Stillness and Slowness in the Work of Michel Houellebecq

Stillness and Slowness in the Work of
Michel Houellebecq
Douglas Morrey
Despite his reputation for writing novels that are liberally dosed with
lurid sex scenes and moments of shocking violence, and despite the
sometimes grimly misanthropic tone of the narrative voice in these
works, closer reading reveals Michel Houellebecq to be a writer who
values stillness and slowness and moments of calm contemplation. This
is demonstrated in the surprisingly placid finales to all of his novels
but also in the aloof lethargy of so many of his protagonists. The
search for stillness is arguably at the heart of Houellebecq’s appeal to
science-fictional utopias, whose ultimate goal seems to be a calming
of desire. It can also be discerned behind the author’s persistent, if
never straightforward, appeal to religion. This article will survey these
questions in Houellebecq’s novelistic output before turning to his most
recent publication, the poetry collection Configuration du dernier
rivage (2013), to consider how these themes are evolving in what might
be called Houellebecq’s ‘mature’ work.
Michel Houellebecq has a reputation for being a provocateur. On
the release of Plateforme (2001), Salon.com memorably cast the author
as a ‘sexual bomb thrower’.1 His novels, by reputation, are full of semipornographic sex scenes (often involving several participants at once);
they are marked by frequent acts of horrific violence (from bullying to
serial murder in Les Particules élémentaires [1998]; from gang rape
to terrorist bombing in Plateforme; and most recently Houellebecq’s
imagining of his own ritual murder in La Carte et le territoire [2010]);
and finally the narrative voice is understood to be an angry and
misanthropic one, constantly venting its disgust at the modern world.
1. Charles Taylor, ‘The Sexual Bomb Thrower’, Salon.com, 2 August 2003, <http://
www.salon.com/2003/08/02/platform_2/ > [accessed 28 November 2013].
IJFrS 14 (2014)
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With this in mind, it is remarkable to note that each of Houellebecq’s
full-length novels closes with some sort of image of stillness or calm
emptiness. At the end of Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), the
narrator, who has previously shown nothing but contempt for his own
body, and for the French regions, suddenly decides to take a cycling
holiday in the Ardèche. He rides out into the hills and forests achieving
an almost-transcendent state of physical exhaustion among nature. If
this quest is ultimately disappointing in Extension (the penultimate
sentence reads: ‘Elle n’aura pas lieu, la fusion sublime’),2 the end
of Les Particules élémentaires might be seen as a more successful
realization of the same impulse. The conclusion of Houellebecq’s
second novel offers both the image of Michel Djerzinski’s monastic
lifestyle in western Ireland, a mysterious region in which ‘tout semble
indiquer une présence’,3 and the evocation of a posthuman race which
is presumed to be peaceful and serene, having shaken off humanity’s
troubles (indeed, it is only in the light of the novel’s closing pages
that we are in a position to understand the lyrical opening pages in
which the neo-humans are described as living ‘Dans un halo de joie [...]
[d]ans des après-midi inépuisables’4). At the end of Plateforme, Michel
is certainly not happy, but he is at least calm. Following the death of
Valérie in a terrorist bomb attack in Thailand, he retires to Pattaya
and does nothing, simply waiting for life to end: ‘Parfois j’allume la
climatisation le matin, je l’éteins le soir, et entre les deux il ne se passe
rigoureusement rien.’5 In La Possibilité d’une île (2005), the epilogue
depicts a neo-human clone wandering alone for weeks in the largely
deserted, post-apocalyptic landscape of western Europe. Eventually he
makes his way across the dried-out seabed to an archipelago of islands
and pools that was once the Canaries. Failing to find the anticipated
neo-human settlement there, he nonetheless decides to stay and live out
the rest of his days, surviving, as neo-humans can, only on sunlight and
2. Michel Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte (Paris: J’ai lu, 1997), p. 156.
3. Michel Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires (Paris: J’ai lu, 2000), p. 292.
4.Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires, p. 10.
5. Michel Houellebecq, Plateforme (Paris: J’ai lu, 2002), p. 348.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
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sea salt. ‘Il me restait peut-être soixante ans à vivre; plus de vingt mille
journées qui seraient identiques […] [J]’étais maintenant entré dans un
espace paisible dont seul m’écarterait le processus létal’6. In La Carte
et le territoire, finally, Jed Martin spends the last thirty years of his
life following the same routine, slowly creating artworks based on the
superimposition of very long, static video images.
There is, in virtually all of Houellebecq’s protagonists, a refusal of
agitation, a rejection of the world, and an almost total lack of interests in
the traditional sense. The narrator of Extension du domaine de la lutte,
though gainfully employed as a fonctionnaire, hates his life and his
job: ‘La société dans laquelle je vis me dégoûte; la publicité m’écœure;
l’informatique me fait vomir.’7 He has no apparent friends, his last
relationship ended over two years ago, and he takes no pleasure in the
rituals and trappings of a consumer lifestyle, as is clear from his sense
of relief at losing his car and his dread at the prospect of purchasing
a bed. The protagonist of Les Particules élémentaires is, famously,
split between two characters who, in the tradition of the roman à thèse,
represent different facets of our society: where Bruno’s trajectory is one
of anger and desperation, Michel has a calm, intellectual apprehension
of the world but, as a result, appears effectively incapable of human
relations, alienating the woman who loves him, Annabelle: ‘d’autres
connaîtraient le bonheur, ou le désespoir; rien de tout cela ne pourrait
jamais exactement le concerner ni l’atteindre’.8 The slogan for his
genetic re-engineering of humanity — ‘Demain sera féminin’9 — will
be drawn from a Trois Suisses catalogue he receives in his mailbox:
sufficient indication of the pathetic extent of Michel’s interaction
with the world, and of his awareness of contemporary culture. Like
the narrator of Extension, Michel in Plateforme is employed by a
government ministry yet manifests no apparent attachment to this role,
or to anything else in his life. When he moves in with Valérie he realizes
6. Michel Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 2007), p. 474.
7.Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte, pp. 82–83.
8.Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires, p. 86.
9.Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires, pp. 123, 311.
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with some consternation that there is nothing at all he desires to keep
from his own apartment: ‘Ainsi, j’avais pu vivre quarante ans sans
établir le moindre contact un tant soit peu personnel avec un objet.’10
Similarly, when Valérie’s career favours a move to Thailand, Michel
has no hesitation about leaving behind his life in France. His plans
for Thailand involve doing nothing in particular, and Michel is unsure
how to explain this to someone like Valérie’s boss Jean-Yves who has
always been extremely active. One might expect more agitation from
La Possibilité d’une île whose protagonist, Daniel, is a celebrity comic
(the novel having been written after Houellebecq’s own encounter
with literary fame). Indeed, the early chapters feature celebrity parties,
magazine interviews and flirtatious encounters with actresses at castings;
yet the overall impression remains one of emptiness: Daniel remarks
that, despite his wealth, he is reluctant to employ a cleaner because
‘l’idée qu’un être humain, si insignifiant soit-il, puisse contempler le
détail de mon existence, et son vide, m’était devenue insupportable’.11
In line with the novel’s thesis about the inevitable decline in vitality
and relevance that accompanies ageing, Daniel before long retires to
Spain and spends his time masturbating on his balcony as he watches
sunbathing girls through a telescope. Finally, La Carte et le territoire
presents two portraits of artists in withdrawal from the world: both
the novel’s ‘hero’ Jed Martin, and the self-portrait of Houellebecq
are marked by the extreme scarcity of their human relations. When
absorbed by an art project, Jed is capable of cutting himself off for
several months in his youth, several years in later life: ‘Le matin du
vernissage, il se rendit compte qu’il n’avait pas prononcé une parole
depuis presque un mois, à part le “Non” qu’il répétait tous les jours
à la caissière […] qui lui demandait s’il avait la carte Club Casino.’12
The fictional Houellebecq, meanwhile, has basically no relations except
for his dog and lives in retirement from the world (first in the west of
Ireland, then in the Loiret), his life and attention principally occupied
by wine, pork products and skin complaints.
10.Houellebecq, Plateforme, p. 175.
11.Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île, p. 133.
12.Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le territoire (Paris: J’ai lu, 2012), p. 61.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
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There would be something almost monastic about this lifestyle
described repeatedly in Houellebecq’s novels were it not for the residual
attachment to sex, which remains much stronger than any will toward
God or the spiritual. It seems, though, that for Houellebecq, the ideal
would be a sort of calming of desire. It is perhaps La Possibilité d’une
île that states most unequivocally an observation that runs throughout
Houellebecq’s work: the principle governing contemporary western
society, we read, is to ‘[a]ugmenter les désirs jusqu’à l’insoutenable
tout en rendant leur réalisation de plus en plus inaccessible’.13 In such a
context, the only relief to be found from the constantly imposed sense of
inadequacy and frustration is to reject the whole mechanism of desire.
This was the conclusion Houellebecq came to in his essay ‘Approches
du désarroi’ (1997), where he proposed a kind of ‘révolution froide’
that could be enacted by each individual in relation to the constant
flow of information and advertising: ‘il suffit de faire un pas de côté’,
writes Houellebecq, ‘Il suffit de marquer un temps d’arrêt […] Il
suffit littéralement de s’immobiliser pendant quelques secondes.’14 As
the examples listed above suggest, Houellebecq’s protagonists seem
particularly adept at ‘stepping aside’ in this way from the hubbub
of consumerism: the attitudes of his characters toward the drive for
professional success and the pressures of conspicuous consumption
could variously be described as exhaustion, incomprehension and
contempt, and repeatedly serve to point up the absurdity of a system
that relies on the continual rekindling of its adherents’ credulous desire
even after countless demonstrations of the system’s incapacity to satisfy
those desires.
Now, the extinguishing of desire is, I argue, what is ultimately
at stake in Houellebecq’s imagined science-fiction futures. In Les
Particules élémentaires, Michel sees, partly through observation of
Bruno, that the struggle for narcissistic self-affirmation through sexual
competition is the source of much unhappiness in humanity, a hangover
from evolutionary instincts that, in other species, are often also
13.Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île, p. 83.
14.Michel Houellebecq, Rester vivant et autres textes (Paris: Librio, 1998), pp. 54–55.
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accompanied by violence and cruelty. Michel’s solution is asexual human
reproduction (whereby procreation is decoupled from sexual pleasure),
something achieved through cloning (whereby sexual pleasure can be
further decoupled from individualism and therefore from narcissism).
The future of Les Particules can therefore still be interpreted as a sexual
utopia, in which everyone could have as much sex as they like (since,
if everyone looks the same, no one would be considered unattractive)
and without consequences or responsibilities (since no one could get
pregnant). (We might also surmise that, if everyone is genetically
identical, everyone would have a roughly equal sex drive, although this
would imply risky speculations about the genetic nature of desire.) In
short, this future can be seen as a grandiose sexual fantasy, and therefore,
in the end, complicit with the same culture of desire responsible for the
sexual revolution, the ubiquity of pornography, and similar phenomena
demonized by Houellebecq.
La Possibilité d’une île takes Houellebecq’s logic further. Indeed,
Ben Jeffery has recently commented that the ‘neo-human paradise’ of
Les Particules ‘returns, ruined’ in La Possibilité.15 The neo-humans
here are also cloned, but each of a different ancestor. They avoid the
traps of human desire not by eliminating individual differences but by
rejecting all social interaction (each clone lives in an isolated secure
compound) and also by refusing to elaborate any project (they spend
their lives studying the history of their ancestors, their only goal being
to avoid making the same mistakes). Neo-human life is organized
according to principles set out in a manual entitled Instructions pour
une vie paisible, which lays out in detail the procedure to adopt with
regard to every conceivable event, thereby eliminating the need for
individual decisions which might lead to desire. The clones have not
entirely relinquished a sexual physiognomy, but genetic modification
has decreased the sensitivity of their skin leaving them indifferent to
touch or its absence. This future thus comes across as more of a dystopia
than a utopia but only because it is so difficult for us, as readers, to
15.Ben Jeffery, Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Winchester:
Zero Books, 2011), p. 59.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
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step outside of an ideology that sees the world, and all life within it, as
governed by desire.16
The neo-humans of La Possibilité d’une île are, in many ways, like
the monks of a new dark age, preserving the memory of human history
in indefinite anticipation of a time yet to come. This comparison leads
me to the final question of this section which is to wonder how all these
images of slowed, or stilled, lives relate to Houellebecq’s enigmatic
treatment of religion. Religion is a problematic but persistent presence
in Houellebecq’s writing since it offers the elusive but alluring promise
of something more than just quantifiable value to the market. Religious
reference is scattered throughout Houellebecq, from the opening
epigraph to Extension (taken from Romans, chapter 13, verse 12) up
to Inspector Jasselin’s Buddhist meditation on the corpse that serves
as valuable training for his role as a homicide detective. Frequently
there is a sense that religious faith is slightly embarrassing, that it has
no real place in today’s society. Yet, even when describing New Age
practices and improbable UFO cults in Les Particules, La Possibilité
and Lanzarote (2000), for all the ironic fun to be had at the adherents’
expense, there is a clear sense that these various creeds respond to a
need or a perceived absence in people’s lives. As Houellebecq puts it
in Ennemis publics (2008), a spiritual principle remains ‘ce qu’il y a,
au monde, de plus difficile à vaincre’.17 In the light of material such
as this, occasional commentators have sought to reclaim Houellebecq
as a Christian writer.18 It is certainly true that La Possibilité d’une île
contains numerous echoes of the Bible, what with its chapter-and-verse
style enumeration of sections, the names of characters (Daniel, Esther,
Marie) and its narrative of prophecy, apocalypse and resurrection.19 But
16.For a more detailed analysis of Houellebecq’s utopian narratives, see Douglas Morrey,
Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2013), pp. 133–39.
17.Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ennemis publics (Paris: J’ai lu, 2011), p. 113.
18.See for instance Vincent Lloyd, ‘Michel Houellebecq and the Theological Virtues’,
Literature & Theology, 23.1 (2009), 84–98.
19.For a detailed consideration of this question, see Fanny van Ceunebroeck, ‘Michel
Houellebecq ou la possibilité d’une bible’, in Michel Houellebecq à la Une, ed. by Murielle
Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 209–19.
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it is difficult not to be brought up short by Houellebecq’s disarming
remarks in Ennemis publics regarding his own relationship to
Christianity: he admits to having committed, for many years, to regular
church attendance and Bible study in an honest attempt to embrace the
Christian faith: ‘Seulement, voilà: le problème c’est que Dieu, je n’y
crois toujours pas.’20
But this, in turn, may help to explain the recurring spectre of
Buddhism in Houellebecq’s work: the appeal of a religious practice
that does not necessitate belief in a deity. Buddhist thought, too, can be
found here and there throughout the novels: it appears in epigraphs in
Extension, drawn from the Buddhist scriptures the Dhammapada and
the Sattipathana-Sutta; Michel, in Plateforme, encounters Buddhist
thought with some approbation in Thailand; and, as mentioned,
Buddhist meditation helps Jasselin to do his unpleasant job in La Carte
et le territoire. There is little sense, in the frequently angry and bitter
narrative voices of Houellebecq’s novels, of a belief in karma or a
subscribing to principles of non-violence; on the other hand, there is
a very real engagement with the Buddhist belief that suffering derives
from attachment to desire which entails enslavement to an illusory
reality. Suffering, both the word and the concept, have been central
to Houellebecq’s literary universe ever since the opening sentence of
Rester vivant (1991): ‘Le monde est une souffrance déployée’21. The
novels, without exception, make it clear that this suffering is tied to
desire and its impossible fulfilment, constantly provoked, teased and
frustrated by our consumer culture. Michel Djerzinski insists that not
only Buddhism but all serious religions and philosophies have arrived
at the conclusion that desire is ‘[une] source de souffrance, de haine
et de malheur’.22 And Buddhism, we might note, is the only religion
that does not condemn Djerzinski’s proposal for a genetically-modified
solution to human suffering. The neo-humans of La Possibilité d’une
île teach the same thing, namely that ‘la jalousie, le désir et l’appétit de
20.Houellebecq and Lévy, Ennemis publics, p. 143.
21.Houellebecq, Rester vivant, p. 9.
22.Houellebecq, Les Particules élémentaires, p. 161.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
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procréation ont la même origine, qui est la souffrance d’être’.23
This, perhaps, is the ultimate sense of Houellebecq’s flirtation
with religion in his writing: the idea that happiness is not of this world,
indeed that attachment to the things of this world can only prevent us
from attaining it. On the contrary, the only kind of serenity we can
hope to reach is through a practice akin to prayer or meditation that
momentarily cuts us off from desire. This, I suggest, is the ultimate
significance of the images of stillness and slowness, of désoeuvrement
and disengagement, that populate Houellebecq’s novelistic universe.
What Houellebecq seems to value most in religious traditions is not any
promise of the special or privileged nature of humanity, nor is it religious
faith and practice as a mode of self-realization. Instead, Houellebecq
seems drawn to religion (and in particular Buddhism, therefore a
religion that developed outside the western humanist tradition) as a
practice that values self-abnegation. Ironically, given the historical role
played by religion in shoring up ideologies of humanism,24 Houellebecq
suggests that religious thinking may be most useful today in providing
a way to think outside the focus on individual desire that has become
ingrained in us through decades of relatively peaceful and carefree
consumerism. In other words, religious thinking can be an important
step in the direction of a posthumanist perspective. One of the most
powerful insights of La Possibilité d’une île is the implication that the
kind of social changes required in order to avert the demographic and
climatological emergencies that could prove destructive to our species
23.Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île, p. 367. This philosophy of the rejection of
desire can also be found in Houellebecq’s frequently stated admiration for Arthur
Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer similarly argued that the unquenchable will was the
source of inevitable suffering and noted points of convergence between his own
philosophy and the teaching of Buddhism. On the connection between Houellebecq
and Schopenhauer, see Morrey, Michel Houellebecq, pp. 121–25 as well as Walter
Wagner, ‘Le bonheur du néant: Une lecture schopenhauerienne de Houellebecq’ and
Floriane Place-Verghnes, ‘Houellebecq/Schopenhauer: Souffrance et désir gigognes’,
both in Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe, ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine
van Wesemael (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 109–22, 123–32.
24.On this connection, see Jean-Marie Schaeffer, La Fin de l’exception humaine (Paris:
Gallimard, 2007), p. 26.
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over the coming century cannot be brought about through liberal
democracy since it is liberal democracy that has shaped the behaviours
responsible for these threatening calamities. A worldview that values,
monetizes and encourages selfish desire is necessarily inadequate to
the task of radical social change with a view to a more sustainable
future. If we are to avoid the kind of collective suicide that Houellebecq
repeatedly envisions in his fiction, it may well require a solution with
the organizational structure and the force of conviction of a religion.
Configuration du dernier rivage
What, then, becomes of these complex and ambiguous ideas in the
context of Houellebecq’s recent collection of poetry, Configuration du
dernier rivage (published April 2013)? Although it is his novels that
have brought about Houellebecq’s international fame, and that have
been the focus of most of the secondary literature devoted to his work,
Houellebecq was a poet first, and his poetry is sometimes regarded,
by the author himself as well as by some commentators, as his most
important literary contribution.25 In Ennemis publics, Houellebecq
relates a charming anecdote in which a fellow poet, and friend from
before he was famous, effectively dismissed the author’s bestselling
novelistic output by suggesting that ‘il était temps, selon lui, que je me
remette aux choses sérieuses’.26 The received wisdom on Houellebecq’s
poetry is that his first two collections, La Poursuite du bonheur (1991)
and Le Sens du combat (1996), with their careful adherence to classical
versification mixed with bathetic subject matter and a nakedly vulnerable
voice relating experiences of chronic depression and acute loneliness, are
among the author’s most accomplished works. Renaissance, published
in 1999 following Houellebecq’s initial brush with celebrity, comes
25.See for instance Houellebecq’s remark that poetry is ‘le genre suprême’, quoted in
David Evans, ‘“Et il y a un autre monde”: Reconstructions formelles dans les Poésies de
Houellebecq’, in Le Monde de Houellebecq, ed. by Gavin Bowd (Glasgow: University
of Glasgow French and German Publications, 2006), pp. 21–39 (p. 39).
26.Houellebecq and Lévy, Ennemis publics, p. 254.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
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across, in comparison, as somewhat rough-hewn and lazy, resorting
increasingly to prose poems and relying on a facile series of expected
images (supermarkets, tourism, pornography, etc.). The present study
marks an initial attempt to judge how Configuration du dernier rivage
— Houellebecq’s first collection of poetry for a decade and a half, and
described as ‘capricious and uneven’ by Le Nouvel Observateur27 —
may be situated within this small but significant corpus.
To return to the difficult question of religion in Houellebecq’s
work, it is immediately apparent that Configuration du dernier rivage
is recurrently haunted by the figure of an absent power or vanished
being, what Libération called ‘le sentiment d’une perte irréparable’.28
The collection opens with the lines:
Par la mort du plus pur
Toute joie est invalidée29
With the exclusive reliance on single-syllable words in the opening line,
and its different metre than the rest of the poem (six syllables rather than
eight), the phrase grabs the attention, but it is unclear to what ‘the death
of the most pure’ might refer: the disappearance of a lover, or, on a more
cosmic scale, the death of God? Presumably not Christ – a realistic
contender for the epithet of ‘most pure’ – since, according to Christian
doctrine, it is on the contrary by His death and consequent expiation of
our sins, that joy would be rendered possible in the first place. But the
second poem seems to confirm the religious interpretation of the first:
27.David Caviglioli, ‘Houellebecq poète, ou les fleurs du pâle’, Le Nouvel Observateur,
14 May 2013.
28.Éric Loret, ‘Avec Configuration du dernier rivage, le prix Goncourt évoque “la fin de
vie” sur le mode élégiaque’, Libération, 1 April 2013.
29.Michel Houellebecq, Configuration du dernier rivage (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), p. 9;
hereafter C in the text.
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Disparue la croyance
Qui permet d’édifier
D’être et de sanctifier
Nous habitons l’absence. (C 10)
Later, the image of a starless sky, a ready metaphor for the godless
heavens, returns on two occasions: ‘L’épuisement central d’une nuit
sans étoiles / Adornée de néant’ and ‘Dans la nuit qui dort sans étoiles’
(C 13, 59). There is a repeated sense of a God, or metaphysical presence,
that has withdrawn itself from the lives of humanity:
L’espoir suspendu sur la ville
Hésite à rejoindre les hommes (C 14)
Later in the collection, this rhetoric of the absence of God becomes as
clear as:
Où est le paradis?
Où sont passés les dieux? (C 75)
Elsewhere, however, even this absent presence of God seems too
hopeful as the collection contains bald statements of atheism and a
materialist belief in the irreparable finitude of death: ‘Rien ne subsiste
après la mort’ (C 16), we read, and:
La nuit va bien recouvrir tout
Et l’épuisement monogame
D’un corps enfoncé dans la boue. (C 17)
Later, in a poem that recalls a famous passage from Les Particules
élémentaires, Houellebecq even evokes the worms that feed upon dead
bodies:
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
13
je connais les asticots
Et les vers blancs, Calliphora,
Ils ne nous laisseront que les os. (C 70)
What is left in the absence of God? Perhaps the distant possibility of
self-realization through individual effort in the here and now? At one
point, Houellebecq evokes the professional cyclist Bjarne Riis:
Son visage torturé se plisse
Comme un visage d’être humain
Trouvant son salut dans la peine
Avec ses testicules, ses mains,
Il écrivait l’histoire humaine (C 35)
Though we might note that even this success is achieved ‘Sans
réelle beauté, sans joie / Avec la conscience d’un devoir’ (C 35) (and
the mischievous assonance between ‘salut’ and ‘testicules’ further
ridicules the very concept of redemptive accomplishment). In the
world of Configuration, in short, having any kind of faith appears as
an impossible dream: one might as well wish one were a dog, whose
happiness could be found in endlessly chasing the same stick; in other
words, faith holds out the impossible promise of ‘le bonheur immobile
et cyclique de la répétition’ (C 32). The ‘thirst for eternity’ is described
as ‘douteuse et pathétique’ and yet nonetheless identified as something
to be ‘reawakened’ (C 73).
The ambiguous relationship to the sacred in Houellebecq’s poetry
can be seen to be reflected in the poet’s use of spatial imagery. This is
notable from the very title of the new collection. The idea of a ‘final
shore’ might imply a reference to death, or even the afterlife, but the
somewhat dry and unwieldy ‘Configuration’ lends a cold abstraction
to what might have been an emotional image. The title necessarily
evokes Houellebecq’s 2005 novel La Possibilité d’une île, both through
the juxtaposition of an abstract noun with a spatial metaphor but also
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MORREY
through the memory of that novel’s epilogue, described above, in which
the cloned neo-human journeys across the largely dry bed of the Atlantic
in search of a mythical community thought to exist on the former
site of Lanzarote – in other words, something like a quest for a ‘final
shore’. As Éric Loret noted in Libération, Houellebecq’s titles have
often employed spatial images of one kind or another, from Extension
du domaine de la lutte to La Carte et le territoire.30 The section titles
within Configuration pick up this spatial imagery but, again, the image
conjured tends to be one of a cold, uninhabited expanse: ‘Plateau’ is
one title, ‘Les parages du vide’ another, and the collection opens with
‘L’étendue grise’, which again recalls the end of La Possibilité d’une île
and the ashen wasteland of the ‘Grand espace gris’ where Portugal was
once to be found.31 The world visualized in Configuration du dernier
rivage thus comes across as a barren, deserted world that exists in the
aftermath of God and indeed perhaps in the aftermath of humanity since
(again, as in La Possibilité) the imagery is almost post-apocalyptic at
times, in lines such as ‘La poussière tournoie sur le sol gris’ and ‘L’être
humain se couche dans le sable’ (C 31, 50). For the most part, however,
this imagery seems above all to stress a sense of emptiness and, by
extension, of the poet’s isolation, his sheer distance from social life.
The spatial metaphors in Configuration perhaps attain their most simple
and direct expression in the title of the poem ‘Loin du bonheur’.
As with Houellebecq’s earlier poetry collections, then,
Configuration du dernier rivage can be read as giving voice to the
experience of depression. The new work perhaps does not have the
rawness of La Poursuite du bonheur and Le Sens du combat which
Houellebecq wrote following extended periods of unemployment and
before he had encountered the privileges — however dubious — of
artistic and material success. Nonetheless, the consistent tone throughout
Configuration is one of monotonous melancholy interspersed by peaks
of despair. Occasionally, the poet does give voice to acute desperation,
as in this blunt admission that comes in a prose poem: ‘J’ai envie de
30.Loret, ‘Avec Configuration…’
31.Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une île, p. 462.
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faire n’importe quoi pour me sortir ne serait-ce que quelques heures
de ce trou où j’étouffe’ (C 18). For the most part, however, the poet’s
suffering is a kind of constant background hum: ‘Maintenant, je souffre
toute la journée, doucement, légèrement…’ (C 19). In this, the work
recalls Houellebecq’s earliest intervention into the field of poetry
with the publication of his poetic ‘method’, Rester vivant, in 1991.
Here, Houellebecq identifies suffering as the wellspring from which
all writing emerges. ‘Et revenez toujours à la source’, he counsels the
aspiring poet, ‘qui est la souffrance’.32 But, again, in Configuration, it
is a weak, as it were bathetic, suffering that is envisaged: ‘un état qui
s’apparente au désespoir, sans pouvoir cependant y accéder’ (C 21).
As is the case in his novels, a sense of depression is often conveyed
in Houellebecq’s poetry through images of stillness, numbness and
inertia. In some ways, this listlessness partakes of a very contemporary
iconography of clinical depression and its pharmaceutical management:
‘Ce soir’, confides the poet in another prose poem, ‘j’ai décidé de passer à
trois comprimés d’Halcion’ (C 20), immobilization coming less through
meditation than through the administration of a sedative. Nonetheless,
as other commentators on Houellebecq’s poetry have pointed out,
this process of stilling the mind and body is inscribed within a poetic
tradition, notably recalling Baudelaire’s ‘spleen’, itself a kind of halflife33 (and Houellebecq’s references to anti-depressants might simply
be interpreted as an updating of Baudelaire’s self-medication with
opium, hashish and alcohol). But, as Tomasz Swoboda remarks, there is
little of Baudelaire’s much-discussed flânerie in Houellebecq’s poetry,
which shows closer proximity, if anything, to the passive immobility of
Samuel Beckett’s world, the poems proposing ‘plusieurs variations des
états d’inertie, d’indolence, de mollesse ou d’atonie’.34 There is, then, a
persistent lack of affect in Houellebecq’s poetry. He writes:
32.Houellebecq, Rester vivant, p. 11.
33.Julia Pröll, ‘La Poésie urbaine de Michel Houellebecq’, in Michel Houellebecq sous la
loupe, ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2007), pp. 51–68 (pp. 57–58).
34.Tomasz Swoboda, ‘Flânerie poétique de Michel Houellebecq’, in Michel Houellebecq
à la Une, ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011), pp. 13–25 (p. 18).
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MORREY
Je n’ai plus d’intérieur,
De passion, de chaleur;
Bientôt je me résume
À mon propre volume.(C 11)
Indeed, the apparent inability to obtain a complete absence of affect
appears as the one ineradicable irritation: ‘Dans un sens, il est plutôt
agaçant de constater que je conserve la faculté d’espérer’ (C 20).
Martin Crowley has recently remarked that the most fundamental desire
underlying all of Houellebecq’s narratives, as well as his poetic voice,
might be identified as the desire not to be. Yet this desire is always
accompanied by an awareness of its own impossibility, of the eternal
return of desire, or at least of some more basic persistence of being35
— what Houellebecq calls ‘Cette affreuse obstination d’être / Fût-ce en
dehors de toute joie’ (C 30). The depression expressed in Houellebecq’s
poetry is accompanied by a seeming voluntary withdrawal from the
world, as though in disgust or disappointment at what it has to offer.
‘Je n’ai qu’une hâte, c’est de quitter tous ces gens’, he writes, ‘Vivre
autant que possible en dehors des autres’ (C 18). Anecdotal evidence
would suggest that this is one aspect of Houellebecq’s writing that
leaves many readers very impatient: there is rarely any recognition
that a happy social life is something requiring work, that fulfilling
relationships are built and sustained rather than simply given to us. But
it would perhaps be too hasty to ascribe the poet’s extreme withdrawal
to nothing but petulance. It is often suggested, in clinical and self-help
literature, as well as in sufferers’ own accounts, that the experience of
depression is like a kind of imprisonment, or — to take up our theme
of stillness — of paralysis that prevents the depressive from making the
social gestures necessary to build the connections that might provide
a route out from depression.36 This, I suggest, is what leads to the, by
35.Martin Crowley, ‘Houellebecq: Not Impossible’, contribution to ‘Michel Houellebecq:
Humanity and its Aftermath’, a workshop held at the University of Warwick, 16
October 2013.
36.See, for instance, Dorothy Rowe, Depression: The Way out of your Prison (London:
Routledge, 2003).
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
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turns poignant and infuriating, sense in Houellebecq’s writing that
failure and unhappiness are somehow imposed from without or entirely
beyond one’s control. The poet evokes the feeling that ‘tous les chemins
mènent à des chambres fermées’ (C 30) and, elsewhere, watching life
pass him by in the Paris metro, concludes, ‘J’ai simplement manqué
de chance’ (C 34). Yet, if these remain, nonetheless, poetic moments,
moments of lucid contemplation, it is because, in the poet’s sense of
non-participation in the life of happy, obedient, well-adjusted citizens,
another, sharper vision of the world is rendered possible, one liberated
from the instrumentalist logic of capitalist production and consumption.
These are moments in which, as Aurélien Bellanger puts it, ‘l’emprise
du monde se desserre’,37 providing just the kind of ‘pas de côté’ that
Houellebecq recommended in ‘Approches du désarroi’.
In places, in Configuration du dernier rivage, the poet’s depression
seems to result from the same key factor that dominates the majority
of Houellebecq’s novels, that is the sense of having been side-lined
in what is perceived as a ruthless competition for sexual partners,
operating according to broadly the same logic as economic capitalism.
This is an aspect of Houellebecq’s writing with which many readers —
and, let us be honest, many women readers in particular — struggle to
sympathize: the apparent self-pity expressed by the narrative or poetic
voice of so many of his books at the failure to find sexual gratification,
while all the time displaying little but contempt for women and
relationships (and, by extension therefore, the apparent blindness to the
probable connection between these two facts). The central section of
Configuration is charmingly entitled ‘Mémoires d’une bite’, picking up
the theme that is crucial in particular to La Possibilité d’une île of the
inevitable decline in sexual attraction and therefore of any possibility of
happiness, that accompanies ageing. ‘Quand on ne bande plus’, writes
Houellebecq, in a sentiment familiar from the 2005 novel, ‘tout perd
peu à peu de son importance’ (C 47). The attempts of individuals in
middle age or later to maintain a sex life are presented as pathetic and
risible, as in the lines:
37.Aurélien Bellanger, Houellebecq écrivain romantique (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer,
2010), p. 145.
18
MORREY
Tu te cherches un sex-friend,
Vieille cougar fatigue(C 44)
where the use of recent slang terms drawn from Anglophone popular
culture adds to the sense of incongruence at the very existence of a
middle-aged woman’s on-going sexual desire. There is, in short,
something rather grubby about these moments in Configuration,
a manifestation of what Martin Crowley has called Houellebecq’s
‘derisory lucidity’: this is a faintly disgusted vision of the world but
that, importantly, conveys almost no sense of superiority, since the
poet finds nothing noble in his own clarity of vision, the prospect of
artistic heroism having long since been subsumed in the levelling maw
of the capitalist culture industries.38 Thus the poet gazes, impotent, at
the bodies of young girls, ‘Promesses de bonheur sur deux pattes’ (C
51) and reflects sadly on the ‘darwinisme avalisé’ of a system of sexual
selection that ultimately creates ‘la banalité suprême’ (C 49). While
its crude rhymes and bathetic images may occasionally generate a wry
smile, this section of Configuration is no doubt the most disappointing,
coming across as predictable, not to say facile, a return to the kind of
crudely reactionary theorizing that the author had seemed keen to leave
behind in his Goncourt-winning La Carte et le territoire. But Martin
Crowley wonders whether part of the disturbing import of Houellebecq’s
writing is to render such aesthetic judgements redundant: his ‘grinding
predictability’, Crowley argues, is ‘precisely the point’; in the absence,
sufficiently established by now, of any ‘redemptive critical insight’, the
avoidance of the crude and obvious on Houellebecq’s part ‘could only
represent a kind of nostalgic delicacy’.39
Crowley’s argument is compelling and original, but it is to reckon
without one of the more surprising developments of Configuration du
dernier rivage, that is to say the inclusion in this collection of a suite
of fairly traditional love poems. More exactly, this may be surprising
38.Martin Crowley, ‘Low Resistance’, in On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, ed. by Sara
Crangle and Peter Nicholls (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 148–64 (p. 149).
39.Crowley, ‘Low Resistance’, p. 157.
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
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to the reader of Houellebecq’s novels, but, as David Evans has pointed
out, it has always been a characteristic of the author’s poetry to provide
a central place for love as a figure promising a process of renewal.40
Configuration thus features a set of poems marked by the loss of a
lover (which may properly be her death: at one point the poet refers to
‘le jardin où tu reposes’ [C 67]) in which the poet expresses both the
sense of emptiness in his life since her departure, but also a profound
gratitude for the experiences they shared: ‘Tu m’as donné la vie entière
/ Et ses merveilles’, he reflects (C 66). The collection revisits, in other
words, the eminently classical theme of the all-consuming nature of
romantic love, the poet at one point even expressing the wish to die in
his lover’s company: ‘ton corps blanc / Est la limite du royaume’, he
writes (C 60). More precisely, we might follow Jacob Carlson in seeing
in Houellebecq’s poetry an unstable combination of ‘desublimation and
emotiveness’ that mixes the bathetic register of slang and trashy adult
entertainment, coldly reported and appraised, with sudden and poignant
indications of the poet’s residual tenderness and existential distress.41
Houellebecq, like generations of readers before him, has admired
Baudelaire’s ability to combine the terrestrial and the celestial42 and
Houellebecq’s poetry too from time to time appeals to an ideal that
might counteract the abundance of spleen. At times, then, the prurient
obsession with sex gives way to relatively restrained and delicate
expressions celebrating the joy of physical love:
Il a fallu que je connaisse
Ce que la vie a de meilleur,
Quand deux corps jouent de leur bonheur
Et sans fin s’unissent et renaissent.(C 65)
40.Evans, ‘“Et il y a un autre monde”’, p. 26.
41.Jacob Carlson, ‘Les Particules poétiques’, in Le Monde de Houellebecq, ed. by Gavin
Bowd (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 2006),
pp. 41–57 (p. 43).
42.
Marc Weitzmann, ‘Zone dépressionnaire’, Les Inrockuptibles, special issue
Houellebecq (2005), 49–53 (p. 53).
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MORREY
With all this evidence of love in Configuration du dernier rivage, we
should perhaps reinterpret the poet’s depression, diagnosed above, as
romantic grief. The prose poem ‘Loin du bonheur’ that provided us with
several examples of depressive discourse appears, on closer reading,
to express the naked pain of one who has lost a lover, as in the blunt,
staccato rhythm of the following line: ‘Un amour. Un seul. Violent et
définitif. Brisé’ (C 21). This loss appears responsible for the poet’s
extreme distress: ‘Perdre l’amour, c’est aussi se perdre soi-même’, he
states (C 22). Similarly, the withdrawal of interest from the world can
be reinterpreted as a response to the intensity of romantic feeling and a
consequence of its removal:
Impossibilité soudain — et apparemment définitive — de
s’intéresser à une quelconque question politique.
Tout ce qui n’est pas purement affectif devient insignifiant. (C 23)
Might we even, in the light of Configuration, be led to reinterpret the
depressive narrative voice of Houellebecq’s novels and to lend greater
weight to the romantic relationships therein? Should the depression
of Houellebecq’s male protagonists be attributed not so much to their
marginal status within the sexual marketplace, as they themselves
claim, as to the failure of one particular relationship: the narrator and
Véronique in Extension du domaine de la lutte; Bruno and Christiane,
or Michel and Annabelle in Les Particules élémentaires; Michel and
Valérie in Plateforme; Daniel and Esther in La Possibilité d’une île;
even Jed and Olga in La Carte et le territoire? For the most part, these
relationships have not been taken very seriously within commentary on
Houellebecq’s novels, largely because the female partners tend to be
crudely drawn and unsubtly idealized: improbably beautiful, incredibly
smart, sexually indefatigable and, in some cases (Valérie, Annabelle),
unfailingly devoted to their rather hapless men.43 Would our perspective
43.In the past, I have been as quick to point this out as other critics. See Douglas Morrey,
‘Michel Houellebecq and the International Sexual Economy’, Portal: Journal of
Multidisciplinary International Studies, 1.1 (2004) <http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/
STILLNESS AND SLOWNESS IN THE WORK
OF MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
21
change if we accepted that these women were viewed through the
crystalizing lens of romantic love, a literary tradition with a pedigree of
many centuries?
In the end, however, this is the weakness of Houellebecq’s appeal
to love: its inability to see beyond an idealized Romantic tradition
with almost no sense of the complicated mixture of give and take,
negotiation and compromise that characterizes enduring love in life as
in literature. There is no recognition of what Alain Badiou has recently
identified as the political significance of love. Badiou writes: ‘Il y a
un travail de l’amour, et non pas seulement un miracle’.44 In Badiou’s
reading, it would only be this sense of love as fidelity, as a commitment
to construct a different perspective on the world together, that could
escape the infernal rhythms of consumerism and permit a slow accretion
of happiness over against the relentless and always replaceable coups de
cœur with which consumer culture renews and retails its products. Love
represents a resistance to this culture of in-built obsolescence since it is,
in Badiou’s words, ‘une déclaration d’éternité qui doit se réaliser ou se
déployer comme elle peut dans le temps’.45 Badiou’s entire philosophy
can be read as an attempt to re-found the possibility of an ethics in
the absence of religious faith, and romantic love provides one of the
grounds for his key ethical concept of fidelity.46 In Houellebecq’s work,
too, love seems to provide the one realistic — albeit increasingly rare —
source for a value system that looks beyond short-term consumerism.
Conclusion
Houellebecq’s novels end with images of calm, stillness and the absence
of desire. His protagonists tend to be men without interests, without
friends, without ambition and without hope. While it may appear grim
journals/index.php/portal/article/view/44/0> [Accessed 31 July 2014].
44.Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, Éloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009),
p. 84.
45.Badiou, Éloge de l’amour, pp. 53–54.
46.See also Alain Badiou, L’Éthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal (Paris: Hatier, 1994).
22
MORREY
and colourless to many readers, Houellebecq makes a thoughtful case
for this extreme detachment to be the only practical solution to the
oppressive clamour of consumerism. The problem is that it has become
so far from conceivable in our culture that extravagant science-fictional
narrative frames are required in order to imagine it. Houellebecq’s
work is repeatedly suggestive of the rhetoric of religious contemplation
and prayer, asceticism and renunciation, arguably drawing stronger
influence from Buddhism than from Christianity. An appeal to religion
often comes across, in Houellebecq, as the necessary means to think us
beyond our current cultural, spiritual, ethical and — perhaps in time —
demographic impasse. The recent Configuration du dernier rivage is full
of images of the absence of God, the withdrawal of the sacred and the
impossibility of faith. The world appears as a barren desert expressing
the poet’s isolation, depression and inertia. Sometimes this appears to
stem from a sexual disappointment only too familiar from the author’s
novels; yet the heightened importance of love in Houellebecq’s poetry
could invite a Romantic re-reading of this same novelistic material.
Still, it is the failure to see beyond a Romantic conception of idealized
love that is perhaps responsible, at some level, for Houellebecq’s
sexual petulance and pessimism. Love appears almost as a kind of
faith for Houellebecq, as it does for Badiou, but the poet seems unable
or unwilling to grant what the Church always understood: that faith
requires work — in the form of regular practice, ritual and enunciation
— in order to be sustained. All the same, the initial eagerness to focus
on Houellebecq’s attention-grabbing discussion of sex has no doubt led
to an overly simplistic account of his understanding of the affective
arena. A careful re-reading of the roles of love, faith and commitment
in the author’s work is overdue; a slow reappraisal that might mimic the
style of some of Houellebecq’s own characters while offering readers a
fuller understanding of his world.
University of Warwick