Of course, experience has taught me that I’m only called on to meet people who, if not exactly alike, are at least quite similar in their manners, their opinions, their general way of approaching life […] Despite that I’ve also had occasion to remark that human beings are often bent on making themselves conspicuous by subtle and disagreeable variations, defects, character traits and the like – doubtless with the goal of obliging their interlocutors to treat them as total individuals. (W, 19)
Indistinction
The narrator’s refusal to distinguish himself culturally through acts of consumption or workplace behaviour is consonant with the novel’s formal refusal to individualize and psychologize any sense of ‘character’ and situation. From the outset, the narrator ridicules narrative realism as the ‘pointless accumulation’ of detail with ‘clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight’ but admits that even he cannot altogether escape the lure of ‘the idea of a kind of realism’:
To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself I will need on the contrary to prune. To simplify. To demolish, one by one, a host of details. In this I will be aided, moreover, by the simply play of historical forces. The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships are becoming progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. (W, 14)
The narrator has no time, either, for the details of individualism in characterization, and accordingly the characters are all more or less interchangeable types: ‘My idea is not to try and charm you with subtle psychological observations […] There are some authors who employ their talent in the delicate description of varying states of soul, character traits, etc. I shall not be counted among these … ’ (W, 14). While there are often lengthy physical descriptions of characters these are, for the main part, wholly generic, and psychological detail is shunned, suggesting that the attempt to tease out characters’ differences realistically in a novel is simply an extension of the fetishizing drive of consumerism.25 Adorno and Horkheimer assert something very similar in Dialectic of Enlightenment: ‘The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions’.26 Functioning, for the most part, as mouthpieces for essayistic digressions on the human condition, characters in Houellebecq’s fiction are, at best, meagrely rendered and it is clear that the narrator of Whatever, the two Michels, Bruno and Daniel, are the same character. The narratives in which they feature repeat upon themselves with a weary repetition that Svend Brinkmann describes as ‘a deep yet non-narrative understanding of contemporary social life’ in a prose style that is ‘objectivist, sociological, behaviourist, and starkly anti-psychological’.27
Whatever searches for a way of articulating this problem of similarity, in many cases an identicalness, in the midst of a cultural pressure for increasing distinction, but it is a search marked by an extreme aversion to a sustained contemplation of the aesthetics of novelistic prose other than an explicitly stated anti-realism, enacting, as John Banville remarks, a distinctly Beckettian manoeuvre, producing a voice that ‘seems furious at itself for having begun to speak at all and, having begun, for being compelled to go on to the end’. The novel addresses both the struggle of the protagonist in profound existential alienation (la lutte) and the continual annulment of the value of literary discourse to give any meaningful voice to that alienation; hence the foreclosing ‘whatever’. It is a work that explicitly and unwaveringly disdains the solace of poetic form prompting Banville to suggest, perhaps somewhat daringly, that ‘… Houellebecq is darker even than Beckett, and would never allow himself, or us, those lyric transports that flickeringly illuminate the Beckettian night’.28 The creation of good form in the novel, the ‘accumulation of realistic detail’ is, for Houellebecq, nothing but ‘pure bullshit […] Might as well watch lobsters marching up the side of an aquarium … ’ (W,14). Wilted, disenchanted, testy, Houellebecq’s writing nonetheless still clings to the space of the literary text as one that has the potential, however limited, to offer some respite from a debased language that can drive one to the brink of madness. Writing is a corrective, therapeutic process that is capable of rendering everyday life, however banal and futile, intelligible in the space of the literary text: ‘The pages that follow constitute a novel; I mean a succession of anecdotes in which I am the hero. This autobiographical choice isn’t one, really; in any case I have no other way out. If I don’t write about what I have seen I will suffer just the same – and perhaps a bit more so. But only a bit, I insist on this’ (W, 12). Literature, or some form of writing is necessary, even imperative: ‘Literature can cope with anything, it can adapt to any circumstances, it can scrabble around in the dirt, and lick the wounds of misery’.29 While this may be regarded as contradictory to his views elsewhere on the purpose of culture more generally, what Houellebecq is getting at here is the healing act of writing as a curative for the suffering of the individual.
Any attempt at delineating psychological differences between characters becomes a faintly ludicrous endeavour. Take for example, the sexually incompetent and ‘exceedingly ugly’ Rafael Tisserand. Still a virgin at 28, Tisserand’s character exists with the sole purpose of illustrating a Darwinist take on the primitive sexual economy suggested earlier in the novel as he is presented as the embodiment of the loser’s camp in Houellebecq’s hypothesis that ‘In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude’ (W, 99). The woman that the narrator and Tisserand follow in a night club is referred to as ‘the pseudo-Véronique’ a copy of the original Véronique, the narrator’s former girlfriend whose time spent in psychoanalysis (a Houellebecquian bête-noire) merely turned her into an object of egotistical inwardness (W, 117). As is frequently the case in Houellebecq’s work, narrative events and incidents are merely ruses for essayistic expositions on a particular subject: in this case, the narrator’s intense and abiding repugnance for psychoanalysis, which he claims is a ‘scandalous destruction of the human being’, annihilating the patient’s ‘capacity to love’, replacing it with the mechanical ‘process of seduction’ that not only avoids the messiness of real human contact but is more readily quantifiable in terms of measuring romantic success (W, 102). Thus ‘cured’, the patient can then be effortlessly re-inserted into the ‘proper’ circuits of reifiable desire and be returned, fully corrected, to society. In Minima Moralia, Adorno argues that psychoanalysis functions as an essentially fraudulent ‘privatizing’ exercise that interpellates the subject as a more fully atomized, private individual:
The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point […] In appealing to the fact that in an exchange society the subject was not one, but in fact a social object, psychology provided society with the weapons ensuring that this was and remained the case. The dissection of man into his faculties is a projection of the division of labor onto its pretended subjects, inseparable from the interest in deploying and manipulating them to greater advantage …30
As I will discuss elsewhere, the ubiquity of psychoanalysis is attacked in all of Houellebecq’s fiction and with it the generation of 1968, routinely depicted as deluded and hypocritical habitués of the analyst’s couch, are portrayed as being hooked on the ‘myths of liberation and individuation’ of psychoanalysis and, indeed, see it as part of their right to self-realization.31 Disparaging psychoanalysis as ‘a ruthless school of egotism’ that encourages ‘pettiness, egoism, arrogant stupidity’ and ‘a complete lack of moral sense’ (W, 102), Houellebecq’s narrators view psychoanalysis as an essentially egotistical activity and see psychother
apy as part of the wider continuum of consumption, ‘selling’ the individual an idea of the possibility of a wholesome, healthy psyche in what becomes simply another act of empty choice.
In what Nikolas Rose calls a ‘new habitat of subjectification’, one characterized by the neoliberal belief that ‘individuals can shape an autonomous identity for themselves through choices in taste, music, goods, styles and habit’, the market draws in the subject, catering to its idiosyncrasies, peccadilloes and predilections to more thoroughly interpellate it through marketing.32 There is no escape from this new habitat, but the narrator attempts to resist any direct participation. Shuffling around in his anonymous anorak, the narrator in Whatever observes shoppers on the streets of Rouen and their quest for individuation: ‘No one group is exactly the same as another […] Obviously they resemble each other, they resemble each other enormously […] It’s as if they have elected to embody the antagonism which necessarily goes with any kind of individuation by adopting slightly different behaviour patterns … (W, 68)’. Believing in the life-affirming properties of consumption, the shoppers ‘commune in the certainty of passing an agreeable afternoon devoted primarily to consumerism, and thus contributing to the consolidation of their being’ (W, 69). In its fleeting confirmation of agency, not for nothing is shopping often called retail therapy. But it is not in the least therapeutic for our narrator; rather, he is baffled by the seemingly endless desire for differentiation through consumption which merely leaves him feeling distanced and dehumanized, like ‘a shrink-wrapped chicken on a supermarket shelf’ (W, 99).
Paradoxically, as the requirement for differentiation and distinction is thrust ever more urgently on the subject, the sense of a pervasive indistinctness of all things, a general flattening out into a grey, monocultural drone of similitude, becomes more insistent in the novel. The streets of Paris are no exception to this gathering mood in the novel as they too are drawn into a zone of indistinction and similarity. Losing his featureless Peugeot after a party in the midst of identical Parisian streets called Marcel, the narrator is momentarily overwhelmed by a ‘violent feeling of identity’ brought on by a vertiginous sense of similarity of everything around him (W, 6).33 Unlike the intriguing Parisian streets of the flanêurs of Baudelaire, Balzac and the Surrealists, this is a curiously anonymous and charmless Paris; a mundane space, sapped of the marvellous potential of the derive.34 The narrator works ‘somewhere in the 13th arrondissement’ in a ‘totally devastated neighbourhood […] When you arrive by bus you’d really think World War II had happened. But no, it’s only urban planning.’ From his office, the windows look out onto a blasted wasteland that ‘stretches practically as far as you can see, muddy, bristling with hoardings’ (W, 16). Urban spaces in Whatever, in fact in all of Houellebecq’s novels, are hostile, blasted geo-psychic landscapes of social and spatial desolation that emphasize the mounting, and in some cases violent, separation between the winners and the losers under neoliberal capitalism. Houellebecq’s Paris is a dreary, bloodless city ‘gaudy and repellent’ full of ‘leprous façades’ drained of any mythic or historical particularity in which affluent, educated, single adults live in often rather menacing quartiers in their miniscule studio-flats in isolated ‘disillusionment and detachment’, filling their leisure time with surfing the net (still then in its infancy), evening courses and buying CDs at FNAC (W, 40, 82). The northern Gothic city of Rouen where Jeanne d’Arc was burnt at the stake is depicted as similarly undistinguished; a ‘dirty, grimy, run down, spoiled … ’ town, any historical significance reduced to a pile of ‘weirdly curved concrete slabs’ (W, 67–8).
The more the market moves in on the domains of the personal and the affective, the more painful these spaces become for the novel’s narrator; they become, in fact, literally maddening. Instead of ‘contributing to the consolidation’ of his being, consumption – cultural or otherwise – leaches all vitality from him and he becomes increasingly immaterial and translucent. Incapable of integrating with the world, the narrator’s existence becomes increasingly insubstantial and publicly invisible, becoming a life ‘without areas of shadow, without substance’ (W, 146). He is another kind of man without qualities.
Sausages, forks and mobile phones
With the exception of the scientist Michel Djerzinski in Atomised, each of the characters in Houellebecq’s novels is representative of workers in the age of post-industrialism; their labour, mostly invisible and immaterial, is deployed within a vast and complex network of information that, as Hardt and Negri observe, involves ‘creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other’.35 This shift from material industrial production to immaterial labour, mirroring in many ways the transformation in the financial sphere from commodity to fiduciary money, part of what is sometimes called cognitive capitalism, has at its core the constant and invisible exchange of information. This new possibility of exchange is acknowledged with some excitement in Whatever by a retiring computer programmer in the Ministry of Agriculture, Louis Lindon, whose favourite subject is the discussion of homological relations between the ‘production and circulation of commodities’ and information which is, like commodity production, undergoing a shift from ‘from the artisanal stage to the industrial stage’(W, 43). Lindon’s almost boyish enthusiasm for the ‘telecommunications revolution’ and the progress towards ‘the globalization of the network’ has its direct inverse in the narrator’s compete indifference to the revolutionary potential of networked information (W, 39); a fact sarcastically underscored when he notes that the kind of meaningless freedom promised by this technological revolution is summed up by its ability to offer ‘the maximum amount of potential choice’ to order by computer the ‘guaranteed delivery of hot food at a given hour and with relatively little delay’ (W, 38–9).
Unceremoniously wedged into the sixth chapter of Platform, a novel about sex tourism, just as the love affair between Michel and Valérie is getting underway, the reader encounters a mini-essay, no more than a few paragraphs in length, detailing in sociological terms, the shift from industrial production, in this case pig farming in France, to finance capitalism, that is, from material labour to immaterial. No longer able to keep up with the bank repayments on a loan they took out to ‘adopt intensive farming methods’, Valérie’s parents are forced to sell up their pig farm. With the proceeds of the sale they use the money to buy flats in Spain and to invest in unit trusts. Valérie’s father comes to realize that the money earned from the rent and the interest ‘brought in more money than all his years of work’ as they ‘… lived in a country where, compared to speculative investment, investment in production brought little return’.36 This short exposition, characteristic of Houellebecq’s quasi-sociological novelistic style, is part of a broader discussion in his work that examines the passage from industrial production of the ‘real’ to the economies of immateriality to an increasing distance from production. Hardt and Negri detail the three types of immaterial labour driving what they call the ‘postmodernisation of the global economy’:
The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalised and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself. Manufacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labour of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labor. Second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affect …37
For Houellebecq’s protagonists, their role in the immaterial labour market of analytic, symbolic and intelligent management of information leaves them feeling useless and redundant; they no longer know how to make anything real or useful. This is remarked upon in both Atomised and Platform. Chatting with his new lover Christiane over a late night supper of roll-mops and cheese in Les H
alles, Bruno muses on his own functional ineffectiveness and on the impossibility of his physical survival outside of the ‘industrialised world’: ‘I’m useless’, he begins, ‘I couldn’t breed pigs, I don’t have the faintest idea how to make sausages or forks or mobile phones. I’m surrounded by all this stuff that I eat or use and I couldn’t actually make a single thing; I couldn’t even begin to understand how they’re made. If industrial production ceased tomorrow, I couldn’t do anything to start things off again’.38 Not only is Bruno unable to make any practical object, something with use rather than exchange value, he realizes that his labour, which consists of writing ‘dubious articles on outdated cultural issues’, is part of this new immaterial economy, and is, to a large extent, utterly pointless. Moreover, Bruno says, most of the people he knows ‘are exactly the same’. A similar comment is to be found in Platform when Michel (redux) is confronted with the practical difficulties of everyday life in Cuba where the inability to fully participate in industrial production (due to sanctions, oil shortages and so on) compels its citizens to become true bricoleurs, making do and mending as they go. Michel muses upon his material worthlessness ‘completely inept in matters of industrial production. I was perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing’. Imagining himself and his friend trying to outwit an economic blockade, he realizes that they would be defeated by their own lack of practical skills: ‘We lived in a world made of objects whose manufacture, possible use and functions are completely alien to us.’39 These then, are the men who populate le monde houellebecquien, men who might be said in some ways to be the result of not only a move to immaterial labour practices but also of a certain feminization of labour that developed in the late twentieth century.
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 14