Hello world! I’m back with another edition of Metaverse Hell. This time I’m talking about books again. (Sigh.) And not just any books, French books. (Double sigh.) But like the good neurotic blogger I am, I’ve got a handful of articles coming down the pike with wacko titles like MOUTHBREATHERS, NEON KEBAB TRUCK, & SCANDINAVIAN HELL. So stay tuned, even if you don’t give a damn about books!
“L'homme n'est décidément pas fait pour le bonheur” - Michel Houellebecq, Plateforme
There are two things that shock Jed Martin, depressed painter extraordinaire, about his 1:25pm Ryanair flight from Beauvais, France to Shannon, Ireland.
The first is the unbelievably low price of the ticket (€4.99 before tax, €28.01 after), a price that seems too low to cover the wages of even one flight attendant, let alone those of three flight attendants and two pilots — and to say nothing of the costs of plane maintenance and airspace clearance and supplies for in-flight food and duty free carts — all of which, even accounting for the 189 passengers that can squeeze into the six-seat-wide rows of a Boeing 737-800, surely runs up a bill far exceeding €5293.89 (€28.01 times 189); a revenue calculation which assumes, probably incorrectly, that this midweek flight from Beauvais to Shannon will be full.
And the second is the type of passengers on the plane. These people are nothing like the people Jed saw on his last flight, an Air France red-eye from New York to Paris. Those people were businessmen. These people are tourists.
In Shannon, Jed lingers in the airport, studying the list of Ryanair departures and marveling at the strangeness of the flight routes: Shannon to Fuerteventura, Shannon to Katowice, Shannon to Beauvais…not a single Western European capital city on the list! He contemplates each flight route like he might contemplate the face of a portrait subject, examining its angles and seizing on its crucial details — that the flight from Shannon to Katowice departs at 3:26pm, for example, or that all of the flights to the Canary Islands are delayed today. He tries fruitlessly to understand these cheap flights to nowhere. How are they financially viable? Why are there so many of them? Fruitlessly, that is, until Michel Houellebecq —the creator of every speck of reality in the universe Jed Martin occupies, Jed Martin included — intervenes. Ireland has a large Polish immigrant population, Houellebecq tells us. This explains the abundance of flights to Katowice, Warsaw, Krakow, and Gdansk. And the Irish love to go on vacation to the Canary Islands. This explains Fuerteventura, Tenerife, and Lanzarote. “Ainsi le libéralisme redessinait la géographie du monde en fonction des attentes de la clientèle, que celle-ci se déplace pour se livrer au tourisme ou pour gagner sa vie.”1
It feels a bit abrupt, this aside about the sociopolitical destiny of the postmodern West inserted into the middle of Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt-winning novel La carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory). But it’s an interesting observation. Maybe low-cost airlines and mass tourism are changing the paths along which people and ideas flow. That seems true enough. But what should do we do with that information? What does it tell us about ourselves and the world? Houellebecq likes to throw out these laconic observations about life in the postmodern West; about secularization and the disappearance of Christianity; about atomized individuals bobbing around in an increasingly automated world, incapable of connecting with each other or understanding themselves. He throws these things out and forces us to look at them. Look at these dirt-cheap flights to Ireland, he tells us. Look at these elderly men with artificial anuses who go to Switzerland to euthanize themselves. Look at these bourgeois Parisians who compensate for their childlessness by doting on their dogs. Look at these Chinese tourists who pay €24 for breakfast at a café in a French village-turned-tourist-trap. And so on.
He doesn’t usually tell us what we’re supposed to think about these things. He just places them before us and lets us examine them at our leisure. This is good, I guess. It is good, sometimes, to state things and let them hang in the air. To show, rather than to tell. To describe, rather than to analyze. As readers, we get the sense that Houellebecq disapproves of mass tourism, euthanasia and overly doting dog parents. But this sense comes to us in oblique hints — a rumor of sarcasm or a lingering narrative gaze. Houellebecq, for all his flaws, is no preacher.
And the flaws, depending on whom you ask, are many: racism, sexism, Islamophobia, general unlikableness, cigarette breath, alcoholism…A bona-fide Frenchman, in other words. (Just kidding. Kind of.) I’m generally unsympathetic to these kind of ad hominem attacks, especially when they’re based on an author’s fiction, and Houellebecq’s case is no exception. That said, it is true that the women in his novels are often shrill-and-superficial companions to depressed-but-brilliant male heroes. And it is also true that Houellebecq occasionally describes these women in ways that are offensive, if not morally then at least stylistically. Take, for instance, the case of Marylin, Jed’s smart but ugly press attaché whom Houellebecq describes as “ce pauvre petit bout de femme, au vagin inexploré.”2 Look, I’m not saying that you can’t use the state of a woman’s vagina to make a point about her personality. Fiction does afford boundless liberty to its practitioners. But there are better and worse ways to use this, and Houellebecq’s way in this case is pretty far down the ‘worse’ end of the spectrum.
Anyway, this all gets at the more trenchant and interesting criticism levied at Houellebecq’s work, the criticism that embittered literary critics and unpublished no-name bloggers (i.e. me) like to pull out when we’re trying to take an Establishment Writer down a few notches — his prose just isn’t that beautiful. There’s not much description of the natural world, not much physicality (but somehow tons of sex), not much good dialogue, and far too many sidebars about abstractions like ‘liberalism’ and ‘secularization.’ Literary critics have devised a euphemism — ‘flat’ — to describe this style, which they seem to consider both the triumphant choice of dullness by a writer who could, if he so decided, write beautifully, and a stylistic catastrophe, the cheap parroting of instruction manual or Wikipedia-style prose. Jean-Phillipe Domecq, a French essayist, puts the latter complaint as follows:
“Le lecteur, lui, s’y retrouve parce qu’il réentend, en romanesque, le style d’esprit des magazines […] il n’en revient pas d’y retrouver ses derniers mots et objets quotidiens, ses tics et tendances du moment, qui n’avaient pas encore trouvé leur romanesque. Peu importe. On est là en plein mimétisme, ersatz de mimesis et fort loin de cette littérature qui fait sourdre la chair du monde par la peau.”
“The reader, for his part, finds himself in Houellebecq’s prose because he finds, in the novels, the prose style of magazines [...] he cannot believe that he finds [in Houellebecq’s books] his own daily words and objects, his quirks and current trends, which had not yet found their novelistic expression. Never mind. We are in the middle of mimicry, an ersatz of mimesis, far from that literature which makes the flesh of the world emerge through the skin."
Basically Domecq is saying that Houellebecq doesn’t write real littérature; he writes romans de gare — unserious, unchallenging books to be read while waiting in train stations and airports. Part of this critique, I’m sure, reflects mere envy. I get the sense that Domecq simply can’t believe that his books — a series of ‘metaphysical’ novels, a biography of Alain Robbe-Grillet, essays on modern art — languish in editorial backrooms while those of Houellebecq enjoy fabulous success in France and abroad. But Domecq does have a point. Houellebecq is not our time’s Balzac or Flaubert or Céline. He’s not what Nabokov would have called a ‘writer of genius’ —
“Time and space, the colors of the season, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
But at least Houellebecq doesn’t write in barely intelligible half-sentences like some other literary ‘dissident’ darlings. This might seem like a sardonic aside, but I’m being serious. A lot of contemporary fiction reads like it’s been written by Ritalin-deficient cokeheads bumbling between a Word document and a forty-tab Chrome page, legs trembling and AirPods blasting low-fi beats. (I’m not necessarily excluding myself from this category, fwiw.) At least Houellebecq seems a bit sane and coherent.
His books aren’t masterpieces, but they are good. The flatness might not be purposeful (can he really write differently?), but it does reflect the way he and his anesthetized protagonists view the world around them — as something devoid of detail, beauty, and joy. Houellebecq denaturalizes, to use an ugly word, things that might otherwise appear banal: low-costs flights, sleek Swiss euthanasia centers, and so on. He exposes the strange underbelly of our ‘enlightened’ modern society. He might not be a writer of genius, then, but he is a contemporary, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense of the word: “[one] who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darkness.”
And maybe that’s all we can ask of him.
Thus liberalism redrew the geography of the world in accordance with the expectations of clients, whether these traveled for tourism or work.
This poor little piece of woman, vagina unexplored.