Houellebecq and the Popularity of the Crisis of Meaning

by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2019)

Urban Malaise, Robert Rauschenberg

Could man be drunk for ever,

With liquor, love or fights,

Lief should I rouse at morning

And lief lie down at nights.

But men at whiles are sober

And think by fits and starts,

And if they think, they fasten

Their hands upon their hearts.

—A. E. Housman

Michel Houellebecq, who has recently been decorated with the Légion d’honneur, is the most famous French writer of his generation. Perhaps there are more acute diagnosticians of the malaise of western civilisation in the world (I assume that there is one to be diagnosed), but if so I do not know of him.

We who are intellectuals normally associate the quality of best-sellerdom with triviality or shallowness. Even the concept of best-sellerdom is curious to anyone who likes to think for himself. Why would anyone choose to buy or read a book merely because very large numbers of other people have done so, irrespective of its quality or subject-matter? And yet bookshops everywhere categorise books as best-sellers, as they categorise books by subject matter, such as health and wellbeing, or the Middle East.

Whether or what the sales of a book reflect on its quality depends on the readership. I was once chagrined to meet a man whose mother’s books on keeping goats far outsold my accounts of various civil wars, and indeed provided her with an excellent living. And in these days of on-line merchandising, the disaggregation of the category of best-seller has proceeded to such an extent that almost every book can be presented as a best-seller, for example in the category of Mesopotamian pottery.

Be this all as it may, Michel Houellebecq is certainly a best-seller. The first print run in France of his latest novel, Sérotonine, was reported to be 330,000, and certainly I have rarely seen such piles of a single book as I saw in France after its publication. Moreover, they seem to have sold, or else they were removed once they had failed to sell as quickly as anticipated. Overall, though, there is little question as to Houellebecq’s popularity, to say nothing of his popularity in other languages.

It would be quite wrong to conclude from this that he is a mere entertainer (I say mere, as if to entertain were either an easy or an unworthy thing to do, though it is of course neither), but entertaining he certainly is. He is also a serious writer and a discomfiting one.

He discomfits us by repeatedly confronting us with the hollowness of our existence in a modern prosperous consumer society, with our tendency to regard the good life as a prolonged series of pleasurable moments, there being no deeper or transcendent purpose to our lives. He does not propose any solution—he does not tell us to take up basket-weaving or table tennis—or propose anything that might fill the vacuum left by an absence of larger purpose. He writes novels, not self-help manuals.

Any reader of Houellebecq will soon enough recognise his themes, or rather his theme and sub-themes. All his novels appear to have scenes which are frankly pornographic, with detailed and unnecessary descriptions of a certain kind of sex. These are so often repeated that one suspects that they are the author’s own fantasies. It is, of course, an elementary error of literary criticism to identify an author’s character with an author himself, but when something is repeated book after book, one suspects that it is not mere invention: it is reportage.

Houellebecq is not a prepossessing man physically, to judge from his photographs, rather the reverse, nor does he make any effort to make the best of himself, by (say) being a dandy. Again it is very much the reverse: he makes no effort whatever to appear even clean and tidy. The shower does not appear his natural habitat and though by now he must be a very rich man, he dresses like an average drug addict from a depressed provincial town in France. I suspect that he loves what he hates, or at least criticises with ferocity.

His sex scenes are purely mechanical, so to speak, in so far as they are unaccompanied by any human affection or warmth. I have known people who regarded food as fuel—they had to eat some to keep going—but the consumption of food was for them a biological necessity, and an unfortunate one at that. Houellebecq’s attitude to sex appears analogous. There is a build-up of tension that has to be relieved, but no more than that. It hardly even deserves the name of sensuality. It is an itch that has to be scratched and that is all. As for Houellebecq himself, he seems to be obsessed with fellatio.

Sérotonine, which must have been written before the eruption of the Gilets Jaunes movement (if any group as acephalous as they can be called a movement), though published after it had been going for a few weeks, he foresaw widespread protests in the countryside in which farmers and others block crossroads. His guesses as to future developments seem to be more than merely lucky.

On practically every page of his books one finds a kind of irony that is at once delicious and disconcerting. I open Sérotonine at random and here is what I find on page 116:

summum bonum of human existence. This in turn raises the question of Man’s rationality and the connection between his knowledge and belief on the one hand and his action on the other. Finally, the narrator’s “favourable mental disposition” does conduce to his own happiness. If materialism is not the solution to Man’s search for contentment and happiness, neither is its abjuration. Perhaps – probably – there is not such solution.

To tell the truth, I felt myself more and more ill at ease in my job. Nothing had established the dangerousness of organically-modified crops, and the radical ecologists were for the most part ignorant imbeciles, but nothing had established their safety either, and my superiors in the company [for which he worked] were quite simply pathological liars.

Imbeciles or liars: that seems to be the choice offered to us time and again in the modern world as Houellebecq conceives it.

Conceiving new yoghourt drinks and new smoothies: could anything be more absurd, more unnecessary, for an intelligent and educated man, or indeed for anyone else to do? What pre-existing human need could be fulfilled by a new yoghourt drink or a new smoothie? Here the sheer ludicrousness of our consumer society, in which some kind of happiness is sought in redundant and worthless products, is exposed. And yet at the same time we know that the whole economic machine must continue, or we shall fall into penury. Modern meaninglessness is inescapable.

Then, unexpectedly, Aymeric makes an unusual decision: he announces that he is going to run a farm on his ancestral lands. The narrator tells us:

Agronomists are present in almost all the domains of agribusiness, sometimes in technical posts, most often in management, but it almost never happens that they themselves become farmers . . . in looking at the list of graduates of the college, I saw that Aymeric was the only one in our year to make this choice.

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