Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  Anti-Matter:

  Michel Houellebecq and

  Depressive Realism

  Anti-Matter:

  Michel Houellebecq and

  Depressive Realism

  Ben Jeffery

  Winchester, UK

  Washington, USA

  First published by Zero Books, 2011

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  Text copyright: Ben Jeffery 2011

  ISBN: 978 1 84694 922 7

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  For my parents

  Introduction: Depressive Realism

  The idea that life is fundamentally not good, and cannot be fixed, has a prestigious history in Western arts and letters. The Iliad and the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles provide unflinching visions of human misery and common helplessness against fate. From the English canon, King Lear is perhaps the work of unromanticised pain par excellence. Pessimism is exemplified in the Christian tradition by the writings of Blaise Pascal and the outlook of the Puritans (people who ‘hated life and scorned the platitude that it is worth living’, in H.P. Lovecraft’s admiring words). Arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer devoted an entire philosophy to the aim of demonstrating that existence was necessarily bad, driven by an unceasing, unquenchable, thoughtless cosmic Will to which we are all puppets, and by which we are inevitably destroyed. ‘Life is a business that does not cover its costs’, he said – all is not for the best in the workings of the universe. We are thrown into the middle of a world we do not understand and cannot control. Our desires are mad and forever outstrip our means of satisfying them. Reality is something we must constantly repress in order to function.

  What all varieties of pessimism have in common is the principle that the truth is undesirable – that unhappiness coincides with the loss of illusions, and that, conversely, happiness is a type of fantasy or ignorance. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), on the subject of optimism, William James wrote: ‘The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of the good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose’. But, he adds:

  there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best keys to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

  The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself.

  In his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Sigmund Freud entertained the thought that depressive melancholy was a kind of sickness-by-truth, something that happens whenever a person is unable to tell themselves the lies needed for getting up and going about their daily business. Freud accepted that depression was a pathological disorder, but just because someone is afflicted with an abnormal amount of self-loathing it does not follow that the feeling is unjustified:

  It would be… fruitless from a scientific and a therapeutic point of view to contradict the patient who levels such reproaches against his ego in this way. In all likelihood he must in some way be right… He seems only to be grasping the truth more keenly than others who are not melancholic… [If] he describes himself as a petty, egotistic, insincere and dependent person, who has only ever striven to conceal the weakness of his nature… he may as far as we know come quite close to self-knowledge and we can only wonder why one must become ill in order to access to such truth.

  The psychotherapist Gary Greenberg comments: ‘Some melancholics may be mistaken… but the validity of their self-evaluations is not germane to the question of whether they are suffering from melancholy. The true mark of illness is the melancholic’s failure to maintain the sense that he is not petty, egotistic, etc., even if he is.’

  The idea that lucidity and mental well-being are not coincident has found some support in modern science. The term ‘depressive realism’ comes from a psychological study performed by Alloy and Abramson in 1979 which suggested that depressives routinely demonstrate better judgment about how much control they have over events (as opposed to non-depressives, who habitually over-estimate their control). Alloy and Abramson concluded that ‘depressed people are “sadder but wiser”… Non-depressed people succumb to cognitive illusions that enable them to see both themselves and their environment with a rosy glow.’

  What follows is not a systematic study of depression or a history of pessimistic thought. The idea of depressive realism is fascinating, however, and I’m interested in the various methods we have for dispelling or staving off pessimism – a task nearly all of us will need (or have needed) to perform at some time in our lives. William James’s observation strikes me as undeniably true. It is generally easier not to think about all of the bad things that go on in the world. But bad things really do happen, and even very sheltered lives will experience periods of awful bitterness, frustration, loss and unhappiness. Then, at the end, you die – just like everybody else. Even if you are inclined toward the view that pessimism is self-indulgent, idle, decadent, or the preserve of weak-wills (and arguably it is all of these things), you would have to admit there are some good reasons for taking a dim view of existence.

  The inspiration for this essay, and its principal focus, is the French author Michel Houellebecq. Anti-Matter could be described as a piece of extended literary criticism, and that would be sort of right, but it would be more exact to say it uses Houellebecq’s novels as a basis for thinking about pessimism and how it relates to honesty, how novelists justify their work, what people think art is for, and philosophical materialism, amongst other things. I would like to thank Keith Jeffery and Lucy Campbell for their help reading and commenting on my manuscript, and Caoimhe McAlister for her invaluable translation work. Special thanks to Mark Fisher and to Jon Baskin and the rest of the Point magazine editorial staff, without whom this book would not have been written.

  1

  Against the World, Against Life

  Michel Houellebecq has published five novels, all of them bitter and miserable. Their pessimism isn’t the only thing to them, or necessarily the most important thing, but it is probably the first that you’ll notice. Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules élémentaires (1998), Plateforme: Au Milieu du Monde (2001), La Possibilité d’une Île (2005) and La Carte et le Territoire (2010) – published in Britain as Whatever, A
tomised, Platform and The Possibility of an Island (at time of writing, La Carte et le Territoire has yet to appear in English) – are callow, cynical, sexobsessed, openly racist and misogynistic in turn, rife with B-grade porn writing, contradictory, full of contempt for art and intellectuals, and operate on a kind of low masculine anger at the indignities of being beta-chimp. They are nonetheless serious, and owe their reputation to artistic achievement as much as any naughty thrill they elicit. Translated into over twenty-five languages, Houellebecq has won the Dublin IMPAC award (the world’s most lucrative single-book prize) and the Prix Novembre for Atomised, the 1999 Grand Prix national de lettres, the Prix Interallié for The Possibility of an Island, the Prix Goncourt for La Carte et le Territoire, and has sustained critical and popular attention during a decade and a half in which the number of writers to emerge from Europe with any sense of importance is next to zero. This comparatively huge success is worth some attention. Houellebecq’s books are not historical romances or ripping thrillers. They are nakedly philosophical novels, embodying one of the more significant efforts by any contemporary writer to understand and communicate the tensions of our times, a great many of which are plainly hostile to the production of engaged literature.

  Whatever was initially an underground hit, scoring respectable sales in France despite receiving almost no publicity. Atomised made Houellebecq famous, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being debated on the front page of Le Monde. Each of his subsequent novels has been a major event in the literary press. He has published a novella, Lanzarote (2000), an extended essay on the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991), a book of poetry The Art of Struggle (1996), and a collection of letters exchanged with Bernard Henri-Lévy, Public Enemies (2008), all of which are available in English, plus various other collections of essays and poetry, which are not. There is an album for sale of Houellebecq singing some of his poems over rock music, and he personally directed the feature film adaptation of The Possibility of an Island (2008). This would be an impressive rate of capitalisation for any sort of writing career. That Houellebecq has achieved as much on the basis of such misanthropic novels is remarkable. They are unconventional books, without much literary flourish, animated by characters either clad in primary-colours or left indistinct (there are scarcely any memorable minor parts in Houellebecq). Which isn’t to say that the prose isn’t stylish: I’ve seen it described as ‘geometrical’, and there is something elegantly hard about the novels’ terse, almost aphoristic passages of social and psychological observation. Houellebecq has a talent for generalisation. He is also filthy and often very funny with it. Julian Barnes was broadly right when he said that Atomised is a difficult book to describe without making it seem ponderous. There is a streak of perverse, satirical glee in Houellebecq that tends to get lost in summary, a pleasure not unlike listening to a very sharp friend being cruel about someone you privately dislike.

  At the beginning of his first book, the biography of H.P. Lovecraft, Houellebecq set out his premises: ‘No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with life.’ Or more than a little:

  Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All these prodigiously refined ‘notations,’ ‘situations,’ anecdotes… All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already nourished by any one of our ‘real life’ days.

  Certainly these opening notes – those scare quotes around the words ‘real life’ – do not promise a wonderfully appetising read. But in fact Houellebecq’s debut is a delight. H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is witty, sympathetic, beautifully written, and accomplishes the nicest thing a piece of criticism can: it makes you want to read what you are reading about. Lovecraft, a recluse whose single happy relationship was wrecked by his inability to find a salary, who wrote horror stories powered on (so Houellebecq argues) virulent racial hatred, exemplified in his life and work one of the engines of Houellebecq’s own fiction: the refusal, or the failure, to develop into an adult. Lovecraft was convinced that the truth is the enemy of human interest. ‘All rationalism tends to minimalize the value and the importance of life, and to decrease the sum total of human happiness’, he wrote, in a letter quoted by Houellebecq. ‘In some cases the truth may cause suicidal or nearly suicidal depression.’ This sentiment is echoed throughout Houellebecq’s work. However, the claim that it is ‘useless… to write new realistic novels’ is something he quickly retreated from. Without exception, Houellebecq’s novels are concerned with the revulsion and hardship of quote-unquote real life.

  What good is a ‘realism’ like that? It is easy enough, you might think, to adopt a manful tone of voice and say that what matters in art is not wellbeing but truth, even if the truth is brutal and distressing. But if a piece of art is not only truthful but depressing and no good for you in its truthfulness, doesn’t that sound like an excellent reason to avoid it? I’m not sure how to answer that question. Houellebecq’s characters are defined by isolation and unhappiness, and they take these to be definitive rather than accidental parts of human existence. Their social relations are those of failure, determined by what they cannot relate to in others – ‘It is in failure and through failure, that the subject constitutes itself,’ as one puts it, and another: ‘It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it is that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable’ – all of which falls perilously close to navel-gazing. Whether in first- or third-person the Houellebecq hero (always male) typically takes the form of a soft-bodied, aging cynic who yearns exclusively for sex with young women and then spirals off into brooding monologues about the impossibility of living when it eludes him. The quantity of invective is high, particularly in The Possibility of an Island, easily the nastiest of the four titles. Its hero, a rich and famous comedian named Daniel, embarks on one affair with a woman that ends after they both agree that it would be futile to pretend that he could go on wanting her deteriorating body, and then another with a 22-year old nymphomaniac with whom he falls deeply in love, whilst maintaining that ‘Like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal, pampered and spoiled, protected from all cares as from any difficult or painful task so as to be better able to devote herself to her exclusively sexual service’. Eventually she dumps him before running off to an orgy. Elsewhere, Daniel notes that: ‘The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity – which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are,’ that ‘living alone together is hell between consenting adults,’ that ‘legitimate disgust… seizes any normal man at the sight of a baby,’ that ‘a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, who combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance’, and so on.

  If it isn’t impossible for women to enjoy reading Houellebecq, it’s true that there’s a lot of junk in the way. Not only are his female characters viewed, and valued, almost exclusively in terms of desirability, Houellebecq unfortunately combines his urge to philosophise with an inability to come up with anything more profound than the idea that women are the only people capable of true empathy and love (when they aren’t heartless, calculating, self-deluded snakes). And while it is strictly fallacious (not to mention lazy) to equate what an author writes with what an author thinks, it has to be said that there’s a considerable amount of evidence that Houellebecq’s novels really are all-about-him. Not only are his leading characters usually the same sort of guy, they are all guys who bear striking resemblances to their author. Two of them are called Michel.
The early novels detail much of Houellebecq’s life, pre-fame. Platform is a love story written shortly after he was married for the second time, and, as he approached fifty, Houellebecq released The Possibility of an Island, a book starring an embittered celebrity ruminating on the horrors of physical decline. Andrew Hussey, a friend of Houellebecq, has written in the Observer that ‘his novels, to anyone who knows anything about him, are barely refracted versions of his life’, and in a review of Denis Demonpion’s biography, Houellebecq non autorisé: enquête sur un phénomène, in the London Review of Books, the critic Theo Tait remarks that, even though anyone could guess that there’s strongly autobiographic current in Houellebecq’s fiction, ‘it’s a shock… to learn quite how much of Houellebecq’s life has been thrust raw – though often distorted – into his novels’. This includes characters in Whatever that turn out to be real people whose names have not been changed, depictions of Houellebecq’s own parents, his childhood, his wives, his dog, his time in a mental institution, and (quoting Tait again) a litany of ‘highly specific attacks on jobs, places and people that have, in one way or another, pissed him off’. The climax of this auto-plagiarism arrives in La Carte et le Territoire, where the novelist ‘Michel Houellebecq’ turns up as one of the characters (‘a solitary man with strong misanthropic tendencies’ who resembles ‘a sickly old tortoise’).

  It is perfectly plausible that Houellebecq is a very self-absorbed man with toxic opinions, scarcely something that makes him unique as a novelist.1 But there are purely aesthetic reasons for criticism besides. Like a lot of authors with a heavy intellectual agenda, Houellebecq has really just one big thing to say, and his trouble is finding ways to re-imagine it. The basic theory of negativity is laid out in Whatever, expanded and given narrative flesh in Atomised, and subsequently reset in the later novels. The first book you read by Houellebecq is therefore likely to be the one that makes the biggest impression, and those that follow, unless you are particularly sympathetic to his ideas, are more liable to try the patience and display flaws. As a work of art, Atomised is the most successful because it has the greatest momentum, and so it powers over most of the reader’s incredulity. The Possibility of an Island – a long and caustic monologue against a cardboard backdrop – is the worst chiefly because it attains nothing like the same velocity.