How Hateful is Michel Houellebecq?
A character in Michel Houellebecq’s most recent novel describes himself as 100% hateful. The character is based, perhaps not wholly, and perhaps not wholly seriously, on Houellebecq himself. The title of John Updike’s review of the novel for the New Yorker (22 May 2006) calls Houellebecq 90% hateful. Is this assessment fair?
Theo Tait, in the London Review of Books (Vol. 28, no. 3, 9 February 2006), writes that there have been three main kinds of response to Houellebecq’s novels:
The first is euphoric: Houellebecq as visionary. [...] 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. […]
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.’ […]
The third attitude is outright disapproval. Houellebecq is a disgusting sexist,
racist, eugenicist and pervert, who ought to repulse us.
My view is none of these. If Houellebecq is a genius, it is not because of any ability to predict the future or to be a good sociologist. I read him instead as a philosopher. He is also a romantic, convinced, like Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, that we are all in the gutter, yet addicted to the idea that there is something more out there, perhaps in space. He does not, perhaps, look at the stars as Darlington claimed to, but he is at least looking for them, or for some possible substitute if they cannot be found. Much of his work can be read as exploratory in this way, not reaching any particular conclusion about what has ultimate value, but imagining various lives and testing their desirability, often under the worst imaginable circumstances. In this sense he is like Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, exploring the lives of passion, intellect, and faith. In the sense that his work seems driven by hyperbolic lust he is also like Quentin Tarantino, although Houellebecq’s lust is more for sex than for violence.
It is not his science-fiction vision of the stars but his attention to the gutter that has won Houellebecq the most criticism. Updike refers to Houellebecq’s “thoroughgoing contempt” for humanity. But this misses the point of the novels, especially The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island. Like Brave New World, which Houellebecq refers to often, these novels present as bad the attempt to overcome humanity, albeit one that might be attempted for understandable reasons. In other words, Houellebecq presents humanity as something that can easily seem bad, but that in fact has a value that is not easily captured or even seen from the prevailing worldview. What is valuable in humanity is not its efficiency at maximizing pleasure. Updike seems to have somewhat utilitarian values, which inevitably miss the more mystical or romantic values that Houellebecq clings to. Near the end of his review, Updike questions Houellebecq’s honesty:
But how honest, really, is a world picture that excludes the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last?
It is as if pleasure, comfort, and making the best of things (being happy?) were the only possible sources of value in life. But this kind of enlightened hedonism is precisely what Houellebecq objects to as shallow. Time and again his characters pursue happiness in one form or another, from sexual pleasure to the “higher pleasure” of self-sacrifice, only for it all to end in tears. There can be no guarantees of a good time in life and, even if there could be, it seems obvious that this would not give life meaning. Philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein have struggled with this question, seeing a good life as more than just a sequence of fun events but also recognizing that there must be some connection with what we would ordinarily recognize as happiness. Houellebecq recognizes this problem, and explores the possibility of a technological solution to it. The exploration seems to result in a debunking, leaving us with the problem and a certain sense of mystery regarding the stubbornly undeniable value of human life. Houellebecq’s novels can be read as searching for the bright side even while facing up to the very worst that life can throw at us. What he wants is something like religion, or perhaps simply love.
It is obviously a mistake to identify him, or any other author, with his characters, but many people do so all the same. It is a mistake partly because a good person might, quite obviously, choose to write about bad people. We do not condemn Agatha Christie for her bloodlust. But it is also a mistake because it is irrelevant: a bad person might write a good book. What matters is the books themselves. In Houellebecq’s case these are filled with bad people doing bad things, but the result is comic, not poisonous. Or perhaps it depends, so that what nourishes one person will be toxic for another. Anyway, if we want the view behind or beneath these novels, I think it is most explicit in the passage from The Possibility of an Island (p. 287) where the self-confessedly hateful Daniel1 asserts that in his heart of hearts, despite all the evidence, he continues to believe in love.
The reader’s response is obviously relevant here and is obviously going to vary from one person to another, but let me try to explain a certain kind of humor that we find in Houellebecq’s work. This humor is one of the main things that make his work good, and that suggest we should not take the seemingly hateful things he writes at face value. It is the humor of going over the top with bad news or pessimism. We find it in Pulp Fiction when events repeatedly take turn after turn for the incredibly worse, in the famous first line of Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse,” and in the song title “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Know.” This kind of humor is common and popular, but it is not to everyone’s taste. Perhaps it depends how miserable you are to begin with. It strikes some people as unethically gloomy, but others find it heartening, showing that one can laugh even at one’s own misery. Houellebecq has been compared to Arthur Schopenhauer because of his pessimism, and it is worth looking at what this means. As Iris Murdoch writes of Schopenhauer, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 62): “It is not just that he hates the world. Let us rather say that he feels that only what is extreme will crack the hard ego. As his numerous writings reveal, he is fascinated by the world and its bright diversity. He is a self-proclaimed pessimist – but he is also merry.”
Houellebecq admires Schopenhauer, and reaches merrily for a similar extreme. We find this in the ridiculous subtitle (given by Houellebcq, not a translator) to his book on H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. If I try to explain what is funny about this it will spoil the joke, but here goes anyway. It is very extreme. Anyone who was really against life would commit suicide, so anyone who expresses such a view, unless on the way to his or her death, is laughably implausible. And that is the point. It is the point, also, of Larkin’s poem, and the reason why its closing lines (“Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf/ Get out as early as you can/ And don’t have any kids yourself”) are a punch line. Such thinking is so alien to some people that they will have to think unusually depressing thoughts to understand what is going on, and will likely then condemn it as being depressing in itself. Others, though, simply laugh, without having to think about why.
Houellebecq is well aware of the mysteriously cheering, life-affirming effect that (superficial) life-denial can have. Writing (p. 34) of Lovecraft’s horrific universe, and the pleasures of reading about it, he says:
It’s clear why reading Lovecraft is paradoxically comforting to those souls who are weary of life. In fact, it should perhaps be prescribed to all who, for one reason or other, have come to feel a true aversion to life in all its forms. In some cases, the jolt to the nerves upon a first reading is immense. One may find oneself smiling all alone, or humming a tune from a musical. One’s outlook on existence is, in a word, modified.
Note the sympathetic and jokily exaggerated, perhaps we might just say friendly, references to those who are weary of life. He is trying to help people “who are a little fed up with the world” (p. 30) to feel better. How does this show contempt for humanity?
At the end of the preface to the second French edition of this book (p. 25), Houellebecq praises Lovecraft’s style, at least as it is represented by a paragraph that he quotes:
Here, we are at a point where the extreme acuity of sensory perception is about to propel us into a philosophical perception of the world; in other words, here we are inside poetry.
As with Schopenhauer, Lovecraft is being presented as a writer who uses extremes in order to change the reader’s perception. In a nutshell, writing about extremes of badness can, it is being claimed, improve our perception of reality. And this is not a spurious kind of ‘improvement’ that would consist only in seeing how bad things really are. Houellebecq does not say that things are bad, and he explicitly rejects realism (p. 29): “We need a supreme antidote against all forms of realism.” Hence the science fiction, hence the extreme sufferings of his characters, and hence the erroneousness of reading his novels as a direct reflection of a simply pessimistic worldview. He is not trying to be realistic, so when he writes of bad things happening he is not saying that this is how life really is. He is deliberately extreme in order to make us laugh and to shock us into something more like happiness. Of course his form of therapy might not work for everyone, but if we are to judge it then we ought first to understand what it is trying to achieve. Whether it works is a matter of how each reader responds to it. Some love it and, presumably, to that extent it is successful.
So what about the claim that Houellebecq is a racist, a sexist, a eugenicist, and a pervert? The first two charges are the most serious, the last being almost hopelessly vague and the third fairly obviously silly. On p. 117 of Whatever, his first novel, the main character, who bears a superficial resemblance to Houellebecq himself, recommends to another man that he launch himself on a career of murder, starting with a black man whom he refers to with a racist epithet. Normally this would be taken as evidence that the main character should not be identified with the author, since it seems only reasonable to assume that the author, any author, unless we know otherwise, is not a homicidal maniac, nor a racist. Camus is not generally written off as a racist because one of his alienated protagonists murders an Arab without good cause. But other racists have shown up in Houellebecq’s work, and an identification of Houellebecq with these characters has been made. The main one of these characters is the utterly contemptible Bruno, summarized accurately enough on the back cover of the Vintage International edition as “overweight and a complete failure at everything.” Having just mentioned that there is no reference in Sartre to concerns about penis size, Bruno continues (p. 159):
Whatever, in the showers at the gym I realized I had a really small dick. I measured it when I got home—it was twelve centimeters, maybe thirteen or fourteen if you measured right to the base. I’d found something new to worry about, something I couldn’t do anything about; it was a basic and permanent handicap. It was around then that I started hating blacks.
Again: this is comedy. It isn’t very funny when it has to be taken out of context and underlined like this, but in context it comes as a surprise. This is hardly evidence that Houellebecq is a racist himself. Certainly the books do not make you want to become a racist, or think highly of those who are. There are racists in them, true, but then there are racists in real life, and Houellebecq deliberately exaggerates the bad features of modern life, and this is one of them. We should expect racism to be a feature of his novels. Nor should we expect members of racial minorities to be portrayed as saints, or non-Western cultures to be portrayed as perfect. And, of course, they are not.
This is relevant to the place of women in the books too. It has been objected that all the main female characters in The Elementary Particles end up dead, but the only main male characters are Bruno, who ends up mad, and his half-brother Michel, who disappears and is assumed to have drowned. So the men do not do much better than the women. Michel, who is a kind of genius, concludes (p. 137) that women are “indisputably better than men. They [are] gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; … less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they [are] more rational, intelligent and hardworking.” One might object that this essentializes women in a patronizing way, but, again, it is the view of a character, and it is far from the crude misogyny of which Houellebecq has been accused. If we are going to judge Houellebecq by the sexism of Daniel1, then we should also take into account the feminism of Michel, who redesigns humanity in order to remove the bad, mostly male, aspects of it.
This redesign is presented by the post-human narrator as a good thing, but of course it would be, wouldn’t it? The thoughtful reader might be expected to value humanity a little more, and, in the process, not to misread Houellebecq as an advocate of eugenics. Indeed it seems hardly possible for a human being who keeps living not to value humanity. It is also to be expected that in The Possibility of an Island, which returns to the theme of reinventing humanity, the main character is a repellant man, neither enviable nor admirable, whose humanity we nevertheless value for its contrast with the less colorful “neo-humans” who follow.
Houellebecq is no misanthrope. This comes out perhaps most clearly in chapter fifteen of The Elementary Particles, in an extended passage on sadism. It is graphic, but quite clearly intended as a shocking portrayal of the depths to which people have sunk. It is not a celebration. The character David di Meola is fictional, but Charles Manson and the Viennese Actionist artists, who killed animals painfully as “performance art,” are real. It is not people that Houellebecq has a problem with, but the inhumanity of so much of life. It is tempting to say of modern life, but he is under no illusions about the lives of nineteenth century peasants. Today we have more freedom, and our desires are satisfied efficiently, but it’s all a bit sterile and lonely. His complaints are familiar communitarian ones about alienation and atomization but, unlike many communitarians, he sees no solution through traditional religion. Like Nietzsche, he does not see how true faith in God is compatible with our faith in science and the empirical method. And a scientific religion, offering immortality through cloning, offers only more life, not more meaning, and a loss of humanity. This is the theme of The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island.
So is there no hope? Not, I think Houellebecq is saying, in the directions that you might think to look. Efficiency, either in terms of bureaucratic rationalization or capitalist free markets, is not a recipe for happiness. Nor is new technology. Nor is old style religion (such as Islam). Nor is casual sex, since we all age and no one wants to swing with the elderly. Yet these are the things that our culture pushes the most. What we really need, of course, is love, the opposite of cruelty and neglect. But this does not guarantee happiness. We might give and give to others only to be neglected in our turn, like Bruno’s grandmother, who dies painfully, alone. This is one reason why so many of the women in The Elementary Particles suffer such horrible fates. Being a paragon of virtue does not save you from the contingencies of biology or the cruelty of others. For the paragon this does not matter, of course, but can we really embrace such a selfless ideal? Houellebecq poses the question, and suggests that as well as virtue we need the goodwill of others, but it is not all we need.
Ultimately what we need, according to the Houellebecq who comes through the novels, is something transcendent. There is (p. 109) a “sheer joy that comes of not being part of the world” which can make us (joke alert!) “almost happy.” Almost happy, that is, if we are as loveless as Bruno. A similar kind of transcendent state is reached at the end of The Possibility of an Island. The novel’s title comes from a poem on p. 308, which ends:
Entered into complete dependency,
I know the trembling of being,
The hesitation to disappear,
Sunlight upon the forest’s edge
And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.
Following this is the novel’s third and final part, which begins with an epigram: ‘What was outside the world?’ The answer, eventually, is “a peaceful space,” in which Daniel25 (Daniel1’s neo-human descendant) tells us: “I was, I was no longer. Life was real.” This is not happiness, and so Updike rejects it as unhealthy, but it is hardly a million miles from the ideals of many venerable religions and philosophies. It is reminiscent of the Hindu and Buddhist ideals of escaping time, of Kierkegaard’s non-egoistic conception of what Christian immortality might mean, of Heidegger’s desire for closer contact with Being, and so on. Updike has said that anyone who does not live in New York must, in some sense, be kidding. Houellebecq’s island is a long way from New York, but it is not hateful or despairing.
So is Houellebecq a genius? Probably not. Not all his work is equally good. The Possibility of an Island helps us to understand The Elementary Particles, since it takes up the themes of artificial immortality and redesigning humanity, which were presented by the narrator of that novel as the solution to the problem of life as we know it. But it is an inferior novel. Whatever is short and almost as good as The Elementary Particles, but lacks its philosophical weight. Platform and Lanzarote are worth reading, but perhaps only because they are by the author of The Elementary Particles. I think it would be fair to say that he phoned it in on those two, as on at least parts of The Possibility of an Island as well. And as for being a reprobate, the orgies are there, the violence is there, the sexist and racist characters are there. The wallowing in all of this is there. Some people like that. Some people are like that. Perhaps we are all a bit like that. I see no point in doing anything but accepting the accusation that Michel Houellebecq is a reprobate. But anyone who sees no more in his work than this is missing rather a lot.
Even his admirers often seem to miss the point. According to Tait, who regards him as a mixture of genius, fraud, and reprobate: “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 not a wildly baseless claim, but focusing on what Houellebecq says about sex misses the themes indicated by his novels’ titles and plots. The Possibility of an Island, for instance, has a lot of sex in it, and some thinking about sex too, but is not a book about sex and market values. John Banville, writing in Bookforum (April/May 2005) has a better understanding. He astutely notes that Houellebecq’s novels are like those of earlier existentialists, with the important difference that: “Houellebecq's fiction is horribly funny. Often the joke is achieved by a po-faced conjunction of the grandiloquent and the thumpingly mundane.” This is exactly right, but it is not true that in these novels sex is “the only reliable source of authenticity and affectless delight.” It is partly the unsatisfactoriness of sex, especially for the unattractive and aging, that pushes asexual reproduction as an (illusory) ideal. Houellebecq clearly sees value in sexual pleasure – who wouldn’t? – but the sex he values most is that between people who care about each other, even if they are strangers, like the kindly orgy-going tourists of Cape d’Agde in The Elementary Particles. And, as I have said, he does not regard this as the ultimate good. Bruno comes to seek sex as the summum bonum, but this is a substitute for something else, something he experienced for a few seconds only as a boy: “What the boy had felt was something pure, something gentle, something that predates sex or sensual fulfillment. It was the simple desire to reach out and touch a loving body, to be held in loving arms. Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so difficult to give up hope.” Love and goodness are more fundamental in Houellebecq’s universe even than sex, and transcendence is a higher value.
The judges’ citation from the 2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award speaks of Houellebecq’s dark brilliance, his “energy, mordant humour and … wondrously passionate excess,” and his “paradoxically (if at times perversely) moral view” of his main characters. Perhaps this is hateful, but I can’t hate it.
Duncan Richter