by Ben Jeffery
What does it mean to praise a person or a work of art as ‘very human’? Francis Fukuyama points out in Our Posthuman Future (2002) that the concept of humanity (as a virtue) depends on the idea that we are born with an unfathomable aspect of ourselves, a deep what-it-is-like to be us that we cannot properly explain. It is not as though religiousness solves this inexplicability, or provides the correct way of thinking about it, but it does at least give it formal acknowledgment, and codifies it, and thereby creates context for it. Institutional religion is buttressed by an inheritance of tradition and ritual, forms of living – services, actions, customs – that embody the ideology (literally ‘bring it to life’). This is one reason why religion might command respect compared to the person who asserts they ‘just know that there’s something more out there’ (whatever that means), or ‘just know that there is such a thing as a soul’ (whatever that is), whilst carrying on in all other aspects like someone who believes no such thing. Their attitude makes no difference.
Today, we could say of the loss of cultural authority, the formal difficulties, the slowing of innovation to a crawl – none of it would matter tremendously if there were a core, immutable good that literature continued to provide. In fact, without all that old momentum it becomes, if anything, even easier to feel that literature serves no profound purpose. The private belief that there is something intrinsically valuable in art owes more than it appears to consensus. Hemmingway was not wrong to say that writing has something inexplicable about it, but he spoke from a position of strength. The 1952 publication of The Old Man and the Sea was an American national event. Hemmingway could rely on a context for his work. The disorientation of the modern writer is very much an absence of context, a loss detectable even in the words we use to try and highlight the special value of literature. It seems to me that one perfectly understandable response to this is to declare that there is no such value, and never was: a retreat into depressive realism. ‘Books are a load of crap.’ One notably persistent theme in Houellebecq’s novels is the contempt given over to imaginative and intellectual life – the formal self-disgust. Recall the dismissal that begins H.P. Lovecraft: ‘It is useless… to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.’ Whatever describes literature as ‘pure bullshit’. In Atomised writing is called a displacement activity, the performance of frustrated animals. When Bruno recounts his time teaching literature to sixteen-year-olds, he lashes out at his memory of one of the black students: ‘He always wore a baseball cap and a pair of Nikes; I was convinced he had a huge dick. All the girls threw themselves at this big baboon and here I was trying to teach them about Mallarmé – what the fuck was the point?’ The hero of Platform, Michel R., informs us that ‘My conclusion… is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine.’ According to Daniel in The Possibility of an Island, ‘After a certain age… it’s quite obvious that everything has been said and done’, theorising is good only after sex – i.e. ‘real life’:
I had probably never had a real conversation with anyone other than a woman I loved, and essentially it seemed unsurprising to me that the exchange of ideas with someone who doesn’t know your body, is not in a position to secure its unhappiness or on the other hand to bring it joy, was a false and ultimately impossible exercise, for we are bodies, we are, above all, principally and almost uniquely bodies, and the state of our bodies constitutes the true explanation of the majority of our intellectual and moral conceptions.
The disrespect for intellectual and artistic activity dovetails with the novels’ obsession with inner drives, and the futility of awareness in the face of bodily urge. Michel R. reflects at one point that ‘there’s probably no point searching for meaning’ in his personality, it’s ‘just a technical matter, a question of hormone levels’. This is a characteristic moment of depressive realism: whether or not we understand ourselves, it makes no great difference. In Platform, Michel R. arrives in a Thai brothel, chancing across two other men from his package tour. One of these men, Robert, is a weary cynic. The scene is fascinating because the narrator’s judgment can so easily be interpreted as Houellebecq’s own, upon himself:
I nodded to Robert to take my leave. His dour face, fixed in a bitter rictus, scanned the room – and beyond, the human race – without a hint of affability. He had made his point, at least he had had the opportunity; I sensed I was going to forget him pretty quickly. I had the impression that he didn’t even want to make love to these girls anymore. Life can be seen as a process of gradually coming to a standstill… In Robert, the process was already well advanced: he possibly still got erections, but even that wasn’t certain. It’s easy to play the smart aleck, to give the impression that you’ve understood something about life; the fact remains that life comes to an end. My fate was similar to his, we had shared the same defeat; but still I felt no active sense of solidarity. In the absence of love, nothing can be sanctified. On the inside of the eyelids patches of light merge; there are visions, there are dreams. None of this now concerns man, who waits for night; night comes. I paid the waiter two thousand baht and he escorted me to the double doors leading upstairs. [The girl] held my hand; she would, for an hour or two, try to make me happy.
***
Something that David Foster Wallace made much of in his work was the idea that literature served as a comfort to loneliness, and that this was maybe its most basic virtue. If you accept that loneliness is the great existential terror that we all, in our different ways, try to escape, it isn’t hard to apprehend the fraught relationship that this gives us to our own bodies, because it’s our bodies that keep us so basically and dreadfully apart. It’s interesting to note how often words used to express the value of literature (or art more generally) conjure up kinds of immaterialism: ‘seeing the world through different eyes’, ‘being transported’, forging a ‘psychic connection’ with the author, ‘losing yourself’ in a book – all of these are expressions that run against what seems to be the brute material truth: that we are locked inside our skulls. Nor is it a great challenge to draw connections between this and the spiritual immaterialism inherent in religion (think about the phrase ‘Giving yourself to God’). Partly, these ways of speaking may be extensions of a vague but deep-rooted sense that what is distinctive and important about being human are things that find their best expression in non-biological, non-material terms, like when someone says that intimacy is the genuinely valuable part of sex. (Here is the reason we cling on to words like ‘soul’.) The villainy of materialism is that it undermines this: for instance, when it tells us that love is only a disguise for the urge to reproduce. Along this road we lose the use of a very fundamental and comforting terminology, or at least are obliged to admit that it gives a false or misleading account of human behaviour. It emerges that there is basically no getting over yourself, no escaping your skull – and the more you are led to feel this way the more you are inclined to see life as isolated and vanishing.
Houellebecq’s men don’t think about God. All they think about – all there is – are the dictates of their biology, and their diminishing capacities to meet them. It is as if to say: the facts are what they are. So long as the facts are in your favour you can be happy, but there’s nothing else to it. Not only is this position terribly lonely, it ridicules concepts of the common good. When Immanuel Kant argued that God must be judged by the same morality as men he was saying, partly, that what is truly good must be as eternal and universal as God himself, because if the good is only open to some – if it is dependent in any way on luck, for example – then it cannot really be good, since its contingency would be an evil. A value-system like the value-system of a hedonist, which relies entirely on the working of the body, is akin to the kind of contingent-good that Kant thought couldn’t possibly be the real thing, i.e. it is good only for whoever it is good for. So sexual freedom is a boon if you are able to enjoy it, but that ‘if’ carries with it the reality of all those p
eople, the Raphaël Tisserands, who are left out. The picture Houellebecq paints across the nightclubs, resorts and restaurants of the West is of a society that understands the facts but won’t spell them out, where concern for the body (health, beauty, sensation) has been raised to a cultural zenith, only without any corresponding apparatus to give meaning to decline and death. This, he opines, is the bleak consequence of consumer capitalism, ‘which, turning youth into the supremely desirable commodity, had little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors – inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth, and the pleasures associated with it’.
Modern materialism has this strange kind of double-effect on self-perception. On the one hand, it isolates the individual by (seemingly) dispelling various illusions of communion (the decline of religion being the paradigm example). On the other, progress in social sciences, psychology and neurology encourages us to think about ourselves in various external fashions: as the product of genetic resources, social and economic starting position, and so on. These modes of thought are uncomfortable because they imply that our view of things ‘from the inside’ is illusory or distorted, and that what we experience as central and singular in our personal day-to-day lives are actually nothing more than instances of general truths about human behaviour. To a certain extent it is healthy to be objective about yourself, but at its limits it becomes dehuman-ising. ‘Flattening’ is, for me, exactly the word for describing how the materialist double-effect feels when you reach these limits – subjective consciousness is squished between the material barrier separating our inner life from those of others, and the inferential awareness that this inner life is itself the product of a hard-wiring that we are subjectively blind to. The deeper way in which Sontag was right when she said that redundancy was the affliction of modern life is that the ascendancy of materialism not only attacks the meaning of this very precious ‘immaterial’ vocabulary we use to talk about what it’s like being human, it breeds biological fatalism, lending weight to the idea that our actions reduce to, and are determined by, dumb physical process, an ultimately pointless set of natural drives. Helplessness is the current running beneath all of Houellebecq’s narratives, the inability to either get what you want or change what you want; to avoid death or believe that death is anything except bad.
This is the omega point of depressive realism. What good are books if you are sick, alone, and unloved? They are no good. At best they are make-believe to help us disguise the facts of life – but the facts remain, and they are unbearably heavy. Hence the dark joke at the bottom of the pessimist’s project is that it subverts itself. Ridiculing the futility of human action finally makes pessimism seem pointless, demonstrates the emptiness of its honesty. Depressive realism leads us up to an airless summit, and the wonder is how seriously we can take it; whether, despite itself, there is anything to be drawn from its negativity.
3
Your Imagination is a Liar
You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.
David Foster Wallace
The fundamental inconsistency in depressive realism was reached at the end of the last chapter: if you follow the pessimist’s logic to its conclusion, it collapses under its own weight. Its ‘truthfulness’ makes truth-telling seem pointless. Houellebecq’s fiction, like all depressive realism, trades heavily on its guise of honesty, and here the tight resemblance between Houellebecq the real-life man and the protagonists in his novels serves artistic purpose, insofar as it reinforces the impression of undiluted (or less-diluted) candour. But the appearance of undiluted honesty should never be trusted, and the simple physical existence of pessimistic art subverts its philosophy. Whether the pessimist’s work rubbishes the value of art explicitly, as Houellebecq’s does, or merely implies it through its worldview – still the pessimist’s work is also art, and it exists. What for? It would be less important if there were no claims to consistency being made, but the lure of depressive realism is precisely that it presents an unvarnished, ‘completed’ picture of the world. Notoriously, depressive thinking is characterised by certainty. Its dissonances matter.
George Orwell said that inconsistency can be a mark of vitality, and this seems doubly apt when the inconsistency lies within an ethos preaching disgust and hatred at life. The issue is not bad faith, as if what the pessimist writes is false and he knows it. It’s that, whatever he thinks about it, the very fact of his writing suggests something left unsettled. Ironically, depressive realism – which regards itself as the most clear-headed, disillusioned, unclouded way of perceiving the world – doesn’t know how to explain itself. Where would the force of Houellebecq’s novels come from, if art has no power? To respond that art is just a trumped up way of achieving some ‘lower’ goal (e.g. that Houellebecq writes books in order to make himself seem important or attractive) still doesn’t explain how it works. What is it that makes a particular book good? What attracts someone to one piece of art but not another?
But just that Houellebecq’s books have blind-spots and inconsistencies isn’t proof that what they say is wrong, only an invitation to consider how it’s not completely right. It is no coincidence, thought, that the moment at which depressive realist art goes blind is over its own status as art, i.e. its identity as an ‘unreal’, imagined thing – artifice. Every kind of art is unreal after a fashion, but the point is particularly obvious with respect to literature. Fiction is fiction no matter how realistically it is written (the characters aren’t real people; the tables and chairs aren’t real tables and chairs, etc.). So with any sort of literary realism there’s a certain degree of ambiguity about what’s being asserted. By its nature, realism is a state of opposition – it only makes sense in contrast with what’s unreal: fantasy, illusion, myth, lies, and so on. But thought of as a literary virtue, ‘realism’ therefore seems strictly incoherent or impossible or both, because how can fiction ever be real? It’s an age-old question, and, again, the core tension of the discipline may really be as basic as this: the need for fiction to be (somehow) real and have (somehow) a real worth, versus its inability to be anything less than fake. Admittedly, the terms ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are awfully simplistic, but they are extraordinarily hard to see beyond. Even very sophisticated theories about the inadequacy of sorting anything, and not just art, into clumsy categories of right and wrong (or true and false, real and fake) are bedevilled by the purity of the terms they try to oppose. It is fiendishly difficult to escape these first ways of thinking, inadequate as they may be.
Sontag wrote that our ingrained disposition to think of art as a matter of mimesis or representation (and therefore as something at a remove from reality, fake) is the reason we are stuck defending it until the end of consciousness. There is a gravity-like tendency within the intellect to belittle art, to see it as an embellishment or a bauble on existence, rather than anything vital. It’s one of the critic’s jobs to try and find ways of suspending this instinct. The challenge is to remain sensitive to how culture shifts, making some methods of defence redundant and creating the need for new ones, and it has to be performed in the knowledge that there’s no sure ground to find. It’s never a question of proving that art is worthwhile, which is impossible, but the fuzzier and more ill-defined issue of how plausible the belief that art is worthwhile can be made. Given the problems of self-reference that dep
ressive realist art falls into, it seems to me that one good way to detect cracks in depressive realist philosophy might be to think more about why art is a valuable thing. But of course the question is muddled when depressive realism itself produces compelling works of art. The dissonance between Houellebecq’s attack on ‘realistic novels’ at the start of H.P. Lovecraft and his own flatly realist prose; the divide between his novels’ form and their content; the egotism of his characters versus their transparent self-disgust – all of it indicates something about the limits of his type of realism. Yet it doesn’t cancel the force of his books. So a good question to begin with would be: how is it even possible that art breathing contempt for itself can manage to seem righter, truer, and more urgent than art that does not? And what is it about our time and place that encourages this?
