An Officer of Civilization
Page 5
Michel is completely unrepentant, articulating what seem to be the common-sense values that he shares. This is a blunt statement, expressed by one who has previously in the novel enjoyed the pleasures of the global sex trade, or, as John McCann accurately remarks
[…] Houellebecq’s characters do not think what they think out of conviction. They recycle thoughts and ideas with the intention not of expressing what they sincerely hold to be true but in order to produce an effect. Houellebecq’s irony does not lie in the gap between what characters say and what they really believe but rather in the acknowledgement that beyond the words uttered or the thoughts held there is no truth by which to judge them.22
Passive-activism is essentially a reader-response structure. It is designed to produce an effect, to distract the reader initially, allowing him to resist the text’s provocations but at the same time develop a tacit agreement with the arguments outlined therein, which in this case regard an ‘ideal trading opportunity’. The reader is so thoroughly interpolated as a subject within the Western condition that he cooperates with the narrative’s stratagem; and Houellebecq ensures the passivity of his readership by using a confessional narration that appreciates the forthright expression of thought. At the same time, since the novel converges at the narrator’s account of a conceptual discourse which cites moral and social theories extensively, the reader’s response becomes resentful. It is at this point exactly that the Activist aspect of the novel matures, with the unbearable legitimacy of Michel’s ideas acting as a trigger. Passive-activism expresses the paradox of over-righteousness and the crisis of meaning that haunts our consumer society. More than merely illustrating the postmodern injunction ← 28 | 29 → of relativity, pluralism, and destabilization, Houellebecq utilizes the ambiguous text in a far more intricate manner, employing it in the service of literary engagement and intervention.23 In order to generate activism, Houellebecq utilizes exposure, the contrary of suppression or embossment (of the self, social doxa), going behind the scenes (of leisure culture, art) and imagining the outcome (of science, religion). In so doing, he remains faithful to the principle outlined by Lakis Proguidis: «Dans ce meilleur des mondes qui est le nôtre; tout va de travers» [“In this Brave New World that is ours; everything is going wrong”].24
Houellebecq’s novels call attention to reality, the result of deep awareness of the current cultural stage of ‘existential anorexia’ (anorexie existentielle),25 in which social forces tend toward emptiness, insubstantiality and general desperation. All these have led to the end of the ideals of individual creativity and self-expression distinct from market forces. For this precise reason, Houellebecq cannot remain outside the market but must be an activist.
A Modular Narration
The poetics of passive-activism rests heavily on a modular narration consisting of different discourses. This generates several simultaneous routes of reading the novels, each of which manifests itself as being the basic form of the text’s communication, but at some point collapses and gives way to a different route, which also in turn collapses. These discourses are overlapping variations of the confessional genre, the realistic novel, and the conceptual novel and textual details that are read in the context of one genre can also be ascribed to another. For example, a basic feature of the roman à thèse is an appeal for the reader’s consent and approval, which ← 29 | 30 → is also true of the confessional novel. However, whereas contradictions and inconsistencies are viewed positively in a confession, as sincere and authentic, in a novel of ideas they cause confusion and incredulity. These various routes of reading function simultaneously are superimposed one upon another and compete with each other throughout the novel, interrupting and disrupting, in this way contributing to the seeming obscurity of the text. Each generic discourse arouses a different emotional or cognitive reaction, further conducive to the loss of solid ground. The reader continuously fluctuates between unfit registers, rendering unsettled the consistent whole. In this manner, the narration complicates any attempt to decipher the quality of the narrative. These discourses are neither abstract nor unattached; they are associated with the protagonists, whether an homodiegetic narrator-I or one described by an extradiegetic narrator. Constantly, and irrespective of narration, Houellebecq makes the character’s ontological status increasingly obscure by refusing to maintain a steady and consistent distance between author and narrator. He thus undermines the ontological boundary between fiction and reality (a device he employs in all his novels), resulting in the general impression that there is no real distinction between the man and the work in Houellebecq’s writing.26
Although Platform is written in the first person, the ‘I’ is not the author but rather a fictional character,27 the confessional discourse is one of self-revelation, and the confession extremely personal and subjective. It is in this tradition that the protagonist confesses to those displeasing aspects of his life, those which are outside the general consensus surrounding acceptable behavior and probably should remain secret. In many cases this is written in a controversial, nuanced, and provocative fashion. Indeed, in chapter 5 of Platform the narrator comments on his fellow tourists in the following manner: “I stared attentively at the two sluts so that I could forget them forever” (p. 29) [«Je fixai très attentivement les deux pouffes, afin de les oublier à tout jamais» (Platforme, p. 44)]; “All in all, he didn’t look much like anything, or nothing more than a real jerk. Not to mention his wife, in overalls, serious, a good milkmaid. It was inconceivable that ← 30 | 31 → these creatures had not yet reproduced, I thought.” (p. 30) [«Pour tout dire, il ne ressemblait pas à grand-chose, mais il avait vraiment l’air d’un con. Sans parler de sa femme, en salopette, sérieuse, bonne laitière. Il était invraisemblable que ces êtres ne se soient pas déjà reproduits, pensai-je.» (Platforme, p. 45)]; “Babette and Léa could never have been Thai prostitutes, I thought, they weren’t worthy of it.” (Platforme, p. 36) [«Babette et Léa, pensais-je, n’auraient pas été capables d’être des prostituées thaïes; elles n’en étaient pas dignes.» (Platforme, p. 54)]. One way or another, Houellebecq wishes to offer the possibility of reading the novel as the confession of a conflicted consciousness with idiosyncratic origins, in addition to permeating the text with autobiographical details available to all readers familiar with online sources;28 first and foremost, the fact that the protagonist is called Michel. Like all of Houellebecq’s protagonists, he is a bored and depressed bureaucrat, a desolate loner consumed by apathy, imbued with the feeling that life is devoid of hope or sense, a man suffocated by the pursuit of unattainable pleasures.29 Yet questions regarding the origins of the text are in fact less interesting than those concerning its effect on the reader. Even if not autobiographical, Houellebecq’s confessional discourse is a matter of style. Through its intimate writing, usually by a first-person narrator, Platform exposes non-consensual issues and uncensored opinions.
Confessional aesthetics provokes among readers emotional states absolutely inappropriate in the space of other routes of reading – voyeurism, sexual interest, disgust, wrath, or tears. It extracts personhood from readership, since the reader responds intensely, with a chain of almost physical reactions, to the content which is fraught with stories of male sexual abjection, social alienation, and parental neglect. This discourse involves the unhappy experience of oneself as a ‘subject’, or the ‘failure of objectification’ in a general sense; such failure “may also happen around […] one’s proximity to social, political abjection (via sex, sexuality, race, for instance) [and] may make the process of self-abandonment more tricky, ← 31 | 32 → more risky, emotionally.”30 Houellebecq’s confessional discourse demands that we do not deny libidinal, emotional, effective issues within the field of artistic production and consumption, even though these extremes prevent the sedimentation of empathy or identification with character. In Platform, as in his other novels, Houellebecq does not attempt to make the protagonist and his views pleasant and agreeable.
; The consistency of this reading route is disturbed by breaks caused by the narrator, who is, at times, omniscient. In Platform, for example, he describes a tourist industry meeting which he did not attend (pp. 125–127; Plateforme, pp. 168–171) in addition to describing Valerie’s actions and thoughts even before becoming closely acquainted with her (pp. 38–41; Plateforme, pp. 57–61). Another breach occurs when the narrator takes on the role of observer during his travelogue in Platform,31 scrutinizing a group of tourists and discerning their social background. Furthermore, the confessional route of reading cannot presume to interpret the vast portions of text that directly address the political, existential, and social issues of life in the Western world which are interwoven with personal, confessional descriptions. Quotations from Auguste Comte concerning how “domestic union degenerates into mere association” (p. 132) [«l’union domestique tend nécessairement à dégénérer en simple association» (Platform, p. 178)], contemplations on the knowledge of manufacturing processes in the age of information and capital (pp. 161–162; Plateforme, pp. 217–219), ruminations regarding “a platform for dividing the world” (p. 178) [«une plateforme programmatique pour le partage du monde» (Plateforme, p. 242)], or comments on the state of monotheistic religions, as well as textual fragments reminiscent of Balzac’s doctrine of Realism all serve to catalogue, classify, and explain human behavior, as for example in the discussion of Valerie’s social background in chapter 6.
The text can also be read as a realistic novel dealing with the socio-cultural realities of our times and seeking to confront and encompass the fundamentals of the human condition. The emphasis of the realistic ← 32 | 33 → novel on the individual entirely subjugates the narrative to an autobiographical pattern, but in a different manner: according to this route the individual is social and thus seeks to unravel the bond between social forces and the individual. In the realistic novel, the individual is an intersection of contemporary social conflicts. Similarly to the great realists, Houellebecq endeavors to tackle the basics of the contemporary human condition and to present a true picture of it in a sequence of novels, each of which derives from its predecessor and anticipates its successor, focusing on a different aspect of life; this, again, he does in the tradition of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. Indeed, Houellebecq’s entire oeuvre constitutes an evolving project which portrays the cultural logic of late capitalism, and especially the decline of emotion.32 As in the realistic novel, the centrality of character representation is closely connected to the general issue of representing the contemporary reality of a specific chronotope. According to this route of reading, Michel is a protagonist steeped within the philosophical availabilities offered by his times; a spiritually and morally weary subject at the end of history. The grand passiveness which he exudes is a result of the careful interpellation he has undergone as a subject. Although this text is not a social tract but a work of fiction, it contains a message concerning the societal ravages wrought by the rule of capitalism and liberalism. The protagonist is represented hand in hand with a society in which subjects become divorced from the possibility of emotions, losing even feelings of nostalgia for them.33 Following Fredric Jameson, who discerns a direct relationship between states of social and personal crisis, the passivity and banality that pervade the protagonist’s character is a useful social barometer. In this context, Houellebecq provides a worthy and valuable description of the crisis of meaning in consumer society, which engenders the reader’s engagement with the text and identification with its characters not on the basis of personal neurosis, as in the extreme confession, but due to the typical vulnerability experienced to some degree by all citizens of the West. According to this line of reading, the emphasis on abject situations is understood as a derivative of larger social structures. Here the reader experiences cynicism as a worthy weapon in social or existential criticism, and it is interpreted as such. However, this route cannot explain the genre-fiction fragments of pornography, those sections in ← 33 | 34 → which the realistic illusion is repeatedly tampered with or the blurring of the borders between author and narrator. Moreover, since the “grain of the voice of the author”34 is understood as an attunement to his idiosyncrasies, his own history and taste, this too interferes with the realistic model.
That Houellebecq does not satisfy himself with the representation of the world and documentation of its experience is made obvious by the abundance of provocative hints that the text is more idea- than experience-driven. Likewise, his characters seem contrived, encountering a profusion of abject situations that exceeds the average individual experience and transforming them into illustrations of ideas rather than characters. In fact, all Houellebecq’s heroes are portrayed as the same type, suggesting that he delineates a concept of life, not an experience of living. Scenes of abjection, in particular revulsion and vomit, allude to the very well known existential tradition in literature.35
The third possible route of reading is as a roman à these. When all is said and done, the novel of ideas must be read and interpreted in a very specific way, one which leads to explicit or implicit conclusions. Every single aspect of the narration instructs readers to pay attention to the argument,36 not to the narrative: the conversations which are in ← 34 | 35 → fact well-formed and eloquent political debates (pp. 51–54; Plateforme, pp. 74–78], the exposition of subjects, such as scientific models of consumption (p. 11; Plateforme, pp. 19–20], and the long monologues that illustrate well founded and well formulated beliefs and opinions on public affairs and society (pp. 80–81; Plateforme, pp. 111–113).
Houellebecq no longer worries about questions of illusion and reality, since these have disappeared with the observation that all fixed reality is fiction. Since characters have been set free, they are able to rise above the realistic model and become illustrations of mental culture. The typical Houellebecquian hero, whose essential condition is one of anhedonia – alienation, passivity, and lack of pleasure37 – is not a realistic character but a conceptual construct. Thus, Platform’s Michel cannot justify his life as a result of a perpetual sense of devaluation. His personal depreciation originates far more from a conceptual confusion than a social impediment.
The reader of a novel of ideas expects to be guided toward the idea of the novel and to move relatively smoothly between the levels of narrative, interpretation, and practice. Hence the author must create an authority within the text which leads the reader towards the intended reading, understanding and conclusion. Houellebecq, however, does not allow a smooth shift from one level to another; he does not depict an authoritative hero nor does his unreliable narrator communicate directly with the reader behind the character’s back. In any case, the distance between author and character is undermined and the reader, eager to follow an argument, is consequently confused.
In this route of reading it is futile to understand a character as reflecting a unique vulgar or amoral personality or the protagonist as faithful to the realistic principle in the depictions of his experiences. Rather, the protagonist is a textual construct designed to express a worldview, to validate and legitimize an ideology. According to this reading, Houellebecq’s protagonists serve as a device to emphasize an argument, delineating the magnitude of the void and mental superficiality into which Western civilization has sunk. Yet is this justified? On account of the lack of a coherent argumentative layout, feelings of perplexity and disjunction arise in this ← 35 | 36 → discourse. Houellebecq’s politics are unsure. We understand that his is a novelistic project of uncertain ideas.38
In Platform, Houellebecq depicts capitalism as gobbling up everything, taking over every aspect of our existence, bringing about the reification and objectification of humans. According to this work, Western culture has exhausted itself with an overabundance of promiscuity and liberalism. Likewise, Houellebecq demonstrates the instrumentalization of liberty by economic organizations that exploit the subjugation of the individual to liberalism; hence, the establishment of the Eldorador chain of
sex resorts. However, the fact that this world is attacked by Muslim terrorist forces appears to constitute a counter argument destabilizing the call for a consideration of the liberal sphere. However, violence, fanaticism, and cultural fundamentalism can hardly offer an alternative to liberalism; and, in his following novels, Houellebecq tests diverse alternatives such as art, religion, and neohumanity – all of which are revealed to be unsatisfactory, if not utter failures.
Clearly the modular triple reading routes of this novel serve to intensify the effect of passivity, making the work’s argument unclear. Yet while the novel is passive, it is also activist, dissecting reality and leaving it open for the reader to grapple with it; «Cette ambiance de décomposition, de foirage triste qui accompagne l’artcontemporain finit par vous prendre à la gorge»; [“that atmosphere of decomposition, of cheerless failure that hangs around contemporary art, in the end grabs you by the throat”] (“L’art comme épluchage”, Interventions 2, p. 68, my translation). This leads to the constant questions: what have we just read, what did he mean, and what are we supposed to do with it?
Houellebecq’s activism causes the reader to argue with himself as well as the author. The reader must remain constantly aware, maintain a high level of vigilance and be alert to the Western lifestyle. Houellebecq’s confessors, characters, or illustrations do not expect empathy from the reader, even though they tend to expose intimate or immoral areas in their lives; paradoxically so, since naturally the more in depth the knowledge of one’s psyche, the more empathy one receives. What the novels achieve through this exposure is precisely to uncover the content, which becomes a tool in Houellebecq’s activism. ← 36 | 37 →