An Officer of Civilization

by Nurit Buchweitz

  Fundamentally conservative, and hostile to any idea of the social redistribution of wealth, Agatha Christie promulgated many deep-seated ideological positions throughout her career as a writer. In practice, this radical theoretical engagement nonetheless made it possible for her to be frequently cruel in her descriptions of the English aristocracy, whose privileges she so staunchly defended. (p. 70)

  [«Foncièrement conservatrice, hostile à toute idée de répartition sociale des richesses, Agatha Christie avait pris, tout au long de sa carrière romanesque, des positions idéologiques très tranchées. Cet engagement théorique radical lui permettait, en pratique, de se montrer souvent assez cruelle dans la description de cette aristocratie anglaise dont elle défendait les privilèges.» (Plateforme, p. 98)] ← 44 | 45 →

  1 The collections of Houellebecq’s two non-fictional works, including essays, theoretical reflections, letters, and interviews published in journals, are entitled Interventions1 and Interventions2 [Interventions et Interventions 2].

  2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 76–79.

  3 Houellebecq has even been referred to as an ethnologist, see Bruno Viard, Littérature et Déchirure: de Montaigne à Houellebecq: Etude Anthropologique (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), pp. 203–204. See also van Wesemael’s survey of realistic readings of Houellebecq in Sabine van Wesemael, Le Roman Transgressif Contemporain: de Bret Easton Ellis à Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 239–240.

  4 Ieme van der Poel links Houellebecq’s writing to fin de siècle and bachelor novels, based on a comparison of their conceptual backgrounds as well as the crisis of male identity they depict, their irony and black humor; see Ieme van der Poel, “Michel Houellebecq et l’esprit fin de siècle”, in Sabine van Wesemael (ed.) Michel Houellebecq: Etudes Réunies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2004), pp. 47–54.

  5 See van Wesemael, Le Roman Transgressif Contemporain, pp. 39–40. Van Wesemael discerns parallels between 19th-century fin de siècle novels and Houellebecq’s works. In particular, she compares their depressive atmosphere, to which Schopenhauer’s philosophy, employed by Houellebecq extensively as a source of knowledge, contributes significantly. She also notes that they share a tone of weariness, crisis, and the despair of an aging civilization. Van Wesemael contends that Houellebecq shares fin de siècle authors’ taste for nihilism and criticism of civilization, the self-contented bourgeoisie, and democracy; Houellebecq adds to these an attack on sexual liberalism.

  6 Ruth Cruickshank, Fin de Millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  7 Van Wesemael, Le Roman Transgressif Contemporain.

  8 Bruno Viard, «Faut-il en rire ou en pleurer? Michel Houellebecq du côté de Marcel Mauss et du Balzac», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 31–34.

  9 Dominique Noguez, Houellebecq, En Fait (Paris: Fayard, 2003), p. 14. According to Noguez, a trans-writer embarks upon the adventure of writing in many genres, in the margins wherein literature is associated with other genres. In this respect, Alain-Philippe Durand cites Houellebecq’s claim (in an interview with Martin de Haan) that «le monde, c’est aussi l’ensemble de ce qui a été écritsur le monde» [“The world is also all what has been written on the world”], in explaining that his novels do not only portray reality but also lean on its exegesis (Alain-Philippe Durand, “Pascal Bruckner et Michel Houellebecq – deux transécrivains au milieu du monde”, in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 159).

  10 Clément and van Wesemael, in the introduction to Le Malaise Existentiel, associate Houellebecq’s writing with the extreme contemporary, explaining the origin of Houellebecq’s stance in his novels as an existential psychological reaction to present times. Their point of departure for this argument is Gilles Lipovesky’s theory of personality in our hypermodern period. Both read the lonely, alienated Houellebecqian characters as a psychological derivative of our time. Clement and van Wesemael apply a psychoanalytical approach in their prolific writing on Houellebecq. See Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Le Malaise Existentiel dans le Roman Français de L’Extrême Contemporain (Saarbrücken: Editions Universitaires Européenne, 2011).

  11 Jacob Carlston, «Ecriture Houellebecqienne, Ecriture Menippéenne?», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), p. 20.

  12 In both their individual studies and collaborative research, Clément and van Wesemael emphasize the complex of castration, sexual abjection, and the crisis of sexual suffering.

  13 Michel David, La Mélancolie de Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011); Ben Jeffery, Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011).

  14 According to Lakis Proguidis, «Une décennie romanesque», in Michel Braudeau, Lakis Proguidis, Jean-Pierre Salgas and Dominique Viart, Le Roman Français Contemporain (Paris: Publications ADPF, 2002).

  15 Maxim Görke, Articuler la Conscience Malheureuse: A Propos du Cynisme dans L’Oeuvre de Michel Houellebecq (Grin Verlag 2008 /Ebook 2013); Jacob Carlston, «Ecriture Houellebecqienne, Ecriture Menippéenne?», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 19–30.

  16 Juremir Machado Da Silva, En Patagonie avec Michel Houellebecq (Paris: CNRS, 2011), p. 83 (my translation).

  17 Maud Granger Remy, Le Roman Posthumain: Houellebecq, Dantec, Gibson, Ellis (Saarbrücken: Editions Universitaires Européennes, 2010), pp. 7–55.

  18 Van Wesemael suggests that Houellebecq’s nihilist tendency stems from criticism of excessive liberal progress, yet results in a reactionary position calling for the return of anti-liberal values. See Sabine van Wesemael, Michel Houellebecq: Le Plaisir du Texte (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), pp. 31–68.

  19 Ibid., p. 14, (my translation).

  20 Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 5; Cruickshank, Fin de Millénaire, pp. 116, 117, 158.

  21 Reuven Tzur, “Two Critical Approaches: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability”, College English 36/7 (1975): pp. 776–778. Tzur refers to the quality of literary works in demanding that readers and critics suspend their quest for certitude and dwell on uncertainties, polemics, and contradictions.

  22 John McCann, Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 167.

  23 Viard sums up Houellebecq’s moral position as ultimately that of «altruisme absolu» [a”bsolute altruism”], based on the author’s tendency to rely on the social conceptualizations of Auguste Comte. See Viard, Littérature et Déchirure, p. 205.

  24 Lakis Proguidis, “Une décennie romanesque”, in Michel Braudeau, Lakis Proguidis, Jean-Pierre Salgas and Dominique Viard, Le Roman Français Contemporain (Paris, Publications ADPF, 2002), p. 63 (my translation).

  25 Ibid., 45.

  26 Viard attributes many of Houellebecq’s themes to the author’s autobiography, especially the facts of his parental deficit (Viard, Les Tirroirs, pp. 126–133). Morrey, on the other hand, stresses that Houellebecq’s works are not of the autobiographical genre (Morrey, Humanism and its Aftermath, pp. 102–104).

  27 Another well-known example is Albert Camus’s The Fall (1956) [La Chute].

  28 In Houellebecq’s writings, even though it is common knowledge that the narrator is not the author and it is not reasonable that the author would limit his story to what really happened, readers still tend to assume that the narrator is not merely a fictional storyteller but is probably relating fact and truth.

  29 See Denis Demonpion, Houellebecq non autorisé: Enquête sur un Phénomène (Paris: Maren Sell Editeurs, 2
005) for details on the real-life acquaintances who provided the inspiration for Houellebecq’s characters. Some have even taken legal action against the author.

  30 Jennifer Doyle, “The Effect of Intimacy Tracy Emin’s Bad-Sex Aesthetics”, in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend, The Art of Tracey Emin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 105. Doyle follows Vogler and Willis in using the term “failure of objectification” to refer to the experience of bad sex. In borrowing it for my use I have elaborated on its validity.

  31 This position is one of Houellebecq’s stylistic markers, see Murielle Lucie Clément, Michel Houellebecq Revisité: L’Ecriture Houellebecqienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), p. 183.

  32 Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991).

  33 Ibid.

  34 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”: Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs. If I perceive the ‘grain’ in a piece of music and accord this ‘grain’ a theoretical value (the emergence of the text in the work), I inevitably set up a new scheme of evaluation which will certainly be individual – I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing […]” (p. 188).

  35 On the existentialism in Camus’s L’Etranger as the basis of Houellebecq’s early novelistic work see 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. The intertextual relations between Platform and L’Etranger rest on the details of the narrative in both novels – a murder, the involvement of Arabs, a parent’s death at the very opening of the work, a meeting with a woman on the beach and, most significantly, the type of protagonist.

  36 In the sense attributed to it by Seymour Chatman. Chatman views genres as sub-categories of text types, which are the primary categories for structural classification, superseding others. The text types are argument, narrative, exposition, description. Texts are comprised of a combination of text types and are often hierarchic and multi-layered. Thus, the fable is primarily an argument, narrative being minor in its textual hierarchy. Indeed, the fable’s significance and complexity is on the level of argument, not of narrative, which is usually simple and repetitive; see Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 6–21.

  37 Sarah Harrison Smith, “A Novel of Uncertain Ideas”, The New Leader, August 31, 2003 [accessed 19-7-2006].

  38 Ibid.

  39 Michel Foucault, Hetrotopia, trans. by Ariella Azoulay (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003) [In Hebrew].

  40 Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity”, in Stuart Hill and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996), pp. 18–36.

  41 McCann, Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times, p. 160.

  42 According to the English translation by Chris Turner: Jean Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal, Ventriloquous Evil, trans. by Chris Turner (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull, 2010), pp. 22–23.

  43 See also Maud Granger Remy, «Le tourisme est un posthumanisme. Autour de Plateforme», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 277–286. Granger argues that in Platform Houellebecq demonstrates how tourism is transformed from leisure activity into a new economic, as well as political and moral stance.

  44 From Meir Wiezeltier’s poem, “I ask myself”, in idem, The Concise Sixties (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1998), pp. 120–121 [Hebrew].

  45 Julian Barnes, cited in Michael Karwowski, “Michel Houellebecq: French novelist for our times”, Contemporary Review 283/1650 (2003): p. 41.

  Familiarity, Kinship, and the Autobiographical Topos

  Balzac’s novel César Birotteau conveys the cultural logic of capitalism at its industrial stage,1 in which sexual liberalism is as yet an unforeseen future and unlimited opportunities in personal life are practically non-existent. From within this social order, Balzac describes the mechanism of falling in love and maintaining a good marriage:

  Some moralists think that love is the most involuntary, most disinterested and least calculating of passions, apart from maternal love. This belief is grossly mistaken. Though most men are unaware of the causes that urge them to love, it is nonetheless true that every physical or moral sympathy is founded on the calculations of the mind, the emotions or brutish instinct. Love is an essentially egotistical passion, and whoever speaks of egotism, speaks of deep calculation. Thus, to any mind that considers everything only in terms of results, it might at first appear unusual, or even incredible, that a beautiful girl like Césarine should be smitten with a poor, lame, red-headed boy. Yet this prodigy is consistent with the arithmetic that governs the feelings of the bourgeoisie, explaining it would account for the marriages, ever a source of unfailing surprise to those who observe them, that take place between little men and gracious, beautiful women, or ugly little creatures and handsome men […]. For all her innocence, [Césarine] could read in the clear eyes of Anselme a passionate feeling that is always flattering, whatever the lover’s age, rank or appearance. Little Popinot must have far more reason to love a wife than a handsome man. If the wife was beautiful, he would be madly in love with her until his final hour, and his love would give him ambition: he would kill himself to make his wife happy, let her be mistress in her own home and anticipate her commands. This is how Césarine thought, involuntarily, and not so crudely perhaps; she glimpsed a bird’s-eye view of the harvest of love, and drew her conclusions: her mother’s happiness was there for her to see and she wanted no other life for herself. Her instinct showed her another César in Anselme, one perfected by his upbringing as she was by hers […] eventually, she had ceased to notice the difference between Popinot’s left leg and the right, and could easily have said, ‘Does he really limp?’ She loved the pure clarity of his gaze and had learned to enjoy the effect that her ← 45 | 46 → own produced on those eyes in which a modest flame would instantly flare up. (Cesar Birotteau, pp. 92–93)

  [«Quelques moralistes pensent que l’amour est la passion la plus involontaire, la plusdés intéressée, la moins calculatrice de toutes, excepté toutefois l’amour maternel. Cette opinion comporte une erreur grossière. Si la plupart des hommes ignorent les raisons qui font aimer, toute sympathie physique ou morale n’en est pas moins basée sur des calculs faits par l’esprit, le sentiment ou la brutalité. L’amour est une passion essentiellement égoïste. Qui dit égoïsme, dit profond calcul. Ainsi, pour tout esprit frappé seulement des résultats, il peut sembler, au premier abord, invraisemblable ou singulier devoir une belle fille comme Césarine éprise d’un pauvre enfant boiteux et à cheveux rouges. Néanmoins, ce phénomène est en harmonie avec l’arithmétique des sentiments bourgeois. L’expliquer sera rendre compte des mariages toujours observés avec une constante surprise et qui se font entre de grandes, de belles femmes et de petits hommes, entre de petites, de laides créatures et de beaux garçons.» (César Birotteau, p. 141)]

  In Balzac’s society anyone can find love and all can enjoy the pleasures of sex. Since there is no free market of love and sexuality, the domain of struggle has not yet been expanded from money to sex and thus members of this society are able to appreciate the advantages of internal personality traits and the benefits of long-term relationships. This state-of-affairs is very distant from the reality reflected in Houellebecq’s novels. The concept of love voiced by Houellebecq cannot be tested in terms of the hackneyed myth of romantic, eternal, total love which blinds lovers and comforts hearts, the kind of love lucidly expressed by Balzac.2 This love is naturally ascribed to conventional relationships, the institution of marriage, and the tradition
al family. Houellebecq’s concept of love in an age when romanticism has taken on the character of emotional capitalism3 is quite different. This period is dominated by the norms of freedom, giving men and women full autonomy to enter into a relationship or end it at any given moment, as they desire, and also to inject that relationship with sexual, emotional, or moral content as they see fit. As sociologist Eva Illouz ← 46 | 47 → has recently commented, the concept of love as we have come to know it in recent centuries in Western Europe has undergone a substantive transformation.4 Capitalist principles such as cost-effectiveness rule today’s love, and the prospective profits of emotional investment are constantly recalculated and reckoned, alongside modern ‘commitment phobia’ and evolving emotional and ontological insecurity.5 Bauman aptly concludes that even though individuals today aspire to experience eternal love, in all probability it will remain unattainable, in the current state of love and sexuality:

  neither love ‘till death us do part’ nor building bridges to eternity, nor consent to ‘giving hostages to fate’ and to no-going-back commitments were redundant – let alone perceived as confining or oppressive. On the contrary, they used to be the ‘natural’ instincts of the homo faber, just as they go now against the equally ‘natural’ instincts of the homo consumens.6 (emphasis in the original)

  Houellebecq’s late-capitalist universe is a “pragmatic society, in which people are dysfunctional parts of a dysfunctional whole, and are an illustration of the atomization of society”.7 Society is composed of individual elementary particles, as the title of the novel The Elementary Particles suggests,8 reflecting the social possibilities of a western society in which integration is dubious and subjects are continually moving further and further away from one another.9 Consider the confession by the narrator of Whatever to his therapist, in which he justifies embarking upon relationships in the following manner: ← 47 | 48 →

  Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance. Their existence is I admit an exception to the laws of nature, not only because this fracture of basic maladjustment is produced outside of any genetic finality but also by dint of the excessive lucidity it presupposes, an obviously transcendent lucidity in relation to the perceptual schemas of ordinary existence. It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, providing he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolutely inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world. (Whatever, p. 146)