Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  While the reviews of the novel were predominantly negative in the major literary columns of The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, this negativity reached something of an apotheosis in Michiko Kakutani’s ‘Unsparing Case Studies of Humanity’s Vileness’ in The New York Times where the novel is characterized as ‘… a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Brett Easton Ellis’ and a ‘deeply repugnant read’ attributable to its ‘right-wing politics and wilfully pornographic passages’.85 Kakutani also objects to the fact that Houellebecq frequently conflates his characters’ points of view with his own authorial voice, a matter to which I will return in more detail below. Anthony Quinn’s objections are similarly unenthusiastic but differently accented: ‘What is surprising about the book is not its pessimism but the fantastically boring way it has been couched […] Its intention is so plainly to rile, to épater, that any objections one might raise feel like further ammunition to its entrenched misanthropy’.86 More positively, in The Washington Post Book World, Steven Moore concludes that the novel’s ‘impressive erudition’ and ‘gutsy willingness […] to re-think and re-imagine the bases for civilization’ mitigate the wilder conclusions of the science fiction.87 In a more ambivalent assessment, Christopher Caldwell writes: ‘It is tempting to link Bruno as a character, and Mr Houellebecq as an author, with the midcentury sybaritic fascism of Drieu la Rochelle and Céline. Mr Houellebecq is too nihilistic, and Bruno too insane, for politics’, but nonetheless concedes that ‘this is a brilliant novel of ideas – many of them bad ones – in which laser-sharp diagnosis jostles with repellent ideology from paragraph to paragraph. It is also a riveting novel by a deft, observant writer’.88

  Scandal redux: Platform and ‘the most stupid religion’

  Appearing to advocate Third World sex tourism for lonely, sex-starved Westerners, Houellebecq’s third novel, Plateforme, was published in France in August of 2001. With the dust barely settled on the earlier tumult, a further and arguably much graver controversy erupted, a controversy that had finally less to do with sex tourism than with Islam. Swiftly translated into English, it was published as Platform the following summer. Again, there were conspicuous differences between the tone of the reviews of the novel in France and in the English-speaking world. The former continued to resonate with the lingering sectarianism of the Atomised controversy, many of the reviews charged Houellebecq with the same ideological delinquency; indeed, they saw this novel as an elaboration of many of the objectionable themes laid out in Atomised but on the whole seemed to be reconciled to his status as a writer-provocateur borne out by his admission in Le Figaro: ‘I admit that invective is one of my pleasures. This only brings me problems in life, but that’s it. I attack, I insult. I have a gift for that, for insults, for provocation. So I am tempted to use it. In my novels, it adds a certain spice. It’s rather funny, no?’89 Yes, and yet no.

  In both major contexts of reception, in Britain and the USA on the one hand and in France on the other, reviews of Platform focused, in the first place, on its particularly controversial content that seems to be advocating, satirically or otherwise, Third World sex tourism as a remedy for a pervasive Western sexual ennui. The more insightful of the reviews drew attention to a kind of ideological ventriloquism that has become a distinctive aspect of Houellebecq’s writing whereby he ‘throws’ controversial or contentious views into the mouths or speech of the marginalized group themselves. Thus, a female character opining on feminism rather implausibly declares: ‘Never could abide feminists […] Stupid bitches always going on about the washing up and the division of labour; they could never shut up about the washing up’.90 This vitriolic denunciation of feminism by a woman has its equivalent in Platform where Houellebecq sets up an Arab character to disparage Islam: ‘The problem with Muslims, he told me, was that that the paradise promised by the prophet already existed here on earth […] For him, there was no doubt, the Muslim way was doomed: capitalism would triumph. Already young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex’.91 And also in Platform ‘Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman had been gunned down in the Gaza strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm … ’.92 Taking Houellebecq to task for his ‘lazy prejudices’ towards Islam in a review of Platform in the The New York Times, Jenny Turner makes a particularly shrewd observation about ‘the annoying way that most of the nasty digs at Muslims are put in the mouths of friendly Arabs’. This technique points up, she says, ‘the changing world order’ of political ideology in which ‘racism, like everything else, has shifted its shape […] and is as likely these days to come in a libertine wrapper as any other’. Acknowledging that while Houellebecq is indisputably ‘a terrific writer, funny, prophetic, more feverishly alive to the world around him than are many authors more tasteful … ’, he nevertheless resorts to using ‘unintegrated slabs of rant’ which in its ‘reactionary and xenophobic’ energies are ‘reminiscent of no one so much as Pim Fortuyn … ’.93 All of Houellebecq’s fiction presents the reader and critic with the problem of the separation of the characters’ voice and the authorial voice of the novel. This problem is, of course, compounded from our knowledge of Houellebecq’s own views on such matters expressed in a multitude of interviews which tend to reinforce rather than distance him from the more controversial aspects of his writing. This is, of course, one of the oldest of critical conundrums in literary analysis and one that has taxed literary critics periodically down the ages. It is not only a question of a slippery postmodernist textual surface, as Ralph Schoolcraft and Richard Golsan suggest in their examination of Houellebecq’s work. In a discussion of the relationship between contemporary writing and reactionary politics they argue that: ‘The question thus is to discern whether the postmodern facets of these novels are mere surface effects, or if they do in fact invite a mitigating re-reading of his ideological content and poetics’.94 In other words, if the controversial views function as purely polemical or satirical effects does this mitigate the offensive nature of the views themselves?

  The words in the novel were one thing – it is, in fact, questionable if those bringing the charges of ‘incitement to racial hatred’ against Houellebecq had actually had time to read the novel itself – he went on not only to reiterate, but to elaborate upon these provocative assertions thus ‘owning’ these views in ways that appeared to suggest not a performance of himself as provocateur but the outpouring of some kind of genuinely held belief. In an interview published in Lire magazine on 6 September 2001 but which had actually taken place some months prior to the publication of Platform in France, Houellebecq spoke to journalist Didier Senecal stating, ‘It is more than contempt I have for Islam, it is hatred’, the reasons for which merit quoting in full:

  … It was because of a negative revelation I had in the Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments […] suddenly I experienced a complete rejection of all monotheisms […] I told myself that to believe in one God, you had to be a cretin, really, I can’t think of another word for it. And the most stupid religion of all would have to be Islam. When you read the Koran, it is a devastating experience! The Bible, at least, is very beautiful; because Jews have a real literary talent, which can excuse many things […] I have a residual sympathy for Catholicism, because of its polytheistic aspect […] and all its works of art, churches, paintings, sculptures, stained glass […] Islam is a dangerous religion, since its very first appearance. Fortunately, it is doomed. First of all, because God doesn’t exist, and even if one is a bloody idiot, one finishes up understanding that in the long term, truth triumphs. On another part, Islam is undermined, under attack by capitalism. 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.95

  The interview was, according to Houellebecq, six hours in its entirety during which time, according to Sénécal, Houellebec
q became drunkenly incoherent. The comments he made became distilled into a single regrettable phrase: ‘the most stupid religion of all would have to be Islam’, a sentence which, unsurprisingly, made headlines all over the world after being picked up by a Moroccan newspaper, which published a photograph of Houellebecq on its front page topped with the caption ‘This man hates you’. The timing could scarcely have been less propitious, as five days later Al-Qaeda flew two planes into the Twin Towers. Houellebecq’s remarks ignited immediate protests from Muslim groups in France. The head of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, accused Houellebecq of inciting ‘racial and religious hatred’, while Mohammed Béchari of the National Federation of French Muslims made a plea to the French intellectual and literary establishment to join them in condemning the writer’s ‘baseness’. A representative of the Arab League, Nassif Hitti, denounced Houellebecq’s comments as ‘despicable’ and said that they had ‘given rise to legitimate outrage among the Muslim leadership of France’. Finally, three Muslim associations and a human rights organization in Paris brought formal charges against Houellebecq.

  While his editor Raphael Sorin met the Grand Imam of Paris to attempt some placatory dialogue, Houellebecq fled into hiding. Quick to repudiate charges of racism saying, he issued a statement saying, ‘I deny being a racist, I have never confused Arabs and Muslims and I am indignant that certain journalists misrepresent me with words I’ve never used’.96 The case also raised legal questions over whether a publication can be held responsible for the views expressed by interviewees especially since France does not have a law of blasphemy in its secular constitution. The editor of Lire, Pierre Assouline, stated that literary magazines should not be held accountable for the ‘declarations’ writers utter in their interviews: ‘If we were to be deemed responsible, then we would not be able to conduct any interviews in the future’.97 However, for the prosecution Boubakeur argued that ‘freedom of expression ends where it can hurt […] I think that my community has been humiliated, my religion insulted, and I want justice to be done’.98 Boubakeur concluded by saying, ‘It’s part of Islamic doctrine that Islam is inseparable from the community of believers […] the distinction between Islam and individual Muslims is a false one’.99

  Houellebecq was tried in courtroom number 17 in the Palais de Justice in Paris on 17 September 2002 with five plaintiffs presenting the case against him for ‘incitement to religious and racial hatred’ including the mosques of both Paris and Lyon, the National Federation of French Muslims (FNMN) and the Mecca-based World Islamic League and the League for the Rights of Man. The plaintiffs sought both financial damages against Houellebecq of around 190,000 Euros and a public condemnation. Wisely or not, Houellebecq chose to defend himself in court, claiming that his words had been taken drastically out of context and distorted by the media. Further, he declared that he had never ‘displayed the least contempt for Muslims’ but added, perhaps somewhat ill-advisedly, ‘I have as much contempt as ever for Islam’.100 Declaring his hostility towards all monotheistic faiths, Houellebecq defended his right to criticize any religious beliefs but crucially pointed out that the tenor of such criticism is important claiming, rather disingenuously, that ‘the whole tone of the interview was one of contempt, not hate’. Essaying an aesthetic argument, he compared the artistic quality of the Koran versus the Bible: ‘In literary terms, the Bible has several authors, some good and some as bad as crap. The Koran has only one author and its overall style is mediocre’.101 One of the presiding judges explained that Houellebecq’s remarks in the interview, while neither ‘elegant nor subtle’, had crucially been ‘directed against the religion of Islam, not its adherents’. Requesting Houellebecq’s acquittal, deputy Prosecutor Béatrice Angelelli, reinforced this view: ‘It cannot be said’ she argued, ‘that when one expresses an opinion on Islam, it implies that one is attacking the Muslim community’. The panel of three judges concluded that Houellebecq’s remarks were ‘without a doubt characterized by neither a particularly noble outlook nor by the subtlety of their phrasing’. They found, however, that his remarks did not ‘contain any intent to abuse verbally, show contempt for or insult the followers of the religion in question’ and therefore were not punishable under French law and on 22 October Houellebecq was acquitted of all charges brought against him.102

  There is little doubt that this trial, which made newspaper headlines around the world, and the trail of enfant terrible scandal that it left in its wake, fortified Houellebecq’s reputation as a controversial writer, a situation consolidated by his inclusion on Daniel Lindenberg’s list of the ‘new reactionaries’ in France in his book Call to Order: Investigation Concerning the New Reactionaries.103 A political philosopher, historian and frequent contributor to Esprit, Lindenberg defined this group of ‘new reactionaries’ by their use of an ideological ‘double talk’ that he believes conceals ‘their truly reactionary nature beneath a liberal gloss’.104 Benjamin Noys offers a persuasive précis of this contemporary ideological situation in French culture:

  Conservative and leftist intellectuals, writers and politicians who espouse generally radical arguments around some sets of ideological questions (economic problem-solving; social welfare; Republicanism; sexual liberation and gay rights) may well not be consistent when they identify other issues of social identity and policy planning. Forms of illiberalism might well suddenly appear in the least likely places because thinkers do not hold cardboard cut-out political philosophies across a spectrum of subjects.105

  Others named alongside Houellebecq were Alain Finkielkraut, Philippe Muray, Maurice Dantec and Pierre-André Taguieff. Houellebecq responded to Lindenberg by writing a scathingly sarcastic article in Le Figaro thanking Lindenberg for giving a coherence and agenda to a hitherto disparate band of writers and thinkers. Whatever Houellebecq thought of his inclusion in this ‘list’, it was an important moment in French literary history as it consolidated a number of overlapping intellectual and political debates in France around the return to a new kind of conservatism that intersected at several important points with the language and concerns of the left.

  The impassioned debates generated by Houellebecq’s trial focused on the novel’s comments about Islam rather than on the, at least equally, if not more, outrageous proposition that sex tourism should be established in many parts of the Third and developing world. As James Meeks argues in the London Review of Books, the long shadow cast by the intense media coverage and ‘so much selective quotation from the book highlighting its racial and religious content’ obscured the fact that the novel is ‘a work of political polemic’ but rather than race or religion as central preoccupations it is sex that ‘pulls the strings together’ of the narrative. ‘This is a book’, Meeks says, ‘which subordinates the clash of civilizations (uncivilizations, in Platform’s view) to sexual longing’. Indeed, it is sex and not Islam that is the real subject of Platform and Atomised;106 more specifically, the impossibility of attaining love through sex. In both novels sex functions as libidinal corollary for economics and is thus traded and exchanged like any other commodity in an increasingly market-defined neoliberal society where the imploded borders between public and private, work and non-work, commodity and affect define a new variant of capitalism, its neoliberal ‘third spirit’.

  Notes

  1Mark Lilla, ‘Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 18, 1 (Winter 2001), 53–60, 54.

  2Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998).

  3Sophie Masson, ‘The Strange Trial of Michel Houellebecq’, The Social Contract 14.2 (Winter 2003–4), http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1402/article_1196_printer.shtml [accessed 9 April 2011].

  4Lanzarote, 12–13.

  5Houellebecq’s most recent novel, La Carte et le territoire (2010), is appreciably less obviously controversial than his previous work, straying into the more recognizable postmodernist territory of narrative self-consciousness and a playful condemnation of the ar
t world. Like Lanzarote, I do not consider this novel in detail here as it sits just outside of my main arguments. Although it does address many of the themes I attend to in this book, for example, shifting notions of labour and the decline of national culture – and I will mention some of these in passing – the novel is finally a less representative text to include in my examination of the ideological contours of despair in Houellebecq’s writing.

  6Theo Tait, ‘Gorilla with Mobile Phone’, London Review of Books, 28, 3, 9 February 2006, 11–13.

  7Bülent Diken, ‘Houellebecq, or, the Carnival of Spite’, Journal of Cultural Research, 11, 1 (2007), 57–73, 57.

  8Tim Martin, ‘The Michel Houellebecq phenomenon’, The Daily Telegraph, 29 September 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8796739/The-Michel-Houellebecq-Phenomenon.html [accessed 18 April 2012].

  9Roger F. Malina, Review of Les Particules éleméntaires, Leonardo, 32, 2 (1999), 147–8, 147.

  10Jonathan Jones, ‘Artistic license to thrill: Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/oct/03/michel-houellebecq-map-and-territory [accessed 20 July 2012].

  11Salman Rushdie, ‘A platform for closed minds’, The Guardian, 28 September 2002, 7.

  12Ben Jeffery, Anti-matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 5.

  13In the three decades between 1980 and the middle of the 2000s many of the most prominent French thinkers of the twentieth century died: Roland Barthes (1915–80); Jacques Lacan (1901–81); Raymond Aron (1905–83); Michel Foucault (1926–84); Fernand Braudel (1902–85); Michel de Certeau (1925–86); Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86); Henri Lefebvre (1901–91); Guy Debord (1931–94); Gilles Deleuze (1925–95); François Lyotard (1924–98); Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002); Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003); Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009).