Michel Houellebecq (review)

For critics of Michel Houellebecq's work, the uncomfortable question of the extent of overlap between the the opinions of the author and the racist and sexist reflections of his narrators (anti-Arab, anti-Islam, pro-third-world prostitution/sexual tourism, pro-pornography) is never far away. The fear that the fit might in fact be complete provokes obvious critical discomfort, although this at least has the merit of renewing interest in the broader question of authorial voice. Such uncertainties recur en filigrane throughout this collection of essays on Houellebecq; they are confronted explicitly in Liesbeth Korthals Altes's essay on the extent to which his works are romans à thèse. One way to domesticate the unpalatable aspects of his fiction would be to argue that it is to be read entirely en abyme, but such evidence as Altes can provide is thin, as in her identification of a 'manque d'originalité presque trop exemplaire', or her unprovable suspicion of guile behind the narrative incoherences that traverse Houellebecq's novels. In the opening twenty-page interview, Martin de Haan broaches some of these incoherences, but Houellebecq's aesthetics is that of the bulging suitcase ('il faut que tout arrive à rentrer'), and such criticisms leave him unperturbed. He similarly throws no lifebelt to those who would hope for clearly expressed authorial disdain for his characters' views and behaviour: on the notorious attack on Islam in Plateforme: 'je ne sais pas au fond ce que j'en pense'. The interview is a rather flat exchange: Houellebecq's answers are, like the discourse of his narrators, laconic and programmatic in equal measure — indeed he acknowledges his taste for maxims with their 'effet d'irréfutable' — and although de Haan retrieves the ball gamely each time with several thoughtful questions, the discussion never builds up momentum. One welcome aspect of the volume's ten critical essays is the attention given to early and short works normally overshadowed in critical discussion by Les Particules élémentaires and Plateforme. Three (by Ieme van der Poel, Robert Dion and Sabine van Wesemael) focus on Houellebecq's first and arguably best novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994); two (by van Wesemael and Christian Monnin) discuss the short text Lanzarote (Monnin usefully maps its evolution during its three editions between 2000 and 2002). Perhaps inevitably, the most interesting contributions are those that set Houellebecq's work in a wider cultural context (Bruno Viard on writing about filiation since Rousseau, or Franc Schuerewegen on Houellebecq's scènes de cul and mass-market erotica). Those, on the other hand, that pursue the traditional exercise of extracting a 'deeper truth' are more disappointing. Houellebecq's themes are so explicit, his style for the most part so flatly discursive, that thematic analyses throw up banalities: 'le monde se transforme en un grand pays de vacances'; Houellebecq's characters are indifferent to other cultures (Wesemael, pp. 74, 80). Similarly, Murielle Lucie Clément's analysis of a passage that one would have thought required no elucidation, the fantasized metro seduction scene in Plateforme, leaves the reader little the wiser on the relationship between eroticism and pornography (nor is the argument advanced by its attribution of essentialist gender roles to readers). The collection lacks an article devoted to Houellebecq's poetry, although it is referred to in passing by a number of contributors. A full bibliography of Houellebecq's works to date would have been another useful addition.