I've been working my way through Michel Houellebecq's bibliography over the past year.
His work first came to my attention when Submission was in the news around the time of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and journalists were eager to condemn his work as anti-Islam. (Surprise! It turns out that Submission is, in many ways, pro-Islam! And it's pro-Islam in a way that's even more frightening to liberal Western thought.)
Image Source: Google Images, labelled for re-use.
Whenever I suddenly hear a large number of people condemning a book or an author, it naturally incites in me a level of curiosity and suspicion. Low quality, terribly-written books never get excoriated with great passion. They're ignored, or casually dismissed. It's the books that have something real and dangerous to say which really whip the media machine into fervor, as if they're eager to bury an author's message before anyone even considers taking their own look at it.
When it gets to the point where just being seen with a book is to risk social condemnation, that's when I really have to read it.
Isn't it funny how librarians and educators love promoting "banned books," when those books support their ideologies and agendas? But in all the hysterics around, say, Milo Yiannopoulos, I haven't seen a single posting with the courage to say, "Let's read his book and see what he actually said."
Maybe it really is a hateful book. I'll decide for myself when I get around to reading it.
Anyway, back to Houellebecq.
I just finished The Possibility of an Island, which was written back in 2005.
(Hey, I never claimed to be timely.) In brief, it tells the story of Daniel, a disillusioned French comedian with a hugely successful career built on scatological humor and avant-garde movie making. Daniel becomes involved with a cult, the Elohimites, who have gotten their hands on some impressive cloning science. Through a combination of cloning, and a sort-of memory-recording and consciousness-transference, this cult is able to provide eternal life to its adherents. So the book is told from Daniel's point of view and that of a couple of his clones from 2000 years in the future.
Island manages to be both dry and self-indulgent. It revels in Houellebecq's usual hyper-sexuality without being particularly arousing. It wallows through endless paragraphs of self-loathing and despair and a surprising amount of armchair nihilist philosophy.
And I couldn't stop reading it.
I think it's because Houellebecq's being brutally honest about what we all really want, and why we really suffer.
There's not likely to be an afterlife. And even if there is, it's going to be so foreign to anything we can understand that it's impossible for us to genuinely want it. (The second half of that sentence is mine. Houellebecq was pretty clear he agreed with the 120 year old French lady, Jeanne Calment who said she'd never see her dead children again because they were dead.)
We don't really want eternal life in heaven. We want it on Earth, under our own terms. And if we perfect our science, maybe there's a way we can have it.
So Houellebecq introduces this new, entirely man-made religion. (A bit of redundancy there. What religion isn't man-made?) The creators start it off with some mumbo-jumbo about our alien progenitors and their eventual return. It sounds an awful lot like the origins of Scientology. One of the founders even laments that this cult, which started out as a joke over drinks, has gone too far. But before long the they abandon the alien business and focus on the cloning and memory preservation, so they can deliver eternal youth to the faithful.
Because it's youth that we really want, and the health and vigor that comes along with it. We want to have the experience and savvy of elders wrapped up in bodies that have just passed through puberty. Eternal bliss - which for Houellebecq is sexual bliss - without the consequences and inconveniences of children.
And yet, being with other people becomes such a terrible, unhappy strain, that the characters evolve (rather they don't evolve, since the descendants are all clones, but they do change) to the point were they live completely in isolation from each other. They communicate through text message, essentially. Once they are promised the bounty of eternal life through science, life becomes passionless and somehow uncompromising. But there's a sort of dull, comfortable happiness in it as well. And Daniel's descended clones are able to enjoy the unconditional love of his dog, Fox, who is likewise cloned and replaced for him throughout the centuries.
In the end, the love of Fox is the last human pleasure for Daniel, and worth sticking around for 2000 years of this eternal life.
Houellebecq riffs on a lot of subjects in this book. Another key to Daniel's disillusionment is his realization that our culture, today, embraces and celebrates, as if for it's own sake, everything that our ancestors would have considered "evil." As a producer of the stuff, he knows he's complicit:
I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to cynicism and evil...
Many could accuse Houellebecq of doing this himself, especially after reading the descriptions of the orgies he chooses to dwell on. But he's not about to make excuses for finding success by speaking the language his readers will understand. I share his blend of seamy fascination and concern. In the past I've expressed my own reservations about these cultural shifts. Torture-porn horror films, discordant and offensive music, scatological art installations, deviant sex performed to order, easy access to abortion - even incest is being embraced as just another form of "sexual diversity"!
We can't condemn having sex with our kids, so long as the kiddos hit legal majority and everything's "consensual." It's reached the point that speaking out about anything we disagree with in our culture, or embracing some traditional value, is seen as a "micro-aggression."
What Houellebecq exposes here (and what the clamor around his novels shows) is that Political Correctness amounts to an institutionalized silence about the degradation of our culture. But while he's as happy as anyone to play around in the muck and the mire, he's not at all shy about rubbing our faces in the consequences.
Human spiritual beliefs were perhaps far from being the massive, solid irrefutable block we usually imagined; on the contrary, perhaps they were what was most fleeting and fragile in man, the thing most ready to be born and to die.
I feel like this is important stuff, from a man who said the role of the artist is to "put your finger on the wound in society and press down real hard.”
Have you ever read a book that made you uncomfortable? That you might not have wanted your friends or family to know you were reading?
And in the end, did you find something to agree with in that book?