Houellebecq’s unique poetical inference to Borges elicits a variant of the representational features of the map by duplicating the cultural economic-consumer-individualistic logic of reality. The duplication of (or, in fact, complicity with) reality disparages representation and does not enable the map that he spreads out over the world to explain the world to us, the readers. For example, Houellebecq inserts trash cultural products, especially those that deviate from the canonical standards of quality, prestige, style, and dignity; he includes many passages containing extreme, aberrant, explicit sex and violence or accounts of deathly decay. Yet the status of trash is ambiguous, as Richard K. Simon has shown; while trash defies standard behavior by daring to deal with controversial subjects, it does so out of agreement and cooperation with the prevailing order.18 Trash textual fragments, then, contribute to the duplication of reality. Moreover, Houellebecq’s penchant for trash materials propagates his poetical paradigmatic and syntactic hierarchies, preferring highly charged materials that function affectively on the reader, which verge on bad taste and often exceeding it. Essentially, this provides an insight into Houellebecq’s prose as a language game in which the narrative structure and realist aesthetics metamorphose into the meta-fictional frame, the latter being concerned with the representational ‘real’, laying bare its inherent impossibility. The body of the Houellebecqian work is a rich surface, a reproduction of reality, a cognitive map of 21st-century consciousness, a representation of societal determinants, and an aesthetic cartogram of its own merit.
Notwithstanding, Houellebecq in fact documents the world and also purports to explain it, and at the depth of his style he never focuses on signifiers at the expense of blurring the signifieds. Houellebecq includes in his writing a dimension of understanding reality, of exposing processes, a systematic causality that explains events; in other words, representation. The inclusion of scientific texts proves that Houellebecq strives at representation, since these sections are intended from the outset as conscious representation: their goal is to explain the laws, mechanism, and history of the world. In this way we can evaluate fragments such as the orderly dialogues between characters who exchange articulate opinions and the ← 14 | 15 → ekphrasis of works of art (in The Map and the Territory) which represent a mise-en-abîme of the immediate present.
The idea of literature as a map of reality is subject to Houellebecq’s ironic criticism. His poetics focuses on the basic tension between the ontological desire to portray reality mimetically and in detail and the epistemological ideal of positing all reality on a limited number of statements or principles. Thus, the realistic form of representation, which enjoys a privileged status as the basis for Houellebecq’s poetics, is repeatedly breached. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes’s famous maxim that realism is a form which attempts to efface its own production, Houellebecq refuses to allow this to occur in his work. The narrative frame extends to the realist novel, which is predicated on representational casualty yet accepts non-representational narrative devices that fracture its realistic frame.
About this book
The starting point of this book is the assumption that Michel Houellebecq is an engaged writer, in the broader sense of the word, as defined by Benois Dennis:
«Fondamentalement, l’engagement est une confrontation de la littérature au politique, au sens le plus large. C’est une interrogation sur la place et la fonction de la littérature dans notre société […] l’engagement est ainsi pour la littérature un horizon à la fois nécessaire et impossible à atteindre: une question à poser plus qu’une réponse à apporter, un désir ou une volonté plus qu’une réalité effective.»19
[Fundamentally, literary engagement is a confrontation of literature with politics, in the broadest sense – a questioning about the place and the function of the literature in our society […] therefore, engagement is to the literature a horizon, both necessary and not reachable: more a question to ask that an answer to give, more wish or will than effective reality.]
Houellebecq posits himself as an officer of civilization, offering a map of contemporary reality and according literature a substantial role in the field of public involvement. His unique style problematizes contemporary cultural ← 15 | 16 → processes and deconstructs the aesthetic and ideological thought-habits that design the collective imaginary of our era. As such, this book, An Officer of Civilization, seeks to satisfy the growing interest in understanding Houellebecq’s poetics. In so doing, it focuses on the particularities of his poetics in the context of literary tradition, intertextual relations, psycho-cultural aspects, and social semiotics, alongside contacts with the contemporary field of art. Some chapters refer to Houellebecq’s entire oeuvre, while others focus on specific works. Thus the book discusses the novels Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (1994, trans. as Whatever by Paul Hammond, 1998), Les Particules Elémentaires (1998, trans. as Atomised by Frank Wynne, 2000; published in the US as The Elementary Particles), Lanzarote (2000, trans. by Frank Wynne, 2002), Plateforme (2001, trans. as Platform by Frank Wynne, 2002), La Possibilité d’une Ile (2005, trans. as The Possibility of an Island by Gavin Bowd, 2006) and La Carte et le Territoire (2010, trans. as The Map and the Territory by Gavin Bowd). It will also refer repeatedly to Houellebecq’s non-fictional texts: H. P. Lovecraft: Contre le Monde, Contre la Vie (1991, trans. as H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Dorna Khazeni, 2005), Rester vivant et Autres Testes (1991), La Poursuite du Bonheur (1997), Interventions I (1998), Interventions II (2009), Ennemis Publics (2008, letters between Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, trans. by Miriam Frendo and Frank Wynne as Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World, 2011). Although Houellebecq’s poetry creates an impression not dissimilar to the conceptual environment of his novels, it will not be discussed herein, since the focus of this work is the poetics of fiction. On occasion, reference will be made to the film adaptations of three of Houellebecq’s novels: Extension du Domaine de la Lutte, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, directed by Philippe Harel (1999); Elementarteilchen directed by Oskar Roehler (2006), an adaptation of Houellebecq’s Les Particules Elémentaires (the film’s title in English is Atomised); and La Possibilité d’une Ile, directed by Houellebecq himself (2008).
This book analyzes how Houellebecq’s poetics allow him to deploy the full power of narrative techniques, to position his writing as both iconoclastic and subversive and at the same time to harness it for the purposes of activism in the service of engaged impact. Among the general themes of Houellebecq’s oeuvre analyzed herein are the inherent tension between narrative and argument and the discord and contention between morality and nihilism; the destabilization of formidable concepts such as liberalism, ← 16 | 17 → individualism, progress, and promiscuity; Houellebecq’s re-evaluation of the 1960s as a culture and his counter-account of the decade and its contemporary ramifications. The approach of this book is more flexible than that of other critical works which focus on a single aspect of Houellebecq’s corpus, such as depressive realism or economy, yet less broad than those which situate Houellebecq within larger frames such as ‘transgressive fiction’ or ‘fin-de-millénaire poetics’. Located at the intersection between close reading, poststructuralist literary theory, and postmodern cultural theory, the book analyzes individual exempla of narrative patterns. It contributes to the understanding of Houellebecq’s multi-faceted literary world, establishing and reasserting the connection between the author’s poetics and his predisposition as an engaged writer; Houellebecq contends with the urgent questions of his time. Yet while his focus is on Western civilization as a whole, Houellebecq also ascribes parallel importance to individual human relationships.
The discussion herein begins with a conceptualization of Houellebeqc’s poetical differentia specifica, the unique and innovative intersection between the cooperation with transnational capitalism and the resentment toward ignorant indulgence in it. At one and the same time Houellebecq’s texts posit themselves
in the literary marketplace as a commodity while arousing inspiration and contemplation on social issues. They are a commodity in the sense that they clearly draw on the non-canonic in order to ensure that the text is entertaining for readers of a sex-saturated age, incorporating lurid sex scenes and nihilistic politics. In this respect, Houellebecq’s stance on contemporary cultural issues is passive, an inversion of activism, that of one who seems indifferent to the pitfalls of Western culture and, indeed, appears immersed in it. Yet his work is also a contemplation of social issues – an inversion of passivity. Blunt descriptions of contemporary practices pervade the narrative, together with an abundance of provocative hints that the text is idea rather than experience-driven. All of these attest to the fact that Houellebecq fully grasps the present condition of Western society and is wholly contemporary, according to Giorgio Agamben’s definition of this term as
a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it […] it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism.20 ← 17 | 18 →
The chapter A Poetics of Passive-Activism offers a general account of Houellebecq’s constitutive poetic model. Passive-activism is a subtle structure that creates a simultaneous effect of complicity and resistance. The passive facet allows the reader to cooperate with the narrative’s provocations and tacitly agree with its dubious events or ideas. The reader is so thoroughly interpolated as a subject within the Western ideology that he cooperates with the narrative’s stratagem. At the same time, the reader realizes the value of the situation represented and its dangers, enabling the activist aspect of the novel to mature. Far from articulating a particular agenda, Houellebecq promotes the necessity of perhaps giving shape to one. Typical techniques of Houellebecq’s passive-activism poetics are disruption of the ontological boundaries between author and narrator, replacement of expository or discursive fragments with ready-made lines quoted from various sources, and deliberate ‘bad writing’ as an expression of overt disdain for high culture.
The chapter entitled Familiarity and Kinship then turns to the larger themes of Houellebecq’s corpus and offers an overall interpretation of his novels through the analysis of the ‘autobiographical topos’. The application of Enzo Neppy’s term pertains to the representation of an event with clearly defined boundaries in space and time that obtains a constitutive, paradigmatic status, in which the subject’s desires and obsessive thoughts are expressed; it does not necessitate that the text be an autobiography, but rather that it employ an autobiographical discourse. The autobiographical topos describes an event from childhood that carries primordial meanings, permeated with a great deal of emotional residue. The topos of abandonment by the mother is a fundamental component of Houellebecq’s works and is associated with numerous structural units and patterns within the narratives. It is an event which heralds the decline of commitment to the other, the termination of family ties and values of mutual responsibility. As betrayal by the mother is also the outcome of the social forces at work in the second half of the 20th century, and as in Houellebecq’s oeuvre the personal is connected to the historical, I will further connect familial relations to the idea of the ‘disappearance of childhood’.
Pornography and the Posthuman explores Houellebecq’s style, which is imbued with frequent and explicit sexual descriptions, graphically detailed and serially produced; his representation of sex adheres to each and every generic convention of pornography. The chapter analyzes this phenomenon through a reading of pornographic representation as a ← 18 | 19 → postmodern parody, and by linking it to the concept of the post-human in contemporary Western society. The pornographic, as an artificial and fantastic representation of human relations, planted within a fundamentally realistic narrative, calls to mind that the foremost and major realistic theme of the stable and concrete individual consciousness has collapsed and is being mediated by convention. Thus, the parodic-pornography in Houellebecq’s novels utilizes a non-canonic form in order to foreground the historicity of human relations and their literary representation.
The chapter Art, Literature and the Market: Viewer/Reader as Voyeur extends the previous discussions into the realm of art. This chapter focuses on The Map and the Territory, exploring the artistic field depicted in the novel as a metonym of the literary field and comparing Houellebecq’s literary poetics to the contemporary artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, who play a significant role in the novel. All three share a common conscious involvement in the artistic market, an intimate knowledge of its mechanisms, and benefit from it. I suggest that they also share a poetics of transgression, which in each particular context turns the reader/viewer into a voyeur of forbidden, obscene sights; visions that ought to have remained ab-scena are brought to the fore, causing the reader/viewer to experience a cognitive and affective vertigo. I analyze the strategies employed to turn the reader/viewer into voyeur and elaborate on the relationship between the poetics of voyeurism and the rules of art, as enunciated by Pierre Bourdieu, including the patterns of production and consumption of art and the intertwining of art and consumerism.
The chapter Visions of the Future, Persistence of the Real turns to an analysis of Houellebecq’s futuristic novels The Elementary Particles and in particular The Possibility of an Island, in addition to a comparative reading of Oryx and Crake by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. These novels depict a future for humanity based upon the technological achievements of our present and in addition draw on the prevailing contemporary cultural and philosophical currents. The envisioned dystopian future realizes the perils and hazards of mankind’s current social situation. As futuristic novels, these works are first and foremost a commentary on the present by means of a glimpse into the future. The novels introduce a new, genetically-manipulated human species whose overall experience is simultaneously a reduction and simulation of real life. The center of my comparison between Houellebecq and Atwood is the adherence of each narrative to the master-plot of the ‘quest’. I discuss the derivation of the ← 19 | 20 → future from our present and follow the epistemological ramifications of these works concerning our reality.
The final chapter, The Cult of Happiness: A Gnostic Theology, explores Houellebecq’s preoccupation with theological topics, religion, and spirituality, in spite of, and simultaneously with, his manifestly existential-gnostic position. This is evident throughout the whole of his oeuvre, from the quotation from Paul’s epistle to the Romans, which serves as the motto for his first novel Whatever, to the motto of The Possibility of an Island – “Who, among you, deserves eternal life?” – which clearly refers to Judeo-Christian divine judgment. Likewise, Houellebecq’s works contain recurrent biblical references, eschatological images, and the vast and detailed description (spread over two novels) of the establishment of the imaginary Elohimite church, founded in late 20th century and still ruling the world some 2000 years later. I will analyze this topic as a profane counter-cultural contrast to the conceptual catastrophe represented by Houellebecq yet deconstructed to the point of non-solution. Houellebecq’s theology is an amalgam of a yearning, mourning, oppressing, and emancipating anti-nostalgic experience that shares a complex relationship with the general cosmophobia of his novels.
Since the focus of this book is on analyzing Houellebecq, it has some accompanying applications in the spheres and boundaries of social and cultural life. Thinking about Houellebecq involves rethinking some of our most deep-rooted conceptual habits. ← 20 | 21 →
1 Due to the psychological primacy and recency effect (according to which, in a series of events, memory is influenced by the position of the stimulus, mainly the first and last thing one sees), such textual deployments tend to be noticed and remembered; see Menakhem Perry, “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings”, Poetics Today1/1 and 2 (1979): pp. 35–64 and 311–361.
2 In Whatever, the main action of the attempted murder by the narrator and Tisserand ta
kes place on December 24th; The Elementary Particles dedicates a chapter to December 31st 1999, the eve of the new millennium, thus marking the brothers’ distinct fates; in Platform, Michel arrives at Roissy airport on December 23rd to depart for his vacation; Lanzarote begins on New Year’s Eve.
3 See also Bruno Viard, Les Tiroirs de Michel Houellebecq (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), p. 115. Viard observes the «warming up» in The Map and the Territory, along with van Wesemael, who states that «comme le constatent ses personnages à de multiples reprises, il manque l’essentiel dans leur univers: la chaleur, l’amour et la vie.» [“as his characters observe it on many occasions, the main thing is missing in their world, which is warmth, love and life”]. See Sabine van Wesemael, Le Roman Transgressif Contemporain: de Bret Easton Ellis à Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), p. 133. See also Michel David, La Mélancolie de Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), p. 132.
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