Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  I move on now to examine some of the specifics of the reception of Houellebecq’s work in literary magazines, reviews and newspapers in both the online and print media. The contexts of reception in France occupy a significant position in this examination as a result of the nationally specific scandals and controversies surrounding Atomised and Platform. My intention here is not to provide an exhaustive account of the reception of Houellebecq’s work but to focus on its most pertinent aspects from 1998 to the present, broadly following the categories outlined above. Both academic and popular reception is largely in agreement with Gavin Bowd’s verdict that Houellebecq, for good or for ill, is ‘one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French literature’.40 In men’s magazines, science reviews, scholarly journals in sociology, psychology, anthropology, biological sciences and religious studies, Michel Houellebecq has been weighed up in almost every cultural and intellectual arena from high to low through middlebrow, and ideologically assessed by commentators from the political left to right. The intensity of the controversies generated around the reception of Atomised and Platform was of a significantly greater magnitude than that of his last two novels, The Possibility of an Island and The Map and the Territory, and accordingly merits the vast bulk of attention here. His first novel, Whatever, caused little rumpus but quietly set in motion what has become known as le monde houellebecquien with its characteristic ambience of dejection, caustic attitude to the world, dubious attitudes, to put it mildly, towards women and an interest in detailing sexual activity that, while still embryonic in this work, will escalate into what many of his detractors describe as full-blown pornography. I begin here with the controversies surrounding the publication of Atomised, Houellebecq’s second novel, which, as Katherine Gantz has rightly noted, ‘remains the defining work of Houellebecqian (sic) controversy’ and one that may be considered paradigmatic for its ‘distinctive brand of controversy questioning the explicit and implicit motives of both the text and the author’.41 Of greater global import, however, was the furore surrounding Platform which, playing out in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, resulted in a series of legal proceedings against Houellebecq.

  ‘L’affaire Houellebecq’

  Writing of his experience, first as a reader then as the translator of Houellebecq’s second novel, Les Particules éleméntaires into Atomised, Frank Wynne immediately saw the potential for the success of the work: ‘This is an extraordinary novel, in every possible sense of that word. Part dialectic, part polemic, part digest of the twentieth century, it is funny, intelligent, infuriating, didactic, touching, visceral, explicit and, possibly, dangerous’.42 He predicted that the English translation of the novel might sell, at best, 5,000 copies after already selling 250,000 copies in France in its first five months of publication, but by the time Platform was published sales figures for the English translation (in Britain and the US) reached 560,000. To date, Houellebecq’s novels have been translated into more than 25 languages and have sold well over three million copies worldwide; impressive figures at a time when novel sales have everywhere fallen dramatically. As previously noted, there were other French writers in the 1990s who, in one way or another, covered similarly controversial ground to Houellebecq but none came close to rivalling him in terms of raw sales figures or global repute. Certainly none of these other writers began their novelistic careers with such a sustained period of highly visible public controversy as marked the reception of Houellebecq’s work in the years between 1998 and 2002 that very quickly and rather predictably earned him that most hackneyed of all soubriquets, l’enfant terrible. A measure of public controversy has held fast to the trajectory of the critical reception of Houellebecq’s work and has continued right up to his most recent novel The Map and The Territory (2010) for which he was accused of plagiarism from Wikipedia, a rather puny charge compared to the intensity and public nature of his previous indictments. I focus here on the controversies that surrounded the publication of Houellebecq’s second and third novels, Atomised and Platform.

  The first of these scandals, while not without its legal dimensions, was broadly speaking focused on Houellebecq’s alleged ideological and intellectual misbehaviour; specifically, it was his gloves-off assault upon the political and cultural legacies of ’68 that initially provoked the most heated responses in the media. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, ‘Liquidating The Sixties’, by the time Atomised was published in 1998, 30 years after les évenements, anti-’68 sentiment had become commonplace in France, but the fact that Houellebecq launched his pensée anti-’68 from within a leftist literary context came as a shock, both to his colleagues and to the grandees of the left-leaning literary establishment in France. The second scandal was more specific and potentially more serious, centring on some explicitly derogatory comments on Islam made in Platform which, together with some equally inflammatory remarks in subsequent interviews about the novel, resulted in a widely publicized trial in which he stood accused of incitement to religious and racial hatred by several mosques in Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims and the World Islamic League. Defending himself in court against these charges, Houellebecq was pugnaciously impenitent before the panel of three judges: ‘I have never expressed the slightest contempt for Muslims, but I still have as much contempt as ever for Islam’.43 I begin here with the first of these two scandals, the commotion around the publication of Atomised, promptly dubbed by Le Monde as ‘L’affaire Houellebecq’, a label which has endured.

  In the spring of 1998, the proofs of Atomised were sent out to a handful of publications, one of which, Les Inrockuptibles, would play a critical part in the early production of Houellebecq’s reputation as a subversive writer. Begun in 1986 as an alternative popular music magazine, Les Inrockuptibles, known more familiarly by its diminutive Les Inrocks, became a cultural weekly in 1995 aimed at a hip youth market. Informed by an ideological stance somewhere between ‘the critical left and the social democratic left’, epitomized by contemporary cultural theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Bouveresse and Anthony Giddens, the magazine has enjoyed considerable success as a taste-former in popular French culture.44 The political allegiances of this publication are important to note here as Les Inrocks was an especially staunch defender of Houellebecq’s literary cause which seemed to them to be defiantly countercultural but which appeared to others, notably his colleagues on Perpendiculaire, as deeply reactionary. In the August edition of 1998, the magazine published an interview in which Houellebecq’s animated, and in places rather theatrically controversial, conversation with the journalist extolled the qualities of Joseph Stalin who knew, Houellebecq insisted, how best to deal with ‘dangerous deviations by killing anarchists and Trotskyites’.45 This confrontational declaration, one of several he made over the course of the interview, fuelled the burgeoning controversies around Houellebecq’s work which had, even by now, provoked a flurry of scandalized headlines in newspapers and magazines expressing both outrage and curiosity at this writer’s scathing take on contemporary life. Another, more routine controversy, surfaced around the novel in August 1998 when L’Espace du Possible, a New Age holiday camp ridiculed in Atomised for its crystal healing sessions and angel workshops, objected to the mocking use of its name and took out a successful injunction preventing distribution of the novel. Houellebecq was compelled to change the name of the holiday camp, which he did, to Le Lieu de Changement, mischievously close to the original if not in words, then certainly in spirit. This seemingly minor incident generated a perceptible murmur of indignation among a handful of well-known writers and a number of critics who sprang to his defence including Frédéric Beigbeder and Dominique Noguez, the latter of whom wrote in Le Monde defending Houellebecq’s right to freedom of speech. The incident, at best a relatively mild case of roguish opportunism, may well have passed by without further ado had not another, almost simultaneous, controversy boiled over into the public domain.

  ‘Me, a lefty?’


  Gavin Bowd has described Houellebecq’s hard-to-determine ideological stance in his novels as those characteristic of the rouge-brun, a helpful shorthand French term that describes ‘an ideological realm where extremes of right and left meet in anti-Americanism, anti-socialism and racism’.46 On the face of it, Houellebecq’s preoccupation with the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on the private and affective life seems to originate from Marxist or post-Marxist concerns about the reifying effects of capitalism on the subject. Houellebecq’s work, then, appears to join that of a long line of thinkers and writers across the twentieth century who have considered the intrusion of market relations to all areas of human life as a process of colonization of the lifeworld where the rich qualitative processes of living, the daily rituals of social intercourse, in short, the entire cognitive and communicative topography of everyday life, have been subsumed by the quantifying logic of capitalism. In such a world, people have become not only human capital but have also been encouraged to be entrepreneurs of themselves, endlessly plugged into a circuit of production and consumption that procures a new kind of subjectivity, one entirely defined by the economic that has gradually blurred the boundaries between work and non-work, between the private and the public.47 Thus, as we have seen, he writes in Whatever, ‘Economic liberalism is the extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society’.48 So far, so leftist. Indeed, his left-wing credentials were seen as impeccable by his collaborators at a writer’s editorial collective, Perpendiculaire, the publishing venture of the earlier Société Perpendiculaire. Set up in 1985 by a group of writers who, perturbed by the collapse of French socialism and the growing political commitment to the ‘third way’ of global neoliberalism, attempted to carve out a space for a new politics of littérature engagée. Meeting every Wednesday in a Paris café, Les Marronniers, members of the Perpendiculaire collective would, in time-honoured Parisian intellectual tradition, discuss literature and politics for hours at a time. Among these café-philo intellectuals was Houellebecq who, as one of revue’s founding members and part of a wider left-wing literary scene, successfully ‘passed’ as a bona fide leftist intellectual. Up to this point, his work had given no real cause for concern as it seemed to be entirely consonant with the review’s ideological agenda, expressing a suspicion of globalization and the pernicious effects of the free market on everyday life. A 1996 collection of poems, Le Sens du Combat (The Art of Struggle), was testament to this, addressing ‘human beings’ emotional relationship with the fleeting nature of the global free market’ and the ‘rot and decline of Europe’: ‘I stick out in a free-market society/Like a wolf on an open plane … ’.49 In a poem of somewhat dubious aesthetic quality, ‘A Last Stand Against the Free Market’, the ideological stance could scarcely be clearer:

  We reject liberal ideology for failing to show us the way, or

  A route to reconciliation between the individual and his

  Fellow human beings

  […]

  It is unquestionable and widely accepted that all human

  Endeavour is measured against purely economic criteria

  Entirely numerical criteria

  Captured in digital files.

  That is not acceptable. We must fight for an economy re-

  trained by the people

  and subjected to different standards I would venture to call

  ethical.

  The idea of Houellebecq calling for anything on behalf of ‘the people’ is, in retrospect, fairly incongruous, not to say implausible, given the thematic arc of his subsequent work which is, to say the very least, devoid of any idea of praxis let alone a ‘furious desire to strangle/Half a dozen financial experts’.50 But the central sentiments expressed in here are those that will remain central in his later work and again, on the face of it, look to be perfectly in keeping with ideas on the political left.

  More consonant perhaps with his later brand of low discontent is the idea of a ‘cold revolution’, presented in an earlier collection of prose, Rester vivant méthode (1991) (How to Stay Alive: A Method), as a manifesto of sorts; a programme for an ascetic method of living that necessitates isolating oneself in a cultural and information vacuum in order to staunch, if only momentarily, the white noise of consumerism:

  Every individual is nevertheless in a position to produce by himself a sort of cold revolution, by placing himself for a moment, outside of the flow of information and advertising. It is very easy do to this […] all it requires is a step to one side […] All it takes is to stop for a moment; to turn off the radio, unplug the television; to not buy anything else.51

  Similarly, in Interventions (1998) Houellebecq proclaims that ‘we are heading towards disaster […] as long as we remain within a mechanistic and individualistic world view, we will perish’.52 This is a view strongly articulated in his first novel, Whatever, which contained many of the themes and preoccupations that he would go on to broach in Atomised and, again, as such presented no cause for ideological concern to his contemporaries in Perpendiculaire. Whatever extends the idea of this ‘cold revolution’, locating it in a more specific context, that of the new informatique management class, playing out the central ideas through the loser-ish characters of the narrator and his hapless colleague.

  Given the evidence of his first novel and right up until the moment when excerpts of Atomised were released ahead of its publication, there seemed to be no reason to suspect that Houellebecq was anything other than a paid-up member of a leftist artist-intellectual tradition. In fact, to all intents and purposes, Houellebecq seemed to be as much opposed to the creeping influence of ‘la pensée unique’ of neoliberalism as his Perpendiculaire colleagues.53 That is until they read the pre-released extracts from Atomised and saw the form that this opposition took. What had appeared as grimly humorous in Whatever had transmogrified into an altogether more unsettling and rancorous portrayal of the political bankruptcy and duplicity of the soixante-huitards, the student radicals of 1968 who raged against the machine of capitalism and who wanted to dig up ‘the beach below the pavement’, but ‘who turned out to be more radical individualists than their parents and bosses’.54 As already noted and as will be examined in detail in Chapter 4, at this time criticism of ’68 was by no means remarkable, and a steady trickle of writers had been addressing the relationship between neoliberalism and the emancipatory politics of ’68 since the early 1970s. Houellebecq, however, went far beyond extant anti-’68 criticism. Unequivocally blaming the entire soixante-huitard generation for much contemporary social malaise, he singled out feminism and its production of a generation of ‘bad’ mothers for exceptionally vicious opprobrium. In short, Atomised suggested that the politics of ’68 with its centrally cherished tenet of the individual’s right to self-realization were wholly responsible for smoothing the way for the triumph of aggressive free market capitalism. This was not a completely new stance for Houellebecq and should not have come as much of a shock to his Marxist colleagues who could have read much the same thing in Rester vivant; suivi de la poursuite de la bonheur (1997) in which he concludes that ‘May ’68 only served to break the few moral rules that still served to brake its voracious operation’ and further that ‘afterwards, the social machine began to turn even more rapidly, pitilessly … ’.55 What was unanticipated, however, was the ferocity of the misanthropy, misogyny and racism, a ‘depressing and disgusted vision of the world’ that marked this critique of ’68.56 Already aghast at comments Houellebecq had made in an interview with Les Inrocks on 19 August 1998 (the unofficial start of la rentrée littéraire in France) in which he confessed a fondness for Stalin, the collective were appalled by what they perceived, quite reasonably, as the deeply reactionary ideological content of the novel. On this evidence, the board of Perpendiculaire summarily expelled Houellebecq from their midst. Given that the editors had already read three extracts from the novel and had actually published two of these in issues four and ten of the journal, the last
of which appeared in August, just a couple of months before the novel’s publication, this might have been considered an unexpected reaction. However, as stand-alone extracts, these pieces did not capture the intensity of Houellebecq’s dyspeptic vision of fin de siècle France that gained its full meaning only in its entirety; that is, when read from cover to cover, bringing into focus the force of his searing attack on post-war France in which May ’68 appears as the crucial turning point in an ‘end of history’ narrative. Read in isolation, many of his targets in the novel – social alienation, sexual commodification, cultural homogenization and so on – are those typically attacked by the left, but pieced together in the novel they added up to an ideological panorama sufficiently unsettling to provoke the unanimous condemnation of the editorial collective of Perpendiculaire that resulted in Houellebecq’s dismissal from the journal’s board, an outcome which ignited public controversy. The expulsion provoked a media hue and cry that transported him from the literary pages to front page news and, as Marion Van Renterghem noted in Le Monde, ‘Houellebecq’s book became the Houellebecq affair’ and from that point onwards any assessment of the novel was caught up in the rapidly accumulating layers of controversy and scandal.57 The right wing press criticized Houellebecq’s dismissal from Perpendiculaire’s editorial board and branded their invitation to explain himself to the board ‘a Stalinist show trial’ with Le Figaro devoting four articles examining the ideological ‘witch hunt’ that Houellebecq was undergoing at the hands of his leftist inquisitors.58 The controversy, now with its official moniker of l’affaire Houellebecq, was given front page coverage no less than five times in Le Monde in the autumn of 1998 and the crumpled, chain-smoking figure of Houellebecq became ubiquitous on television, in papers and magazines and at literary events. Dominique Noguez pointed out in ‘La Rage de ne pas lire’ that the scandal had something of the absurd about it as, instead of commenting on the novel itself, critics had become obsessed with the unrepentant and scruffy figure of its author, forgetting ‘that Atomised is a novel’.59