NRC Handelsblad — The writer who has come to resemble his characters
Profile: Michel Houellebecq, writer
Margot Dijkgraaf · NRC · 9 March 2023
In the autumn of 2000, Michel Houellebecq performs in Amsterdam. He does not turn up at the time I have arranged to meet him in his hotel. Around midnight, he stumbles in, back from the red-light district. Still wearing his parka, he gets into bed and directs his band members and his wife around him. They have to stand against the walls, the room is so small. I am planted at the foot of the bed. His wife, in a miniskirt and black fishnet stockings, is ordered to make coffee with the espresso machine she has brought especially for him. She too has to remain standing, balancing the espresso machine on her flat palm. Grinning with pleasure, he holds court from beneath his down duvet like an eighteenth-century French monarch.
It is a scene that has stayed before my eyes ever since when reading his novels. A man who demands attention, who wants nothing more than to be at the centre, surrounded by a court and serving women.
Over the course of his career, probably with that aim, Houellebecq has pulled out every possible stop. Every uproar, every controversy was welcome. Writing, insulting, suddenly disappearing, making a film, sighing poetry breathlessly into a microphone, displaying an excessive love for a dog, exhibiting photographs: there was nothing he would not do to remain in the spotlight. Because without another person’s gaze, you do not exist. That is the particular disadvantage of the aspiring poet or writer, especially if he is unattractive or shy. From the start, “Suffer!” is Houellebecq’s motto, promoted in his first collection of prose poems, To Stay Alive: A Method, from 1991. Any kind of suffering is good, as long as it is intense: strike where it hurts. Cultivate self-hatred, accumulate frustrations, fail in social life; that is where you find the energy to fight.
For a while, that method worked. His novel Atomised, published in 1998, a direct attack on the generation of May 1968 that put the motto of carefree freedom into practice, immediately provoked fierce reactions. That generation, which according to Houellebecq lived for sexual promiscuity and individual pleasure, was to blame for everything that befell his characters: divorce, wayward youth, social isolation and unsatisfied sexual desire. That generation was also responsible for the women’s emancipation he loathed, as well as the disappearance of religion and the increase in violence in society.
Ever since, Houellebecq has had admirers who see him as the century’s most brilliant writer and critics who believe he belongs in a psychiatric hospital. His reputation as a provocateur is established. One person finds him visionary, another sex-obsessed. One finds his language clear, another dislikes his clinical, sometimes sociological style. Whatever the case, the way he hops, steps and jumps between prose, poetry and essay commands admiration. He can write, and not without wit.
Downhill
Over the years, Houellebecq remains faithful to his theme. He analyses what is wrong with the world; “deprimism” is everywhere. Everything is the fault of the 1960s. His own parents, about whom he has never had anything good to say, also belong to that generation. Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the island of Réunion, the son of a mountain guide and a doctor, both Communists. Since his parents soon divorced, he spent his early childhood with his maternal grandparents in Algeria. His father rather suddenly collected him there and subsequently entrusted him to his own mother in Normandy. This is the grandmother Houellebecq reveres and whose maiden name he chose as his pseudonym.
Houellebecq became a biologist and agronomist, lost his job, retrained in computing and published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. In it, a depressed computer programmer incites a sexually frustrated colleague to murder. This is already a typical Houellebecq protagonist: an unambitious, culturally pessimistic, sad loner craving sexual pleasure and love. A loser who demands attention like a whining toddler, seeking a woman to cry on and take shelter with. A pitiable man looking for a lifeline in a chaotic, violent world full of change he cannot cope with.
More often than not, his protagonists go downhill. A later novel, Serotonin, from 2019, speaks of a “dying animal, looking for a den in which to await his end”. Pathos is not alien to the ageing author.
In Houellebecq, men are unhappy above all because women neglect their duty: women must provide men with that pleasure, in the kitchen and in bed. They must care for them and be submissive. It has earned Houellebecq a reputation as a misogynist. He denied it in an interview with NRC: “I love women. A misogynist is someone who finds women irritating; I’m a macho.” And what, the author wonders, is actually wrong with that? He likes putting that machismo into practice himself. During another interview I had with him in Paris, he had his wife sit a few metres behind me so that, at a signal from him, she could hand over another cigarette or a fresh glass of white wine.
Such a devoted woman remains a dream, a pious illusion, for many of Houellebecq’s characters. The protagonist of Platform, from 2001, for example, is a cultural civil servant who travels to Thailand. What the world needs, he knows, is a global network of brothels. Then Asian prostitutes can provide what Western men are crying out for: sexual services. The idea becomes reality until a terrorist attack causes a bloodbath in one such sex-tourism resort.
Controversy erupted as soon as the novel appeared: was the book a hymn to sex tourism or an indictment of it? World events — the attacks of 11 September and those on tourists in Bali in 2002 — gave the novel enormous topicality, further underlining the author’s visionary reputation. Houellebecq himself needed permanent protection and moved to Ireland. Attention guaranteed.
Until then, his books had generated plenty of uproar and plenty of income, but no major literary prize. A writer who describes Islam as “the most stupid religion”, causing controversy and a court case, is bound to be a sensitive matter for a literary jury. But in 2010, Houellebecq finally received the prestigious Prix Goncourt he so intensely coveted, for a novel that was, by his standards, quiet and nostalgic.
In that prize-winning novel, The Map and the Territory, about a visual artist who obsessively photographs everyday objects, he sketches France’s future nostalgically: the country becomes a museum. No attack on Islam in this book, no misogyny, but a father–son relationship, the art market and big money, murder and mayhem, and also Europe in the future. During that period, Houellebecq exhibits his own photographs: dark forests, misty lakes, posters of French cheese, baguettes and folklore, rusting industrial heritage. Nothing human beings have produced is permanent. France is beautiful, but as a nation the country no longer matters in the world.
Houellebecq continues that line in Submission, a novel published on 7 January 2015, the very day of the fundamentalist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Coincidentally or otherwise, that week’s cover featured a caricature of Houellebecq. In Submission, the leader of an imaginary Muslim Brotherhood wins the French elections in 2022, after which the country becomes Islamic step by step.
This is how Houellebecq repeatedly portrays France and Europe. We must return to the way things used to be: that is what he keeps insisting on. Although every new Houellebecq novel remains an event, the French media are nevertheless losing interest in his literary work. Abroad, his fame grows, and he is often the only French writer people know.
The author prefers to keep quiet about his private life. That his marriage became public in 2018 was down to the Instagram account of Carla Bruni, Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, who posted a photograph of the couple. What you keep secret causes a stir when it comes out.
Tragic romantic
A year later, Serotonin appears, named after an antidepressant, a little white pill containing the “happiness hormone”. It is a politically inflected novel about depression and hopelessness in which society as a whole is going to hell: “Nobody will be happy in the West any more.”
Houellebecq darkens that motif a little with every book. Death lurks around the corner and there is no escape. Decline is everywhere. That is more true than ever in Anéantir, his latest novel, from January 2022, appearing in Martin de Haan’s Dutch translation as Vernietigen on 10 March.
Once again, it is a wide-ranging, ambitious novel in which Houellebecq addresses today’s hot-button issues: healthcare, the family, Europe’s future, technological developments and, strikingly, the desire for a safe, quiet country house among the vineyards.
In Anéantir, Houellebecq certainly does not strike where it hurts. He pokes at the wound a little, looks for a plaster, while, turned inward, shedding a tear over the human condition and mourning the decline he sees around him. The tragic romantic that Houellebecq also is gains the upper hand here.
Step by step, the writer comes to resemble his protagonists and becomes a caricature of himself. Increasingly, as a public figure, he is labelled “reactionary”. Increasingly, he veers off the rails to the right and emerges as an adherent of the “great replacement” theory. In a recent conversation with philosopher Michel Onfray in the magazine Front populaire, Houellebecq argues that this is not a theory but “a fact”.
Houellebecq the public figure seems intent on generating the much-needed attention that Houellebecq the writer no longer manages to attract. He recently participated in a non-literary project, an “erotic-artistic” film by the Dutch collective KIRAC. His appearing in a film is nothing new: he previously featured in Near Death Experience, about a man who flees into the mountains, and The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, prompted by his own temporary disappearance. This new film seems to be of a different, pornographic calibre. The trailer shows the author half-naked in bed with a young woman. When the writer saw the finished product, he called the film “defamatory”; it allegedly also contained lies about his wife. Last week, he lost the injunction proceedings through which he sought to force a ban on screenings. By now, the trailer has been watched all over the world, and he has secured attention in yet another, slightly more extreme way.
As death approaches, the writer Houellebecq becomes gentler — in his novels, at least. As a public figure, by contrast, there is no sign of calm wisdom coming with the years. Why is Houellebecq playing with fire, Libération wondered. The newspaper suggests that the author mainly wants to provoke now that his great opposite, feminist author Annie Ernaux, has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Perhaps the explanation is different: he has lost his place as an eighteenth-century French monarch on the great double bed, and his court has fled. Perhaps Houellebecq is drawing ever closer to Charles d’Orléans, the French prince who spent decades imprisoned in an English castle during the Hundred Years’ War, the man from whom Houellebecq borrowed the epigraph for Submission: “Le monde est ennuyé de moy / Et moy pareillement de luy.” In other words: “The world is weary of me / And I am equally weary of it.”
Biography
French writer Michel Houellebecq, born in 1956, was born on Réunion as Michel Thomas. He wrote his first novel, Whatever, in 1994; his international breakthrough followed four years later with Atomised. In 2010, he received the Prix Goncourt for The Map and the Territory. The Dutch edition of his latest novel, Anéantir, appears on 10 March as Vernietigen, translated by Martin de Haan.