Poseur

On Michel Houellebecq's Fichtean ego

‘The only time an educated and well-balanced person has any business being depressed by a book is when its author is simply a bore’. I want to send this statement by the late Martin Amis to all of my friends who have described the works of Michel Houellebecq as ‘depressing’ or ‘bleak’. If I was feeling a bit down last week, it wasn’t because I was reading Atomised (1998), a novel that claims happiness is biologically impossible. Houellebecq is not a bore; that in itself is immensely uplifting. He doesn’t retail soapy romances or prattle about morality, doesn’t tire us with the biased confirmation or banal exposition of a popular ideology. He’s not timid, the most contemptible thing a writer can be.

Authorially speaking, Houellebecq isn’t just interesting, but optimistic. His life is a tale of how art can raise one from the doldrums, how failure, pessimism, and ugliness lose their sting – their negative power – when they become a pose, a deliberate provocation. Bret Easton Ellis has said he likes Houellebecq’s ‘authenticity … he’s not a poser’ – a fundamental misunderstanding. As the young Descartes wrote in one of his notebooks: ‘Larvatus prodeo … as actors put on a mask, lest they be shamefaced, so I … come before the audience masked’. The reader would be forgiven to think masks a subset of fancy dress. In his first novel Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) Houellebecq wore his biography, professional identity, marital status, and psychiatric condition – everything modern society considers intrinsic and defining of the individual – as an amusing costume to be played with and discarded. He frees himself through his work from the straitjacket of ‘identity politics’ which placates its prisoners, like a King granting favours to his nobles, with dubious benefits and rights. This is the romantic core of Houellebecq’s work, a Fichtean absolute ego ironically detached from any finite manifestation.

Houellebecq walking his dog during his Irish exile

In Plateforme (2001), Michel Renault reads Agatha Christie’s The Hollow and praises her depiction of ‘that suffering which is particular to being an artist; that inability to be truly happy or unhappy, to truly feel hatred, despair, ecstasy or love; the sort of aesthetic filter which separates, without the possibility of remission, the artist from the world.’ It’s this suffering, rather than that of twenty-eight-year-old virgins or sexually frustrated middle-aged men, that lies closest to Houellebecq’s heart. Everything else is a pose, the jolly art of the actor, a masquerade of the ordinary.