This is a text that embarrasses everyone. Let’s see right away why: “Whatever the position adopted, if the woman can (and therefore must) caress the man’s balls during penetration, it is on the other hand impossible for her to lick them, the intervention of another woman is essential – the superiority of the tongue over the fingers is no longer to be demonstrated. Even in the case of simple fellatio, the simultaneous licking of the balls and the glans is impossible to achieve alone.”
I draw these sentences at random among many others from a very short text.
Apart from an anecdotal settling of scores with Michel Onfray and the now inevitable few considerations “on Islam” – if one can call it that, at least the few indigent sentences that the author devotes “to the Muslims” of which he says he discovered the good side thanks to a Pakistani neighbor concerned about the virtue of his daughters (“with good reason”, he adds), most of the few hundred pages that make up A few months in my life (Flammarion) is devoted to the crapoteuse misadventure in which Michel Houellebecq says he allowed himself to embark “out of stupidity” and which he recounts in a way that is at the same time vulgar, incoherent and visibly biased. In two words: because he likes the Thalys and underestimates its notoriety, Houellebecq would have agreed to go by train to Amsterdam for the sole purpose of satisfying a groupie eager to “get screwed” by him with the participation of his wife, and under the eye of a camera; Houellebecq would have understood only too late that the images would be used without his consent. The whole thing is written from a sort of absolutely extraordinary flat fatuity. A few months in my life is not only a lying text – all of Houellebecq’s books are that – it’s a dirty text. Deliberately dirty, say those who want to defend it with intelligence, and they will not necessarily be completely wrong.
Something in the feeling of almost unanimous abjection that it provokes indeed recalls the first Houellebecq, that ofExtension of the field of the fight, whose effect we have now forgotten when it came out (“I can’t read that, I feel like I’m getting dirty”, reacted a friend to whom I had lent it and who returned it after thirty pages, physically disgusted). We can also remember Stay alive, Method with his series of maxims that have justly remained famous: “Every society has its points of least resistance, its wounds. Put your finger on the wound, and press hard. Dig into the subjects that no one wants to hear about. […] Be abject, you will be true.”
Anti-Light and anti-Republican
This way of intervening in society in a harmful way means that he has always been closer to contemporary art than to romantic literature. In this sense, Houellebecq expresses like no other the disavowal of the time vis-à-vis the notion of representation. He does not like representative democracy any more than he grants the art of the novel its power to represent life. If the modern novel, born of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, “absorbs the contradictions” of democracy, to quote essayist Nelly Wolf, so Houellebecq, as deeply anti-Enlightenment as he is anti-Republican, seeks to destroy gender at the same time time as society. From this point of view, each of his books is at least as much a book as a performative act – in the sense that Karlheinz Stockhausen gave to this term during the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center (“the most great work of art that has been given”): a propaganda by the fact. The real spectacle is then played out, when the author himself comes to comment on the TV sets on the damage caused by his care, with his defeated look and his hometown tone seeming to contradict his violence and which, at the same time, amazes everyone. (Thus we recently saw him gently explain that the notions of “Western” freedom and democracy did not apply to either Muslim Turkey or Putin’s Russia).
The most interesting aspect of A few days in my life finds himself there, around this non-literary object: in the embarrassment – justified – that he arouses, in particular among those who for twenty-five years have seen in him “the greatest French writer”. Those who act as if the text did not exist and persist in questioning Houellebecq on the great questions of the world (even though the author confides that he does not read a newspaper and only obtains information on the Internet), those who, ignoring the work, expediting it quickly or looking elsewhere after several years spent praising the author as essential, those, finally, who, like The Inrocks, play the angry card of disappointed love.
A word about The Inrocks, since it was I who brought him there in 1995 shortly after the release ofExtensionwhich coincided with the launch of the weekly formula of this left-wing newspaper with which Houellebecq was to remain associated until the turn of the 2000s. Marie-Dominique Lelièvre rightly underlines this at the start of the remarkable portrait published in the JDD Magazine May 28: “Houellebecq comes to us from the 1990s.” No one had like him painted with so much simple cruelty the hideousness of everyday life that we all had constantly before our eyes, nor the despairing sexuality and the pathetic existential impulses of the children of the silent majority first standardized by the Trente Glorieuses , disoriented by the crisis, and finally made secretly furious by the mixture of moral socialism, managerial technocracy and advertising capitalism which for fifteen years served as the official culture of the country. Houellebecq perceived with organic precision the poisonous waves bubbling beneath this French schizophrenia, but what he brought to the surface undoubtedly contained all that the country had that was detestable. This is the reason why I never had the slightest hesitation as to what it was going to become. Won over by my enthusiasm and by the bizarre charm emanating from his person, the rest of the team of Inrocks, largely masculine, saw in him an unclassifiable and ramshackle utopian whose anti-liberalism placed him in the right camp. But for me, no, he captured something of France. What ? This was illustrated three years later by the collective sigh of relief accompanying the release of the Elementary Particlesthe book who settles his score with the sexual revolution and feminism. What delight he offered! Finally we could let go, no longer want to be free, put an end to the moral complexity of desire!
Resignation and mediocrity as the only desirable shelters
Literature for losers, that’s what struck me though. Where the rest of the literary world celebrated with ambivalence the consequences of the end of the Cold War, where Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis, Kathy Acker – and so many other writers from the new classes averages of the old third world (the Indians Vikram Set, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nadeem Aslam…) –, questioned, each in their own way, the ethical conflicts with which autonomous individuals found themselves confronted now that the world was opening up, revealing unthinkable opportunities, the most French writer in the Global Village preached resignation and mediocrity as the only desirable shelters for refugees from capitalist brutality.
But something has changed at Houellebecq since the 1990s. Submission (2015), the utopian-dystopian anticipation novel in which he had specialized since the Particles gave way to the novel of political prospective. His writing was affected by this, became less metaphysical.
The obvious link between this change and the attacks has been repeatedly emphasized but misinterpreted. Submission has thus been read as an “Islamophobic” book while on the contrary it explores the very correct hypothesis of a convergence between the ideals of French reactionary groups and a rigorous political Islam rid of its terrorist tendency. Houellebecq himself explained this change of perspective in his famous interview with Onfray in Popular Front : “I thought for a long time and said that I was not reactionary and for a simple reason, I did not believe in a possible return to the past, and I do not think that one can really wish for what one believes impossible. Well, the successes of the Salafists, that of the Taliban like that more ephemeral of Daesh, proved to me that a return to the past is possible. western world propose to go back to the 13th century. So I tell myself, even if it is very unlikely, that it is not absolutely impossible that a theocratic regime will emerge in a Catholic framework. The committed observer, in other words, has given way to the wayward activist.
*Marc Weitzmann is a writer and producer on France Culture of the show Signs of the times.