According to folklore, somewhere in the Southern Carpathians there’s a university called Scholomance that’s run by the devil. Students are taught how to conjure spells, command the weather and ride dragons. What, though, might be on the devil’s curriculum? What set texts could corrupt the world?
There are, of course, books the church once condemned. The Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum contained some of the cornerstones of modern thought — Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Milton, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Kant and so on, right down to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In Ireland, there was even a Committee on Evil Literature, which led to a Censorship of Publications Board that prohibited some of the nation’s finest writers, including Edna O’Brien and Brendan Behan, as well as material from abroad.
There were books so heinous that their authors were regarded as being agents of the devil. Cardinal Pole wrote of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, the earliest author to appear on the Vatican’s list in 1559: “Though it bore the name and pen of a man, I hardly began to read it without recognizing that it was written by the finger of Satan.” The Irish philosopher John Toland, reputedly the first figure to be called a “freethinker”, was accused of selling his soul to the devil on a Donegal hillside. Similarly, Spinoza’s pioneering Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was slandered as being “Forged in hell by the apostate Jew working together with the devil”.
What these all had in common was that they exposed humanity as it is — rather than what it claims or desires to be. Exposing the hypocrisies of their times, they threatened the existing order. Where would we find such characters and texts today? For all the onanistic claims of progressivism, these are starkly conservative times in publishing. Yet if there’s one contemporary writer who could be studied at Scholomance, it’s Michel Houellebecq.
Provocateur, professional controversialist, literary enfant terrible, patron saint of trolls — the image is as cultivated by the author as it is inflicted upon him. Far better, though, is to think of him as the smoke of literature’s guttering candle. Alternately reviled and lauded, there’s always been more than a hint of brimstone to Houellebecq. The reasons why are worth exploring; they result not necessarily in a portrait of the writer, who’s both exposed and enigmatic, but of us, his readers, inquisitors and targets.
It’s difficult to imagine the Anglosphere producing or permitting a homegrown Houellebecq. For one thing, the bar for “daring” literature is ridiculously low here, where endless writings about the breakup of marriages or relationships at university are hailed as radical or edgy. The bar for heresy is exceptionally low too. Though many feign to question our orthodoxies, as every great writer should, the penalties for dissent are severe — the Crucible-like puritanical witch-hunt of Mark Fisher only proved the accuracy of his warnings.
It’s tempting to contrast France and applaud its history of transgressive writing: Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mirbeau, Colette... Some parallels do exist in English literature, but they’re relatively scant. The Earl of Rochester was no Marquis de Sade. And when Oscar Wilde was destroyed by the British establishment, and partly himself, where did he go but Paris? In France, the “liberty” part of their revolutionary inheritance remains strong. The French tradition demonstrates it’s often only on the outer reaches of decorum, only when we are brutally honest about our deepest desires and worst impulses, that we can truly know ourselves. There’s a nobility in such aims, even if the means appear ignoble, or even diabolical. And this is Houellebecq’s realm.
The demonic power of Houellebecq’s writing comes primarily not from what he’s creating, but rather what he’s feeding off: the hypocrisy of Western neoliberal society. He’s not, however, a moralist. Houellebecq makes little attempt to rise above the fray. If there is a ship of fools, as medieval artists used to portray the corruption of civilisation, the author is on board, smoking below deck. Houellebecq’s references to himself in his prose and interviews are fairly disreputable. The fact he sees himself among the wretched and the doomed is telling.
It’s a shame that controversy clouds how we view him. It obscures his scope, from studies of sex to political thrillers, via ruminations on desire, parenthood and the spectre of terrorism. It misses the fact that he’s a funny writer, reminiscent of Beckett; sometimes conditions are so grim and melodramatic that his writing circles back into amusement. “Look at the little creatures moving in the distance; look. They are humans. In the fading light, I witness without regret the disappearance of the species.” This is not to say that there is a soft-centred optimist within the demon imp caricature waiting to get out. Like Beckett, beneath layers of pessimism, there is a rich seam of humour — yet beneath the humour is an endless fall to oblivion. “Irony won’t save you from anything,” one of his characters claims, “humour doesn’t do anything at all.”
Houellebecq sees and writes the world without the blinkers that more “civilised” authors possess. He obsessively studies people in all his novels, like an ape turned anthropologist. He notices the things — petty, distasteful, criminal, insulting, exploited, decadent — that we can afford to ignore, and which in-group policing would forbid if ever seen. His talent for prophecy — incels; the rise of nativism; the anti-immigrant reaction; the resurgence of the right; psychoanalysis becoming a tool for narcissists; the commodification of sex — makes him foolish to ignore and difficult to dismiss as a Right-wing troll. He’s much more problematic than that.
In elite Western cultural circles, there has been such a successful commodification of the self that anything conferring status and credentials, anything that might give an edge over a competitor, is fair game. Ideally, this involves exploiting real and deep things but ones that are conveniently unverifiable (queerness, neurodivergence, that sort of thing). Marxism is one such device. By Marxism, I don’t mean the economic theory and movement for societal transformation but rather the imposter that bears its name and wears its face in Western cultural circles. I mean an identity politics performed online by a cultural elite, and espoused by discreet landlords, trust-fund nepo-babies, deconstructionist Ivy League professors, and multimillionaire “creatives”. I mean an identity politics that gives an edge and an alibi to those reaping the benefits of luxury capitalism, one that steals the valour of the poor and profits by obstructing meaningful change. For all the Right’s panic that the Left have been undertaking ‘a long march through the institutions’, there’s very little attention paid to how the Left has effectively been body-snatched by wealthy pseudo-liberal entryists in the past few decades.
Rereading Houellebecq, I wondered if he might be one of the last genuine Marxists. Not in terms of solutions or idealism — we’re much too lost for that — but rather in diagnosis. The author has admitted to nostalgia for the old faith; he was raised by his Communist grandmother, after his hippy parents moved on. Houellebecq has insisted he does not write in attack, like a polemicist, but rather in defence. From what? One answer is neoliberalism. “To increase desires to an unbearable level,” he writes, “whilst making the fulfilment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.”
This leads to an estrangement from ourselves, each other, and the world, and brings the author under the shadow of Marx, especially his theory of alienation. The following passage from The Communist Manifesto fits Houellebecq’s work, and our current conditions, to a shocking degree: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Just like with Marx, every aspect of life becomes debased in Houellebecq. For both the Frenchman and the German, the market must always keep growing, keep metastasising, into every aspect of existence. As Marx put it, capitalism must “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere” — and so too in Houellebecq’s world, almost everything ends up for sale, including love, innocence, the soul. Almost every promise is betrayed. Almost every effort ends in squalid disappointment, as the cheap thrill fades or the cash disappears. In Platform, it’s the promise of sex, adventure, exoticism, travel. In Annihilation, it’s the promise of the internet, politics, family, optimism.
Yet Houellebecq shows we rarely face up to this grim reality, at least not initially. Instead, consumerism keeps the truth at bay: we procure younger faces or partners, covering up how everything is sourced. Denial is big business. There are no costs or consequences, indeed no end, until all collapses. People continually become ill in Houellebecq; Annihilation is no exception. All the artifice we conjure to convince ourselves of our own invulnerability cannot keep the truth at bay forever. Our society may be rich, but exploitation, decline and death all remain the same. It’s often right at the end of his novels that an epiphany finally comes, too late but not too little. These are small Ivan Ilyich moments that make you question everything you’ve previously read and thought of him.
Indeed if you actually listen to Houellebecq, rather than reactively dismiss him, he’s insightful. Forget capitalism for a moment — he also redirects our attention to political correctness as a tool of evasion and/or destruction. He is strong, too, on the theme of ageing, and on the loss of innocence. Part of his callousness, perhaps, is a survival mechanism; he switches off his emotions. How to remain romantic when faced with entire industries dedicated to debasing all that is good?
“Those who love life do not read,” Houellebecq claims. “No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.” Elsewhere, he has asserted, with more than a hint of gallows’ humour, that writing is “like cultivating parasites in your brain.” This is immensely refreshing to hear, as the contemporary literary world often congratulates itself that literature is a saintly act of empathy. The implication is that writers are innately good, indeed better, people. Writers are good, it naturally follows, because “good” is what you declare — not what you actually do. Anyone who points out the falsity of this joins the list of the forbidden. There’s no greater sign of goodness, after all, than the occasional necessary witch-hunt or search for the devil’s mark, sifting through the digital dirt, on the accused. Houellebecq has no such delusions. “We are both rather contemptible individuals,” is how he opens his dialogue with Bernard-Henri Lévy in Public Enemies. He prefers to be a circling vulture than a cuckoo in the nest.
The word “Satan” comes from the Hebrew for “adversary”; “devil” from the Latin for “slanderer”. Lucifer is different. The name of the rebellious angel, the morning star, comes from the Latin for “light-bringer”. Surveying the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Committee on Evil Literature, and their present-day equivalents, it’s clear their opposition was not to sinful texts per se — but rather those that enlightened. The light cast by some illuminates extraordinary things, liberating things. In Houellebecq’s case, what it reveals is painful, wretched, disgraceful, with only occasional joy. There have always been those who oppose diabolical writers. But whether they know it or not, what they’re seeking is not the purging of evil but the extinguishing of light.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/