Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  14Perry Anderson, London Review of Books, 26, 17, 2 September 2004, 3–9, 3.

  15Bernard Henri-Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies (New York: Random House, 2011), 65.

  16Jonathan Kandall, ‘Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74’, The New York Times, 10 October 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html [accessed 15 January 2010].

  17John Marks, ‘L’Affaire Sokal’ in French Cultural Debates (eds) John Marks and Enda McCaffrey (Melbourne: Monash Romance Studies, 2001), 80–93, 80.

  18‘France’s literary sensation: Generation war’, the Economist, 23 October 2001, http://www.economist.com/node/378602 [accessed 15 February 2010]. See also The Death of French Culture, (eds) Donald Morrison and Antoine Compagnon (London: Polity, 2010).

  19William Cloonan, ‘Literary Scandal, Fin du Siècle, and the Novel in 1999’, the French Review, 74, 1 (2000), 14–30, 14.

  20Founded in 1941 in German occupied Paris and famous for its distinctively discreet blue and white image-less covers, Les Éditions de Minuit is an eminent French publishing house renowned for its publication of nouveau roman writers Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Saurraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor. The publisher of Beckett’s major works, Les Éditions de Minuit continues to be a major force in French literary culture with a stable of Goncourt winning authors on its books.

  21Frédéric Badré, ‘Une nouvelle tendance en littérature’, Le Monde, 3 October 1998, 14.

  22Michel Guenaire, ‘Beauté cou coupé’, Le Monde, 4 February 1999.

  23Marc Petit, ‘Nouvelle tendance, vieux démons’, Le Monde, 10 October 1998.

  24Cloonan, 14.

  25Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature? And Other Essays, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 37.

  26Public Enemies, 79, 82.

  27John Banville, ‘Futile Attraction: Michel Houellebecq’s Lovecraft’, Artforum International, 1 April, 2005, 2.

  28Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 19.

  29Jacques Derrida warns against confusing this concept of indecision with the aporetic stalemate of postmodernism. See ‘Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’ in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Continental Philosophy, (eds) Richard Kearney, Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999).

  30Jack Abecassis, ‘The Eclipse of Desire: L’Affaire Houellebecq’, MLN, 5, 4 (September 2000) 801–26, 806.

  31Emily Eakin, ‘Le Provocateur’, The New York Times Magazine, 10 September 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/10/magazine/le-provocateur. [accessed 18 March 2011].

  32Susannah Hunnewell, ‘Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction’, The Paris Review, 206 (Fall 2010), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq [accessed 18 April 2010].

  33Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur (Genève: Slatkine, 2007); ‘Le roman et l’inacceptable: Sociologie d’une polémique: autour de Plateforme de Michel Houellebecq’ in L’œil sociologue et la littérature (Genève: Slatkine Érudition, 2004) 181–209. See also Louise Moor, ‘Posture polémique ou polémisation de la posture?: Le cas de Michel Houellebecq’ COnTEXTES, 10 (2012), http://contextes.revues.org/4921 [accessed 28 August 2012]. I am indebted here to my research student Chloe Chourrout, whose work on authorial posture in Houellebecq and Céline brought Meizoz’s work to my attention and helped me think through the relationship between the ‘living’ paratextual presence of Houellebecq and the reception of his novels.

  34Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.

  35Respectively, http://www.houellebecq.info and http://aeamh.free.fr [accessed June 10 2010].

  36Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1.

  37Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur (Genève: Slatkine Érudition, 2007), 15–32.

  38See Corina da Rocha Soares, ‘Michel Houellebecq, Amélie Nothomb et Jacques Chessex: Performances sous contexts médiatisés’, Carnets, Cultures littéraires: Nouvelles performances et développement (Autumn/hiver 2009), 207–20, http//:carnets.web.ua.pt [accessed 18 March 2010].

  39Salhi Abdel-Illah, ‘Un racisme chic et tendance’, Libération, 4 septembre 2001, 6. My own translation.

  40Gavin Bowd, ‘Michel Houellebecq and The Pursuit of Happiness’, Nottingham French Studies, 41, 1 (2002), 28–39, 28.

  41Katherine Gantz, ‘Strolling with Houellebecq: The Textual Terrain of Postmodern Flânerie’, Journal of Modern Literature, 28, 3 (2005), 149–61, 141.

  42Frank Wynne, ‘Terribleman’, http://www.frankwynne.com [accessed 18 June 2010].

  43Nicholas Le Quesne, ‘War of Words’, Time, 22 September 2002, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,353525,00.html [accessed 11 April 2011].

  44Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno: Culture, Identity, and Society, (eds) Steve Cannon, Hugh Dauncey (Aldershot: Ashcroft Publishing, 2003), 175.

  45Les Inrockuptibles, 19 August 1998.

  46Bowd, 37.

  47On the rationalization of the lifeworld see Marcuse (1964); Adorno and Horkheimer (1997, originally published 1972) and on the technocratic consciousness see Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

  48Whatever, 99.

  49The Art of Struggle, trans. Delphine Grass and Timothy Mathews (London: Herla, 2010), ix, 27, 55.

  50Ibid., 85.

  51Rester vivant, méthode, 54–5.

  52Interventions, 48.

  53‘La pensée unique’ is a term coined by Ignacio Ramonet, a journalist for Le Monde diplomatique, Le Monde diplomatique, janvier 1995, http://www.monde diplomatique.fr/1995/01/RAMONET/1144 [accessed 24 October 2011].

  54Mark Lilla, ‘Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 18, 1 (Winter 2001), 53–60, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/089–850.00308/full [accessed 18 October 2011].

  55Rester vivant, my translation.

  56Marion Van Renterghem ‘Le procès Houellebecq’, Le Monde, 8 November 1998, 10.

  57Van Renterghem, 10.

  58‘Les nouveaux inquisiteurs: Le retour des chasses aux sorcières’, Le Figaro, 25 September 1998, 30.

  59See Dominique Noguez, Houellebecq, en fait (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 73. This also has a usefully detailed, if highly subjective, account of the break between Perpendiculaire and Houellebecq.

  60Nicolas Bourriaud, Christophe Duchatelet, et al., ‘Houellebecq et l’ère du flou’, Le Monde, 10 October 1998, 16, my translation.

  61The Wall Street Journal Europe, 18 March 1993.

  62Seth Armus, ‘The American Menace in the Houellebecq Affair’, French Politics and Society, 17, 2 (1999), 34–42, 34).

  63Marion Van Renterghem, Le Monde,10 October 1998, http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/09/09/le-proces-houellebecq_1409163_3260.html [accessed July 8th 2011].

  64‘Michel Houellebecq répond à Perpendiculaire’, Le Monde, 18 September 1998, 10.

  65On the anti-American dimension to l’affaire see Seth Armus, ‘The American Menace in the Houellebecq Affair’, 36.

  66Ruth Cruickshank, ‘L’Affaire Houellebecq: Ideological Crime and Fin de Millénaire Literary Scandal’, French Cultural Studies, 14.1 (2003), 101–16, 104.

  67In addition to Cruickshank’s detailed study of l’affaire Houellebecq and Marion Van Renterghem’s contemporary account, Eric Nalleau devotes a whole chapter to these events in Au secours, Houellebecq revient! (Paris: Chiflet & Cie, 2005), 61–123. See also Olivier Wicker in L’Événement de jeudi and Jean-Luc Douin in Le Monde; Dominique Noguez, ‘La Rage de ne pas lire’, Le Monde, 29 October 1998 and ‘Le Style de Michel Houellebecq’, Atelier du Roman, June 1999, 17–22.

  68http://www.impacdublinawa
rd.ie/2002/Winner.html [accessed 30 September 2012].

  69Wendy Michallat, ‘Modern Life is still Rubbish. Houellebecq and the Refiguring of “reactionary” Retro’, Journal of European Studies, 37 (2007), 313–31, 314.

  70Cloonan, 27. See also Atelier du Roman, June 1999, 17–82.

  71Adrian Tahourdin, ‘Generation ’68’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 January 1999, 23.

  72Paul Gent, ‘Human nature: a particle guide’, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 April 2000, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4720583/Human-nature-a-particle-guide.html

  73Andrew Marr, ‘We’re all Doomed … except for middle-aged French philosophers’, The Observer, 2 May 2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/21/fiction.michelhouellebecq/print [accessed 24 March 2001]. Other important reviews for Atomised in the British press include Jason Cowley, ‘Atomised’, The Times, 7 July 2001; Andrew Hussey, ‘Animal Omega: the dubious moral universe of Michel Houellebecq’, Planet Magazine, 142, 9 December 2001, http://www.planetmagazine.org.uk/html/archive/houellebecq.html [accessed November 2000]; Nicholas Lezard, ‘Pick of the Week: Atom Bomb’, The Guardian, 24 February 2001, 11; Victoria Segal, ‘Atomised by Michel Houellebecq’, The Times, 10 March 2001; Paul Tebbs, ‘Atomised by Michel Houellebecq’, The Daily Telegraph, 24 February 2001, 2.

  74James Sallis, ‘Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 21.1 (2001), 19–197.

  75James Harkin, ‘Review of Atomised, by Michel Houellebecq’, New Statesman, 129, 4487 (22 May 2000), 57. In a carefully measured review of Atomised in the same magazine a year later, Gerry Feehily observes that the novel is ‘fiction as diagnosis’ told in a blunt, colloquial language’ that may owe more to the discursive mode of the ‘archetypal Parisian figure, imbued with l’esprit de contradiction ‘than to any artistic or intellectual genius’. Gerry Feehily, ‘A World on the Brink of Collapse’, New Statesman, 18 June 2001, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/140573 [accessed 20 September 2012].

  76Joshua Winter, ‘France: Into the Void’. New Statesman, 131, 4586, 6 May 2002, 25–7, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/142882 [accessed 25 January 2012].

  77Alex Clark, ‘Atom bomb’, The Guardian, 13 May 2000, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/may/13/fiction.michelhouellebecq [accessed 13 June 2006].

  78John Sturrock, ‘Agitated Neurons’, London Review of Books, 21. 2, 21 January 1999 24–5, 24, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n02/john-sturrock/agitated-neurons [accessed 17 January 2011].

  79Melanie McGrath, The Evening Standard, http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/houelbqm/partelem.html [accessed 10 October 2011].

  80Chase Madar, ‘Review of Interventions, by Michel Houellebecq’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 October 1999, 36.

  81Lorin Stein, ‘What to read in October’, Salon, 23 October 2000, http:/ /www. salon.com/2000/10/23/octoberfiction [accessed 23 November 2003].

  82Michael Orthofer, ‘On Michel Houellebecq’, The Complete Review, 11, 2 (August 2010), http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol11/issue2/houellebecq.htm [accessed 11 November 2010]. This article appeared in translation in Le Monde as ‘Michel Houellebecq se replie complètement sur lui-même’, September 2010, http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/ [accessed 11 February 2012].

  83Adam Gopnik, ‘Noel Contendere’, The New Yorker, 28 December 1998, 64–7, 61).

  84Alan Riding, ‘Arts Abroad; Roman à Gripe Stirs Flames Among French’ The New York Times, 2 March 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/02/books/arts-abroad-roman-a-gripe-stirs-flames-among-french.html [accessed 28 September 2005].

  85Michiko Kakutani, ‘Unsparing Case Studies of Humanity’s Vileness’, The New York Times, 10 November 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/10/books/books-of-the-times-unsparing-case-studies-of-humanity-s-vileness.html [accessed 17 April 2013].

  86Anthony Quinn, ‘One Thinks, the Other Doesn’t’, The New York Times Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/19/reviews/001119.19quinnt.html [accessed 28 September 2011].

  87Steven Moore, ‘Getting Physical’. Washington Post Book World, 31, 3 (21–7 January 2001), 7.

  88Christopher Caldwell, ‘Enraged by Licentiousness … And Indulging in It’, The Wall Street Journal, 15 November 2001, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB974254862463439512.html [accessed 3 July 2011].

  89Alan Riding, ‘Arts Abroad; France’s Shock Novelist Strikes Again’, The New York Times, 11 September 2001, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/arts-abroad-france-s-shock-novelist-strikes-again.html [accessed 17 June 2007].

  90Atomised, 173–4. All subsequent references to the novel will be abbreviated to A and given in parentheses in the text with the page number.

  91Platform, 350.

  92Platform, 349. All subsequent references to the novel will be abbreviated to P and given in parentheses in the text with the page number.

  93Jenny Turner, ‘Club Bed’, The New York Times, 20 July 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/books/club-bed.html [accessed 31 October 2011] .

  94Ralph Schoolcraft and Richard Golsan, ‘Paradoxes of the postmodern reactionary Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq’, Journal of European Studies, 37 (2007), 349–71, 359.

  95Quoted in Sophie Masson ‘The Strange Trial of Michel Houellebecq’, The Social Contract, (Winter 2003–4), 110–13, 111. See also Alan Riding, ‘France’s Shock Novelist Strikes Again’, The New York Times, 11 September 2001.

  96‘Houellebecq in court over race accusations’, The Guardian, 17 September 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/17/michelhouellebecq [accessed 8 November 2011].

  97‘French author denies racial hatred’, BBC News, 17 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2260922.stm [accessed 22 November 2001].

  98Koenraad Elst, ‘Afterword, The Rushdie Affair’s Legacy’, http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/misc/rushdie.html [accessed 2 May 2012].

  99Nicholas Le Quesne, ‘War of Words’, Time Magazine, 22 September 2002, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,353525,00.html [17 April 2013].

  100‘French author denies racial hatred’.

  101Ibid.

  102See Alan Riding, ‘Author Charged for Islam Remarks is Acquitted’, The New York Times, and Gerry Feehily, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’, New Statesman, 131, 4599 (August, 2002), 36–7. See also Julian Barnes, ‘Hate and Hedonism: The insolent art of Michel Houellebecq’, The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/07/07/030707 [accessed 20 September 2012]. Reviewing Platform in The Guardian Michael Worton asserts that he cannot engage meaningfully with Houellebecq’s ‘gratuitously offensive’ comments about monotheism in the novel as ‘he provides so little evidence to support his view’. His main objection to the novel, however, is principally an aesthetic one: it is ‘weakly conceived, badly structured and in narrative terms simply not convincing’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/oct/29/fiction.michelhouellebecq [accessed 10 April 2013].

  103Le Rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002).

  104John Lloyd, ‘Is Man Too Wicked to be Free?’, New Statesman, 16 December 2002, http://www.newstatesman.com/200212160024 [accessed 18 September 2009].

  105Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, ‘Reactionary Times’, Journal of European Studies 37, 3 (2007) 243–53, 247.

  106James Meeks, ‘Every Boy’s Young Dream’, London Review of Books, 24, 22, 14 November 2002, 26–7.

  2

  The Extension of the Domain of the Struggle: The Third Spirit of Capitalism

  What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.

  Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

  Extending the domain

  ‘Economic liberalism is the extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society’.1 With the possible exception of ‘the most stupid religion’ anti-Islam comment in Platform, this is the mos
t frequently cited line from Houellebecq’s work, and for good reason. Encapsulated in this simple expository pronouncement is the overarching hypothesis of Houellebecq’s entire oeuvre; namely, that market principles have come to determine and define every aspect of human life. We have arrived, he suggests, at an era that permits, indeed demands, the complete subsumption of human life to market forces and where economic subjectification extends into every sphere of human subjectivity. Houellebecq’s characters stumble around and finally disintegrate in this world in which human experience is systematically reified from the cradle to the grave and where human desire, above all sexual desire, is the aspect of human life most recently has been drawn into the domain of the market and as such represents a particularly agonizing burden for the subject. Unable to embrace such a world, his protagonists are besieged and beleaguered, able only to half-exist among the affective ruins of relentless commodification, they live what Adorno would call ‘damaged lives’. Set in atomized communities of single males and sometimes females, Houellebecq’s characters are profoundly emotionally and sexually isolated and have few meaningful kinship relations, weakened societal affiliations and no religious ties to the society in which they live. The morose trajectories of each of their lives register the processes and effects of neoliberalism which, as David Harvey has argued, ‘… has pervasive effects on the ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world’.2 Examining the production of subjectivity in a society increasingly evacuated of Marx’s ‘heavenly ecstasies’, Houellebecq’s writing describes a life world in which the dynamics of reification have assumed a sovereignty hitherto unparalleled; a social reality not only where relations between people have progressively become the relation between things, but where, through the processes of neoliberal governmentality, a society is produced in which ‘[…] the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man […] It stamps its imprint on the whole of consciousness.’34 Reification, Verdinglichung, the transformation of human beings into thing-like objects and by extension the ‘thingly quality of human experience’ is central to the new spirit of capitalism that emerged in the last half of the twentieth century, functioning literally in the sense of markets but also, as Timothy Bewes has noted, as a ‘… metaphor for the effects of capitalism on people, relationships, self-image, ideas, social life, art and culture’.5 If people are transformed into mere things, it is important to examine how their behaviour operates in ways that are in accordance with the laws of this ‘thing-world’.6 This is precisely, I suggest, what Houellebecq’s novels do. They are examinations of how refusing this ‘thing-world’ can have devastating consequences when there is no imaginable liveable alternative.