Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  Whatever: Failure to consume

  Defined by their indolent misanthropy and an unremitting Weltschmerz that has, as Jerry Varsava rightly points up, a historically specifically inflection, Houellebecq’s characters have no aspirational drive whatsoever and are incapable of taking pleasure in anything offered to them. This mood of anhedonia reverberates aesthetically in the peevishly flat prose of Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever (Extension du domaine de la lutte), which Martin Crowley sees as ‘distinguished in particular by its singular receptivity to the mediocrity of its world’, it replicates the flattening of a world in which all is commodifed and thus must have a suitable ‘limp flatness’ that grinds ‘pointlessly on … ’.11 Attracting something of a cult following its publication in both French and in English translation, the novel was arresting for its writing style and eccentric juxtaposition of elements that combined philosophical essayistic asides, pornographic interludes, scraps of moral fabliaux and absurd ‘management-speak’, all couched in a discourse that is banal and un-literary. Whatever writes of its world in its own particularly flattened language that does not, or cannot be troubled to distinguish itself from the world it depicts with a ‘fluent complicity’ of high and low registers that suggest, as Crowley puts it, that the ‘game of distinction might itself be bust’.12 This game holds no interest for our frequently nauseous narrator who relates his account of the workplace in a laconic prose style that is neither fully realist nor sufficiently non-realist to be regarded as connected to its closest corresponding influences of either the brittle aesthetic of the nouveau roman or to a ‘waning of affect’ strain of literary postmodernism; indeed, Houellebecq’s novel is generically rather difficult to situate in the French or Anglo-American novelist tradition.

  In an attempt to sum up the relationship between the existential disaffection of the novel’s protagonist/narrator with the banality of the IT workplace, Tibor Fischer reaches for a somewhat lazy literary comparison on the front cover blurb describing the book as ‘L’Étranger for the info generation’. Translated into English rather puzzlingly by the single word ‘whatever’, this choice of translation suggests a terse indifference apposite for my concerns here. In the original French, the title may be understood quite literally as the ‘extension of the domain of the struggle’, therein neatly summarizing the concerns of Houellebecq’s slim novel (and indeed of all his subsequent novels), that is to say, the penetration of the economic into the private and affective areas of human life. In this situation then, writing becomes just another activity to be commodified and, as such, cannot be a site of either resistance or transcendence. Such a demystification of literature is, I think, part of Houellebecq’s anti-’68 agenda and is something to which I will return in the final chapter, ‘The End of Affect’. In contrast to the expository title in the original French, the translated word/phrase in English – ‘whatever’ – suggests a lack of any appetite for narrative, and its textual surface is pieced together from a makeshift realism to produce what Michel Biron calls a ‘a second degree realism’ or ‘the idea of realism’.13 A prototype of his later works, part-essay, part-satire, Whatever, by most principles of literary convention, barely qualifies as a novel at all; we are indeed, as Houellebecq’s narrator observes, ‘… a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least’ (W, 40). However, despite frequent self-conscious interjections about its own status as writing, the narrative is not interested in the self-conscious manoeuvres that might be said to inhabit the ‘properly’ postmodernist novel; stylistically speaking, Houellebecq has no time for the parodic, the intertextual, the playful, the metafictional or the pastiche. My proposition here is that the novel’s lack of narrative appetite emanates from the neoliberal gait of the times, outlined above and in the previous chapter, and traces what Houellebecq calls a moment of ‘vital exhaustion’, that is as much aesthetic as it is ideological (W, 29). This exhaustion inevitably presents certain difficulties for the novelist, as Houellebecq notes: ‘the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented’ (W, 40). Taken together then, both readings of the novel’s title, the translation and the original, sustain my suggestion that the novel addresses the ‘bad’ subject of neoliberalism – ‘no sex drive, no ambition, no real interests either’ – a man whose life is one of ‘prolonged boredom’ and ‘vacuity’ as he fails to realize his competitive advantage in either the affective or cultural domain (W, 30, 46). ‘The third millennium augurs well’, deadpans the bilious narrator as he vomits silently behind some cushions (W, 4).

  Just turned 30, the protagonist of Whatever is a misanthropic and reclusive computer programmer who has been contracted out to develop a software for the Ministry of Agriculture to assist in the efficient distribution of subsidies to farmers across France. A lucid but dejected witness of the contemporary world, our unnamed, socially isolated narrator is at the centre of this low-spirited novel set in the burgeoning information technology industry of the mid-1990s among a hitherto neglected social group of middle managers (cadres) who comprise the ‘vast, amorphous masses of the middle classes’ eager to please at work and at play.14 The novel shows the ways in which what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘the space of play’, the space in which the body rediscovers its use value, has been ‘drawn into the heart of exchange’ where it has become fully subject to capital and an important site for the ‘opportunity for profit … ’.15 In an economy shaped by the ever-expanding domain of the market, the space of play, of leisure time, becomes part of the whole production of sociability itself within an ‘increasingly lucrative regulation’ of every aspect of human life; ‘personal and affective interactions, emotions, consumer habits and satisfaction’ all are measured up in the neoliberal mission that instrumentalizes all ‘contexts of interpretation and assessment, forms of identification and membership, interpersonal behaviour and human interaction’.16 Crucially, these new modes of consumption have shifted from the Protestant, prohibitive ethics that underpinned Fordism to a hedonistic and narcissistic individualism typical of the more secular atmosphere of post-Fordist capitalism. Patterns of consumption are crucially important, if not vital, to the production of neoliberal subjectivity: you are what you consume. This exhortation to consume, however, fails at every turn with Houellebecq’s characters.

  In an almost perfectly inverse relationship to the rigorous clamour to consume that marks his socio-cultural environment, the narrator of Whatever lacks any of the acquisitive desires associated with a man of his age, salary and professional status. Despite a comfortable income and unencumbered leisure time, he is devoid of materialist objectives, shuffling around his unadorned flat in a fog of hopeless boredom in drab, functional clothing, a ‘quilted parka and “Weekend in the Hebrides” chunky pullover’, apathetic at the prospect of consumption, conspicuous or otherwise (W, 53). Wholly impervious to the allure of commodity fetishism, he finds the efforts of others to distinguish themselves though repeated acts of highly differentiated consumption profoundly baffling. Observing the bustle of Rouen city centre on a Saturday afternoon, the apogee of time and space devoted to the ritualistic, eroticized pastime of shopping, the narrator adopts a Camus-like outsider point of view on the action: ‘… I notice that all these people seem satisfied with themselves and the world […] All commune in the certainty of passing an agreeable afternoon devoted primarily to consumerism, and thus to contributing to the consolidation of their being […] I observe, lastly, that I feel different from them, without however being able to define the nature of this difference’ (W, 69). Lefebvre has described consumption as a process of ‘ideological substitutions and displacements’ that has ‘substituted for the image of active man that of the consumer as the possessor of happiness and of perfect rationality … ’ producing a sense of objectification of the active subject. In this process, he argues, ‘Not the consumer nor even that which is consumed is important in this image, but the vision of the consumer and consumi
ng as art of consuming’.17 A stranger to this art of consumption, the narrator of Whatever is painfully alienated from the world; economically comfortable but existentially besieged, he wretchedly inhabits both his professional and social roles. Unconcerned with forging any social connections outside of work, he stays at home to carry out a ‘spot of do-it-yourself’ and to muse on the hopelessness of life and ‘the sensation of all consuming emptiness’; ‘… the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when […] the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering’ (W, 10, 11). In due course, the suffering undergoes transference from the purely physical public spectacle of vomiting that takes place in the opening pages to psychosomatically induced nausea and eventually to a complete nervous breakdown. Incapable of participating in the carnival of consumption, the narrator is quite literally sickened by it; first, with a physical illness in the form of a pericardial infection, then with a severe psychological breakdown in which he attempts to gouge out his eyes in a botched pseudo-Oedipal manoeuvre. Both physically and psychologically, then, he has profoundly malfunctioned, and is finally unable to assimilate into a world that asks him to be dynamically engaged in everyday life only in the role of a consumer or producer.

  Not only failing to acquire pleasure in the new range of affective activity, the narrator is also incapable of producing the necessary desire to reinvest any surplus profit in the affective domain and is thus rendered both neurotic and impotent.18 ‘Lacking in looks as well as personal charm’ and ‘subject to frequent bouts of depression, he exists almost entirely in social isolation (W, 13). ‘With no family or friends or sex life and no real interests either’, he cannot be enticed in any way to participate in the carnival of the market. ‘Nevertheless’, the narrator dolefully pronounces, ‘some free time remains. What’s to be done? How do you use your time? In dedicating yourself to helping other people? But basically other people don’t interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less’ (W, 10). This is, perhaps, a nodding reference to Nausea (1938) and Sartre’s anti-hero Roquentin who finds a moment of stilled ecstasy, even authenticity, in the tones of a jazz record called Some of These Days. Similarly, the narrator of Whatever is in search of something ‘real’, outside the nausea, an unsubsumed authenticity that somehow has remained exterior to the forces of reification. Indifferent to the siren call of culture and consumption, he prefers to remain at home smoking at least four packs of cigarettes a day, an activity he describes rather perversely as, ‘the only real element of freedom in my life’, doing a ‘bit of tidying’ and writing animal fables that function as palliatives for his ever-increasing anhedonia. Both writing and reading, it seems, provide a faint hope of succour: ‘Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism’ (W, 124). ‘An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven’ (W, 12). The composition of animal fabliaux – Dialogues Between a Cow and a Filly, Dialogues Between a Dachshund and a Poodle, Dialogues Between a Chimp and A Stork – is a defiantly non-utilitarian activity. Essayistic explications of the contrast between the natural and the cultural, these crude fables point up the ‘natural’ evolutionary violence of sex and natural selection, implying that, under the completely liberated forces of free market sexual competition, humanity is returned, in a counter-evolutionary manoeuvre, to the ‘all pervasive agonistic modality of the natural state’.19 These curious tales are counter-narratives to the ones that dominate in culture as they strip away what Abecassis calls the ‘sleek appearance’ of the glittering advertising machine that exhorts us to be seductive and to seduce freely whomsoever we desire, to reveal the ‘baboon-like hierarchies and symbolic violence’ beneath. This slick surface of seductive images that makes up the beguiling vernacular of marketing will always lead back to, what Bourdieu calls, the ‘Darwinian world’ unleashed by neoliberalism.20

  Notionally, the narrator is an exemplary beneficiary of affluent mid-1990s France, a fact that his travelling companion Raphael Tisserand points out to him. With their high salaries ‘… two and a half times the minimum wage; a tidy purchasing power, by any standards’ and ‘great facility for changing jobs’, Tisserand sees them as the fortunate workers in the new knowledge economy: ‘It’s us guys, the computer experts, we’re the kings’ (W, 6). Our narrator, however, does not have the slightest interest, either financially or culturally, in his ‘king-like’ surplus, shunning all advice regarding investment opportunities – portfolios or share packages or savings schemes – the mediocrity of which he finds profoundly ‘distressing’. For him, free time is the occasion, not for the organized fun of Club 18–30, nor the packaged exotic thrills of Nouvelles Frontières holidays, nor even for a local trip to Paris art galleries, but rather for staying in on drizzly Sundays and getting ‘gently depressed’ (W, 29). Immune to the allure of product branding, he eats, dresses and drinks in a ‘no-name’ manner. What he should be doing as a good neoliberal consumer is deftly satirized in a scenario entitled Today’s People from the Galeries Lafayette catalogue:

  After a really full day they snuggle down into a deep sofa with sober lines (Steiner, Roset, Cinna). To a jazz tune they admire the style of their Dhurries carpets, the gaiety of their wall coverings (Patrick Frey). Ready to set off for a frenzied set of tennis towels await them in the bathroom (Yves Saint Laurent, Ted Lapidus). And it’s before dinner with intimate friends in kitchens created by Daniel Hechter or Primrose Bordier that they’ll remake the world. (W, 14)

  The tensions of the bourgeois consumer’s labouring day are assuaged by a luxury brand sofa. Life is made that bit easier by the availability of matching towels and expensively fitted kitchens with tastefully matching accessories. Disdaining any of the nuances of taste and distinction described in meticulous sociological detail by Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Houellebecq’s narrator is a kind of anti-distinction machine; wholly indifferent to the marking out of one’s bourgeois cultural capital by the acquisition of symbolic goods suggesting ‘attributes of excellence’ and creating thereby the category of ‘good’ taste.21 The cultural capital of an individual is, according to Bourdieu’s later work, not only one of the most important aspects of class formation but is central to the operation of the ‘neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market’ in which all citizens are transformed into consumers, urged to define themselves through the proliferating avenues of differentiated consumption.22

  In contrast to the world of distinction in which he lives, the narrator of Whatever, and indeed all of Houellebecq’s characters, remain indifferent to all signifiers of excellence, with cultural coordinates that are resolutely functional. Eating ‘down-market’ canned food from Saupiquet, Monoprix and Unico straight from the tin, they enjoy chips smothered in plentiful mayonnaise at the over-lit tables in Le Flunch, they drink reasonably priced New World wines, and live in domestic spaces unmarked by any aesthetic considerations.23 Even that most hallowed totem of consumerism, the car, leaves the narrator of Whatever unmoved. When he loses his own car, what should be a simple material loss provokes a queasy feeling of Nietzschean over-abundance and moments of extreme existential discomfort in which he is ‘gradually overcome by certain weariness in relation to cars and worldly goods’ (W, 6). Knowing that to admit to losing one’s car ‘is tantamount to being struck off the social register’ and admitting this would constitute social calamity, ‘joking about such matters is not the done thing; this is how reputations are made, friendships are made or broken’, he tells his work colleagues that the car has been stolen (W, 7). The (bogus) announcement of the theft of his car at work the next day is greeted with a reverent compassion and a colleague’s hushed counsel to ‘hang on in there’ (W, 23). To admit that he had lost his car would be an a
dmission of weakness in regard to material objects indicative of a lack of grip over the world of things, thus making him appear psychologically suspect. Such seemingly trivial things can, he later confesses to a psychiatrist, trigger the process of social disgrace, leading, in due course, to the ‘The death of a professional’ (W, 134). Immune to the neoliberal imperatives of cultural and social distinction, Houellebecq’s characters enact what Crowley calls a ‘low resistance’ to the mythology of cultural distinction. Almost instinctively repelled by consumerism, they simply observe this world of things, acknowledging that they ‘feel different’ from others but are unable or unwilling to ‘define the nature of this difference’ (W, 69). Indeed, as Houellebecq’s narrator observes, the more one assiduously attempts individuation through cultural distinction the more homogenous, in fact, one becomes:24