Houellebecq is charged, then, with offering a kind of titillating ideological and intellectual exposé in which he mischievously reveals a less palatable side of the ‘true French’. This reputation of Houellebecq as provocateur has proved particularly enduring in the reception of his novels in the United States where his work is seen as speaking to a France tombée; a nation that has lost its political and cultural exceptionalism, but perhaps more significantly, one fallen from its lofty role as intellectual leader. In an insightful essay reviewing the latest crop of books tracing the downwards arc of a ‘fallen France’, Perry Anderson remarks, ‘No other nation, after all, has so conspicuously based its identity on culture, understood in the broadest sense. But here too, as much as – in some ways, perhaps even more than – in matters of industry or state, the scene at large is dismal … ’. While literature as a ‘pure’ genre may have ‘lost its position at the apex of French culture’ under the Fifth Republic, Anderson argues that the intensity and quality of post-1945 cultural production truly ‘set France apart for two generations after the war’. During this time, he continues, the generic definition of what constituted the literary became more flexible: ‘Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought, at the altar of literature. It was the product of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle’s reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity.’
Portraying contemporary France as a transformed nation state in which the role of culture and the public importance of cultural and literary-intellectual discourses have altered, many say deteriorated, beyond recognition, Anderson argues that Houellebecq is the only French writer since Sartre with significant national and international ‘public authority’.13 If, as Anderson suggests, all of this is true, then it is of equal significance to note that this ‘exotic marriage’ seems to have reached the end of its union in Houellebecq’s work as his novels are constructed in such a defiantly lisible manner that the scriptible formalism of ‘high’ post-structuralism with its penchant for ludic metafiction, self-consciousness, multiplicity and linguistic aporia seems but a distant memory. Explicitly, and often humorously, attacking the Nietzschean-Freudo-Marxist intellectual axis of ’68 thought, Houellebecq sees literature informed by ‘theory’ as more than a little ridiculous, and it is this mood of intellectual philistinism permeating much of his work, perhaps as much as the salacious content, that has contributed to his reputation as a mulish literary provocateur. Although he acknowledges the significance of Houellebecq’s work in contemporary French literature, Anderson observes, not without some hint of regret, that ‘the days of Malraux are long gone’.14
Houellebecq offers a cultural pessimism served up not in the formally pleasing prose of Beckett, Musil or even Céline, but in a monotonous, often inconsistently textured, drone that seems fitting to ring in the greyish political tenor of twenty-first century France. Commenting on the relationship between literature and politics in France, he has observed, shrewdly but perhaps somewhat hubristically, that ‘when a country is strong, self-confident, it is prepared to accept any amount of pessimism from its writers without turning a hair. The France of the 1950s accepted people like Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett. The France of the 2000s has trouble putting up with people like me’.15 The France of which Houellebecq speaks here is, of course, ideologically a world away from that of Camus and Sartre, where Right and Left were clearly defined in an oppositional, often acrimonious, relationship. Such ideological differences have, however, become increasingly less clear and, in very many cases, have collapsed into one another producing a blurring of the boundaries between Left and Right, resulting in the now familiar ideological terrain that defines the centre-right ground of mainstream politics. This has certainly been the case in Britain since the re-branding of the left under Tony Blair’s New Labour which embraced rather than denounced neoliberalism. With its strong tradition of dirigisme, to a large extent France was buffered against the excesses of neoliberalism experienced in Britain and the United States, but post-Chirac, it has been gradually joining the rest of the West in accepting this Anglo-Saxon, centre-left economic model.
In the light of this idea of a ‘fallen France’, part of an intellectual discourse known in French as déclinisme, American reviewers in particular have regarded Houellebecq’s writing as a long overdue debunking of a particularly haughty Gallic moral and intellectual relativism, a view made quite explicit in the title of Jacques Derrida’s obituary in The New York Times: ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’. Scarcely able to contain his antipathy towards deconstruction, obituarist Jonathan Kandell describes it as one of ‘those fashionable, slippery philosophies that emerged from France after World War II’ which:
… asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts – whether literature, history or philosophy – of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence. The concept was eventually applied to the whole gamut of arts and social sciences, including linguistics, anthropology, political science, even architecture.16
Viewed in this way, since the post-war period French thought had been stealthily ‘robbing’ the truth content from not only literature but also society, replacing it with a menacing radical uncertainty in which the world and its citizens are perceived as little more than discursive entities. Ruth Cruickshank has pointed up this intellectual scepticism, predominantly American in origin, towards French theory and cites as an example, the now notorious, publishing hoax carried out by Alan Sokal’s ‘postmodern’ article in Social Text, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. Saturated with erudite disparagement and impudent references to anti-Enlightenment discourses, interdisciplinary thought and hegemonic epistemologies, the piece attacked what Sokal, a physics professor at NYU, perceived as the linguistically obfuscating and pointlessly anti-establishment values espoused by a Parisian variety of ‘high’ intellectualism. Commenting on this affair, John Marks notes that ‘Sokal and Bricmont might be considered to have uncovered nothing less than a “pathology” lying at the heart of the supposedly rude health of thought in French life […] the anti-Republican drive to seduce rather than to persuade by rational argument’.17 In this context, then, Houellebecq’s work has been taken as a reaction against the obscurantism of his intellectual forebears; his novels a much-needed ‘common sense’ unmasking of the abstruse pretensions and tendencies of critical theory that have influenced much of French literature since the 1950s. A review of Atomised in the Economist seizes on precisely this mood of anti-intellectualism:
As he inveighs against trendy intellectualism and liberal complacency, you catch something like the rage and calculation of National Front speeches. As a place of grey nightmare, his France is a fictional invention, to be sure, but one that has had an astounding reception. In Mr Houellebecq’s success some see confirmation that his main target, France’s intelligentsia, has its head dangerously in the sand. Less starkly, his success may simply represent the passing to a new generation of the literary flame—albeit, in this instance, a blowtorch.18
Predictably, in France many reviews of Houellebecq’s early work were eager to situate him within this ‘new generation’ of French writers, which included Marie Darrieussecq, Iegor Gran, Virginie Despentes, Christine Angot and Maurice Dantec and it was not long, as William Cloonan observes, before ‘the birth of a new school was announced, the decline of morality decried […] and humanism was once again pronounced dead’.19 In an article in Le Monde in October 1998 called ‘Une nouvelle tendance en littérature’, Frédéric Badré decried the French novel as essentially ‘irrelevant […] too narcissistic […] too introverted’ and ‘turned towards the past’, announcing that Houellebecq, along with Darrieussecq and Gran, represented a new school of French w
riting that eschewed the avant-garde aesthetics of Les Éditions de Minuit.20 Rejecting the dense and often impenetrable semantic ambiguity and undecidability that still lingered from the days of post-structuralism and the nouveau roman, these new writers ostensibly offered a less cryptic depiction of everyday life that had an immediate and visceral connection with a wide reading public.21 The mood of everyday life they describe, however, is decidedly grim and in an article in Le Monde in 1999, surveying this new tendency in French literature in a less than positive light, Michel Guénaire takes Houellebecq to task for being the head boy of a new school of writing, ‘apostles’ of a new misery who are the last ‘inheritors of the spoils of materialism’ and who have set out ‘to abolish the dream’ and ‘kill beauty’.22 Another article in Le Monde attributes Houellebecq’s emergence at the end of the nineties as illustrative of a wider intellectual vacuum in French culture that favoured ‘the proliferation of anti-poetics and anti-fiction’ and a sort of literary ‘kitsch’ well-suited to its politically blank times.23 Both Whatever and Atomised were, in many ways, entirely consonant with this ‘new tendency’ in French literature; indeed as Cloonan notes, ‘far from being unique in capturing this feeling whatever one thinks of Les Particules éleméntaires, there is nothing in the novel, either thematically or descriptively, that cannot also be found in other works’.24 Broadly speaking, these are accurate assessments of the content of Houellebecq’s novels as it was certainly the case that his literary peers were addressing comparable issues in their writing, namely, the adverse effects of consumerism and social and sexual alienation, but with nothing like the mordant despair and ideological recalcitrance of Houellebecq’s work. What further distinguishes his work from his contemporaries is his unremitting, manifest disdain, if not actual contempt, for those modes of post-war French writing that combine the textuality of a Derridean-influenced post-structuralism with a Sartrean political and ethical commitment. Houellebecq’s writing is the very antithesis of Sartre’s concept of littérature engagé defined most clearly in What is Literature? (1947): ‘… by speaking, I reveal the situation by my very intention of changing it; I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it […] with every word I utter, I involve myself a little more in the world, and by the same token I emerge from it a little more, since I go beyond it towards the future’.25 By his own repeated admission, Houellebecq has no interest in involving himself in the world, politically, textually or otherwise; indeed, each of the novels considered here depicts, in one way or another, an inching away from the world and its vicissitudes. Claiming to be possessed of ‘an ideological diffidence verging on atheism’, Houellebecq is a quietist in every respect, ‘… happy to live in a peaceable world in which the moral fibre of a man is rarely truly tested’, one in which ‘most actions are morally neutral’.26 Houellebecq’s impression of his own ‘neutrality’ is, however, misleading to say the least. What he regards as neutral and indifferent has elicited condemnatory, even outraged, reactions from many critics, particularly in France, who regard the views expressed in his novels as an insolent anti-intellectualism that is integral to his denunciation of the ‘would-be Jacobins’ of the generation of 1968.27
Houellebecq’s work, then, is a rejection of a literary tradition that might broadly be called political in which the literary text, typically the novel, offers some kind of engagement with an otherness, a complex term deftly summed up by Derek Attridge as ‘that which is, at any given moment, outside the horizon provided by the culture for thinking, understanding, imagining, feeling, perceiving’.28 In Houellebecq’s novels quite the opposite is the case and, as noted by his most perceptive of critics, his writing returns us to a world decidedly closer to both the positivist determinism of the nineteenth-century literary naturalists and the seventeenth-century moralists for whom life is decipherable according to a set of either prescriptive or proscriptive doctrines. Le monde houellebecquien appears to be, then, a categorical reversal of the ethical spirit that has characterized some modern French literature shaped by the Derridean concept of a generosity to the tout autre of alterity that involves a radical openness to the not-yet-experienced of thought. If, as, Derrida has suggested, ethics and politics ‘start with undecidability’, then Houellebecq’s work could be judged as non-ethical and non-political as it is predicated upon the already decided, situated in an already anticipated ethical landscape of knowability in which otherness is continually excluded.29 As Jack Abecassis notes of Atomised, it is ‘No longer a space of the heroic or the exploratory, the difference between the reader and the fictional character has been reduced to a contemplation of the same by the same … ’.30 The world of the same, then, is Houellebecq’s narrative territory. But is this a reaction against and a critique of the blandly homogenizing texture of neoliberalism or a kind of surrender to and acceptance of this similitude? Whatever claims Houellebecq may make about himself as politically neutral and passive, his work certainly cannot claim a similar neutrality. Imperfect though it may be deemed stylistically, his writing is possessed of an uncommon sense of polemical urgency that proffers a genuinely unsettling condemnation of its times. Houellebecq’s writing is not a neutral take on contemporary culture, a common-sense view of the way things are, but an expression of a disappointed political idealism that suggests that if neoliberalism is regarded as the pensée unique of politics then this can be taken to its logical conclusion in a literature that allows no possibility of an outside to the low, monotonous drone of our times. If there is no outside, no space of opposition, then our only options, Houellebecq suggests, are either hedonistic participation or an ascetic retreat. Unsurprisingly, the unwaveringly self-assured intensity with which this message is articulated has earned him the critical reputation, in some quarters at least, of being a reactionary writer. As we shall see, many reviews and articles have mounted a vigorous, and in some cases extremely censorious, ideological condemnation of his work in which he has been ‘considered by turns a pornographer, a Stalinist, a racist, a sexist, a nihilist, a reactionary, a eugenicist and a homophobe’.31 This is an attitude with which Houellebecq has become extremely familiar since the publication of Atomised:
What I do reproach them for isn’t bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I’ve become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they’ve already got their idea about me.32
Then, there is the performative, médiatisé figure of ‘Michel Houellebecq’ to consider; the louche, shambolic figure in a crumpled anorak who sits slumped in interviews, chain-smoking and inaudibly mumbling between improbably long conversational pauses, has become a familiar image in French culture. The mediated presence of Houellebecq has become a significant element of his reception as a living writer; indeed, the ubiquity of this presence almost constitutes a separate cultural phenomenon in itself. Numerous appearances on television, newspaper and magazine interviews, photos of himself on the covers of his novels and his cyber-persona on the fast-moving online sites that can make up a cultural discourse within days – the whole array of extra-literary material – have created what the sociological literary critic Jérôme Meizoz has called the paratextual field of authorial posture.33 Building upon Gérard Genette’s concepts in Seuils (1987) of the paratext as a para-literary ‘message that has taken on material form’ and that ‘necessarily has a location that can be situated in relation to the location of the text itself: around the text and either within the same volume or at a more respectful (or more prudent) distance’. Meizoz updates and elaborates on these categories for the age of the internet, arguing that the paratextual character of Houellebecq has been a powerful aspect of the production of the persona maudit of Michel Houellebecq, née Thomas, a figure that circulates in and around the economy of texts inevitably influencing their interpretation and reception.34 The paratextual cloud surrounding Michel Houellebec
q is almost overwhelmingly large. It is not, however, particularly difficult to order as it is shaped by two vociferously contrasting receptions, both within the academy and outside, summed up by the striking polarization of the two websites devoted to Houellebecq: Les Amis de Michel Houellebecq and L’Amicale des Ennemis des amis de Michel Houellebecq.35
From the early 1980s into the 1990s, there was a proliferation of outlets for the both the dissemination of literature and for its popular reception in France, part of what has been called ‘l’effet Pivot’ after the presenter of the influential television programme Apostrophes, Bernard Pivot. The popularization of literature continued with the proliferation of literary reviews and magazines like La Quinzaine littéraire, Le Monde des livres, Le Magazine littéraire and later Lire, L’Atelier du roman and Les Inrockuptibles. More significant perhaps was the gradual incorporation of writers and intellectuals into non-literary arenas. Indeed, by the end of the twentieth century, as Tamara Chaplain notes in Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television, around 35,000 programmes had aired on French TV dealing with philosophy and its cognate domains of literature and culture.36 Little by little then, French writers found themselves, or in some cases put themselves, in the media eye and this began to have a real effect on the ways in which the role of the writer was understood. Meizoz was one of a group of critics influenced by a new understanding of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus who were interested, among other things, in these shifting contexts of reception. Carefully examining Houellebecq’s provocative statements in the press such as his (non) defence of the alleged misogyny and racism in his work in an interview given to Le Monde: ‘Literature’s calling is not to appease but rather to worry and to offend. It is there to provoke. Otherwise, what is the point? Nothing human, or inhuman for that matter, is off limits to literature’, Meizoz began to theorise the idea of the ‘author’s posture’ which he sees as ‘the convergence between a discursive and a non-discursive form of self-presentation (e.g. in behaviour and dress)’.37 This ‘posture’ of the author is a mediated performance that is consumed across a variety of media in which text-images of the author accumulate around these public outings and become a separate product or a commodity in their own right.38 The authorial creation that has become ‘Houellebecq the controversialist’ is built upon the ongoing confusion around the status of the authorial voice in his novels, a situation neatly and sarcastically summed up by Salhi Abdel-Illah in Libération: ‘… let’s start with the hyperrealist storyline where Jospin is called … Jospin, and Chirac is called … Chirac, the same courtesy being extended to Jacques Maillot. But the same equivalence does not hold for the fictional Michel, the hero/narrator, who in no way is to be confused with the real Michel Houellebecq … ’39
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 4