Not studying many modern French novels, I'm not entitled to say that Michel Houellebecq is essentially the most fascinating French novelist writing immediately, however he's actually very good, if in a considerably restricted manner. His beam is slender however very penetrating, like that of a laser, and his theme an essential, certainly a significant one: specifically the vacuity of contemporary life within the West, its lack of transcendence, lived as it's more and more with out spiritual or political perception, and not using a worthwhile artistic tradition, typically with out deep private attachments, and with out even a battle for survival. Into what Salman Rushdie (a a lot lesser author than Houellebecq) referred to as “a God-shaped gap” has rushed the seek for sensual pleasure which, nevertheless, not more than distracts for a short time.
One thing extra is required, however Western man—not less than Western man at a sure degree of training, intelligence and materials ease—has not discovered it. Houellebecq’s underlying nihilism implies that it's not there to be discovered. The results of this lack of transcendent objective is self-destruction not merely on a private, however on a inhabitants, scale. Technical sophistication has been accompanied, or so it typically appears, by mass incompetence within the artwork of residing. Houellebecq is the prophet, the chronicler, of this incompetence.
Even the ironic title of his newest novel, Sérotonine, is testimony to the brilliance of his diagnostic powers and his capability to seize in a single phrase the civilizational malaise which is his distinctive topic. Serotonin, as by now each self-obsessed member of the center lessons should know, is a chemical within the mind that acts as a neurotransmitter to which is ascribed powers previously ascribed to the Holy Ghost. All types of undesired conduct or feeling are brought about a deficit or surplus or malalignment of this chemical, in order that in essence all human issues turn out to be ones of neurochemistry.
On this view, unhappiness is a technical drawback for the physician to resolve fairly than a trigger for reflection and maybe even for adjustment to the way in which one lives. I don’t know whether or not in France the phrase malheureux has been nearly fully changed by the phrase déprimée, however in English sad has nearly been changed by depressed. In my final years of medical apply, I will need to have encountered tons of, maybe hundreds, of depressed folks, or those that referred to as themselves such, however the one sad individual I met was a prisoner who wished to be moved to a different jail, little doubt for causes of security.
Houellebecq’s one-word title captures this phenomenon (a semantic shift as a handmaiden to medicalisation) with a concision not often equalled. And certainly, he has remarkably delicate antennae to the zeitgeist normally, although it should be admitted that he's most delicate to these facets of it which are absurd, disagreeable, or dispiriting fairly than to any which are optimistic.
Houellebecq satirises what is perhaps referred to as the neurochemical view of life which is little higher than superstition or city fable. The protagonist and narrator of Sérotonine, an early-middle aged agronomist whose jobs, although rewarding sufficient financially, have all the time appeared to him unsatisfactory or pointless. He suffers from the unhappiness that outcomes from his incapacity to type a long-lasting relationship with a lady, as an alternative having a sequence of relationships which he sabotages by his impulsive sensation-seeking behaviour. This man goes to a health care provider to acquire extra of his Captorix, a fictional new serotonergic anti-depressant. The physician, with out enquiring into the circumstances of his life, says to him:
What’s essential is to take care of the serotonin on the right degree–then you definately’ll be all proper–however to decrease the cortisol and maybe increase the dopamine and the endorphins could be the best.
That is the form of debased scientistic language that may be heard on conversations on any bus, and jogs my memory strongly of Peter D Kramer’s preposterous ebook, Listening to Prozac, which some years again persuaded the general public that we're on the verge of understanding a lot neurochemistry that we will quickly be capable to design our personal personalities by the use of self-medication.
The novel lacks even the illusion of a plot, being extra the fictional memoir of the chagrins of a person (one suspects) very very similar to the creator himself. The protagonist, Florent-Claude (a ridiculous title that he hates) has been in love twice, however has each occasions ruined the connection by a fast fling with a passing younger girl. Though he has turn out to be dependent, not less than psychologically, on his Captorix (by the way, however not coincidentally, a really believable title for a brand new drug), he recognises on the finish of the ebook that he's the victim-participant of a tradition wherein monogamy is hardly to be anticipated. Talking of the failure of his relationships, he says:
I might have made a lady joyful… In truth, two; I've already informed you which ones. Every thing was apparent, extraordinarily apparent, from the primary; however we didn’t realise it. Had we surrendered to illusions of particular person freedom, of the open life, the infinity of prospects? That might be, these concepts have been within the spirit of the occasions; we hadn’t formalised them, we hadn’t the will to take action; we have been content material to evolve to them, to permit ourselves to be destroyed by them.
For me the pleasure of studying Houellebecq isn't within the plot, nonetheless much less within the characterisation which is skinny as a result of the protagonist-narrator is so egotistical that he has little curiosity in anybody else (a trait which we're clearly supposed to consider is widespread and even dominant within the fashionable world). It's fairly within the mordant observations that Houellebecq makes on consumerism and its vacancy. Right here, for instance, Florent-Claude meets Yuku, his former Japanese girlfriend residing in Paris, at an airport in Spain the place he's briefly residing:
I knew her baggage very effectively, it was a well-known model that I had forgotten, Zadig and Voltaire or maybe Pascal and Blaise, whose idea had been to breed on its materials a kind of Renaissance maps wherein the landmass was represented very roughly, with a classic legend studying one thing like ‘Right here be tygers’, anyway it was stylish baggage, its exclusivity strengthened by its lack of the little wheels that the vulgar Samsonite instances center managers have, so it was essential to wrestle with it, identical to with the elegant trunks of the Victorian period.
He continues:
Like all the opposite international locations of Western Europe, Spain was engaged on the mortal battle to extend productiveness and had suppressed all of the unskilled jobs that previously helped to make life rather less unpleasant, on the identical time condemning the larger a part of its inhabitants to mass unemployment. Baggage like this, whether or not it was Zadig and Voltaire or Pascal and Blaise, solely had sense in a society wherein porters nonetheless existed.
On this passage, with typical financial system, Houellebecq skewers each the vanity of a tradition wherein folks acquire their sense of themselves from the seen labels or manufacturers of their possessions, and the absurd however intractable contradictions of our political financial system. He after all proposes no answer (maybe there may be none), however it's not the aim of books comparable to his to suggest options. It's sufficient if he opens our eyes to the issue.
His mordant observations make many individuals extraordinarily uncomfortable, not as a result of they're inaccurate, however as a result of they're solely too correct and will conceivably result in disagreeable conclusions, or not less than ideas. They subsequently reject the entire: it's the best solution to deny what one is aware of to be true. Within the following passage, for instance, the protagonist (or Houellebecq) describes the proprietor of a bar in Northern France who has simply spent his time—of which there was a lot—in minutely studying the native newspaper:
The proprietor had completed Paris-Normandie [the local newspaper] and had launched on simply as shut a studying of France Soccer, it was a really thorough studying, such studying exists, I've recognized folks like that who will not be glad by studying simply the headlines, the statements of Édouard Philippe [the current Prime Minister of France] or the quantity of Neymar’s switch payment [Neymar is a famous Brazilian footballer], however wish to get the underside of issues; they're the muse of enlightened opinion, the pillar of consultant democracy.
Houellebecq runs an abattoir for sacred cows.
What will be stated in opposition to his misanthropic, fully disabused view of the fashionable world? His intercourse scenes, which for many who have learn a number of of his books now appear to be a tic or the general public confession of his personal deepest fantasies, indicate that intercourse is (and will be) nothing however the transient satisfaction of an pressing need, as mechanical in its operation as that of a cement mixer. Extra importantly, it is perhaps stated that he concentrates solely on the worst facets of modernity, its non secular vacancy for instance, with out acknowledgement of the methods wherein life has improved. However that is like objecting to Gulliver’s Travels on the identical grounds.
His work, not least Sérotonine, is crammed with disgust, as was Swift’s: however it's the form of disgust that may solely emerge from deep disappointment, and one isn't disillusioned by what one doesn't care about. There's gallows humour on each web page: the personage hanged being Western civilisation.
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