Michel Houellebecq
(b. 1958)
They order these things differently in France. Back in June, when the British tabloids were offered the chance to buy a pre-publication copy of the new Harry Potter book, the botched handover that ensued was like something out of a Ray Winstone film. Rottweiler-toting guards waved guns around as the police swooped and the presses churned. But Angelo Rinaldi got the French literary scoop of the summer during a stroll on his lunch break.
Rinaldi, literary editor ofLe Figaro, dropped his bombshell on Thursday. While sauntering through Paris, he says, he came upon a dog-eared paperback lying on a bench, covered in greasy fingerprints. Some nameless youth had scribbled "What on earth is this? I didn't get it" on the flyleaf. A quick flick through revealed the book to be La possibilité d'une île, the next book by the infamous Michel Houellebecq, France's most inflammatory novelist and the foremost contender for the establishment's top prize, the Prix Goncourt. Nettled at not having received an advance copy, Rinaldi slated the book in his column, and the well-oiled Houellebecq publicity machine was forced to grind into action a month early.
Houellebecq, probably the bestselling contemporary French author outside France, may very well be stung by having his book described as "science fiction in the hands of a pissed-up chemist" and his prose style denounced as "a leaky kitchen tap, dripping away tasteless liquid with no plumber in sight". But his publishers certainly will have been prepared; indeed, French literary gossip implies that they engineered the leak. Certainly no one believes Rinaldi's story that he is the lucky victim of the bookcrossing.com craze, in which participants pass on copies of favourite books by setting them free in public places. Every Houellebecq book until now has sold on the controversy it generated, and the new one - a futuristic saga of cloning, anomie and oral sex - will be no exception.
A 47-year-old, nondescript boozehound who once programmed computers for the French government, Houellebecq is an unlikely choice as either a literary lion or sacrificial lamb. To his admirers, he is the torchbearer for a tradition of literary provocation that reaches back to the Marquis de Sade and Baudelaire; to his detractors, he is a pedlar of sleaze and shock, who relies on the political incorrectness of his pronouncements for his place in the pantheon. What none of them would contest is that, for whatever reason, he has hit a nerve. His thesis, first promulgated in Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994, published in English as Whatever, that the sexual revolution of the Sixties created not communism but capitalism in the sexual market, that the unattractive underclass is exiled while the privileged initiates are drained by corruption, accidie and excess - has since found both antagonists and devotees not only in France, but worldwide.
Houellebecq was born in 1958 in La Réunion, a French colony off East Africa. His father was a mountain guide, his mother an anaesthetist: as his website gloomily states, "they lost interest in his existence pretty quickly". His childhood would have psychologists whooping: at six, Houellebecq was packed off to a dismal suburb of Paris and brought up by his paternal grandmother, while his mother headed off to lead the hippy lifestyle.
He was a good student, and in 1980 he graduated in agricultural engineering, got married and had a son; then he got divorced, got depressed and got on with writing poetry. His first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue. Six years later, in 1991, he published a potted biography of the horror writer H P Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the prophetic subtitle "Against the World, Against Life". Rester vivant: méthode (To Stay Alive) appeared the same year, and was followed by his first proper collection of poetry. Meanwhile, Houellebecq signed up as a computer programmer at the Assemblée Nationale in Paris. In 1994 he brought out his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte, which chronicled the accidie of a sexually frustrated, terminally jaundiced computer programmer in the civil service.
Les particules élémentaires (Atomised), 1998, his second book, divides some of these autobiographical elements equally between two brothers. Plateforme (Platform), the third, mounts a vigorous attack on Islam, the religion his mother adopted. Les particules élémentaires came just in time to break a drought in French literature that had lasted for decades. Houellebecq's book, which was, as one critic wrote, not so much published as detonated, went straight for the jugular of the liberal establishment with its thesis that the sexual and social liberation of the 1968 revolutions had directly caused the death of love in contemporary society. The fury this caused among the ageing revolutionaries ensured that the book sold 300,000 copies in France within months.
When it was translated, English readers found themselves just as divided. Houellebecq's jaundiced anthropologist's eye, allied with the rigour of his construction and his ruthless judgements on human motivation, had him pronounced the Camus of a new generation. Quietly enough, since then, Houellebecq has become something of a multimedia phenomenon in France. In 1999 he worked on the adaptation of Extension du domaine de la lutte for the screen; the next year he issued a CD of himself reading his poems. Lanzarote (2000) was interleaved with photographs he had taken while on holiday in the Canary Islands. His public might be forgiven for thinking this odd, since he is famously reticent in person. Though friendly with writing contemporaries such as Frédéric Beigbeder and Florian Zeller, he declines most interviews and can barely be tempted out of his house.
In the autumn of 2001 he had a disastrous publicity tour for Plateforme, cancelled seven days before 9/11, when he denounced Islam as "la religion la plus con" in an interview with the magazine Lire. Drunk and belligerent, he justified his characters' condemnation of radical Islam with the judgement that it was "the stupidest religion in the world", declaring, to boot, that "when you read the Koran, it's appalling, appalling". He was taken to court for inciting racial hatred. Half the writers (even some he had lampooned) in France turned out to speak in defence of a man who said he had never confused Arabs and Muslims - that he was speaking of a religion rather than of a people. The case was thrown out but he retreated to Ireland to write.
What the palaver over Plateforme served largely to obscure was that it was not as good as its predecessor. Lanzarote, a novella hastily translated into English after the success of Platform, proved little more than a dry run for the conceits of that novel. If Houellebecq was not actually blocked and coasting on his reputation, it looked like it.
In person he is serious, mournful, almost naive, which sits ill with the force and flash of the prose he writes. When last seen, Houellebecq was living on the remote Beara Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, with his second wife and an ancient collie that came with the house. Although his imperfect English is apparently not a problem locally, he asks that all interviews be conducted in French: since not many journalists can manage this, he usually concedes to talk in English, which delivers the pregnant pauses, abstract comments and long silences that play directly to our conception of the French intello. He almost never sees his son, who is now in his twenties, and he drinks heavily. Occasionally, if some enterprising editor sends out a pretty reporter, he makes a gloomy pass. This is no more than his acolytes expect, since at least a third of a Houellebecq book consists of graphic descriptions of sexual conquest. And yet both a documentary in 2001 and a collection of essays and jottings that appeared in 2003 portray him as happily married, indifferent to praise and unambitious of fame. He is, tout court, a bit of a mystery.
A dog's life
(poodles excepted)
Michel
Houellebecq's misanthropy is all too evident in his latest, The Possibility of
an Island, says Michael Worton
Saturday October 29, 2005
The Guardian
The Possibility of an Island
by Michel Houellebecq
345pp, Weidenfeld, £12.99
Houellebecq is a controversial writer, and his latest novel is certain to increase the controversy around him. For his many admirers, he is a daring, prophetic figure who anatomises with honesty life in the contemporary west and exposes the lot of the millions of mediocre, grafting individuals whose role in our financial and emotional economies is usually ignored.
In his second novel, Atomised (2000), he tilted ferociously, and often creatively, against such targets as the decline of religion, consumerism, sexual freedom and "free love", the liberalist tradition of the west and, with an abiding obsession, the nature of love. In Platform (2003), he chose sex tourism, renewing his attack on western decadence and managing also to alienate the worldwide Islamic community with some gratuitously offensive comments about the supposed stupidity of Islam, which led to him being prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for inciting racial hatred.
While I disagree profoundly with his position that all the major monotheistic religions are based on "texts of hate", he provides so little evidence to support his view that it is not worth engaging with him on the subject. The problem with Platform for me is neither the allegedly anti-Islamic remarks nor its tawdry subject-matter; it is the fact that the novel is weakly conceived, badly structured and in narrative terms simply not convincing.
In The Possibility of an Island he once again addresses big ideas, but without giving them big thought or attention. This time the main subjects are mankind's desire for immortality, as made possible by cloning, and, again, human love. Written in the first person, the novel tells the story of Daniel, a stand-up comic whose career is built on "the commercial exploitation of bad instincts" such as racism, paedophilia and torture. Like all Houellebecq's anti-heroes, he is a misanthropist, loathing both his public and mankind in general and making a fetish of his own honesty.
Daniel's chapters are interspersed with those of two of his cloned descendants living 1,000 years later, Daniel24 and Daniel25, both of whom seem warmer and more human than their originator - even though, as neohumans, they are said to "go through life without joy and without mystery", living on sunlight, water and mineral salts and having only occasional, virtual contact with other neohumans.
Daniel's life is one of unrelenting disappointment with life and rage against other people, including his two lovers, the sophisticated magazine editor Isabelle, who doesn't like sex, and the sensual budding actress Esther, who doesn't like love. He finally discovers a sect, the Elohimites, whom he initially finds attractive because of their cult of promiscuity and, later, because they give him, through cloning, the possibility of eternal life after his suicide - although why anyone so miserable would want to live for ever defeats me. The Elohimites are based on the Raelians, a sect in whom Houellebecq became interested when living in Spain and who believe that the ancient Hebrew concept of Elohim should not be translated as "God" in the singular, but as "those who came from the sky", flying in from another planet to create life on earth. They infamously hit the headlines in December 2002, when Brigitte Boisselier, a Raelian bishop and biochemist, claimed that they had created the first successful human clone.
There is a strong autobiographical dimension to the novel. Daniel has a son he doesn't see and in whom he isn't interested, just as Houellebecq for a long time showed no interest in his son. Predictably, his favourite philosopher is the pessimist Schopenhauer, who believed that people could not have individual wills but were part of one vast universe-embracing but evil will, which is the source of all endless suffering. And, of course, Schopenhauer was a lonely, angry, friendless man, who found his only solace in his poodle - just like Daniel and his creator. This is one of the problems with reading Houellebecq: he seems incapable of creating characters who are more than ventriloquist's dummies for him.
The real flaw at the centre of this novel is that Houellebecq can't think or talk interestingly about love, the novel's main concern. We are treated to a series of Scrooge-ish maxims, such as "Living together alone is hell between consenting adults". Dogs are "machines for loving", but the novel articulates a stunted and confused view of love, where love between a man and a woman is equated with love for a pet.
Houellebecq's style is one of scattergun misanthropy: he often gets bored with his own rants, and targets are abandoned without resolution as Daniel and his successor clones move on to new howls of contempt. The best way to read Possibility is quickly, without pondering its cod philosophy and portentous metaphysical pronouncements, which take the anatomisation of banality to a paroxysm of the baroque. There is little point in thinking about what Houellebecq says or following up his references, since their irrelevance is the point.
Houellebecq is at bottom a sentimentalist who lacks the honesty to recognise that fact. And his novels, especially this one, can seem like therapy sessions, with the reader cast in the role of the therapist, condemned to listen silently to a torrent of platitudes and prejudices.
Michael Worton is Fielding professor of French language and literature at University College London
October 29, 2005
This island is full of noises
Michel Houellebecq is still angry, still scabrous. But his lack of new targets makes this novel merely a clone of earlier ones
THE
POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND
by Michel Houellebecq
translated by Gavin Bowd
Weidenfield & Nicolson, £12.99; 512pp
£11.69
AROUND PARIS THIS autumn, one heard all the rumours. He’s been paid €1 million for world rights . . . No, it was €1.5 million . . . And you know why the book is embargoed until publication? Because it’s “merdique” . . . No, that’s just his enemies talking.
Who was this figure around whom so much talk swirled? Michel Houellebecq, a man who is either the saviour of the contemporary French novel, or is symptomatic of the navel-gazing that so dominates French literature today.
Whichever camp you are in, there is no doubt that, since the publication of his second novel, Atomised, Houellebecq has become the most talked-about French writer de nos jours. Even those who despise his misanthropy recognise that he is one of the few contemporary novelists addressing the ennui of modern life.
Houellebecq’s world is hyper-consumerist, devoid of meaning or purpose. Our lives are vacant and idiotic. Or, as he notes in this new novel, The Possibility of an Island, youth is the only time for happiness, “its only season”:
“Later on, having started a family . . . they (the young) would be introduced to work, worry, responsibility and the difficulty of existence . . . while ceaselessly bearing witness — powerless and shamefilled — to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies.”
If you think that is just a tad nihilistic, just wait for Houellebecq’s assertion that sex is the only real delight known to mankind: “. . . it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures — whether associated with rich food, tobacco, alcohol or drugs — were only derisory and desperate compensations, mini-suicides that did not have the courage to speak their name . . .”
No doubt, Houellebecq’s bleak appraisal of the human condition has struck a chord in a France often racked by self-doubt and boredom. But you don’t just read him to flagellate yourself for being a pathetic consumerist. You also read him for his undistilled outrageousness. When he writes a sex scene, it is explicit and hard core. When he voices his opinions on matters such as, say, Islamic fundamentalism, he takes off the gloves. And his humour is often unapologetically tasteless. Consider:
“Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina?”
“No.”
“The woman.”
It is no surprise that Houellebecq has been often been accused of misogyny.
He happily plays the misanthropic card whenever possible, having his narrator note: “On the day of my son’s suicide I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child; he was as stupid as his mother and as nasty as his father. His death was far from a catastrophe; you can live without such human beings.”
The purveyor of such warm “family values” is a self-loathing comedian named Daniel. Like his creator, he is a Class A misanthrope. He has made a fortune out of scathing comedy (not surprisingly, Daniel takes many potshots at Muslim extremists — and Houellebecq has great fun with many “infra”-digs at the French media). Along with vast amounts of money comes a sort of love in the shape of Isabelle.
But an ever purer liaison affectif is established between Daniel and his dog, Fox, especially as Isabelle runs to fat, the marriage collapses, she kills herself and Daniel gets involved in a weird cult.
Meanwhile, modern life is disintegrating. But thanks to that new bio-techonological wonder called cloning, immortal life can be achieved. We discover that the text we are reading, the story of Daniel 1, is being simultaneously read by his 24th clone, 2,000 years in the future. (For animal lovers, the good news is that Daniel 1’s dog also gets cloned.)
Houellebecq is speed-juggling many ideas here. His novel is part-science fiction coupled with a scabrous commentary on the impossibility of achieving personal intimacy with someone else. We are fed gloomy predictions on the collapse of human existence as we know it. Along the way, there is the usual Houellebecquian cocktail of dehumanised sex, his obsession with beach resorts (a prominent feature of an earlier novel, Platform, which many angry readers regarded as a defence of sex tourism) and a bizarre romantic belief (considering his sardonicism) that love is the unattainable holy grail toward which we all strive.
In many ways, the plot of The Possibility of an Island is ridiculous. It is also a devoid of any emotional purchase; any sense of involvement with the characters.
But you don’t read Houellebecq for his narrative skills or for the subtle shading of his characters. You read him for his caustic world view, his delight in speaking the unspeakable. All such attributes are on show here. So is a genuine horror at the dismal way that life is lived now. Whether or not you find his stance bracing and necessary, or gratuitously offensive, there is no doubt that he is a writer who deserves the serious attention that he is now receiving.
Still, you come away from this novel thinking that he is basically pounding away at the same targets as in previous books. You find yourself enjoying the occasional nasty aside or the extended rant but little more. Houellebecq remains an interesting polemicist but diatribes do not a novel make.
Douglas Kennedy’s latest novel, State of the Union, is published by Hutchinson
A talent to abuse
Houellebecq on:
Islam:
“It’s the stupidest religion in the world.”
The
Bible:
“Packed with passages so boring they make you want to shit.”
Reading and writing:
“Reading changes your world view. Writing changes absolutely nothing. Except, of
course, when it makes your rich.”
The
shape of the novel:
“The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head;
it has the same shape as the human brain.”
Men
of ideas:
“Active people don’t change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less
important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”
Politics:
“I don't think politics is that important. Belief systems and technological
revolutions are important, but I don’t think political decisions have the
slightest effect on events.”
Psychiatric hospitals:
“I mainly went to the psychiatrist to get time off work. The problem is the
people in the hospitals are so much more interesting that sometimes you don’t
want to come out again. Those places suit me rather well. They’re not stressful
and you can smoke as much as you like.”
Love:
“Given a person’s past, it’s usually bound to end badly, but sometimes it can go
right.”
Modesty:
“I don’t suffer attacks of excessive modesty.”
Writing about sex:
“It’s quite difficult to write about sex. The language isn’t made for that.”
Provocation:
“I attack, I insult. I’ve a gift for that. It’s rather funny.”
Feminism:
“I’ve always seen feminists as amiable idiots.”
Novelists:
“Listen to the novels, not the novelist.”
A World Without Laughter
By Eric Pape | Oct 17 '05
In the future there will be no sex, intimacy or love. Desire and passion will endure only in the typed word. Forget about laughter and tears. People no longer will be humans, but rather "neo-human" clones, looking back on their originators' past trying to understand all that has been lost.
That's the grim future envisioned by French literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq in his latest novel "La Possibilité d'une île" ("The Possibility of an Island", in French. 485 pages. Fayard) and judging by the initial French sales, it's a world that hundreds of thousands of French readers find convincing. The book contains elements that have helped turn Houellebecq's previous works into best sellers: a quirky fascination with science, joyless but explicit sex, a clear relish or Western society's decadent decline and a selfish antihero who offers a jaded but honest look at a dehumanized society even as he sinks into hedonism. It's a cautionary tale for a society that doesn't realize that is doing the same.
Publishers smell a gold mine. "Island" is being translated into 36 languages, including Icelandic, Korean and Albanian. In Europe, hopes are exceedingly high; Houellebecq's last book, "Platform," sold 50,000 copies each in Spain and Italy, and more than 200 000 in Germany. His new novel is on the shortlist for the Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, as well as the distinguished Renaudot. The respected conservative daily Le Figaro has called Houellebecq the “emblematic writer of his generation.” In late October, an international colloquium of “Houellebecq specialists” will spend two days analyzing his oeuvre in Edinburgh, offering up speeches on such topics as “Nature in Michel Houellebecq’s work” and “Phallus”, examining Houellebecq’s heavy sexual content. “Houellebecq speaks of the contemporary world”, says writer Josyane Savigneau, former editor of Le Monde’s literary supplement. “In France, there are too many narcissistic little novels. People want to hear about society and what it is becoming”.
“Island” is a surprising readable tale of a fascinating, if pathetic universe defined by the malaise of modern Western civilization. The main voice belongs to Daniel1, a provocative performer and filmmaker with a striking resemblance to Houellebecq. Daniel1 dumps his wife for a 22-year-old woman, a quarter-century younger than him, whom he discovers while scouting actresses for his sex-laden film, “The Highway Swingers”. Interspersed among Daniel’s tales are those of his future clones, Daniel24 and Daniel25. They look back on their human originator’s writings and try to find the remaining shreds of their humanity. It is a bleak comment on modern society, but for all its harshness, there is a profound longing when Houellebecq writes about a world “that has forgotten how to love.”
Though Fayard launched “Island” with a publicity campaign worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, Houellebecq is his own single best promotional tool. Early on, the author and his handlers recognized the challenges of standing out in France’s cluttered literary market, where 663 books are slated to come out this season – double the number six years ago. To that end, Houellebecq goes out of his way to provoke charm and offend. In television interviews, he speaks in a barely audible monotone, coming across as someone struggling with painful shyness. But he mixes his sharp social commentary with seemingly calculated diatribes on sex, women and religion. He regularly offers up remarks blasting Islam – he’s called it the world’s “dumbest” religion – and promotes the sex trade, among others. In France, that’s taken by some as challenging traditional thinking.
Houellebecq’s combination of panache and provocation makes him the most influential writer in France right now. He wrote “Island” during the off-season at a Spanish resort, where it is easy to picture him smirking while typing up his musings on modern society. If the future does turn out to be barren of laughter, it will be because Houellebecq had the very last laugh.
life in books
Contradiction
fiction
He has been accused of misanthropy, misogyny and Islamophobia, but Michel
Houellebecq makes no apologies for his bleak view of humanity. His latest book
is true to form
Maya
Jaggi
Saturday November 5, 2005
The Guardian
The Possibility of an Island is published on November 10 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £12.99.
Ever since Michel Houellebecq became France's chief literary export, readers and reviewers have been curious about the source of his morbid misanthropy and deadpan humour. His latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, throws up clues in allusions to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, while its comedian protagonist scoffs that those who consider the "alliance between nastiness and laughter" to be innovative "can't have read Baudelaire". But in a recent diary fragment on his website, Houellebecq identifies his father as a master of "paradoxical humour" whose delight in playing the beauf (bumpkin), though a connoisseur of Joyce's Ulysses, made him a compelling model for his son.
Sexuality, ageing and death have been Houellebecq's obsessive themes since his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated in 1999 as Whatever), was published in 1994. In it, a software engineer called Michel, not unlike the author's younger self, seeks desperately to lose his virginity. For Houellebecq, the 1960s sexual revolution made sex a brutal extension of consumer gratification, whose losers are the old and the undesirable. He still holds to that view.
While life for his characters tends to end at 40, Houellebecq, now 47, unveiled the promise of immortality in his second novel, Les particules élémentaires (1998), whose translation as Atomised (2000) won the 2002 Impac award. In it, the celibate geneticist Michel lays the foundations for cloning a superior race of neo-humans, while his sex-crazed half-brother Bruno sinks into madness.
The Possibility of an Island (trans-lated by Gavin Bowd) returns to the prospect of eternal life through an ageing comedian, Daniel1, and his cloned successors centuries on. Daniel24 and Daniel25 inhabit a dystopia where relationships have given way to virtual "intermediation", and remnant "savages" of the human race roam outside the gates. Though freed from both desire and decay, the neo-humans know neither joy nor mystery, "no laughter, cruelty or compassion".
Bruno in Atomised sees Huxley as "probably one of the most influential thinkers of the century", and Brave New World (1932) not as social satire, but as "our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against ageing and the leisure society". Yet Houellebecq, who discovered science fiction at 15, finds it "very intelligent but lacking flesh; once you assimilate the ideas, you don't want to re-read it".
Set largely in Almeria, his new novel was inspired by "crossing the desert plains of southern Spain and seeing road signs to crematoria. I was concerned about the disappearance of Catholicism in Spain, and Ireland [where he has lived since 1999]. Thirty years ago, people believed they would live happily ever after in an afterlife, whereas now they're happy to be incinerated. I thought, perhaps a new religion promising eternal life could emerge." For his "Elohimite" sect, he drew on the Raelians, who in 2002 claimed to have cloned the first humans, and who appeared as the Azraelians in his novella Lanzarote
Although Houellebecq himself has a burgeoning fan club, and was guest of honour at a conference in Edinburgh last weekend, "The World of Houellebecq", opinion has always been divided. While some agree with Julian Barnes's verdict on Atomised, that he "hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits", he has also been criticised as a pornographer, misogynist, racist and Islamophobe. He was taken to court by Islamic groups in France in 2002 after being quoted as saying Islam was the "stupidest religion"; eventually he was cleared of incitement to racial or religious hatred. Island has had lukewarm reviews in Britain. Douglas Kennedy in the Times damned him with faint praise as an "interesting polemicist", and novelist Michèle Roberts says that although Houellebecq is sometimes considered the Albert Camus of his generation, his work "lacks Camus' poetry". He "writes from inside alienation. His bruised male heroes, neglected by their parents, cope by depriving themselves of loving interactions; they project their coldness and loneliness on to the world."
In an otherwise favourable review of Platform (2001) in the Spectator, Anita Brookner concluded that his prose was "entirely humourless", but in person, his doleful torpor is punctuated by furtive smiles and giggles. He has been likened to Ozzy Osbourne for his politically incorrect provocations, and there is surely self-satire in his portrayal of Daniel, a clown who hates laughter, and has built his career "on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts". An "abrasive humanist", Daniel favours misogynist gags, snuff sketches and "light Islamophobe burlesque" balanced by a touch of anti-semitism.
"I've never been 100 per cent a comedian," says Houellebecq. "It is pleasant to be a comedian from time to time, but unbearable to have to do it all the time. That's why comedians are plunged in despair." He can also be a stern moralist, in Swiftian mode. While his novel presents euthanasia as a useful means of clearing away those past middle age, an allusion to the summer heatwave of 2003, in which hundreds of elderly people died in France, there are hints of authorial disgust: "Only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish."
Houellebecq was born in 1958 in Réunion, a French island colony. His mother was an anaesthetist and his father a mountain guide, of the hippie "me generation" dissected in Atomised: "The couple quickly realised that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their personal freedom." At six, he was sent to his paternal grandparents in the Yonne, near Paris. "I was probably quite isolated, but people left me in peace. I didn't really look much for human contact, or suffer for lack of it." In his website diary, however, he confesses to having been handicapped by "frightful physical complexes". Recalling a lack of tenderness from his mother, he writes: "Still today, when a woman refuses to touch or caress me, I suffer atrociously . . . Till my death, I'll remain an abandoned little child."
He was reading at three. "I don't think life is the real influence, it's much more imaginative life." He still has his copies of the comic Pif, featuring Pif le Chien and the Native American Black Woolf, first published by the commu-nist party daily L'Humanité. He dislikes American cartoons on "aesthetic" grounds ("Donald Duck is ugly"). Of Alfonse de Lamartine's novel Graziella (1849), about a passion that ends in death, which he read at 10, he says, "I wonder why they give that to children - it's neurotic. How on earth could I have a normal love-life after that?"
The first science-fiction book he loved was City (1952) by Clifford Simak, about a "dog utopia. I was already a bit weary of mankind. It was a good change to have robots and dogs." He was also gripped by the early 20th-century American master of horror and "weird" fiction about whom he wrote HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991), translated this year. For Lovecraft, he writes, the "universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles", a vision "paradoxically comforting to those souls who are weary of life". For him, "life shouldn't exist: even vegetable life is suspect. Almost all my favourite writers have that position."
Baudelaire, Pascal and Dostoevsky were "three simultaneous shocks at 15", though Pascal and Dostoevsky believe "life's an error, but God exists. For me, life's a mistake, and God doesn't exist." While allusions to Camus pepper his work, he believes the absurdist Ionesco's novel Solitaire is "more beautiful than L'Étranger". At 18 he began to read about atomic physics and genetics. "What I was looking for in science was certainty." He graduated with a degree in agronomy in 1980, but had spells of unemployment and, after divorce from his first wife (he has one son), was treated for depression. He became a computer programmer at the French parliament in 1991, writing novels and poetry in his spare time. But he left after his second marriage, to Marie-Pierre Gauthier in 1998, and moved to Ireland.
The spark for Platform, which appears to present sex tourism as an ideal solution for rich, clapped-out westerners and locals with nothing to sell but their bodies, was a package tour to Thailand. "Day 1, Day 2 ... Everything is so well foreseen," he says. But in Platform, Islamic terrorists lay waste to a Thai resort. It was later seen as uncannily prescient of the Bali bombing of October 2002. "It wasn't that difficult to predict," he says. "You just need to go to these places to see there's a problem developing," though he thinks everybody but Islamists "is profiting from it". He says the remarks for which he was tried were part of a dismissal of monotheistic religion. "I've too much contempt for religions to talk about them. It's a total waste of time."
He writes of Lovecraft's "obsessive racism", a charge some critics level at him too. "I'm interested in subjects more important than race, not details of colour or skin," he says. "The biological fate of mankind, the struggle against ageing, the development of intelligence through interconnection with mach-ines. Real racist thought could only develop after Darwin and before modern genetics, when intervention in human DNA becomes possible. Racist thought is dead, just as I've said religion is dead intellectually. That doesn't stop remnants of it living on."
Daniel1 believes in the possibility of love, though feeling himself to be a "prehistoric monster with my romantic silliness, my attachments, my chains". For Houellebecq, "what excites me as a novelist is not my personal contradictions - I'm used to them - but the contradictions of other people. People are able to not believe in the possibility of love while being in love. Human beings are as contradictory as that."
Stephen King, introducing Lovecraft, writes that those who create their generation's fantastic literature "chart that generation's deepest fears". Houellebecq's beliefs may in a sense be immaterial if his fiction captures the fears and contradictions of his age. "It really gets on my nerves when publishers say they laughed a lot when they read my books," he says. "I want people to cry."
Key works
Pif
by various illustrators
Tintin in Tibet by Hergé
Graziella by Alfonse de Lamartine
Solitaire by Ionesco
City by Clifford D Simak
12 November 2005
WEIDENFELD £12.99/£11.99
Michel Houellebecq's admirers either admire his flick-knife intellect and morose wit or simply cheer at the explosions he creates: his court case for "racial hatred"', his slagging of the soixante-huitards in Atomised, his purported defence of sex tourism in Platform. His detractors call him a dull misanthrope with a penchant for porno, and present papers at conferences entitled The Abject Penis of Michel Houellebecq (yes, delivered last month). Without exception, though, they have been waiting for The Possibility of an Island, for which Houellebecq was paid a reported €1m advance, to see whether he could shed the weary insipidity that crept through in parts of Plarform. Would he exceed himself, or would he emerge from the tunnel resplendent upon his own gravy train?
Sad to say, mostly the latter. The Possibility of an Island is narrated partly by Daniel, an embittered observational comedian whose reputation as a "hero of free speech" rests on bilious sketches called things like "We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts", and partly by two clones of himself thousands of years in the future. Surrounded by desolation, the "neohuman"' clones attempt to pick through the testaments of their predecessors "for the edification of the Future Ones".
The present-day Daniel is a pretty joyless fellow. He finds brief happiness with Isabelle, the publisher of a magazine called Lolita, who loves him but doesn't love sex. After she kills herself (women always end badly in Houellebecq) he has his heart stamped on by Esther, a nubile actress who loves sex but doesn't love him. Unconditional love, he maintains at great length, can come only from a dog.
In between the women, he falls in with the Elohimites, a sect of sun-worshipping alien-watchers based on Lanzarote. This is a thinly veiled portrait of the Raelian order, with which Houellebecq spent some time a few years ago - right down to an unflattering portrayal of its seedy chief prophet from Clermont-Ferrand. The Elohimites offer Daniel the chance to have his DNA stored for future cloning projects, to which he and his dog eagerly agree: hence Daniel's future self, his 6,174 clone companions and his clone-corgi.
At the end of Atomised, Houellebecq gave us a couple of final chapters describing the human race evolving into "a species which was asexual and immortal... which had outgrown individuality, individuation and progress": here, he dishes up a whole book of it. The dusting of hard science that was little more than plot thickener to the previous novel becomes a dense film in this one. Elsewhere, he simply drags out the tropes on which he has traded for years: male desolation, salvatory blowjobs, general death of love, etc.
In both this book and its predecessor Platform there are passages of irresistible black humour, savage condemnation and genuine (and surprising) sentiment. But devotees of the old Houellebecq will have to wait for yet another book to see whether he will tire of ploughing the same furrow, or whether this supremely talented writer really intends to become just a clone of himself.
The
Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
£12.99
John Crace
Monday November 14, 2005
The Guardian
Daniel 1,1: I get so tired writing comic sketches about gays, blacks, Jews and Muslims these days. But being thought to be avant garde has its advantages; people take you seriously and pay you shed loads of cash for any old tosh. And you get lots of pussy, too.
Daniel 24,1: Look at those savages in the distance. They are humans. I sit alone in my fenced-off compound sending the odd email to Marie 22.
I am not happy, I am not sad
I never cry and I'm never bad
Daniel 1, 2: I don't know why I married my first wife and I didn't care when my son committed suicide. That's how shocking I am. I met Isabelle when she came to interview me after the success of We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts. She was OK; her tits didn't sag and I felt
almost affectionate towards her. We stayed together for a while in a house I had bought in Spain
with my many million euros.
Daniel 24, 2: I am neo-human. I sit here with Fox, reflecting aimlessly on our previous incarnations.
I'm even deep
When I'm asleep
Daniel 1, 3: Isabelle aged badly and I grew tired of her. I acquired a dog I called Fox, who was much better company. One morning some neighbours invited me to join the Elohim sect. Weighed down by my professional ennui I was naturally sceptical, but the prospect of free love and everlasting life was undeniably attractive.
Daniel 24, 3: Marie 22 sent me an email.
My breasts are low
It's time to go
She is about to become Marie 23.
Daniel 1, 4: With Esther I thought I had discovered happiness. Just looking at her 22-year-old body gave me a hard-on and she willingly let me fuck her in every orifice.
Daniel 25, 1: Daniel 24 has had enough. The Supreme Sister has called him
Daniel 1, 5: Esther left me as I knew she would, but my Fourierist principles had drawn me ever closer to the Elohim. I had even taken to writing doggerel.
Just one push
On a friendly bush
Vincent had replaced the Prophet and he was convinced the time of human cloning was drawing ever nearer.
Daniel 25, 2: It was around this time that the early leaders pioneered a genetic mutation of autotrophism, allowing the new species to survive on minerals and water.
Daniel 1, 6: Sometimes I think I overstated my despair; though not that of my readers. I chose to visit Isabelle. "I still love you," she said, before committing suicide.
Daniel 25, 3: Marie 23 has escaped to live with the savages. I read Spinoza.
Daniel 1, 7: Occasionally my cock showed signs of life, but I had come to realise that happiness was the preserve of the young. Vincent suggested that Fox and I should have our DNA copied. "It is time for you to commit suicide," he said. "You will be an example for millions of others." I sent a last poem to Esther.
You are in clover
But my life is over
Daniel 25, 4: I'm tired of feeling nothing. I break out. I smell the pestilential ordure between a savage's legs and make for the hills. I will die. I am finally alive.
The digested
read, digested:
25 Daniels don't give a damn. And neither will you.
WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON £12.99 (345pp)
Although a more pressing concern over the last two decades, the concept of cloning has intrigued storytellers for thousands of years. It is obvious why: the possibility of doubles resolves all kinds of narrative problems. Euripides, in his play Helen, suggests that his protagonist had a double made from air, redeeming her from responsibility for the Trojan War. Michel Houellebecq, whom many consider the most significant French novelist today, uses cloning to address a perennial problem of science fiction (and The Possibility of an Island is, at least in part, a science fiction novel): how to interest the reader in an imagined future far removed from our era.
He resolves this by making one of his protagonists (Daniel24) the 24th replication of a character who lives in a very recognisable present day. In doing so, he addresses the biggest crises of our age. No longer believing in religion, denied the comforting fantasy of an eternal afterlife, what possible ambition could we have besides remaining young and living as long as possible?
Having children offers no satisfaction: Daniel1 believes babies are so disgusting that he attempts to make a film, the first 15 minutes of which consist of "the unremitting explosion of babies' skulls under the impact of shots from a high-calibre revolver". Sex offers only temporary consolation, and the only real affection a human can receive is from a dog - which Houellebecq, in a rare flash of sentimentality, calls a "loving-machine". As the author guides us towards the possibility of a neo-human world, being cloned seems as good as it's going to get.
Before giving up on the human race, Houellebecq's depressed 47-year-old does manage to fall in love. Much of the middle of this novel is taken up by a description of Daniel1's relationship with Esther, a 22-year-old actress. She is described in the same reductive prose that Houellebecq uses for descriptions of female characters in all his novels, lovable for not wearing knickers and possessing what Daniel describes as the greatest skill a woman can have: knowing when to put your hand on a man's penis in public. Daniel1 knows this relationship is pathetic, and it's not long before she leaves him. The last time he sees her, she is in the middle of a public ménage à trois with two other men at a house party.
Still, his fate is far better than that of poor old Daniel24, who lives in a time when neo-humans are denied all physical contact and spends his days showing Marie22 his penis via the video mechanism in his computer. She responds by sending him jerky images of her vagina. Daniel24 is even more disillusioned than his original, describing said image as "a hole for dwarves, fallen into disrepair."
When not lusting after Esther, Daniel1 spends his time as the only sizeable celebrity interested in a religious sect who worship the Elohim, "extraterrestrial creatures responsible for the creation of mankind, and due one day to return". As this sect is based in Lanzarote, it seems reasonable to assume they are another version of the Azraelians, who appeared in Houllebecq's Lanzarote (one of countless references to the author's previous work). They are a fictional version of the real-life Raelians, famous for their human-cloning claims, who have spoken of their admiration for Houellebecq and their approval of this novel.
But the pleasures offered by the Elohimites are not enough to distract Daniel1 from either the human condition or his doomed love affair, and it is not long before he commits suicide. Before he does so, he pens a letter to Esther that gives the novel its title and will have a devastating effect on at least three of the clones after he is dead.
After Daniel24 dies, he is replaced by a more adventurous clone, who sets out into the wilderness. Here Houellebecq seems to lose his way. The first 300 pages of this novel prove that Houellebecq is one of the best novelists writing today. His contemporary references suggest an author at ease with all aspects of modern culture: arguments about whether Larry Clark is as good a filmmaker as Michael Haneke; his description of Steve Jobs as the first to join the cloning cult, followed by Bill Gates and Richard Branson; his narrator's name-checking of Coetzee's Disgrace as a novel that sums up his situation. But although world events make this a good time for apocalyptic fiction, the final commentary and epilogue are the novel's weakest sections.
I have no problem with science fiction as a genre, but Houellebecq's descriptions of the debris of ancient human activity ("flat screen televisions, piles of shattered CDs, an immense point-of-sale advertisement depicting the singer David Bisbal") are the product of a much more predictable imagination than evident elsewhere in the novel. It's unsurprising that a misanthropic talent with a love of science fiction would want to realise his vision of the end of the world, but Houellebecq is undoubtedly at his best when he uses his forensic skills to dissect our present age.
Matt Thorne's novel 'Cherry' is published in Phoenix paperback
Default to gloom
(Filed: 13/11/2005)
Tibor Fischer reviews The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq.
'That was a period of almost constant pain. Never had I felt to what point writing a novel is a solitary and punishing activity; in fact I believe it's the saddest activity in the world."
This is from Michel Houellebecq's web blog on the genesis of his fifth novel The Possibility of an Island. Of course, as readers of his previous work will know, Houellebecq's default setting is gloom. Not since Sartre has a French writer had such stature in France and not since Sartre has a French writer had such stature outside France, and while Sartre had a band of detractors and cock-snookers, Houellebecq is genuinely hated by so many Parisian intellos that he deserves some sort of special award.
Houellebecq's prose has always sported four main strands: the banal, the copulation, the polemic and the sci-fi. He is one of the few writers who can do the ordinary, the unremarkable, the dull and yet make them live. His greatest talent is for emotional journalism: a boring party, a TV dinner, queuing up to get your breakfast at a hotel buffet - these are the areas where Houellebecq can't be topped.
Houellebecq has coupled this gift with assiduous efforts as a wind-up merchant. Infuriating the bourgeoisie is almost a recognised art-form in France and it is Houellebecq's speciality. Like his predecessor in acerbity, Celine, you can imagine him crossing out a line from his manuscript because he doesn't think it's good enough, but you can't imagine him holding back anything because it might offend or repel someone.
Capable of mephitic cynicism and misogyny ("Do you know what they call that fat stuff around the vagina? A woman"), Houellebecq and his creations are none the less still sniffing around for love and susceptible to disappointment.
The novel takes the form of parallel narratives by Daniel and his far-future cloned descendants Daniel 24 and Daniel 25. Daniel is a celebrated, successful comedian with many similarities to Houellebecq: full-time provocateur, Muslim-baiter, Corgi-fancier. Through his celebrity Daniel is invited to stay with the Elohim, a cult founded by a failed pop singer (and with many similarities to a real-life French cult). The Elohim manage to come up with a technique for immortality for believers and their pets (Houellebecq seems to have reached that Brigitte Bardot state of disillusionment where only dogs are truly admirable).
No one can accuse Houellebecq of ducking the big issues. The family, society, religion, love, science and the future of mankind are all present and accounted for. At the beginning of The Possibility of an Island I thought Houellebecq was working towards a gentler venture, but, rather like in his earlier novel, Atomised, the shagging and despair break out in industrial quantities until science comes along to offer us the possibility of escape from our grubby earthly existence.
If you liked Atomised and Platform, you'll love The Possibility of an Island. Houellebecq is perhaps the most talented of current French writers, and might be termed the Lord of the New Despair, but he has yet to write his masterpiece. He can do whatever he wants; a happy, but dangerous state for a writer.
THE TLS N.º 5356, November 25, 2005
A blunt instrument
EMILIE BICKERTON
Michel Houellebecq
THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND
Translated by Gavin Bowd
512pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £12.99.
0 2978 5098 9
Last month, Gavin Bowd, who is Michel Houellebecq’s English translator, organized an international conference in Edinburgh With the title The World of Houellebecq. For the contributors to this conference, as for many readers and critics, the French writer is primarily a novelist of ideas. Moreover, the critical consensus is that his prose is flat and banal, reflecting the mood of his characters and their predicaments; English reviewers often remark that the simplicity of his sentence structure makes for fluid translations.
To bypass the prose and consider Houellebecq primarily as a social philosopher, is to misread him. Bowd’s translation which must have been done very quickly, as La Possibilité d’une île was published in France in early September (and reviewed in the TLS, September 16) — shows how much is lost when the words are considered a mere vehicle for the message. la fact, Houellebecq is no visionary; he seems unable to conceive of change other than through scientific revolutions that will obliterate the human race. He has, however, developed a particular prose style for dealing with contemporary life. He is constantly bathetic, mixing elegant expression, especially a self-consciously literary past-historic, with blunt, cruel reflections. He is clear (not simple) and often succinct. A quick, literal English translation risks producing a crude work, further compounding Houellebecq’s terseness and losing his original elegance and earnestness. Bowd’s translation, as well as being coarse, is also full of jarring literal renditions, misunderstandings, and a lack of interest in the subtleties of the writing.
Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994, translated as Whatever), is which his critique of society is expressed, contains the essence of his ideas; he hasn’t developed his thesis since then, just found new settings for it. He is most interesting to read for the way he communicates banality through writing. It is not fair to say he is just a ventriloquist, that his blank prose is the point; it is through language that he evokes resigned despair, he doesn’t merely reproduce it. There is no reason this cannot be translated, but it needs closer attention to language than is given in The Possibility of an Is/and.
For “le portique de détéction d’objets métalliques”, for example, Bowd simply supplies “metal detector”, thereby neutralizing the effects of Houellebecq’s deliberate elaboration. The original wordiness evokes the way Daniel’s thoughts have been submerged in the mechanical processes around him. Elsewhere, Daniel’s elegant and humble description of a beach concludes: “toute cette beauté, ce sublime géologique, j’en avais en fin de compte rien à foutre”. Bowd translates this with shocking insensitivity, opening the sentence with the statement of disregard, “I didn’t give a fuck about this beauty”, in spite of the fact that Houellebecq has been careful to make the statement less blunt (“en fin de compte”) and to qualify it with a sense of human irrelevance faced with the sublime exhibitions of nature. Thus Bowd’s Daniel is a brute, Houellebecq’s a brute one is encouraged to understand. So much of Michel Houellebecq’s message is contained in the medium that his real import is precisely in his literary contribution. It is a testimony to his seriousness as a writer and how deserving he is of an equally serious translator.
|
||||
|
Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène by Denis Demonpion · Maren Sell, 377 pp, €20.00
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq trans. Gavin Bowd · Weidenfeld, 345 pp, £12.99
Towards the end of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls into a severe depression. He leaves a note on his desk saying ‘I AM SICK,’ and checks himself into a ‘rest home’. Relations with his psychologist are not easy:
She took me to task for speaking in general, overly sociological, terms. This, according to her, was not interesting: instead I ought to try and involve myself, try and ‘get myself centred’.
– But I’ve had a bellyful of myself, I objected.
– As a psychologist I can’t accept such a statement, nor encourage it in any way. In speaking of society all the time you create a barrier behind which you can hide.
It’s obvious that Houellebecq’s novels contain a strong vein of autobiography. The main character is always immediately recognisable. He is a Parisian civil servant or middle manager, aged between thirty and fifty, depressed, isolated, alienated, miserably obsessed by sex, given to sociological conjecture and blasé, sometimes very funny asides. In Plateforme (2001, translated as Platform, 2003) he is even called Michel. Nevertheless, it’s a shock, on reading Denis Demonpion’s biography, to learn quite how much of Houellebecq’s life has been thrust raw – though often distorted – into his novels. It’s no surprise that his first novel is, like many first novels, closely modelled on the author’s life: like the young Michel Houellebecq, the narrator of Whatever works as an IT technician, contracted out to install software at various depressing provincial outposts of the Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters – Philip Schnäbele, Jean- Yves Fréhaut and Catherine Lechardoy – actually exist, and have simply been plonked into the book. Understandably, they took it badly: they are represented, like many characters in Houellebecq’s novels, as pointless and pathetic. (‘Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn’t been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone.’) Demonpion records the grievances of Schnäbele (in the novel, a self-aggrandising IT manager known as ‘the Serpent’), who has no memory of meeting Houellebecq: ‘I recognise myself in his descriptions. He describes my office, mentioning the posters that I had up at that time, which proves that he was physically there – but from a very biased point of view. That said, an author has every right to his freedom of expression. I just wish he’d changed my name.’
Houellebecq has consistently exercised a similar freedom of expression with respect to his parents. The mother in Les Particules élémentaires (1998, translated as Atomised, 2000) is an appalling proto-hippy slut, who dumps her kids on their grandparents, and on one occasion leaves her young son locked in a hot attic room in pools of his own urine and excrement. She then joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys. Although the more sensational aspects are Houellebecq’s invention, this character shares a great deal of his mother’s biography: she too was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle. But again Houellebecq upstages the invention, by giving the character his mother’s maiden name, Janine Ceccaldi. As Demonpion reports, his mother ‘flipped’ when she read the book: she flew to Paris from her home in Réunion and considered sueing her estranged son.
Houellebecq’s father, an admirer of Céline, was more sanguine when he found himself killed off at the beginning of Platform, in an updated and energetically offensive version of the opening of L’Etranger:
Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.
Houellebecq’s father’s house provides the backdrop for these first few scenes, and his North African lodger the model for Aïcha, the narrator’s father’s young lover, whose brother has murdered the older man. This mixture of documentary detail and lurid fantasy is a recurring pattern in Houellebecq’s fiction. He was successfully prosecuted by the owner of a New Age holiday camp which was described in Atomised – very accurately, except that it was depicted (like many locations in Houllebecq’s novels) as a torrid den of anonymous sex. Yves Donnars was keen that his business should avoid an unearned reputation for sexualité de groupe, so he took Houellebecq to court. The author reluctantly changed the name in later editions.
Fiction often seems like a form of revenge on the world; Houellebecq’s is an extreme case. Read alongside his biography, his novels turn out to be filled with highly specific attacks on jobs, places and people that have, in one way or another, pissed him off. Most of all, though, in their characters, their tone and their underlying thinking, they represent a sustained act of vengeance against his parents and their way of life.
Houellebecq non autorisé is a decent, intelligent hack-job. Demonpion, a journalist for the weekly news magazine Le Point, is prone to cliché and has a few exasperating tics, such as always describing what people are wearing (‘replied the writer, wearing a checked Vichy shirt’). On the other hand, he has done his research, and the book is full of entertaining and illuminating detail, and ends, rather unusually, with an astrological projection of its subject, written by Houellebecq’s friend Françoise Hardy, the 1960s pop star. At one point, Houellebecq thought of adding his own footnotes to Demonpion’s text, but negotiations between the two broke down. This collaboration would have made the biography more interesting, but might also have muddied the waters: Houellebecq is not a reliable witness. Demonpion’s real coup was securing the co-operation of Houellebecq’s parents, and his biography is built around a series of interviews with them.
Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas in 1956 in Réunion, where his mother was working as a doctor. His father had been a lorry driver and a ski instructor. Bruno in Atomised is born in the same year: ‘The couple quickly realised that the burden of caring for a small child was incompatible with their personal freedom and, in 1958, they agreed to send Bruno to Algeria to live with his maternal grandmother.’ Houellebecq’s parents set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. He lived there until 1961, when, with the Algerian war of independence nearing its end, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Henriette, in the Yonne, south-east of Paris. By this time, his parents had divorced. Michel only saw them during the holidays. ‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ Responding to Demonpion’s biography on his website, he wrote: ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’
All Houellebecq’s books have the same theoretical underpinning: a modest extension of the argument of the Communist Manifesto, proposing that what we call sexual freedom is in fact the last stage in the free market’s resolution of personal wealth into exchange value. This is laid out in the section of his first novel that explains its ironically grandiose title:
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market’. In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system, certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment in misery. In a totally liberal sexual system, certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.
His later novels explore various solutions: in Atomised, the naturist resort at Cap d’Agde is described as a ‘sexual social democracy’, in which French, German and Scandinavian couples swap partners and share their love with lonely single men, in an atmosphere of ‘discipline and respect for the social contract’. In Platform, sex tourism is proposed as a radical free-market solution, allowing sexual paupers to achieve the same consumer satisfaction they have at Monoprix: rich but ugly Westerners and the poor but handsome of the Third World share resources.
But Houellebecq’s novels also clearly and vituperatively blame his parents and their generation – the hippies and the soixante-huitards – for the sexual misery in which many of his characters live, and for all kinds of social ills besides. In Atomised, Bruno’s parents are horribly compromised, carnal people. His father (‘give a gorilla a mobile phone and you’ve got the general idea’) is a cosmetic surgeon, one of the first to benefit from ‘the use of sex in marketing and the resulting breakdown of the traditional couple’. Their heinousness doesn’t end there: his mother’s fellow cultists, not satisfied with free love, turn to ritual murder. According to Bruno, we shouldn’t be surprised: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’
‘I’ve lived my life rather than his,’ Houellebecq’s father admits to Demonpion. ‘But I knew he was in good hands.’ Houellebecq always describes his time growing up with his grandmother Henriette as a short episode of idyllic happiness in a largely miserable life. If Houellebecq’s parents serve as his symbols of self-indulgent evil, Henriette represents the ultimate good: it’s tempting to see in this the origin of the sharp division in his books between cynicism and hatred, on the one hand, and sentimentality, on the other. Henriette is memorialised in the description of the life and death of Bruno’s grandmother, once again closely based on the facts:
After the death of her husband, she had worked in a factory and brought up her four children; in midwinter she drew water from the pump in the courtyard so that they could wash. At 60, having just retired from the factory, she agreed to look after her son’s only child. He had wanted for nothing – clean clothes, good Sunday lunches and love. All these things she had done for him.
When Michel came to publish his first poems, he did so under Henriette’s maiden name, Houellebecq, later adopting it as his legal surname.
He was an introverted, bookish child, who did very well at school but sometimes had trouble getting on with other children. According to his father, he was afflicted by existential angst even then: ‘Very early on in life, he was conscious of the futility of existence, of the difficulty of living.’ His mother’s less sympathetic assessment is that he was ‘mentally gifted, emotionally subnormal’. He was sent to board at a lycée in Meaux, where he was probably bullied, and where the older boys led a mini-insurrection in May 1968 – no doubt adding to his growing horror of leftist radicalism. But he made friends: plenty of Demonpion’s interviewees, from all periods of his life, report that although unusual and sometimes difficult, Houellebecq is also funny and charming. He then went to Paris to cram for university entrance, studying science subjects, particularly biology, and starting to live the solitary urban lifestyle often described in his fiction. In the studio flat that his father had bought him, he lived off dry bread, mustard and whisky; there was no furniture except a bed and two posters: one of Iggy Pop, the other of Jacques Chirac.
In 1975, Houellebecq enrolled at the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon to study agricultural engineering. This seems to have been a bad idea: the atmosphere was left-leaning, jolly and carousing. Some classmates remember him as an ‘uptight intellectual poseur’ with an ‘extraterrestrial’ way about him. There are also various descriptions of his abject misery after falling in love and being rejected. Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed himself, making a few good friends, especially among the children of the Catholic squirearchy – Demonpion suggests that he was both sympathetic to their view of the world and, as a working-class boy, impressed by their social status. He read Dostoevsky and science fiction, discovered Schopenhauer, published an arts magazine, and made a short gothic film under the pseudonym d’Evel de Smythe-Winter. And he had at least one girlfriend, who remembers him, and his immoderate love of Camembert, fondly.
In 1978, his grandmother Henriette died – by all accounts a devastating experience for him. Despite his diploma from the INA, he was unable to get a job; he spent two years at film school, but nothing came of it, and he found himself unemployed again. At 24, he married the younger sister of one of his aristocratic college friends. They had a son, and she had to work to support them both, until eventually a friend pulled some strings to get him a job in IT. He hated it, and began to suffer from clinical depression, having to be hospitalised on various occasions. The parallels with the plot and mood of Whatever are close: ‘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, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning.’
After four years, his marriage broke up. Both Atomised and his new novel feature a first wife and child, who are described with indifference and casual brutality: ‘Today it’s almost impossible for me to remember why I married my first wife; if I was to come across her in the street, I don’t even think I’d be able to recognise her,’ says the main character in The Possibility of an Island. ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’
Writing seems to have saved Houellebecq. In 1991, he published his first collection of poetry, a manifesto for depressed poets called Rester vivant, méthode: ‘Your existence is nothing more than a tissue of sufferings. You think you can manage to lay them out in a coherent form. Your objective, at this stage: to live long enough to do it’ (the translation, from Houellebecq’s website, is by Richard Davies). But, around the same time, he also found a comfortable job in a sympathetic environment, in the IT department of the French National Assembly. His poetry brought him a small group of admirers, though his first prose book, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, against Life (1991), attracted little interest. It’s a strange, messianic celebration of the seminal fantasy and horror writer – more revealing of Houellebecq’s own Schopenhauer-derived pessimism and intentions as a writer than of Lovecraft:
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined ‘notations’, ‘situations’, anecdotes . . . All they do, once the book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our ‘real life’ days.
In 1992, he met Marie-Pierre Gauthier, whom he would marry in 1998. She worked in publishing and became, effectively, his unpaid literary agent: submitting his first novel to scores of publishers, until it was eventually taken on by Editions Maurice Nadeau and became a cult success. According to those who know the couple, she is also the model for the principle of female good in his novels, embodied in Valérie in Platform and Christiane in Atomised – gentle, intelligent, sexually accommodating, an appreciative audience for the miserable male character’s autobiographical ramblings and highfalutin theoretical talk; ‘consolatrice’ is Demonpion’s apt word. Gauthier seems to have been an enthusiastic participant in the Houellebecq project. She went with him to Parisian swingers’ clubs and to the naturist camp Cap d’Agde; she starred in his soft-porn movie; in the run-up to the publication of Platform, she had sex with him in front of a photographer. The rest of Houellebecq’s story is a matter of public record, to which Demonpion adds little. Atomised became a bestseller at home and abroad. It won the Prix Novembre, though it missed out on the Goncourt. The publication of Platform saw him prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred, after describing Islam as ‘the most idiotic religion’ in a promotional interview. (His exact words were: ‘La religion le plus con, c’est quand même l’Islam.’) He argued that he was entitled to criticise Islam, and that he had never conflated Muslims with Arabs; he was cleared; the book sold 200,000 copies in two weeks.
Houellebecq has established himself as one of the great international brands of popular literary fiction. But there is a great deal of disagreement over whether he’s a genius, a fraud or a reprobate. Responses to his novels largely fall into three categories. The first is euphoric: Houellebecq as visionary. According to this view, he sees the dehumanising effects of the market, the breakdown of religion and the family, and the unbearable tensions of Western life: the sexual misery, the inevitable conflict between Western morals and Islam. His novels are regarded as having a prophetic quality: Platform, published two years before the Bali bombing, ends with an assault by Islamists on a decadent tourist resort in Thailand. His then publisher, Flammarion, apologised for any offence caused by the novel on 10 September 2001. By this time, Houellebecq was in hiding in Ireland after receiving death threats. ‘You’re saved,’ the writer Michel Déon told him as they watched the planes fly into the World Trade Center.
The second view is that, though his perspective is not necessarily right – and probably rather regrettable – it’s an interesting and prevalent one, and illuminates the attitude of many people in modern France and Europe. As Salman Rushdie put it, ‘Platform is a novel to go to if you want to understand the France beyond the liberal intelligentsia, the France that gave the left such a bloody nose in the last presidential election, and whose discontents and prejudices the extreme right was able to exploit.’ On this view, Houellebecq speaks, though in a rarefied and intellectual tone, for les beaufs – the hicks, the Le Penistes. This is also true in the realm of sexual politics: he represents unreconstructed man, slavering and masturbatory, whose existence tends to get glossed over in the era of supposed sexual liberation and equality. As an unnamed Dutch academic quoted in a recent Sunday Times profile remarked, he reveals ‘the vile 20 per cent of himself’ that most people keep hidden.
The third attitude is outright disapproval. Houellebecq is a disgusting sexist, racist, eugenicist and pervert, who ought to repulse us. He is a professional provocateur, a marketing whizz, whose success is down to his courting of controversy, to the racist jokes and great dollops of pornography in his work.
After the publication of Atomised, he was ejected from Les Perpendiculaires, a leftish writers’ collective to which he belonged. As far as they were concerned, the novel was ‘a machine of war’ for his ultra-right ideas: a flashy way of expressing intolerant conservative regret at the decline of traditional social structures, at women’s liberation and the growth of immigration. This is tidily expressed by Bruno’s rant about one of his black students:
He always wore a baseball cap and a pair of Nikes; I was convinced he had a huge dick. All the girls threw themselves at this big baboon and here I was trying to teach them about Mallarmé – what the fuck was the point? This is the way the world ends, I thought bitterly, people worshipping in front of big dicks, like hamadryas baboons.
(In the original, it’s ‘civilisation occidentale’, not ‘the world’, which ends – making the point even clearer.)
The answer, of course, is that Houellebecq is a mixture of all three – and this mixture is probably the key to his success. There’s little point in denying that he has some profoundly fascistic tendencies (the biography reveals that he is, or at least was, a committed racist). Like Céline, he’s a right-wing misanthrope who has produced a genuinely perceptive and resonant picture of French society – obscenified and isolating. He’s also a careless writer (in his view the modern world doesn’t deserve anything better). His fiction is often crude and repetitive. His observations, bracing at first, seem specious and grating when repeated, in almost identical form, in novel after novel. It’s frequently obvious that he is simply dressing up his personal obsessions as something more significant, or cannily repackaging popular prejudices as grand philosophical positions. On the evidence of The Possibility of an Island, his latest novel, he would be the first to admit all this.
Daniel, a celebrated and super-rich stand-up comedian, has built his career ‘on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts’ – pandering to the prejudices of his audience, by producing shows with titles like ‘Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler)’. He knows he’s overrated, and thinks it’s funny that he is regarded as a ‘humanist’ and a representative of free speech, when in fact he despises most humans and is rather against freedom.
Wealthy and bored, he lives in a huge villa in Almeria. He separates from his wife, Marie, largely because she’s getting a bit old and saggy, and doesn’t like sex enough. He then meets and falls in love with Esther, a beautiful young actress from Madrid, who, ‘like all very pretty young girls, was basically only good for fucking’. She gives him many days and nights of pleasure, which are described at great length. But, inevitably, she doesn’t want to spend her life with Daniel, and decides to pursue a career as an actress in America. At her leaving party, he finds her in a bedroom sandwiched between two handsome, muscular young men. Daniel takes solace in the dubious generalisation that, ‘for Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment.’ Even so, the episode drives Daniel to despair, thoughts of death etc.
Meanwhile, Daniel has become involved with a thinly fictionalised version of the Raelian cult, with which Houellebecq has himself flirted. The Raelians believe that human life was begun by visiting aliens named the Elohim. This message was revealed to Claude Vorilhon, a sports journalist from Clermont-Ferrand, when he was visiting the crater at Puy-de-Lassolas in 1973. A flying saucer descended, and a four-foot alien told him to build an embassy to facilitate further contact. The Raelians also believe that cloning will allow us to live eternally, and indeed claim to have cloned human babies already. They are called the Elohimites in The Possibility of an Island. Every other chapter is narrated from a post-nuclear future, by one of Daniel’s genetic successors. As in Atomised, which has a similar but less intrusive science-fiction structure, these future humans are sexless immortals, looking back in pity at the desperate rutting of their predecessors. Daniel24 lives in Daniel’s house in Almeria; outside his electric fence, sexually reproducing mortals have survived, as ‘savages’ – ‘slightly more intelligent monkeys, and, for this reason, more dangerous’.
It’s difficult to summarise further without sounding completely mad. Let’s just say that the plot illustrates the Schopenhauerian principle that people are trapped between pain and striving, on the one hand, and boredom and emptiness, on the other. The original Daniel suffers from the first, the future Daniels from the second. Daniel25 sets off across Spain, hoping to find a fabled community of real humans, and to learn what they meant by love, sex and laughter. By and large, The Possibility of an Island seems like the result of a very uninteresting experiment: to see how much Houellebecq can get away with, how slapdash, how misogynistic, how programmatically ‘controversial’ he can be. It showcases many of his fascist instincts. Daniel’s clones shoot humans for the hell of it, witnessing ‘without regret the disappearance of the species’. They tell us that the post-apocalyptic world they inhabit is the result of the Eurabian civil war currently being gleefully predicted by Le Penistes and unhinged neo-cons.
When Houellebecq’s novels work, it’s because he has three interlocking talents: his sense of humour; his sharp, aphoristic way with ideas; and his ability to write perceptive, alienated and detailed accounts of everyday activities – working in offices, going on package tours. The new novel provides the odd striking aphorism and the descriptions of life in the cult are initially interesting. But, strangely enough, since Daniel is meant to be a comedian, it’s all deadly unfunny. Disastrously ricocheting between scepticism and credulity, cynicism and sentimentality, The Possibility of an Island offers mostly pointless hate and filth. As Yves Donnars, the owner of the New Age holiday camp, complained: ‘I got the impression that he saw himself as a redresser of wrongs, but one who loves to wallow in the muck, while saying: “Look, society is even more disgusting than I am.”’
Theo Tait works at the Week.