An Officer of Civilization
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4 See Kerstein’s review of The Possibility of an Island. Benjamin Kerstein, “The Western Abyss”, Azure 26 (2006). Available at
5 Ruth Amar notes that weakness of dialogue is a phenomenon typical of the contemporary French novel, which reflects the decline in the communicative value of relationships. Thus, the father-son conversation is an exception that highlights this rule. See Ruth Amar, «‘Chacun de nous est un désert’: solitudes multiples au vingtième siècle», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Le Malaise Existentiel dans le Roman Français de L’Extrême Contemporain (Saarbrücken: Editions Universitaires Européenne, 2011), pp. 11–33, in particular see p. 15.
6 See Douglas Morrey’s analysis in Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 92.
7 Jed Martin travels back and forth between city and country; in The Elementary Particles, Michel moves to the country. Likewise, protagonists in Houellebecq’s other books make similar trips: in Whatever, the narrator travels back and forth from Paris to the provinces. We see the same principle of transition of themes from one book to another, which further bolsters the theory that Houellebecq’s oeuvre is different variations of the same story.
8 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 2011), pp. 50–86.
9 Here the term “intertextuality” is used in the sense of “the corpus of texts the reader may legitimately connect with the one before his eyes, that is, the texts brought to mind by what he is reading. This corpus has loose and flexible limits”; See Michael Riffaterre, “Syllepsis”, Critical Inquiry 6/4 (1980): p. 626. See also Riffaterre’s formulation that “what the text does not say, or says obscurely, the intertext spells out” in Riffaterre, “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality”, New Literary History 25/4, 25th Anniversary Issue Part 2 (1994): p. 781.
10 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fiction, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Press, 1998), p. 325. The story was originally published in 1946.
11 Most recently Viard, Les Tirroirs.
12 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 305.
13 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1984), 317.
14 A point well observed by Houellebecq’s critics, who highlight the discrepancy between the well-formed argumentation and the lack of an unwavering thesis; see van Wesemael’s formulation: «L’oeuvre de Houellebecq est absolument saturée de thèses, et pourtant l’ambiguïté prend le dessus» [“Houellebecq’s work is absolutely swamped with theses and yet, ambiguity overcome”s] (van Wesemael, Roman Transgressif, p. 266). See also Pascal Riendeau, “Kant au Cap d’Agde ou la sexualité social-démocrate comme art de vivre”, in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq à la Une (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 197–208 and Liesbet Korthals Altes, “Persuasion et ambiguïté dans un roman à thèse postmoderne (Les Particules Elémentaires)”, in Sabine van Wesemael (ed.), Michel Houellebecq: Etudes Réunies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 29–46.
15 Jean-Louis Cornille, «Extension du domaine de la littérature ou j’ai lu l’Etranger», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 133–143.
16 Zofit Karni compares Houellebecq’s animal story “Dialogues between a Cow and a Filly” in Whatever (p. 7; emphasis in the original) [“Dialogues d’une vache et d’une pouliche” (Extension, p. 9)] with Nietzsche’s “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”. In Houellebecq’s work, the narrator continues Nietzsche’s concept and informs us that Nietzsche was mistaken. But his argumentation is perfectly circular, proving false the claim that “the philosopher is found wanting” (p. 8) [«le philosophe se trouve pris en défaut» (Extension, p. 10)]. See Zofit Karni, “Extent of the Void,” Haaretz, 15 May 2002 [Hebrew].
17 Maud Granger Remy, Le Roman Posthumain: Houellebecq, Dantec, Gibson, Ellis (Saarbrücken: Editions Universitaires Européennes, 2010), pp. 249–269. Remy maintains that the text sabotages the claims themselves. Analyzing the animal stories in Whatever, she demonstrates how the pastiche of styles, the excess and overload play on the reader’s expectations (p. 260) and destroy the seriousness of ethical thinking (p. 259).
18 Richard Keller Simon, Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 14–28.
19 Denis Benois, Littérature et engagement: de Pascal à Sartre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000), pp. 296–297.
20 Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?”, in idem, What is Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatolla (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p.41.
Passive-Activism: A Modular Narration
“When you think of it, I said to Vincent, I had done intervention art without knowing it.” (Possibility, p. 105; emphasis in the original) [«En somme, dis-je à Vincent, j’avais fait de l’art d’intervention, sans le savoir.» (Possibilité, p. 149)]. This sentence is pronounced by the comedian protagonist of The Possibility of an Island, Daniel1, the alter-ego of the author.1 In whatever way we are to understand this – as a confession by the author, an indicative sign projected onto the protagonist and characterizing him or as a meta-poetic remark regarding the text – this sentence provides a clue to deciphering the core of Michel Houellebecq’s poetics.
Houellebecq has been hailed by some as a prescient genius with a deep grasp of our times and dismissed by others as a rabid extremist. His novels are appreciated as mordantly clever and resented for their portrayal of uncertain ideas. Yet Houellebecq has unequivocally turned reading into an entirely new and qualitatively different experience, making the appreciation of what we have read perplexing. In all of Houellebecq’s books, the narrative is ridden with a celebration of misogyny, racial comments, and explicit sexual descriptions, along with a morbid view of Western culture and humanity in general. His writings reiterate the diagnosis of a society in the process of becoming devoid of meaning. They depict the futile pursuit of pleasure never obtained or truncated in one fell swoop – while expressing deep disdain towards kinship and family ties and seeking relief from interpersonal responsibility. Houellebecq’s characters are absorbed with and immersed in freedom of thought, speech, and action; concurrently, they acknowledge the dangers of unlimited freedom in scathing critiques. Nevertheless, Houellebecq’s narratives, even if blunt and sometimes murky, are essentially familiar to anyone well acquainted with life in Western society over the last decades.
The term ‘intervention art’ in the context of The Possibility of an Island refers to an interest in present-day issues and the acknowledgement ← 21 | 22 → that contemporary cultural criticism and the technological advancements of our time have rendered the accumulation of knowledge and consolidation of moral principles over the past 200 years dubious, or even irrelevant:
I don’t mean that my sketches were unfunny; they were funny. I was, indeed, a cutting observer of contemporary reality; it was just that everything now seemed so elementary to me, it seemed that so few things remained that could be observed in contemporary reality: we had simplified and pruned so much, broken so many barriers, taboos, misplaced hoped, and false aspiration; truly, there was so little left. […] What’s worse is that I was considered to be a humanist; a pretty abrasive humanist, but a humanist all the same. (Possibility, pp. 14–15; emphasis in the original)
[«Je ne veux pas dire que mes sketches n’étaient pas drôles; drôles, ils l’étaient. J’étais, en effet, un observateur acéré de la réalité contemporaine; il me semblait simplement que c’était si élémentaire, qu’il restait si peude choses à observer dans la réalité contemporaine:
nous avions tant simplifié, tant élagué, tant brisé de barrières, de tabous, d’espérances erronées, d’aspirations fausses; il restait si peu, vraiment. […] Le pire est que j’étais considéré comme un humaniste; un humaniste grinçant, certes, mais un humaniste.» (Possibilité, pp. 21–22; emphasis in the original)]
Similarly to Daniel1 in the novel, Houellebecq too acknowledges that there is no single truth, no ultimate knowledge or universal morals, but only subjective representations of reality. Thus, Houellebecq’s engagement with reality punctuates chaos and disorder in the components themselves; this aesthetics must be read in terms of the ‘ideology of form’,2 according to which the formal structure is viewed as a symbolic message, reflecting contemporary modes of production and social contradictions. Obviously, in the background of Houellebecq’s novels lie the pathologies and neurosis of the postmodern era, of ‘the society of experience’, consumerism, hyper-reality, and schizophrenia. While Houellebecq’s clearly engaged texts dissect Western society, his neglect to present a closed system of thought or to favor masks and guises, split discourse, and contradictions, blocks the pronouncement of any unequivocal judgment, allowing ambivalence and problematization of basic conceptual habits.
At the same time, Houellebecq has acquired a celebrity status as a ‘personality’. His works are praised as being ‘himself’, a combination of biography and creativity in an age in which intrigue has become the author’s mark, his poncif. Houellebecq offers bloody penetration into body and soul, his own and that of society as a whole. Intensity, instantaneity, ← 22 | 23 → inversion, and introspection pervade his writings, in which ostensible emotional intensity and unmediated expression constitute strategies to enlighten a reality of ethical contacts with our time, history, and the history of literature.
The difficulty of classifying Houellebecq’s writings has preoccupied critics since the publication of his earliest texts. Some define his works as similar to the ‘realistic novel’ and 19th-century naturalist novel;3 others highlight the influences of the Roman célibataire4 written by the decadent writers of late 19th-century or fin de siècle5 and fin de millénaire poetics.6 Houellebecq has been compared to the French moralists, due to his association with existentialism,7 realism, and naturalism.8 He has often been described as applying an interdisciplinary approach to the art of the novel: he has been called a trans-writer (transécrivain),9 an author ← 23 | 24 → of extreme contemporary works (l’extrême contemporain),10 and a transgressive writer. Houellebecq himself proclaimed that he belongs to the German romantic tradition of the total novel, in which all genres converge,11 and he has tied himself to Balzac in more than one of his works (particularly Platform [Plateforme] and The Possibility of an Island [La Possibilité d’une île]). Other scholars emphasize his strong psychological basis,12 depression, and melancholy;13 while there are those who focus on his conceptualism,14 cynicism, satire, and Menippean satire,15 in addition to his employment of minor genres such as science fiction and pornography. ← 24 | 25 → For the most part, critics have tended to favor one reading over another, selecting one at the expense of others, attempting to combine the multiple signs in Houellebeq’s novels under one generic rubric. Houellebecq’s Brazilian translator, Juremir Machado Da Silva, accurately summarizes this situation:
«J’avais devant moi un écrivain célèbre et incompris, défenseur de l’homme et accusé d’antihumanisme, provocateur – il avait proposé d’attaquer l’islamisme avec des mini-jupes -, mais souffrant de carence affective, un idéaliste capable de croire en un gouvernement mondial fondé sur la bonté et la fraternité. Un authentique exemple de Mai 1968 en guerre contre l’esprit de 68. Un libertaire plus proche de Kant que de Nietzsche. Un paradoxe.»
[In front of me was a famous, misunderstood writer, defender of humans and accused of anti-humanism, of being provocative – he had suggested to tackle Islamism with miniskirts –, but suffering from emotional deprivation, an idealist able to believe in a World government based on kindness and brotherhood. A real specimen of May 68 events in France waging war against the spirit of 68 events. A libertarian closer to Kant than to Nietzsche. A paradox.]16
I suggest that Houellebecq rises above classifications and distinctions to create his own sui-generis, a reader-oriented structure designed to generate affection and action.
Passive-Activism
Houellebecq’s poetics represent a unique and innovative intersection between transnational capitalism and literature, both within the confines of the narrative and outside it. The text at once posits itself as a commodity in the literary marketplace and as a work designed to inspire and arouse the contemplation of social issues. Houellebecq’s line of selection and combination reveals that the differencia specifica of his works lies in their hybrid model of passive-activism. On the one hand his works present themselves as a commodity, not free of market constraints and aware of their commercial potential by the very fact of being a commodity. They ← 25 | 26 → are a commodity in that they clearly draw on the non-canonical in order to ensure that the text appeals to a sex-saturated age, including lurid sex scenes, nihilistic politics, misogyny, and racism. In this sense Houellebecq’s stance regarding contemporary cultural issues is an inversion of activism. He is seemingly indifferent to the pitfalls of Western culture and appears to be immersed in it – see the plethora of sexual descriptions and intentional ‘bad writing,’ sometimes referred to as hollow or shallow.17 This apparent loathing of high culture can be read as the writer’s attempt to distance himself from high art or anything that would appear to have literary value. Yet on the other hand, Houellebecq’s oeuvre is a socially involved project and it contains lengthy passages directly addressing the cultural logic of late capitalism and, in particular, the current era in which capitalism is colonizing every aspect of our being. Vast sections discuss the state of the Western world and the history of human advancement in a matter-of-fact, at times even scientific or contemplative, language.
However, the poetics of passive-activism does not automatically comply with his audience’s reading habits. The confusion it creates regarding the value and quality of what has already been read leads to what seems to be Houellebecq’s thematic goal: the problematization of truisms – liberalism, freedom, globalism, and transnationalism – in the postmodernist tradition of destabilization. Yet this problematization is used to support an activist stand. Thus, passive-activism embodies the epitome of contemporary literature’s role in laying siege to capitalist imperialism, globalization, and the moral decline of Western culture; neither by being identifiably reactionary and calling for a return to rudimentary values, nor by advocating a nihilist or indifferent approach to the current reality.18
Some critics acknowledge that Houellebecq adheres to market logic, as, for example, Sabine van Wesemael’s comment, «Le monde capitaliste qu’il dénonceest aussi le sien.» [“The capitalist world he criticizes is his as well.”]19 However, for them this is a provocative game: playing with taboos is part of Houellebecq’s enjoyment in posing as the enfant ← 26 | 27 → terrible and presenting himself as a victim of public and media coverage.20 Yet Houellebecq’s involvement in popular culture goes far deeper. The hybrid nature of passive-activism should in fact be read thus – Houellebecq writes from within post-capitalist culture and also against it. Indeed, Houellebecq cooperates with the social order in the post-capitalistic world. Furthermore, he convinces us of his position by using the simple, commonsense logic of his arguments which, blunt as they may be, are clear to those who were raised within Western culture or have lived within it in recent decades: the generation that suffers – to use Jean Baudrillard’s phrase – “from the despair of having everything”. Conversely, Houellebecq calls for vigilance and alertness to this order, and stirs the problematics that underlie its basic assumptions. This aesthetics echoes a Kippfigur, or a reversible figure, in which a visually ambiguous pattern appears, demanding that the beholder vacillate between two or more simultaneous interpretations. Houellebec
q’s Kippfigur poetics is a textual analogue of this neurosis and the quality of adapting to the vicissitudes of the time. This ambivalence results in an open, dispersed, never final object. The postmodern world does not concede to any interpretational meta-structure and neither do Houellebecq’s novels. They demand that the reader exercise a negative capability,21 never allowing the suspension of disbelief. Granted, this all derives from the crisis of cultural authority in postmodernism, specifically the authority immersed in Western culture and its institutions.
The novel Platform, which centers upon the connection between patterns of global consumerism, the decline of the West, and sex tourism in the Third World, provides some illustrations. The narrator Michel asserts the logic behind his sex tourism enterprise:
‘Therefore,’ I went on, ‘you have several hundred million westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction. They spend their lives looking without finding it, and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left ← 27 | 28 → to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand: it’s an ideal trading opportunity. (Platform, p. 173)
[«Donc, poursuivis-je, d’un côté tu as plusieurs centaines de millions d’Occidentaux qui ont tout ce qu’ils veulent, sauf qu’ils n’arrivent plus à trouver de satisfaction sexuelle: ils cherchent, ils cherchent sans arrêt, mais ils ne trouvent rien, et ils en sont malheureux jusqu’à l’os. De l’autre côté tu as plusieurs milliards d’individus qui n’ont rien, qui crèvent de faim, qui meurent jeunes, qui vivent dans des conditions insalubres, et qui n’ont plus rien à vendre que leur corps, et leur sexualité intacte. C’est simple, vraiment simple à comprendre: c’est une situation d’échange idéale.» (Plateforme, p. 234)]