Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  On Saturday 10 October 1998, five days before the publication of Atomised and after they had had been able to read the novel in its entirety for the first time, the co-founders of the Revue Perpendiculaire, Nicolas Bourriaud, Christophe Duchatelet, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Laurent Quintreau, Christophe Kihm and Jacques-François Marchandise wrote a piece in Le Monde called ‘Houellebecq et l’ère du flou’ in which they explained their position on their erstwhile colleague: ‘Houellebecq is not a Nazi, he is not even a Lepeniste; he consider himself by turns, a social democrat, then a Stalinist. What he is not, is interested in mere Politics which is for him a set of opinions overdetermined by class and social background. As an alternative approach to politics, this is surely equally dispiriting’.60 Visible here is a real anxiety over the idea of a rightwards turn, droitisation, in French politics that is disguised by a kind of ideological vagueness or fuzziness, ‘flou’, which might be translated as ‘blur’ or ‘vagueness’ and refers to a phenomenon whereby a set of ideological positions can simultaneously belong to both left and right. To take only one example of this, consider the comments of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then Socialist Minister for Industry who, when asked in an interview what would change if the Right won in the French elections in 1993, replied ‘nothing’, ‘their economic policies will not be much different to ours’.61 Not unlike the politics of the rouge-brun mentioned above, Atomised seems to address broadly left-wing concerns about the dominance of market values in human life and the attendant loss of affective poignancy, but the effect of the whole appears reactionary, not least the novel’s conclusion, set in the near future which, in the face of the bankruptcy of philosophy, ethics and culture, suggests that only science can offer a viable ‘solution’ to the world’s ills. The ways in which ‘Houellebecq appropriates the language of the Left for what many see as a right-wing attack’ is, as Seth Armus suggests, the real and enduring controversy of Atomised and, I would add, the reason that the novel enjoyed such a wide appeal as this confluence of left/right/middle is close to the dominant ideological gait of the times; a grey-ish, murky middle ground.62 Perpendiculaire’s article attacked Houellebecq’s ostensible endorsement of this ideological ‘flou’ that they saw as defining the direction of mainstream politics in France where the polarized discourses of the right and left were giving way to these centrist positions of the ‘third way’. Marion Van Renterghem’s piece on Atomised in Le Monde sums up Houellebecq’s ideological stance when she notes that the novel could be embraced by left and right alike; a view typified by Le Figaro towards what they regarded as Houellebecq’s victimization by the left but who, in the same breath, decried Atomised as an ‘interminable porno-misère’. He is a writer, Van Renterghem argues, who is ‘unclassifiable’, one who ‘deranges and divides […] who comes from the left who in turn pays homage to Stalin … ’.63

  Houellebecq’s response to his accusers was contemptuously succinct. Referring to one of the Perpendiculaire’s members as an imbecile, he said that he simply hoped for the revue’s collapse.64 In Houellebecq’s view, the charges that they had brought against him accusing him of being reactionary and misogynist were essentially ‘American’ as they reflected an Anglo-Saxon concern with political conformity.65 Dropped unceremoniously by Flammarion, Perpendiculaire’s last issue was published by Floch à Mayenne in August 1998. In sharp contrast, Houellebecq’s career took a dramatic upward turn in ways that few could have predicted for the author of the modest-selling Whatever. Whether or not Houellebecq’s highly visible public profile and notoriety might have occurred quite so rapidly without the media attention he initially received in France remains open to question, but it is obvious that the extraordinary media interest generated around the controversies of l’affaire certainly contributed to the novel’s overall reception and to its reputation as ‘an important intellectual juncture, not only in terms of the future of the French novel […] but also in terms of the future of the intellectual paradigm in which the novel is inscribed’.66 But whatever effect l’affaire might have had on the novel’s reception, it is clear that controversy alone cannot account for the remarkable success of the novel, either in France or worldwide.

  There was, however, one last surprise left in l’affaire. Just as the commotion in the media around Atomised was gradually subsiding and the novel was beginning to be given serious literary consideration, came the, if not shocking, then certainly extremely startling news that this much talked-about, best-selling novel had been abruptly dropped with no explanation from the 1998 Prix Goncourt shortlist.67 Although the novel went on to win the Prix Novembre, even this was not without considerable controversy, the prevalent feeling among the literary establishment and the public was that Houellebecq had been pointedly snubbed by the Goncourt jury. Houellebecq would have to wait until his most recent novel The Map and the Territory to receive France’s most prestigious literary accolade. Outside of France though, Atomised was awarded one of the most lucrative international literary prizes in Europe, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, open to books in translation from any language. Drawn from library nominations from all over the world, the entries for that year, 2002, made an imposing shortlist including Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood and Peter Carey. Commending the novel as a perverse morality tale ‘filled with energy, mordant humour and … wondrously passionate excess’, the panel of judges deemed it ‘darkly brilliant’ and ‘addictively readable’: ‘For all the frustrations and failings of the brothers’ separate experiences, Atomised in the end presents a paradoxically (if at times perversely) moral view of these two anti-heroes, each alienated from surrounding society in his own way.’68 Significantly, this appraisal of the novel took seriously the work’s worldview without once connecting it to l’affaire.

  The end of the affaire

  Wendy Michallat has pointed out that the early French reception of Atomised was almost compulsively focused on the ‘desire to locate Houellebecq, his work and sundry controversial utterances within a political ideology or tradition’ and further that this desire ‘accounts for much of the polemic surrounding both the man and the writer’.69 The controversial material and Houellebecq’s eccentric, often wilfully provocative, interviews in the wake of l’affaire threatened to engulf any consideration of book itself and it was some months before the worst of the commotion died away and more sober considerations began to emerge. Among these was a special issue of Atelier du Roman in June 1999, publishing a series of critical essays on Atomised that testified to the sea-change in the critical climate around the novel. As Cloonan notes, the controversies around Atomised were ‘pretty much spent’ and these articles ‘reflect this change in sensibility’ and register a mild sense of incredulity at the intensity of the ‘furore created around the novelist and his text’.70

  In Britain, the reviews of Atomised were less impassioned, more measured, and most did not become embroiled in the ‘for or against’ debates that typified much of the French reception. While not without some reservations about the level of sustained provocation in the novel, most reviewers commended the scale of Houellebecq’s ambition, the punchiness of his prose and the disquieting atmosphere of decline and fall created in this tale of two half-brothers. In The Times Literary Supplement, Adrian Tahourdin reviewed Les Particules élémentaires (as yet untranslated) a year after its publication. Describing it as ‘the great literary event’ of the 1998 rentreé, he continues in effusive style, ‘not since Michel Tournier’s The Erl King (1970) has French fiction produced a novel as unsettling, or as rich in ideas as Les Particules éleméntaires’. Noting that Houellebecq is not ‘the sort of ludic writer British readers expect the French to be’, Tahourdin’s review praises Houellebecq’s attention to detail and his determination to tackle ‘big themes’; the decline of Christianity, genetic cloning, consumerism and the ‘destructive nature of liberal values’ in a ‘forceful polemical tract’. Like Julian Barnes’s reference to ‘big game’ on the back cover of the English translation of the nov
el, the word ‘big’ also looms large in Tahourdin’s review, praising Houellebecq on the grand scale of his intellectual ambition with its novelistic ‘echoes of both Balzac and Céline’. Noting that the novel will undoubtedly cause offence to the generation of soixante-huitards as it is an unrelenting attack on what he calls ’68’s ‘platitudes, its ideals of individualism and free will’, he concludes that Houellebecq had struck ‘at the heart of the French liberal Establishment’.71 The kind of assessment of Houellebecq as a debunker of idées reçues also appears in Paul Gent’s review in The Sunday Telegraph:

  Again and again Houellebecq digs below our platitudes to expose the raw and uncomfortable feelings we are often afraid to admit to ourselves. His bitterness is that of the disappointed idealist. You may remain convinced that Houellebecq is wrong in his relentlessly bleak assessment of society and human nature. But the novel makes you re-examine your beliefs, which is the kind of bracing challenge that literature is for.72

  Misrecognizing, or perhaps misdiagnosing, Houellebecq as a philosopher, Andrew Marr argues that Atomised, while finally marked by a ‘pronounced conservative opinion’, is a work that nevertheless possesses integrity: ‘Houellebecq’s disgust and horror are not feigned. He is making serious points about the grimmer outcomes of the sexual revolution, the despair of the first sexual revolutionaries as their bodies age and they find they have failed to invest in companionship, family and the dense web of non-sexual connections that keep us fully alive’.73 Most critics reviewing Atomised in the British literary press read the novel, like Marr, against a wide historical and political canvas and value the importance of its social critique over the idiosyncratic style of his prose; a style that James Sallis, however, cannot let pass unnoticed: ‘… this novel speaks the language of profundity, but speaks it poorly, tenses incorrect, articles awry, phrases misplaced … ’ The criticism of the prose style notwithstanding, Sallis admits that ‘it must also be remarked that the novel is compulsively readable – readable almost in spite of itself – not for its profundity but for all the small verisimilitudinous touches against which structure and author seem pitched in Jacob-like struggle’.74 The banality of the language and idiom set against the grand scale of his ideas, the juxtaposition of the high and the low, has become Houellebecq’s literary marque, something recognized by James Harkin who sees the narrative techniques deployed in Atomised as an integral part of the novel’s success: ‘It is his knack of weaving grand themes into the most inauspicious material that gives Houellebecq his distinctive edge’.75

  Many of the British critics commend Houellebecq for a certain moral bravery and sincerity of intention. Joshua Winter, for example, argues that he is ‘perhaps the most talented and contrary writer in Europe today’, one who speaks to the ‘moral and cultural emptiness of modern France’ with a nihilist verve that is neither artificial nor exaggerated: ‘Houellebecq means it, both in his life and work’.76 Similarly, writing in The Guardian Alex Clark astutely reads Atomised as an ‘anti-novel in the sense that it consistently diminishes any sense of its own possibilities’. Houellebecq’s treatment of the ‘velvet jackboot of consumerism’ and the failure of the ‘liberal western intellect to come up with any coherent response to the disasters that enfold it’ is occasionally rather adolescent in its foot-stamping but it is, she concedes, a novel full of conviction and one ‘which immediately invites comparison with writers such as Céline, Beckett and Camus’.77

  In another view, in the London Review of Books, John Sturrock described Atomised as ‘boldly out of tune with the times’, ‘aggressive in thought’ and ‘often enough tacky in deed’, and argues that the novel is propelled by a ‘radical intolerance of the ways and means of a society that the novelist sees as terminally degenerate’. Speaking to the varied and often contradictory ideological poses struck in the novel, Sturrock concludes: ‘How seriously he occupies any one position at all is open to question, but he has clearly stirred things up to promising effect among the dozing adherents of what I’ve lately seen referred to in France as ‘la pensée unique’, which makes it sound as though that once heroically fissile community can no longer raise the intellectual energy to dispute the premises of the liberal consensus’.78 A similar consideration of the novel’s challenge to the literary status quo is offered by Melanie McGrath in The Evening Standard: ‘Literature with a sure and unapologetic confidence in its own ability – its duty, even – to make a difference’.79 Chase Madar sees Atomised as ‘an ambitious novel of ideas’ and crucially recognizes the ‘irresistible’ allure of the novel’s ‘Left-conservative message’, a rare observation among British reviewers, many of whom intuit this ideological miscegenation but fall just short of fully identifying the rouge-brun tone of Houellebecq’s writing.80

  Translated in the United States more literally as The Elementary Particles, Atomised made a distinct impact on the literary scene, although the American reviews were consistently more unenthusiastic than their British counterparts, with many reviewers pointing up the cultural differences between Europe and America. Lorin Stein admits that the novel might tax some American readers who are ‘accustomed to radical realism on a big scale’ and who may be unimpressed by the discrepancy between the large scale of Houellebecq’s narrative canvas and ‘the small, sad details that animate it’. Stein admits that while Atomised’s non-realism is ‘grotesque and fantastical, full of loony physics, half-baked history and sociobiology, bad verse and sputtering misanthropy’, this is offset by the fact that is ‘also very funny, and sharply observed’ and what lingers in the reader’s mind is the novel’s ‘childlike capacity for disappointment’.81 Assessing the impact of Houellebecq’s novels on the international literary scene, Michael Orthofer notes that Houellebecq’s sense of anomie hits closer to home in Europe where ‘readers can relate more readily to the social commentary in his books’ whereas for Americans ‘much of his worldview still comes across as exotic and fantastical’. The controversy in France around Atomised, Orthofer says, helped to propel the novel across the Atlantic with a more than a whiff of scandal in its tailwind along with a touch of anti-Americanism that is ‘all bluster and little sting’, full of ‘basic misconceptions’ about America.82 Writing in The New Yorker Adam Gopnik, who lived in Paris for five years from 1995 to 2000, has a more first-hand understanding of the crucial distinctions between ideological terms in France and the US. Atomised is, he says ‘a more complicated take on liberal and anti-liberal politics’ and this must be read in relation to anti-Americanism in Houellebecq’s work: to the French left, ‘liberalism’ (or, as it is often called, ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ liberalism, a quaint and comic thought in American terms) has also come to mean, essentially, American civilization, in all its McDonald’s, Friends and Exxon aspects’. Suggesting that Atomised has the urgency of ‘real pathos’ it is, Gopnik continues:

  … less a novel than a kind of eighteenth-century conte moral, at once a narrative and a philosophical essay, in which an obsession with oral sex oscillates strangely with fatuous ideological posturing, as in a story by Sade or in the proceedings of an American congressional committee. It is obscene, hateful, pretentious, half educated, funny, ambitious, and oddly moving […] the book’s bitter tone and its readiness to say the unsayable recall Genet, and even Céline, its literary, dystopian feel brings it much closer to Burroughs (who anticipated the sexless clone years ago), or to J. G. Ballard.

  Gopnik concludes: ‘What is memorable in Houellebecq’s book is not the pseudo-scientific incantations, or the potted “theories,” but the depth of feeling, the authentic disgust with fin-de-siècle liberal materialism’.83 Acknowledging the specifically French context of Houellebecq’s novel, The New York Times journalist Alan Riding asks the incisive question that remains after the histrionic media excesses of l’affaire have been stripped away: why is Houellebecq so popular? His answer is by no means comforting, suggesting that ‘many French share Mr Houellebecq’s dark vision of a post-idealistic, post-ideological France gripped
by malaise, unemployment and growing insecurity, where materialism, hypocrisy and corruption have long since replaced dreams of a better life’.84