Does Michel Houellebecq still matter? Part I: Setting the scene

Michel Houellebecq (Photo: ApolitikNow CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr)

In this column, Geordie Cheetham looks at the work of France’s most successful living writer, Michel Houellebecq. He explores how the author’s early works provide a framework for understanding his output over the last thirty years, and asks: what has made the former IT technician’s tales of modern anomie and despair so popular? And, more importantly: is Houellebecq’s detached pessimism still important for understanding modern France, or has the cynical novelist lost his edge?

It appears rather strange to those of us in Britain that the publication of a novel could be regarded as a significant political event, with dedicated prime-time radio segments and front-page interviews of the author in mainstream papers. Of course, ‘we’ occasionally consider that writers have something important to say about the state of society – with ‘we’ obviously meaning readers of the LRB and the Times Literary Supplement. When novelists do make mainstream news, the content of their work is secondary to the furore surrounding it – there was certainly a lot of coverage of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but who could give a summary of the plot of the Satanic Verses?

You might think that things would be different in France, where the public intellectual, from the terrace of some chic Parisian café, stands at the forefront of trends in both ideas and fashion: where, in a word, professional thinkers are cool. But times have changed. There is probably only one ‘writer’ – he would certainly not want to be called an ‘intellectual’ – who could claim anything like the global celebrity once enjoyed by a Sartre, de Beauvoir or Foucault. Described as the enfant terrible of modern literature by English writers in search of the obligatory French-ism, that writer is of course Michel Houellebecq.

Immediately, something feels wrong about putting Houellebecq’s name in the company of those big 20th-century names. Politically, Houellebecq opposes the traditional stances of the French left on almost every issue – he is anti-sexual revolution, anti-euthanasia, pro-police, at best ambivalent about immigration, and his general ironic detachment cuts a sharp contrast with the écrivains engagés of the post-war period. Economic inequality is overshadowed by sexual inequality in his works, and he is a self-described opponent of liberty. As well as his ideas, something about the man’s demeanour is strange, perhaps even off-putting. Houellebecq frequently turns up to interviews with ill-fitting clothing, and a scruffy combover. A far cry from the slicked-back hair and upturned pea-coat collar which made Camus a poster-boy for Gallic style (and speaking of posters, it seems doubtful that the image of Houellebecq’s diminutive, gnome-like figure adorns the wall of many student bedrooms). 

There is one trait he shares with Camus, and this one most typically French: if the interview takes place in a studio, the anchor will invariably break the ice with a joke about whether the novelist can last the duration without breaking the studio’s no-smoking rule (if it takes place in a private residence, Houellebecq will rarely be seen without a cigarette). What’s more, he participates in orgies and makes romantic advances on female interviewers; he recently appeared in a Dutch pornographic film, though took issue with the director’s apparent lack of professionalism. 

And yet. Even in this country, major papers review his books, and recently one columnist from these isles went as far as to label him the world’s ‘greatest living writer’. What explains the success of Michel Houellebecq? Does he hold a mirror up to modern France, perhaps even the West as a whole? Well, if his novels do give us a mirror, we ought not to like what we see. Houellebecq’s novels follow depressed and disillusioned characters as they deal with anomie and loss of meaning in contemporary France: he writes in a flat, unadventurous tone, without ponderous sentences or complex plot devices. For some, he is France’s keenest social critic, an iconoclast who unsparingly describes the depravity and hopelessness of the modern world, with concern neither for liberal pieties nor conservative sexual morality. For others, however, he is a reactionary provocateur: a racist and misogynist who compensates for a lack of literary talent with a capacity to court controversy.

In this column, we’re going to try and get to the bottom of Michel Houellebecq: the man and his work. That way, we’ll be able to understand why his novels have captured such a great deal of attention, and whether they still manage to say anything interesting about the world we live in. I’m going to argue that to understand Houellebecq, we need to go back to the beginning. Starting from his biography of H.P. Lovecraft, we’ll see that the defining thread of Houellebecq’s work is the alternation between terror and boredom. We’ll see this dynamic at work in Houellebecq’s discussions of tourism, sex, religion, and politics; how at every step he scorns modernity’s attempt to accept liberty in exchange for danger, terror instead of boredom. But his characters also try to escape this binary: they fall in love and dream of sexual harmony in domestic bourgeois idyll, try to overcome death spiritually through God or literally through scientific developments like cloning, or simply embrace the terror, the struggle at the heart of modern (and perhaps all) life. But this is Michel Houellebecq – nothing is overcome, nobody escapes the human condition. 

What I want to argue, however, is that this doesn’t matter: as a novelist Houellebecq is only obliged to tell thought-provoking stories and - contrary to the desire of critics of all political stripes to reduce the work of a novelist to a simple normative statement - not to ‘provide solutions’. In showcasing the ways people try to navigate between the twin perils of terror and boredom, Houellebecq tells us – sometimes in spite of himself, and less than he used to – a great deal about our world.