De Groene Amsterdammer — Decadent and anti-modern

Profile: Michel Houellebecq. His shift to the right, or radicalisation, is more complex than it first appears. Where does the novel end and reality begin?

Marijn Kruk. 15 March 2023, issue 11.

A depressed white man of a certain age indulges in sex with young women in an Amsterdam hotel. At his own suggestion, he allows a controversial artists’ collective to film him. The result will be posted on YouTube.

It could easily be a scene from a Michel Houellebecq novel. Ever since his 1994 debut, Whatever, the bestselling French writer has populated his work with shabby, sex-starved losers adrift in a world structured by ruthless neoliberalism.

Except that, in this particular case, the man in question is not a fictional character, but the 67-year-old Houellebecq himself.

In late January, France reacted first with disbelief and then with sniggering to reports that its most famous writer would appear in a ‘porn film’ by the Dutch artists’ collective KIRAC, Keeping It Real Art Critics. The accompanying trailer left much to the imagination, but not everything. It showed a half-naked Houellebecq in the arms of a young woman.

Another scene shows Houellebecq’s own wife, Qianyun Lysis Li, in the back seat of an Amsterdam taxi. Meanwhile, a voice-over mentions a cancelled ‘honeymoon trip’ to Morocco and Lysis Li, who ‘had spent a month arranging the prostitutes in advance from Paris’. KIRAC offered a solution. There were plenty of girls in Amsterdam who would ‘sleep with the famous writer out of curiosity’.

What devil had got into Houellebecq? In France, they are used to quite a lot from him. Besides, he has acted in films before. In them he staged his own kidnapping, underwent seawater therapy with actor Gérard Depardieu, squeezed himself into cycling gear and performed with rock legend Iggy Pop. He had not previously appeared in a sex scene. Talk shows treated it as a joke; Houellebecq’s friend, celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, intervened.

Then suddenly there was a lawyer’s letter stating that the Houellebecqs’ privacy had been violated. An application for an injunction followed, with the French judge declaring a lack of jurisdiction, and then another application, this time in Amsterdam, heard on Tuesday 14 March. Houellebecq made much of the trailer’s claim that his wife had spent ‘a month’ arranging sex workers.

‘You don’t do that a month in advance,’ he grumbled on German radio last week. ‘You arrange that sort of thing on the day itself.’

Houellebecq is known for being extraordinarily difficult about facts from his private life. He once clashed with a Le Monde journalist when she approached friends of his to contribute to a six-part summer profile, the excellent Les six vies de Michel Houellebecq. That, too, ended up in court, and Houellebecq lost.

Houellebecq’s motivation for appearing in a sex scene remains unclear. Initially, last autumn, he was to cut a ribbon at KIRAC’s request in honour of his body of work. To find out what the collective did, Houellebecq and his wife watched Honeypot, an earlier KIRAC film, also featuring explicit sex scenes, this time with conservative commentator Sid Lukkassen in front of the camera. ‘I want him in a porn film,’ Lysis Li would say to a running camera on 1 November 2022. ‘That is better than cutting a ribbon. Porn is always a good idea. I want him to stop being depressed and regain hope, even if only for a moment.’

The film was supposed to be released on 14 March, but has been postponed. All the fuss and the media attention it generates will not be unwelcome to Houellebecq, since it pushes another controversy surrounding him into the background. In Front Populaire, the magazine founded by far-left pop philosopher and prolific writer Michel Onfray, Houellebecq warned late last year of a civil war by immigrants against white French people, said Muslims who did not obey the law would be better off leaving, and expressed astonishment at those who thought the Great Replacement was a theory. This notion, in which the original white European population is ‘replaced’ by immigrants from Africa and/or the Islamic world, has become an article of faith for radical-right parties around the world within just a few years. According to Houellebecq, it is no theory, but ‘a fact’.

Under threat of legal action from the Grand Mosque of Paris, Houellebecq softened the sharpest edges of his statements. But they remain welcome ammunition for those who argue that Houellebecq has crossed over to the dark side of the identitarian and Catholic right, a trend supposedly set in motion after the Islamist attacks of 2015: first on the weekly Charlie Hebdo, in which one of Houellebecq’s best friends died, and later on the Bataclan music venue and surrounding cafés. Has he indeed gone off the rails? Has Houellebecq been radicalised?

This week sees the publication of the long-awaited Dutch translation of Anéantir — Vernietigen — Houellebecq’s latest novel and, at more than seven hundred pages, by far his longest. The story revolves around Paul Raison, a senior civil servant at the French Ministry of Finance. He lives in peaceful coexistence with his wife Prudence, herself a senior civil servant, in a home they own overlooking the Parc de Bercy, a stone’s throw from the ministry. Their marriage is childless. They have not had sex for years.

The novel moves between Paul’s inner world, dominated by increasingly intense dreams; family troubles in Burgundy, where Paul’s father, a former domestic intelligence analyst, ends up in a care home after a stroke; high politics, featuring a Machiavellian president unmistakably modelled on Macron who is trying to secure his re-election; and, finally, a series of mysterious attacks.

The subtle irony that characterises many of Houellebecq’s other novels, sometimes wrong-footing readers, as in Submission, is absent. The ruthlessness and bite of his earlier books, especially early works such as Atomised and Platform, are greatly diminished in Annihilation. The text is atmospheric, however, and brims with compassion, especially towards the end, when its protagonist is diagnosed with cancer. ‘You could see this as a dark, pessimistic Houellebecq,’ said a French radio presenter the day after publication, on 7 January last year. ‘But no. Many characters are trying to do good, and the book’s message could be: “Love saves”.’

At the same time, Annihilation is also a ‘real Houellebecq’, and diehard fans will certainly get their money’s worth. The pace is slow, very slow, though, and while reading I involuntarily thought of a television appearance a few years ago in which Houellebecq said he hoped eventually to conclude his career with ‘a fat book full of boring passages, like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain’. French critics were predominantly positive, although the response on the left was sharply divided. Le Monde and Libération were wildly enthusiastic. L’Obs, Les Inrockuptibles and Mediapart definitively gave up on him and described the book as a reactionary tract.

The setting of Annihilation is familiar: a France torn loose from its Christian moorings, and since then slowly but surely heading towards the abyss. It is late 2026. Democracy has become more authoritarian; the country is turning into a ‘post-democracy’. Decisions are guided neither by ideology nor by any clear political orientation. Meanwhile, the gulf between the political establishment and the population is wider than ever, especially in the provinces. The Yellow Vests were only a foretaste of the social unrest awaiting the country. Racial hatred was unprecedented, as elsewhere in Europe, which had become a distant province of the United States: ‘ageing, depressed and faintly ridiculous’.

Only the family and marriage really remain standing as organising principles of society. All-powerful liberalism denied ‘this problem’ and continued to insist that the pursuit of profit could replace every other human motivation. Wrongly, Paul knows, and it seems obvious to him that the system will collapse at some point. This places him in a precarious position: on the one hand, he works devotedly for a minister who presents himself as a herald of free trade. At the same time, he is convinced that this system is doomed.

Paul’s sister Cécile, two years his junior, and her husband Hervé never believed in the system in the first place and vote wholeheartedly for Marine Le Pen’s radical-right Rassemblement National. Hervé, whom Paul suspects of having belonged to the far-right Bloc Identitaire in his youth, is an unconditional fan of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, based on Tolkien’s books. Hervé probably saw it as an allegory of the heroic struggle the West would later wage against Muslim invaders, Paul thought. In 2001, when the first Lord of the Rings film came out, ‘the Reconquista of Europe had not yet begun, but there was already the film; that was probably how he would see it’.

During his visits to his father in Burgundy, Paul is struck by the presence of large groups of Arabs, an ‘innovation’ in the wine region, indeed in all of France. In the care home where Paul’s father was spending his final days, you saw virtually none, and that too said something about contemporary France, because the North African population would never put their parents in such an institution; they saw it as dishonourable. They would take them into their own homes — at least, that was what Paul had read here and there in the magazines.

It is another aspect of supposed Western decadence that Houellebecq likes to illuminate in his novels: the treatment of the elderly as a mirror of a society that has severed its ties with the past, that has no roots. Muslim migrants, whatever else he thought of them, emphatically did possess those roots.

Gradually, a plan takes shape within the family to abduct Paul’s father from the care home and look after him in the countryside. The operation is prepared by Hervé’s far-right childhood friends, and their leader, a certain Brian, tells Paul that care homes, and certainly a phenomenon such as euthanasia, are symptoms of a profound crisis of being within modernity. The past, however heroic, no longer meant anything. All that mattered was a ‘projection into a vaguely outlined future’. In that future, elderly people were unimportant; more than that, people would prefer to get rid of them as quickly as possible. This echoes Houellebecq’s vehement public interventions against the right to euthanasia. Two years ago, for example, he declared in Le Figaro that a civilisation legalising euthanasia ‘would lose all right to respect’. Otherwise, not a bad word is said about Hervé’s sinister friends in Annihilation.

Perhaps that is because Paul’s attention is taken up by a series of mysterious attacks. It begins with a series of cyberattacks and a doctored video of his boss being beheaded. Then a Chinese container ship is attacked and sunk off the Spanish coast. There is also an attack on a Danish sperm bank, and finally a migrant ship is torpedoed, leaving five hundred dead. Everyone aboard dies. Who is behind these attacks remains anyone’s guess, including Paul’s, but it is clear that globalisation, shaped by free trade and cultural liberalism, is the target. A panorama of activist groups and ideologues passes by, each more deranged than the last. ‘The worst thing was that if the terrorists’ aim was to destroy the world as he knew it, to destroy the modern world, Paul could not entirely disagree with them.’

Since the publication of Submission in 2015, Houellebecq has increasingly been raised aloft by the radical right. The novel centres on the Muslim Brotherhood’s democratic takeover of France. The writer allows himself to be celebrated and interviewed by publications decidedly to the right of centre, such as the monthly Causeur and the right-wing identitarian weekly Valeurs actuelles, which crowned him ‘our national writer’ in 2019. Houellebecq shines at right-wing rallies in Paris’s affluent districts, but with his grubby appearance and perennial green parka, he strikes a discordant note among the glossy hair and expensive suits of those who attend such events.

When Houellebecq accepted the Oswald Spengler Prize in Brussels in 2018, named after the author of The Decline of the West, he endorsed the jury’s verdict, which praised him as a chronicler of Western decline, but added that ‘decline’ was too weak a word and proposed ‘suicide’ instead, pointing to the European Union as he did so.

In the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet sings Houellebecq’s praises, a few years ago in a much-discussed essay and recently in his book De Gideonsbende, where he calls him nothing less than ‘the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of our time’ and ‘the first great dissident who dared expose the dystopian reality of the ruling ideology’. Baudet calls him ‘an ideological teacher’, ‘a conservative mentor, if you will’.

Houellebecq certainly rode the wave of the rightward shift that has taken place in France and beyond over recent decades. He also depicted it in his novels, thereby helping to shape it.

But anyone who thinks Houellebecq used to be progressive and has suddenly become reactionary has not been paying attention. He has spent decades railing against belief in progress, the legacy of 1968, modern individualism and economic liberalism. In Public Enemies, the book he made with Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2008, Houellebecq himself answered the question of whether he was a reactionary. ‘We ought to be able to agree on the meaning of words,’ he wrote. ‘A reactionary is someone who longs for an older type of society, would prefer to return to it, and works towards that end. But if there is one idea, a single one, present in all my novels to the point of obsession, it is the notion that any process of decline, once begun, is irreversible. That decline may affect a friendship, a family, a couple, a community, a society; in my books there is no return, no second chance; whatever is lost is lost for ever. For someone so steeped in this thought, the idea of reaction does not even arise.’

Houellebecq has also been railing against Islam since 2001, before the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, Submission can be read as a hymn to Islam: now that Catholicism ‘had proved no longer capable of resisting the erosion of sound morality, Islam offered an unexpected opportunity for Europe’s moral rearmament’. Unlike Catholicism, Islam had retained its spiritual strength, according to Houellebecq, and, as he learned from Auguste Comte, an author who has captivated him in recent years, religion is a prerequisite for any society.

The impetus for writing Submission was a failed conversion to Catholicism. Houellebecq once said that he had considered converting to Islam, but was too attached to Christianity for ‘sentimental reasons’. The French esoteric thinker René Guénon, who plays a role in Submission and whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) features prominently on Forum for Democracy’s reading lists, emphatically did take that path.

Submission, initially given the working title La Conversion, is regarded by the radical right as a kind of prophecy, a terrifying vision of the future. Conversely, the then centre-left prime minister, Valls, portrayed Houellebecq as a hate-monger. On the very day after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Valls said that France ‘is not submission; it is not Michel Houellebecq’. Totally irresponsible, considering that the writer was under police protection at the time because of fears that he too might be targeted in an attack.

At the time, I read Submission more as a play with the existential fears that lie deep within Western society, especially on the radical right: fear of decline, of ‘population replacement’, of men becoming soft, or of a feminist seizure of power. That is where Houellebecq’s merit as a writer lies, because he shows that you can mock something in a novel while perhaps emphatically believing in it outside the novel.

Where does the novel end and reality begin? Or is everything a novel? Or is everything reality? Houellebecq himself seems to make no effort to mark that boundary clearly or choose a side, and the freedom he allows himself through that alone makes him effectively impossible to appropriate politically.

Besides, he lives the decadence that the radical right so fears and condemns; his shameless appearance in a KIRAC film is only one of many examples. This makes him hard to imagine as a role model for the Catholic right, which is all too eager to embrace him in other areas, such as the fight against euthanasia. It also gives him something elusive. Houellebecq continually adds small qualifications, says Vincent Berthelier, author of Le style réactionnaire, a book published last year analysing the language of several French writers known as reactionaries. ‘This allows him to remain free-floating, even when he assumes the guise of an ideologue.’

If Houellebecq is anything, he is anti-modern, part of an intellectual tradition beginning with the Savoyard lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre, 1753–1822, and running through Baudelaire and Guénon to Cioran. De Maistre is known as a counter-revolutionary thinker, a reactionary, in other words. But if he was convinced of anything, it was that the French Revolution — the revolution in question — could never be undone. That would be ‘like trying to pour Lake Geneva into a milk bottle’, he once wrote.

The anti-moderns are anti-modern despite themselves: torn, resigned, disgusted by their age, yet condemned to it and ultimately simply belonging to it. Paul Raison, the protagonist of Annihilation, summed it up succinctly: ‘However much you despise your generation and your age, or even hate them, you belong to them.’ The big question, of course, is what you do next. Michel Houellebecq knows. The answer to that question lies in a hotel room in Amsterdam.

Vernietigen, translated by Martin de Haan, has just been published by De Arbeiderspers.

From De Groene Amsterdammer, 15 March 2023.