HUMO — ‘Perhaps Adriaan van Dis and Mensje van Keulen could make a porn film in solidarity with you’

Column by Arnon Grunberg. Monday, 26 June 2023.

Dear Michel Houellebecq,

Years ago, I wrote to your mother here. After that, I felt I had done enough. I wished you a Nobel Prize. You would not look out of place among Elfriede Jelinek, Bob Dylan, Peter Handke and Dario Fo. Ah well.

A few weeks ago, this magazine published an interview with you. Valérie Toranian and Clément Pétreault described the tapas restaurant where the conversation took place with disgust. The headline read: ‘The young lady wanted to fuck me because she considered me the greatest French writer of all time. Fine, she was right, wasn’t she?’

In other times, that was called ‘honouring the poet’, and I prefer that description. When I visit people, I ask: ‘Are your adult children willing to honour the poet?’ The days when the poet was allowed to discriminate against a body with a dick attached are over. Honour is honour; gender is secondary.

Unfortunately, only a small part of the interview concerned your porn scandal. You claimed: ‘Society swallowed me up, ground me down with its sharp teeth and then spat me out again in disgust.’

This is Louis-Ferdinand Céline all over again. But back then we had been through a war, several of Céline’s comrades had been executed by firing squad, and he himself had been in prison. What have you endured? Yes, some dental problems. Martin Amis apparently had those too, and that was not what killed the great writer — who also deserved a Nobel Prize.

After Muslims, Pablo Picasso is now your favourite enemy. I quote: ‘I refuse to call Pablo Picasso a painter. He was a dauber of the lowest order, and a mean hypocrite who only put women on a pedestal so he could brutally kick them off it afterwards.’

You could call that a flight forwards. You have become a fellow combatant of Hannah Gadsby, who also saw Picasso as the ideal enemy. Anyone repelled by modernity and by men can only embrace Picasso as an enemy. A bit as if Céline had declared in 1953 that he really had only one enemy: Marcel Duchamp.

Then, in your pamphlet Quelques mois dans ma vie, you claim there is not enough ‘fucking’. Yes, those pamphlets. But perhaps there will be another novel.

I do like the fact that you stand up for Macron, though, and you ride your favourite hobbyhorse: euthanasia.

Let me sum up: you are against euthanasia and against Picasso. I am not sure which disgusts you more; I suspect Picasso one day, euthanasia the next. You are also against ‘professional porn’. And you are for Macron and for fucking and for amateur porn, but if you appear in amateur porn yourself, you wish to be unrecognisable on screen. Fair enough.

Now a Dutch artists’ collective has seduced you in a weak moment and shown you recognisably after all. Shame on them. Euthanasia is bad, but this is dreadful too. Why didn’t they put a Picasso mask on you? The contemporary artists’ collective has little imagination.

You are no Céline, but self-pity took possession of you, and how. Nevertheless, I stand in solidarity with you, because of some of your books.

I call on all Dutch writers over sixty to show solidarity with you too and make an amateur porn film, but not with the young. The days when we took our pleasure in the young are behind us. Now we take our pleasure in the very elderly. Director Ulrich Seidl is showing us the way.

I am not yet sixty, but of course I shall contribute too. I now address Rob van Essen, to whom I have written many love letters in the past that I never dared send, because I feared he would find me too ugly.

Perhaps Rob van Essen could make an amateur porn film with Adriaan van Dis and Mensje van Keulen in solidarity with you, Michel. Cees Nooteboom watches and gives instructions in two languages, Spanish and French: ‘Spread your legs, Adriaan.’ You barely know any of these writers, if at all, but you will be delighted. And are we not in this world to delight ourselves?

As a writer, you can preserve your dignity only by losing it radically and publicly. It is 2023.

In other words, every age gets the Céline it deserves. The fact that we are now saddled with you gives a fair indication that our age is nothing to write home about. But, I say, to paraphrase you: if your own age is a thin soup, you must stir it with a ladle.

You said in the interview that when sex is accompanied by love, ‘or at least a certain mutual affection’, even you, ‘a diabolical creature […] imagine yourself in seventh heaven for a few minutes’.

When Rob van Essen and I walk naked towards each other wearing Pablo Picasso masks and pant ‘Houellebecq’ into each other’s ears, we too shall imagine ourselves in seventh heaven.

It is about solidarity with you, but seventh heaven is no sin.

Michel, look up.

Arnon.