As the 1970s wore on into the 80s, the Lieu did not fare well. As its clientele grew older the ‘anarchic’ spirit guiding its management did not lend itself to an easy financial situation and its rudimentary hippy accommodations failed to measure up to ‘the standards of package holidays’. So in 1984, to the dismay of its more left-wing founders, it dramatically remodelled itself along corporate lines as a venue offering alternative therapies, workshops and ‘residential courses aimed at businesses’ soon counting IBM, the Banque Nationale de Paris and the RATP among its multinational clientele. Dropping its cooperative association status, the Lieu duly floated itself on the stock market and continued to intensify its aggressive marketing techniques in ways wholly antithetical to its ’68 anti-establishment ideals. By the time of Bruno’s sexually optimistic visit to the Lieu at the end of the 1990s, although initially ‘dedicated exclusively to sexual liberation and desire’, the Lieu had ‘naturally became a place of depression and bitterness’ (my emphasis) and had started to reveal the raw sexual competition behind the ‘cult of the body’ (A, 126). The veterans of ’68 continued to visit the Lieu but increasingly found themselves excluded from the sexual activities that they had once enthusiastically promoted 30 years earlier; their ageing, sagging and decaying bodies with their ‘flaccid pricks and fleshy tits’ now only ‘filled them with disgust’, a ‘disgust they could see mirrored in the gaze of others’ (A, 126). Bruno asks a grizzled veteran of ’68, Paul Le Dantec, about his memories of the sexual abandon that he suspects must have taken place every night in the early days of the Lieu: ‘Liberation my arse’, replies the old hippy ‘… take it from me nothing much has changed … ’ Here, Bruno prompts the man to confirm his own partisan position; ‘So, what you are saying […] is that there was never any real sexual liberation – just another form of seduction’ (A, 161, 162). In this way, it is suggested that 1968 was a sham; merely the excuse for nothing more radical than sexual predation.
More upmarket in accordance with the unabashed commercialism of its time, the nudist resort in the Cap d’Agde offers sexual freedom with distinctly less mysticism, a place where ‘very correct, very middle-class’ Dutch, Scandinavians and Germans can be trusted to enjoy a ‘sexual “social” democracy’ in a permissive sexual environment that is close to some of the utopian ideals of the sixties. In addition to sexual freedom, there is a range of activities for the holidaymakers who can sign up for yoga, silk painting and oriental exercises. The resort is based upon a highly exclusive sexual permissiveness based on an extremely strict ethical contract in which ‘sexual pleasure is recognized as an important commodity’ (A, 260). Enjoying strenuous and pleasurable group sex with Rudi and Hannelore from Hamburg, Bruno and Christiane are, for a while at least, bathed in the warm glow of erotic fulfilment: ‘It was nice to know that there would be no problems, that all the sexual issues had been resolved: it was good to know that each of them would do their best to bring pleasure to the others’. In this quasi-idyllic space sexuality is brought ‘back to its original form’ and is, above all, ‘based on the notion of goodwill’ (A, 262, 263). Although sexual differentiation still occurs between the old and the ugly and the young and beautiful, masturbatory voyeurism is ‘looked on with kindly compassion’, and in this way no-one is fully excluded and there ‘is not so much as an undertone of violence’ (A, 264). This sexual utopia is not, however, as ‘free’ as it first appears. Structured by strict, if unwritten, regulations and rules, the sexual contract of the resort is only workable due to its homogenous class demographic made up of almost entirely liberal, middle class professionals who are ‘an uncommon example of the qualities of discipline and respect for the social contract’ (A, 264). But even this kind of orderly erotic democracy cannot endure and just as all romantic and sexual relationships end in death in Houellebecq’s novels, sexual contentment is forever compelled to degenerate into its depraved opposite as the polite reciprocity of the Cap d’Agde metamorphoses into the harsher environment of the Parisian sex clubs.
The sex clubs, revisited in Platform as S & M clubs, ‘can only exist among cultured cerebral people for whom sex has lost all attraction’ and, as such, represent the next logical step of this journey to the Sadean system and are initially enticing for the would-be philanderer Bruno (P, 244–5). At first, he finds the offer of all the ‘cunts and mouths open to him’ unbearably exciting, almost swooning with the variety of pleasure on offer, but very quickly realizes that, even in this ostensibly liberated erotic environment, ‘there was no escape’ from the exacting standards of the market; his ‘five-inch cock’ is indisputably too small and many of the women he encounters are ‘somewhat disappointed’ when they see his penis (A, 292, 293). Far from being a utopian erotic space however, the laws of the commercial marketplace are even more strictly applied in these clubs as they are revealed to be exaggerated mirrors of the ‘dominant culture’. The ‘teeming and bestial’ atmosphere takes its cue from the reductive and standardizing discourses of contemporary pornography with a strict homogeneity imposed on the size and shape of sexual signifiers; ‘cocks are invariably enormous and rock hard’, ‘breasts are enhanced’ and ‘cunts wet and shaven’ (A, 293). Erotic pleasure which requires ‘time, finesse and sensitivity’ is overtaken by the ‘empty experience’ of ‘prodigal sexual abandon’ in which, against a background of techno music, participants ape sexual techniques learned from mainstream porn films: ‘Imitating the frenetic rhythm of porn actresses, they brutally jerked his cock in a ridiculous piston motion as though it was a piece of dead meat’ (A, 294). This, then, is the heart of the Sadean-libertine system for which a strong sense of authorial distaste is shown through a marked preference in these passages for a more sensual approach to sexual activity defined by words such as like ‘deftness’, softness’, ‘gently’ and ‘delicately’, starkly contrasting with the more brutal descriptions of the women habitués of the clubs, their bodies ‘gaping from multiple penetrations’ (A, 292). Effectively sacrificed to this evermore transgressive Sadean system, Christiane is killed by sexual dissipation – ‘five men had fucked her without Christiane even glancing at them’. She then begins her rapid descent into illness then death, a process that starts with Bruno’s penis in her mouth and a succession of anonymous men penetrating her and ends with her paralysis then suicide. Unfettered by moral or kinship constraints and underwritten by a commercial rather than affective or spontaneous drive, sexual desire will always, it is suggested, revert to the Sadean system which is ‘governed by the principle of adventure’ and ‘seduction’. Such a system flows only one way; towards destruction. The sex clubs Bruno and Christiane visit are a step away from the degenerate sexual trajectory that reaches its apotheosis in the figure of David di Meola whose actions bear out Michel’s theory that sexuality is ‘a useless, dangerous and regressive function’ and as such must be done away with (A, 320).
If the wretched Bruno remains at heart the chubby, pasty and victimized omega male, then Francesco di Meola’s son, David, with his raw animal beauty, his ‘long, thick phallus’ and ‘big, hairy balls’ is the definitive alpha male. An increasingly monstrous figure who progresses from seduction to sexual sadism of the most depraved kind, di Meola is a modern Neanderthal who ‘had done nothing more than to extend and to put into practice the principles of individual freedom advocated by his father’ (A, 249, 263). A paradigmatic figure of Jameson’s famous aphorism the ‘sixties gone toxic’, di Meola’s brand of gladiatorial masculinity fares well in the new sexual marketplace of the 1960s and ’70s. Despite brief but ecstatic moments of erotic fulfilment, none of Houellebecq’s protagonists can ever hope to match up to di Meola, a sexual athlete who has slept with more than five hundred women and who represents the ‘logical conclusion’ of his father’s sexual conquests among the incense sticks and Afghan rugs. In characteristic Houellebecquian style that reads more like a sociological treatise than a novel, we learn that di Meola’s sexual degeneration evolves from a relatively innocuous serial pr
omiscuity into monstrously sadistic sex acts and eventually the production of pornographic ‘snuff’ films. It is a ‘really disgusting story’ but no more that the ‘logical conclusion’ of ‘the principles of individual freedom advocated by his father’ (A, 253). The façade of hippy spirituality now dropped, sexuality reverts to an orgiastic savagery that confirms the novel’s thesis that the sixties prompted a ‘return to the true nature of desire’ which inevitably leads to murderous violence against the weak (A, 125). A biographical study of David di Meola, From Lust to Murder: A Generation (published in French as Génération meurtre), clearly explicates this message lest it not be already sufficiently clear: ‘… like their master, the Marquis de Sade, they were pure materialists – libertines forever in search of new and more violent sensations’ and ‘the destruction of the moral values in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties was a logical, almost inevitable, process’ (A, 252).
Anti-feminism
For women in Houellebecq’s fiction, the legacy of ’68 is decidedly more destructive as feminism has made them ‘complicit with the individualistic ethos of capitalism’ in ways that differ from their male contemporaries. For the feminists of ’68, ageing involves not only the trials of physical decay but also the recognition that they brought their sexual obsolescence upon themselves and thus must accept ‘their own inevitable defeat: for the market will move on, no product can dominate indefinitely’.38 The most unpleasant denunciation is reserved for older women; feminists of ‘the old school’, who are the subject of a volley of derision and for whom ‘… their mature years brought only failure, masturbation and shame’ (A, 126). Described as ‘deranged old lefties who were probably all HIV positive’, they are ‘intolerable at breakfast, but by the early evening the mystical morons were hopelessly vying with their daughters’ (A, 121, 150). Sexual competition between generations, particularly between parents and children, is a recurring thematic in Houellebecq’s meditations on sexuality and there are long passages devoted to a detailed explication of this thesis: ‘Sexual desire is preoccupied with youth, and the tendency to regard ever-younger girls as fair game was simply a return to the norm; a return to the true nature of desire, comparable to the return of stock prices to their true values after a run on the exchange’. (A, 125) In Platform, Michel sees the time coming when he and his son will compete over the same females, a situation that Aldous Huxley envisages in Brave New World where advances in pharmacology will ‘break down the distinction between youth and age’ (A, 187). The soixante-huitards have ‘endorsed a cult of youth over age … ’ and sexually liberated women in particular have ‘shot themselves in the foot’ as by the time ‘they hit 40’ feminists find themselves in a ‘difficult position’ and ‘could hardly claim to be surprised when they, in their turn, were dismissed by succeeding generations’. ‘As their flesh begins to age, the cult of the body, which they had done so much to promote, simply filled them with disgust for their own bodies’ (A, 125). Men, on the other hand, can get away with ageing and could continue to enjoy the comparative sexual advantage in this Darwinist scenario as their period of physical attraction could be extended by successful public performance; those ‘who had attained a certain intellectual, financial or social position fared much better in their pursuit of young women’ (A, 126). To suggest that women had been the main promoters of the ‘cult of the body beautiful’ is a patently unfair and inaccurate observation but it is in accordance with the pervasive anti-feminism inhabiting all of Houellebecq’s novels discussed here. This anti-feminism is countered by an over-idealized portrayal of women as naturally ‘compassionate’ and tender beings that inspires the slogan for Michel’s biogenetic revolution: ‘The future will be feminine’ a take on the only slightly more clichéd advertising slogan employed by Monoprix ‘The future is female’.
Houellebecq’s representation of feminism in his novels is at best prejudiced and, in very many cases, defiantly fallacious. Always understood pejoratively as the destroyer of ‘natural’ sexual relations, feminism is depicted as little more than a new opportunity for the reification of sexuality that has resulted in widespread erotic dysfunction by destabilizing the categories of both masculinity and femininity, the weakening of the ‘conjugal bond’ and the wrecking of the ‘personal domain’ by an insistence on politicizing the personal. A staple feature across Houellebecq’s oeuvre, anti-feminism reaches its apotheosis in Platform which builds upon the earlier mood of Whatever and Atomised, offering a more elaborately articulated anti-feminist invective through its narrative structuring conceit that proposes the ‘solution’ of Third World sex tourism for men unhappy with the demands of Western women ‘who do not appreciate men’. But is this not a satirical suggestion in the mould of Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal? How seriously can we take such an outrageous proposition? Before examining the particulars of anti-feminism in Platform, the question regarding the satirical (or not) nature of this proposition must be tackled.
It has now become something of a critical orthodoxy in Houellebecq scholarship to align oneself broadly for or against the seemingly reactionary agenda in his novels, or more precisely, to take a decisive critical position in relation to the narrative techniques employed to express controversial content. On one side of this critical debate, critics such as Dominique Noguez (2003) and Fernando Arrabal (2005) assert that Houellebecq’s agenda is clearly a satirical one and thus any offence expressed along the way cannot be taken at face value.39 Others see Houellebecq’s writing as an ‘insistent and acerbic critique of capitalism’ that boldly offers a political agenda eclipsing all other concerns.40 Those on the other side of this critical divide argue that satirical or otherwise, ‘his texts express an unvarying and unambiguous stance on women, Islam, blacks, homosexuals, ecologists, Americans, etc. … ’ and despite his humorous agility in prodding the hallowed convictions of right and left alike, Houellebecq does so ‘only to reveal an intellectual myopia of his own’.41 In her essay ‘La Barbarie postmoderne’, Marie Redonnet acknowledges the interpretative dilemma posed by Houellebecq’s ideologically double-voiced writing position and vigorously lambasts him for a ‘hypocritical double-crossing’. His writing is, Redonnet claims, ideologically duplicitous as he ‘… can turn precisely the kind of objections made by readers considered too critical back against them: the reader who dares express a critical opinion is nothing more than a blinkered sheep, a censor, or an interrogator who wants to cast literature in the name of political correctness and right thinking’.42 This ‘damned if we do and don’t’ ideological impasse discourages us from speaking directly about difficult material, a critical stalemate recognized by Crowley as a ‘pre-emptive closing down of the space of critical dialogue’.43 Houellebecq’s fiction, he suggests, both anticipates and deflects charges of being reactionary by a process, however inconsistent, of disavowal that seems to forestall critical positions: ‘To criticize Houellebecq for the insistent presence of such material in his texts is, however, to already situate oneself in a position which these texts themselves criticize’.44 The slippery ideological territory of Houellebecq’s writing, then, requires more than a simple identification or censure of his ‘modest proposal’, rather it necessitates a direct engagement with what Crowley calls the prose’s ‘insulating frame’.45 It is possible, however, to obtain some critical purchase, and even dare to ‘express a critical opinion’ on the anti-feminism in the novel, by examining how the ideological manoeuvres of Platform set up this anticipatory critical silencing. The novel’s ostensibly satirical proposal of sex tourism, in many ways a logical conclusion of ’68’s call for sexual liberation, dissimulates a troubling gender politics. Rehearsing another obsessive concern of Houellebecq’s, that of the ‘ludicrous over-rating’ of critical theory, in particular the work of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze, Platform invokes the figure of the un-socialized ‘natural’ woman in a quasi-primitivist sexual discourse that returns women to a pre-Foucauldian biological essence where they function as the site of sola
ce from the wreck of culture (A, 376).
The most ubiquitous of Houellebecq’s framing techniques is a somewhat crudely executed narrative ventriloquism in which potentially controversial material is thrown somewhere other than in the authorial voice; a strategy of disowning that ‘disallows any authoritative meta-discourse’ while simultaneously refusing ‘the singularity of any one discourse’.46 The following extract from Atomised in which a female character articulates a deep abhorrence of feminism perfectly exemplifies such a technique:
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 18