forever, for life

Houellebecq, from beginning to end

A true writer writes truly when he realizes he has to start writing and when he realizes he has to stop. In Whatever, Houellebecq’s first novel, everything ends with the main character walking into the forest, into nothingness. When I first read it I was by the sea, in Mallorca, and felt like jumping in and swimming and swimming past the haven and swimming so far that no land could lie ahead or past. Something had to go on, but could not, it didn’t even feel like death. What animated the writing was not there anymore, the promises the novel’s world held for Our Hero had been definitely unfulfilled, so the novel had to end, without an answer. There were effective ways of finding a narrative resolution for the story, but Houellebecq was simply not interested in lying, in giving to the question that was the first heartbeat of his 8 novels, of his life’s work, an untrue, not good enough answer.

The soul of Houellebecq’s writing is not modernist refinement or genre fiction suspense. His prose is bland, maybe a bit more elevated in his longer works, but fundamentally brutalist, as close as possible to his protagonists’ heart: il pleut ; je bande. Moreover, his stories are almost exclusively aporetic, with an ending where nothing fits. But literature, at least the one I’m interested in, is not just words and events nicely paired, a proof of a certain kind of intelligence, it is first and in essence an expression of a writer’s life, his life’s work, everything done & everything felt, his soul. And in this Houellebecq succeeds, not because he writes autofiction—as he himself says, it’s impossible, writing about oneself one’ll sooner or later start lying, start writing about someone else—but because he writes, at his best, truly, like his life was on the line if he lied, as if the parasites that he cultivates in his brain, as he refers to his characters, would torment him forever if he did not. His style of course is the only one possible for such beings trapped in such a world, a brutal prison, and one that he regards from inside. Anything but a style steeped in suffering would be a farce, and false.

This, a pain that’s also his, is the reason why Houellebecq’s been able to find society’s wounds and stab at them in every one of his novels, and draw blood. It’s also why Houellebecq’s worst, not bad but lesser works are always those he wrote backwards, those for which he had a point, an idea in mind, and filled in the rest. It’s sad that he’s still regarded as a (right-wing, edgy) social critic, and that perhaps so will he be remembered, when everything that in his writing feels stilted, unnecessary, dead is precisely his deliberate social critique, his attempts at directly pointing out the ills of Globalization, the Decline of the West, the Sexual Revolution, etc. It is even more regrettable because he’s arguably & amusingly one of our last moralists (Anna Kachiyan is right), and perhaps one of the finest critics of all such things, and precisely of the void that makes them possible, but not in his descriptions, never when he’s writing something he has merely come up with.

The main and unavoidable example of this is perhaps one of his most widely-read novels, Atomised. It’s a novel crippled since its inception, by its inception. It is an attempt to show why humans are condemned, why we’ve created or we exist in a world that will never be enough for us, and why the only exit may be transhumanism, a kind that extirpates all that is alive in humans. It is, for sure, an interesting thesis and one that is iterated in other incarnations throughout his writing, but when one reads Atomised it leaves no space for any true characters, or souls, it deforms & distorts whatever spark of life the twins have into a caricature (of autism & desire), and such a caricature extends to the entire world that reads almost like an exhibition of postmodern horrors. It’s not bad but it’s not enough.

This is why, if Houellebecq is always in a way rewriting, his truest and most deliberate renovelization is that of Atomised, which takes the form of The Possibility of an Island. It is Houellebecq’s central work, connected to and in a way containing every other one up to that point. It is also one of Houellebecq’s most hopeful novels, even if the ending is again aporetic—Daniel stranded in a desert island, unwilling to move on and quietly awaiting his decay and death—it is, up to its realization, only a possibility, and the tension with its opposite is present to a degree that’s not to be found in any of his preceding works. Daniel & Esther, and moreso Daniel & Isabel. Of course, and here is Houellebecq’s genius as a critic of our world apparent, Daniel fails as he pursues a love that is youth, that is merely un joli arrangement de particules, whose failure is presupposed in life itself which is to grow old. The times’ answer, and Daniel’s very answer, is a denial of death, of mortality, excising those parts of being human that cause suffering and committing to an everlasting but pointless existence, one clone after the other. But Daniel rebels, because unlike what Atomised concluded, there remains an indivisible remainder of soul in humans and in everything that humans create.

Of course, the rebellion was like all rebellions doomed. Not because the ending would have been too cheerful otherwise, but because it’d have diverted from something that Houellebecq still felt, from a question he’d been trying to if not answer at least grasp since he started writing, the question that inspired Possibility’s title, love. The answer could not be part of a plot, something earned & easily forgotten, because such an answer if at all ever found, it seemed to Houellebecq, was likely absent from our world. His regard for the past, for which he may be called a pessimist, stems from precisely that notion, that maybe there’s something those who lived before us understood (or were) that we don’t (or aren’t), perhaps they were not ashamed of death, perhaps they were simply more alive. But it’s not up to us to revive and relive the past, as François in Submission realizes as he stares at Rocamadour, where the fate of Christianity was once decided, and sees lifeless rock. Faith, beauty itself, are just not enough, or not there, anymore.

What lies ahead is no better, rather more of the same, slightly worse. In Whatever everything ends with the main character walking into the forest, into nothingness. Something had to go on, but could not, it didn’t even feel like death. What animated the writing was not there anymore, the promises the novel’s world held for Our Hero had been definitely unfulfilled, so the novel had to end, without an answer. This was Houellebecq’s silence, that meant he needed to keep writing, truly. It’s echoed in Daniel staying in an island to await his decay and death, and in the many other fates of his characters, but this is not the only note that his works strike, as what little is good and hopeful in our world, though powerless, shines through, even through the bland and unfeeling language that is every one of his characters’. There may be possibilities, even here and now, as Isabel’s words to Daniel suggest, as the silence at the end of each novel cries for, as Annihilation affirms.

The last pages in Annihilation feel out of place, because they are out of place in our world, because they could not be the result of any story that takes place in it, only a discontinuity, a leap could lead to them. For that the world deserves no mercy from us, as most of Annihilation is written to show. Yet the last part, Paul Raison’s death, is not merely about that, but is precisely meaningful as Houellebecq’s farewell, as his parting wish or truth, as a response to the silence that lies at the end of every other one of his works. Maybe it is a lie, and there is no grace, and the only truth is in silence, but Paul walks into the forest with Prudence, to his death, animated by a love that's not youthful, that's not beautiful, but that can grow old, but that can face death, sure of itself, forever, for more than life. Houellebecq said something true and good, and stopped writing.