Michel houellebecq: French novelist for our times

Michael Karwowski

THE controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq has probably initiated more acres of newsprint than any other writer, living or dead. In the process, he has been hailed as a prescient genius and dismissed as a rabid extremist, but almost always recognised as a novelist of great power and originality.

The last of his three novels, Platform, published shortly before al-Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, predicted that 'never, for as long as Islam exists, will peace reign in the world'. The novel features an attack by Islamic fundamentalists on a tourist resort in the Far East which reads uncannily like a prediction of the Bali bombing a year later in which more than 200 people died.

In an interview with the influential French literary magazine Lire to promote Platform, Houellebecq did not disagree when the interviewer spoke of his hatred for Islam: 'Yes, yes, you can speak of hatred... Islam is a dangerous religion'.

The upshot was that the very week of 9/11, Houellebecq's face appeared on the front page of the Moroccan daily newspaper Liberation over the caption: 'This man hates you'. Death threats were made against both him and his publisher before, a year later, four leading Muslim bodies took him to court accused of racial discrimination and inciting religious hatred.

Houellebecq (pronounced Well-beck) defended himself on the grounds of freedom of expression: 'I've never shown the slightest hatred for Muslims', he told the Palais de Justice in what the French media termed 1 'Affair Houellebecq, 'but I still have the greatest contempt for Islam. One cannot say that when one expresses an opinion against Islam, that amounts to an attack against the Muslim community.

Salman Rushdie, himself a novelist whose work has attracted the hostile attentions of Muslims, defended Houellebecq in print, arguing that it was his accusers rather than the French writer who were more likely to increase antagonism towards Muslims in the West. 'Platform is a good novel and Houellebecq a fine writer who writes for serious reasons', he wrote, 'and neither he nor his book deserves to be tarred and feathered'. In the event, Houellebecq was acquitted by the court, a decision hailed by the French media as a major victory against censorship.

L'Affair Houellebecq did not represent the first occasion that this enfant terrible of French -- or European -- literature found himself in the eye of a media storm for his uncanny prescience. His previous novel, Atomised (1998), appeared to condone cloning as a means of dealing with mankind's perennial competitiveness and aggression. This was years before the final deciphering of the Human Genome raised the possibility of interfering with human genes to produce healthier human beings.

Atomised was a world-wide best-seller and hailed as the great end-of-millennium novel. The English writer Julian Barnes memorably praised it as 'a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbit'. Debated on the front page of the leading French newspaper Le Monde, it was denounced by the Catholic press, and bitterly divided the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize, who gave the award to someone else.

Houellebecq's first novel, Whatever (1994), was hardly less controversial. The book amounted to an extended attack on the liberal values of the 1 960s which ushered in the sexual revolution. Far from liberating humanity, Houellebecq argued, these were condemning it to a profound solitude. 'Love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterises the modem era', he wrote. The outcome of the 'Peace and Love' of the '60s was that: 'No civilisation, no epoch has been capable of developing such a quantity of bitterness in its subjects'.

The rising tide of divorce in the West, the increasing numbers of people who live alone, and the explosion of agency dating, now even involving the more traditional Asian communities, would seem to lend credence to this view. Indeed, no less a figure than Mother Theresa of Calcutta suggested that loneliness was the overriding problem of our age.

So what are we to make of Michel Houellebecq, aside from his massive media presence? In the first place, a close reading of his three novels shows that, however consciously controversial he might sometimes appear in interviews, Houellebecq's work is both profound and sincere. He has been compared to Albert Camus, the last major French novelist to attract a world-wide audience. There is little doubt that he belongs in such elevated company.

But Houellebecq is also truly exceptional as a great novelist in that he expresses his philosophy of life in terms of a satire of contemporary society. It might be said that George Orwell in Animal Farm and 1984 and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World did the same. But Houellebecq's society, his civilisation, is more recognisable as our own, with its answerphones, computers, supermarkets, globalisation and terrorism. In this respect, Houellebecq is a writer for our times.

This marriage of profundity, sincerity, and contemporaneity is what gives Houellebecq his unique voice in world literature and also, incidentally, provides his novels with much of their wit, humour, and humanity. Take this sentence from Platform as an example: 'The minute they have a couple of days of freedom, the inhabitants of Europe dash off to the other side of the world. They behave -- literally -- like escaped convicts. I don't blame them. I was preparing to do the same'.

The comparison with Camus is singularly appropriate in positioning Houellebecq, for his starting point is essentially the same as that of the author of L'Etranger. Existential angst is everywhere in his novels. The nameless computer programmer who is the narrator of Whatever defines his state of mind as one of 'total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness ... One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away'.

The civilisation in which he finds himself offers no prospect of meaning or significance: 'I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data. It has no meaning ... In fact, nothing justified my presence here, neither here nor anywhere else, to tell the truth'.

The molecular biologist Michel in Atomised, who represents the writer's own search for meaning, just as his half-brother Bruno represents the search for the perfect orgasm, is described thus by a colleague: 'There was something about him, something monstrously sad. I think he was probably the saddest man I have ever met, even the word 'sadness' seems inadequate; there was something broken in him, something completely devastated. I always got the impression that life was a burden to him, that he no longer knew how to make contact with any living thing'.

Similarly, the civil servant Michelin Platform, whose job involves funding dubious exhibitions of modem 'art', writes: 'I was perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing'.

At the same time, the suffering of Houellebecq's protagonists is peculiar to existentialist literature. Thus, Platform's Michel speaks of 'that suffering which is particular to being an artist; that inability to be truly happy or unhappy, to truly feel hatred, despair, ecstasy or love; the sort of aesthetic filter which separates, without the possibility of remission, the artist from the world'.

The upshot of this supreme detachment is that, whatever their individual circumstances, Houellebecq's protagonists can all say, with Michelin Platform: 'I observe the world as it unfurls; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it, I can do no more than observe'.

But this observation is not meant simply to register the nature of the reality of the world observed. It has a purpose, a destination. As Whatever's narrator explains: 'To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself, I will need ... to prune, to simplify, to demolish'. And what needs to be demolished are the illusions to which mankind is prey. This is the vocation of the existentialist: to accept life as an 'experiment' whose purpose is to see if some order can be extracted from the chaos of experience.

It is this goal of rejecting everything that is not grounded in empiricism which explains Houellebecq's antipathy to Islam. Thus, in Atomised, he writes: 'Religions are basically an attempt to explain the world; and no attempt to explain the world can survive if it clashes with our need for rational certainty. Mathematical proofs and experimental methods are the highest expressions of human consciousness. I realise the facts seem to contradict me, I know that Islam - by far the most stupid, false and obscure of all religions - seems to be gaining ground; but it's a transitory phenomenon: in the long term, Islam is doomed just as surely as Christianity'.

He takes this argument further in Platform, where an Egyptian, who, like Michel in Atomised, is a biochemist working in genetic engineering, explains: 'When I think that this country invented everything: architecture, astronomy, mathematics, agriculture, medicine. Since the appearance of Islam, nothing. An intellectual vacuum, an absolute void ... The closer a religion comes to monotheism, the more cruel and inhuman it becomes; and of all religions, Islam imposes the most radical monotheism. From its beginnings, it has been characterised by an uninterrupted series of wars of invasion and massacres; never, for as long as it exists, will peace reign in the world. Neither, in Muslim countries, will intellect and talent find a home; if there were Arab mathematicians, poets and scientists, it is simply because they lost their faith'.

Houellebecq's antipathy to Islam, then, is based on the fact that, in our time, it appears to be the particular religion or orthodoxy which insists through extreme and violent action on its claim to be the one and only human truth. At different times in history, the same could be said of Judaism, Christianity, Communism, Fascism, or a number of other belief systems. But if Houellebecq is decidedly anti-religious, he is no less antipathetic to liberal humanistic values, which many would see as the antithesis of Islam.

He defines those values as starting from the point of view of the desirability of establishing 'the maximum amount of freedom' in order to foster 'the maximum amount of personal choice' for the individual. This is all very well, he contends, but only if there is 'a unifying project' which lends direction to this freedom, and Houellebecq disputes that such a purpose exists. As a result, 'If human relations become progressively impossible, this is due, precisely, to the multiplying of those degrees of freedom'. Without an underlying purpose, in other words, freedom is merely the opportunity to pursue a multiplying plethora of profoundly unsatisfying illusions with ever-more-desperate abandon. Thus, Bruno in Atomised muses in a characteristic aside that 'the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies of the 60s'.

Indeed, Whatever's narrator comments with respect to an 'enthusiastic prophet' for these liberal values that: 'He himself had never known any intimate relationship'.

Houellebecq's view of the establishment of liberal freedoms is summarised in Whatever's original title in French: Extension du domaine de la lutte (which literally translated would read: 'Extension of the Domain of Struggle'). Sexual liberalism, like economic liberalism before it, Houellebecq is saying, amounts to the creation of a society in which all must compete to survive and prosper: every man for himself or the survival of the fittest, in other words. Houellebecq returns to this in Atomised: 'The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit separating the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day'.

Critics have contended that this shows Houellebecq to be a reactionary, that he harks back to a more paternalistic society. There is an element of truth in this in that it does tell us something about where Houellebecq comes from, if nothing about where he is going. In common with Bruno and Michel, the half-brothers in Atomised, for instance, Houellebecq was the offspring of a marriage which soon dissolved, his 'sexually liberated' mother leaving to live the 'hippy life', and he was brought up by his grandmother. He has testified to the fact that this led him to feel 'the victim of a grave injustice'. Similarly, both brothers in Atomised are emotionally damaged as a result of their abandonment. Again, Bruno and Whatever's narrator, like Houellebecq himself, spend time in a psychiatric clinic as a result of their growing alienation, while the Michels of Atmoised and Platform both appear to give up on life.

Unlike Bruno, however, his half-brother Michel refuses to participate in the sexual rat race, although he is vouchsafed the opportunity of an emotionally-fulfilling relationship with Annabelle, but is unable fully to respond. This enables Houellebecq to provide an antidote to 'free love' through Michel's tentative approach towards true love: 'He had an immense compassion for her, for the boundless reserve of love he could feel simmering inside her, which the world had wasted... He was capable of realising that love, in some way, through some obscure process, was possible'.

As Houellebecq comments: 'Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope'. This echoes Whatever with its 'The desire for love is deep in man'.

The contrast between free love and true love is taken further in Platform. Now, 'the suicide of the West' has reached the point where the only outcome for the children of the sexual revolution is to seek sexual fulfilment through the commercialisation of sexuality in the East. As Michel explains, on the one hand, millions of Westerners have everything they want except sexual satisfaction, on the other hand, billions of people have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality: 'It's simple, really simple to understand; it's an ideal trading opportunity'.

This is contrasted with Michel's love affair with Valerie, in which each finds love through a renunciation of their individuality. 'It's impossible to make love without a certain abandon', Michel explains, 'without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness'.

This, implies Houellebecq, is where liberal values are erroneous in their contention that greater freedom equals greater happiness: 'Westerners have completely lost the sense of giving... We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights ... hardly ideal conditions in which to make love'.

And here, finally, we come to the nub of Michel Houellebecq's work. For while Houellebecq's contrast between free and true love is genuine as far as it goes, it is also a metaphor for something deeper, i.e., for humanity's search for personal fulfilment and contentment, in a word, for human significance.

This explains Houellebecq's attack on the West's promotion of individualism, which underlies the fostering of the maximum amount of personal choice. He expresses this attack in terms of what he sees as liberalism's failure to examine empirically the liberal doctrine of man's unique individuality. Houellebecq, in fact, is dubious in the extreme that this even exists.

Thus, Michel in Platform rejects the very idea of individuality when he accepts that he loves Valerie and moves in with her: 'It is wrong to pretend that human beings are unique, that they carry within them an irreplaceable individuality . . . When all's said and done, the idea of the uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity. We remember our lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read. That's about right: a little, no more.

This is where Houellebecq reveals his quite extraordinary originality. For in examining the fundamental nature of humanity, he contends that there is no real difference between those implacable enemies: the liberal humanist and the Muslim. But what possible connection could there be between the sexual liberalisers of the West and Islamic fundamentalists? A clue here is in the fact that the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda were promised that their deaths would result in their immediate entry into a heavenly paradise where each would have numbers of virgins for their personal satisfaction. We are told that some of the 9/11 hijackers actually went to Las Vegas before their mission to get a feel for their coming reward.

Then, in Platform, Michel's father is killed by an Algerian immigrant whose sister is having an affair with him. Rejecting her family outright, this woman tells Michel: 'They're not only poor, they're bloody stupid. Two years ago, my father went on a pilgrimage to Mecca; since then, you can't get a word out of him. My brothers are worse: they encourage each other's stupidity. They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them'.

Houellebecq's contention is that, from the point of view of achieving his goal of empirical simplification, 'the guardians of the one true faith' and the liberals who elevate the human individual to a position of supremacy start from the same point. Where liberals are concerned, this is encapsulated in the current sacred cow of Western political correctness: the dignity of the individual, a particular bugbear of Platform's Michel. For what is 'dignity' but another word for human pride? In the past, the acceptable face of pride was 'honour'. But this synonym came to be associated with the so-called upper classes, so a new synonym was found, one which was less elitist. This was 'dignity'. Similarly, what is the meaning of 'guardian of the one true faith' but human pride? And in each case, this pride is simply an expression of the ego, the self.

Again, this links with Houellebecq's existentialism. For existentialist angst can be seen as the experience of the futility of human life as lived in terms of self-fulfilment. And just as love is not possible through the elevation of the self -- our experience of sexual permissiveness has taught us that much -- but through selflessness, so, too, does Houellebecq's experience of life tell him that human fulfilment is only possible through the abandonment of the self or ego. In spiritual terms, we must lose our life to find it.

Thus, Whatever's narrator condemns sexual permissiveness for the selfish blind alley that it is, but without giving up on the search for some kind of fulfilment in a different environment: 'Everything which might have been a source of pleasure, of participation, of innocent sensual harmony, has become a source of suffering and unhappiness. At the same time, I feel, with an impressive violence, the possibility of joy. For years, I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I've long believed that it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That's done with'.

In Atomised, Michel, too, has a vision of an alternative to life lived as self-satisfaction: 'the self was an intermittent neurosis, and this man was far from being cured of it. . He saw space as a thin line separating two spheres. In the first sphere there was being, then space, and in the second was non-being and the destruction of the individual. Calmly, without a moment's hesitation, he tumed and walked towards the second sphere'.

Even the hapless Bruno, in a moment of exhaustion in his search for the perfect orgasm, has a vision of this alternative: 'Bruno had stopped wishing, he had stopped wanting. He was nowhere. Slowly, by degrees, his spirit soared to a state of nothingness, the sheer joy that comes of not being part of the world'.

From this perspective, Michel's genetic engineering, just like Bruno's search for the perfect orgasm, is a metaphor for something deeper. As Platform's Michel explains: 'I would say that man is clearly not intended to be happy. To truly arrive at the practical possibility of happiness, man would have to transform himself... Something, at any rate, in which spirit was possible. I know now for certain that the spirit is not bom, that it needs to be brought forth, and it will be a difficult birth, something of which we now have only a vague and harmful idea'.

To see Houellebecq as racist or an apologist for any doctrine is to mistake the role of the artist, which is to act as the vanguard of humanity's search for meaning. As such, he has no partiality. He is absolutely impartial. We are all in the same boat, all made the same way. Houellebecq's subject is mankind, an all-inclusive term. Far from promoting a particular agenda, he promotes the negation of all agendas. Take this comment from Platform, an excellent summary of Houellebecq's whole oeuvre: 'That's culture for you, I thought: it's a bit of a pain in the arse, but that's good; everyone is returned to his own nothingness'. Perhaps that is precisely what his critics resent.

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