Michel houellebecq: French novelist for our times

Contemporary Review, July, 2003 by Michael Karwowski

This marriage of profundity, sincerity, and contemporaneity is what gives Houellebecq his unique voice in world literature and also, incidentally, provides his novels with much of their wit, humour, and humanity. Take this sentence from Platform as an example: 'The minute they have a couple of days of freedom, the inhabitants of Europe dash off to the other side of the world. They behave -- literally -- like escaped convicts. I don't blame them. I was preparing to do the same'.

The comparison with Camus is singularly appropriate in positioning Houellebecq, for his starting point is essentially the same as that of the author of L'Etranger. Existential angst is everywhere in his novels. The nameless computer programmer who is the narrator of Whatever defines his state of mind as one of 'total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness ... One stumbles around in a cruel fog, but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away'.

The civilisation in which he finds himself offers no prospect of meaning or significance: 'I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data. It has no meaning ... In fact, nothing justified my presence here, neither here nor anywhere else, to tell the truth'.

The molecular biologist Michel in Atomised, who represents the writer's own search for meaning, just as his half-brother Bruno represents the search for the perfect orgasm, is described thus by a colleague: 'There was something about him, something monstrously sad. I think he was probably the saddest man I have ever met, even the word 'sadness' seems inadequate; there was something broken in him, something completely devastated. I always got the impression that life was a burden to him, that he no longer knew how to make contact with any living thing'.

Similarly, the civil servant Michelin Platform, whose job involves funding dubious exhibitions of modem 'art', writes: 'I was perfectly adapted to the information age, that is to say good for nothing'.

At the same time, the suffering of Houellebecq's protagonists is peculiar to existentialist literature. Thus, Platform's Michel speaks of 'that suffering which is particular to being an artist; that inability to be truly happy or unhappy, to truly feel hatred, despair, ecstasy or love; the sort of aesthetic filter which separates, without the possibility of remission, the artist from the world'.

The upshot of this supreme detachment is that, whatever their individual circumstances, Houellebecq's protagonists can all say, with Michelin Platform: 'I observe the world as it unfurls; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it, I can do no more than observe'.

But this observation is not meant simply to register the nature of the reality of the world observed. It has a purpose, a destination. As Whatever's narrator explains: 'To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself, I will need ... to prune, to simplify, to demolish'. And what needs to be demolished are the illusions to which mankind is prey. This is the vocation of the existentialist: to accept life as an 'experiment' whose purpose is to see if some order can be extracted from the chaos of experience.