Getting under the skin of France’s ‘enfant terrible’
He hates ‘Leftist scum’ and describes feminists as ‘amiable dimwits’
INTERVENTIONS 2020 by Michel Houellebecq, tr Andrew Brown 314pp, Polity, £20, ebook £16 ★★★ ★★
It is never difficult, as PG Wodehouse might have said, to distinguish between Michel Houellebecq and a ray of sunshine. Hailed as France’s greatest living novelist, Houellebecq received the Légion d’Honneur in 2019 for his compelling visions of a broken world rife with sexual alienation and social pathology. Ever since the opening sentence of his first book declared “The world is an unfolding suffering,” Houellebecq has specialised in the literature of boredom and despair. The latest collection of his journalism, Interventions 2020, published this month in English, is likewise packed with gloomy zingers. Sexual desire came to him aged 13 “like a natural biological disaster”. Partying is a way to “forget that we are lonely, miserable and doomed to death”. The logical consequences of individualism are “murder and unhappiness”.
The verve Houellebecq brings to his tales of desolation has captured that rare thing for any literary writer, a popular following, even among the English. Part of the appeal is Houellebecq’s uncanny gift for narratives that exploit his country’s political tensions. His novel Submission imagined France’s conversion to Islam. Another, Serotonin, appeared to predict the grassroots “gilets jaunes” movement. Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir, isn’t yet translated into English, but is set in a near-future France where far-Right presidential candidates are rising in the polls.
Houellebecq’s gift for poetic diction and pessimistic political scrying are not, however, the whole story. His work provokes horrified fascination, even among its critics, because it is so politically incorrect. Houellebecq scorns conventional pieties, presenting reality as few others dare. His work is dogged by accusations of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia.
This new collection provides a chance to look behind the curtain of Houellebecq’s fiction and assess the ideas of the man himself. Do they add up to a coherent philosophy? Is he a purveyor of well-phrased bigotry? Or does Houellebecq deserve the label, often given to him, of conservative?
Interventions 2020 doesn’t offer easy answers. Its jumble of interviews, essays and thinkpieces is wrapped up in a distinctively French discourse, with names and references that often mean little to an English eye. This makes it an essential read only for the true completist. There is also a notable omission: Houellebecq’s controversial interview in Lire magazine, given in 2001, where he called Islam “the dumbest religion”, after which he was taken to court, and then acquitted, for incitement to racial hatred.
However, there’s plenty to learn here about how Houellebecq thinks. To start with, he doesn’t fit neatly into any political box. Yes, he despises “the Leftist scum who monopolised intellectual debate throughout the 20th century”. A few pages on, however, he warns any reactionaries looking to adopt him that they will need to cover his ideological deviations with a compassionate – or sly – veil.
Houellebecq is no capitalist, either. He calls for less global trade and loathes our “market society”. Modern dating, in particular, is accused of having pulled markets and sex into a grotesque embrace, one that crushes the possibility of intimacy and relationship in favour of narcissistic gratification. Feminists are “amiable dimwits”, who have undone the long domestication of male intemperance in a single generation. Perhaps he has himself in mind. Elsewhere, he claims “for a man, the most delicious gift of fame is what is called, using the Anglo-Saxon term, ‘groupies’”.
“I don’t know if I’m a conservative” he admits at another point, and it’s hard to disagree. Conservatism contains a spirit of moderation and respect for the past out of kilter with Houellebecq’s coarse style and his
rejection rejectio of our inherited world. His equal opportunity contempt includes the modern West as one more evil and unsustainable mistake. Where conservatives look back to a rosetinted past, Houellebecq hankers after an impossible future, in which human connection, which he finds so elusive, is somehow finally made real.
That dream of connection also leads Houellebecq far from liberal individualism. He is a fan of Auguste Comte, who opposed individual rights in the name of scientific altruism. In this, Houellebecq resembles the new generation of post-liberals, who share his concern for the consequences of sexual liberation, and seek a renewed spirit of collectivism, often religious, to combat moral decay. Yet Houellebecq, like Comte, has no time for God.
Comte’s atheism led him to create a Religion of Humanity, hoping to outcompete Christian doctrine. It failed, of course. Houellebecq has no such delusions, only his certainty that transcendence is the ultimate fiction. Sharing Blaise Pascal’s terror at the eternal silence of infinite spaces, he cannot accept Pascal’s wager that belief is a good bet. “I express,” he tells one interviewer, “the horror of the world without God.”
Consciousness of that horror keeps Houellebecq’s work from nihilism. His stories of moral collapse are animated by a deep longing for moral order. In one interview here, he accepts a description of himself as “an almost Christian romantic moralist”. Behind the scenes, too, we find signs of this unrecognised side, in his stance against euthanasia and his work for animal rights.
In the end, though, Houellebecq’s gift is not as a moralist or philosopher, but a melancholic provocateur. Perhaps the nearest he comes to looking on the bright side is his attitude to the pandemic. “We won’t wake up, after lockdown, in a new world; it will be the same world, but a bit worse.” It’s never sunny in the world of Michel Houellebecq, but since our godless night has already descended, at least it can’t get much darker.