and romantic fulfilment on the neoliberal economic system that has introduced a Darwinist element into the hitherto protected domains of sexual and affective life. In the novels examined here, there is a remarkably similar narrative trajectory. Living in a world where economic considerations contour personal and affective relations, the male protagonists find themselves frozen out of the sexual marketplace, briefly find sex, describe this sex in minute detail, make a few bitterly disparaging comments about rival ethnic groups and feminism both of which threaten their acquisition and enjoyment of sex; the women providing the sex then die, always directly or indirectly because of sex, and the protagonists spend the rest of their days in abject solitude musing on the fact that what they wanted all along was actually love not sex. At the risk of belittling the novels, this summary of Houellebecq’s ‘plots’, such as they are, is not much of an exaggeration.
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 3