My recent trip to France has made me think a lot about French literature.
Looking around the French language bookshops I visited in Paris, I couldn’t find anything untranslated that I hoped would be. Maybe you know of something? Something great?
Years ago, I was asked to write the introduction to an edition of the first novel by Michel Houellebecq to be translated into English.
The publisher was Serpent’s Tail.
Quite a few people have told me this is the first thing of mine they ever read.
I’m not sure what I think of that.
Sometimes you look back at something you’ve written and you think, Why?
I feel a much less aggressive person than the one I am here.
Perhaps the domain of my struggle has reduced in size.
The novel is lazy. As a form. It hates work. As a subject. More specifically, it hates workers. As subjects. People who go to work. More specifically still, it hates office workers. Does that mean you? You’re not an office worker, are you? Then I’m sorry. I don’t mean I’m sorry that you’re an office worker. (Although I am. Profoundly.) No, I’m sorry the novel, as a form, hates you, as a subject. On behalf of the novel – particularly on behalf of this novel – I apologize. It’s not nice to be hated, is it? It makes you feel bad. So I’m sorry. Michel Houellebecq isn’t sorry. He hates you a lot more than I do. He really fucking hates you. And he’s not going to apologize for that. Because he hates what you and all the other office workers are doing to the novel. Because he hates the kind of lives you and all the other office workers are leading. Because he hates what you and all the other office workers are doing to life itself. You might take comfort from the fact that Michel Houellebecq also hates the novel, hates himself, the world and just about everything in it. He’s a famous hater. He’s a famous hater partly because he’s very good at it and partly because he’s French. And there’s nothing people love to hate more than a French hater. His first book, published in 1991, was about the then-unfashionable writer H.P.Lovecraft. H.P.Lovecraft, who has since become painfully fashionable. This book’s full title was H.P.Lovecraft: Contre Le Monde, Contre La Vie. In English that’s the less elegantly snarling Against the World, Against Life. With obvious admiration, and clear agreement, the young Houellebecq quoted Lovecraft: “I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.” The tone of Whatever is exactly this, “beastly tired”. It is a resolutely desultory novel about a resolutely desultory part of a resolutely desultory life. The life of Our Hero, a male thirty-year-old office worker. As such, as an example of resolution, it is an artistic triumph. Because of what it stops itself doing. Because, even more, of what it doesn’t really seem tempted to want to do in the first place. Which is seek any way out of or around or beyond the desultoriness. Houellbecq holds himself back from Lovecraft’s “horrors unnameable and unaccountable”. Houellebecq’s horrors are all too nameable. His horrors are wearyingly accountable. Some of his horrors are accountants. Whatever is a novel that sticks to the world as given, not the world as conveniently distorted for literary novelists or pleasingly distorted for reading group readers. If you’re looking for a sympathetic main character, fuck off. If you’re in search of page-turning plot-twistiness, fuck off. If you’re hoping for redemption in the final paragraph, fuck off. What you’re going to get here is what the original French title promises: Extension de domaine de la lutte. That is, An Extension of the Domain of the Struggle. What does this mean? What struggle? Like George Orwell’s 1984, Whatever is a novel that interrupts itself halfway through to hawk up a chunk of partially digested socio-political theory. Orwell’s is called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Houellebecq’s is called Dialogues Between a Dachshund and a Poodle. Houellebecq’s thesis comes down to a one-liner: “Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy.” Later on, he expands on this: “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization.” And here we arrive at the original title, as it occurs in the body of the novel: “Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.” If Whatever has a plot, it is about Our Hero’s attempt to deal with one of the absolute sexual paupers of our day - Raphaël Tisserand, office worker, virgin. ‘He has the exact appearance of a buffalo toad – thick, gross, heavy, deformed features, the very opposite of handsome.’ The description continues. And worsens. It is of one of Houellebecq’s nameable, accountable horrors. It is of the kind of thing you see when you glance up from your computer screen, when you gaze out across your office, when you survey the perpetually extending domain of the struggle.
I read Whatever a long time ago, in English. I remember it as always interesting and often bracing, as we used to say of events that challenged and sometimes surprised us but were survivable. I know I was pleased to have read it.