X Close

Michel Houellebecq is a hopeless romantic He's cynical about sex, yet prey to the potential of love

An apologist for the self-shattering potential of love. Credit: Alessandro Albert/Getty

An apologist for the self-shattering potential of love. Credit: Alessandro Albert/Getty


January 7, 2022   5 mins

One afternoon back in pre-pandemic time, I was sitting in the corner office of a gay sauna, trying to discuss a banking issue with the owner. But we kept getting interrupted by the moans which could be heard through the wall: a young man was getting railed over his lunch break.

I’ve had many strange gigs, but being a consultant to the sex industry had the most promise for literary inspiration. Alas, no matter the degree of perversity I surrounded myself with, everything had an air of mediocrity. From brothels to strip clubs to porn sets, it turns out the business of pleasure is as mundane as the business of anything else.

While talking to the owner about the intricacies of “reputational risk”, I caught the eye of the young man heading for the exit (his paramour remained, on the prowl for round two no doubt). I glimpsed his surprisingly anxious eyes. For him, weekday sodomy may have been genuinely transgressive, a moment where his lust overwhelmed all personal injunctions. More than likely though, he was just getting off.

The author and poet Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel Anéantir is published today, is renowned for capturing our current state of sexual ambivalence. His novels depict aimless contemporary masculinity, often either institutionalised corporate bores (Extension du domaine de la lutte and Sérotonine) or failed lotharios (Lanzarote, Plateforme, Les particules elémentaires). His most archetypal protagonist is Bruno, from Les particules élémentaires (Atomised, in English), a loner who attempts to sublimate the misery of a broken childhood through hedonistic conquests. His story is a series of bleak, pathetic attempts to gain meaning by attending sex parties with his ageing lover:

Imitating the frenetic rhythm of porn actresses, they brutally jerked his cock in a ridiculous piston motion as though it was a piece of dead meat (the ubiquity of techno in the clubs, rather than more sensual rhythms, probably contributed to the mechanical nature of their technique) . He came quickly, with no real pleasure, and after that, the evening was over as far as he was concerned.

As the academic Gerald Moore has noted of Bruno: “Nietzsche’s supposedly revolutionary affirmation of life is reduced to the futile but comforting banality of one who hopes that naughty consumption (ice cream!) and unconventional sex are enough to redeem the misery of existence.”

Despite his aggressive ambivalence about sex, Houellebecq’s novels are often lumped within the genre of “transgressive fiction”. Indeed, Houellebecq’s whole persona is seen as a kind of transgression of contemporary norms to many critics. So tightly has this reputation held, that an event was organised in 2018 at which scholars from Australia, England, France, Northern Ireland and Switzerland at the University of London were brought together to “discuss and debate Michel Houellebecq’s cultural transgressions”.

Transgression, as philosopher Michel Foucault defined it in his Preface to Transgression, is a rapture which opens onto a scintillating and constantly affirmed world, a world without shadow or twilight…It was originally linked to the divine, or rather, from this limit marked by the sacred it opens the space where the divine functions.”

Transgressive authors of the 20th century generally produced narratives which were virulently anti-social (often sexually graphic and violent); both the junky psychedelia of William S Burroughs and the hip psychopathy of Bret Easton Ellis fit into this mould. The archbishop of transgression, though, is undoubtably the dissident surrealist and “excremental philosopher” Georges Bataille, who not only produced transgressive works, such as his pornographic novel Story of the Eye, but provided a theoretical foundation for the genre in his works Erotism and Literature and Evil.

For Bataille, civilisation involves a tension between social taboos (norms of rationality, morality and purity) and the desire to transgress into the heterogeneous (madness, evil and filth). “I believe that the Evil — an acute form of Evil — which [literature] expresses, has a sovereign value for us,” he notes.

To cross the threshold from civilised mind into mad ecstasy (even if merely through art), was what gave man a taste of unindividuated nothingness — complete ego-death both terrifying and exquisite. Bataille deemed non-productive sexuality (from orgies to “high prostitution”) to be crucial to this. For him, a brothel was a church. But, as Houellebecq notes in his novels, to the extent that this was ever true, the sexual revolution of the Sixties has led to the de-stigmatisation of sex, rendering it both moral and healthy. Contemporary sexuality is well and truly within the realm of the normative and rational, which is why it is so susceptible to free market transactional logic.

Bataille himself noted that sacred sexuality required taboo: “If there was not in us a prohibition which is deeply opposed to the freedom of our erotic activity, we would not have erotic activity.” But if transgression through virility and violence is now impossible, how then has Houellebecq managed to capture the spirit of transgression? I’d argue he has done it through a particular form of radical honesty.

Cultural critics who frame Houellebecq as a mere enfant terrible, a provocateur characterised by xenophobia and misogyny, are blind to the deeply spiritual quality of his writing. As a follower of arch-pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Houellebecq’s words hurt, they are painfully true. His ironically titled poem “L’amour, l’amour” includes this cutting stanza:

I speak to all those whom one has never loved, who has never been able to please:
I speak to those absent from liberated sexuality,
from normal enjoyment

Houellebecq’s spiritual pessimism is similar to early 20th century Romanian essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran. Cioran’s cynical aphorisms (“What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself”) sound quintessentially Houellebecqian to modern ears. Interestingly, though, Cioran was also a mystic — for whom nihilism was a passage to the absolute.

The spark of transgression in Houellebecq’s writing, unlike Bataille’s violent sexual drive, is that of raw, emotional fragility. As the (likely self-insert) character of Michel notes in Les Particules élémentaires: “Tenderness is a deeper instinct than seduction, which is why it is so hard to give up hope.”

In a 2007 interview with Le magazine littéraire, Houellebecq angrily dismissed comparisons between his work and Bataille, saying: “Pour moi, le sexe et la transgression n’ont rien à voir” (For me, sex and transgression aren’t related), going on to lament “Je n’aime pas cette confusion entre le sexe et le mal qui fait que tous les gens sont hors sujet” (I don’t like the confusion between sex and evil which means real people end up irrelevant).

Following this, Russell Williams argued that perhaps “Houellebecq’s true transgression lies in the extent to which his novels, even in the face of the insidious creep of neoliberalism, consistently champion the outmoded what Barthes terms ‘l’obscénité sentimentale’: old-fashioned romantic love”.

Indeed, despite his cynical view of sex, Houellebecq is an apologist for the self-shattering potential of love. As the character Florent-Claude Labrouste, bemoans in Sérotonine:  “The outside world was harsh, merciless towards the weak, and hardly ever kept its promises, and love remained the only thing in which one could still, perhaps, have faith.” It is this brutal longing which makes Houellebecq’s novels truly transgressive. He is a hopeless romantic in a world of excess, a sentimentalist in a time of tech-mediated spectacle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening lines to his poem, Loin de bonheur:

The world is disenchanted.
All that has the nature of appearance has the nature of cessation. Yes. And so? I loved her. I love her. From the very first second this love was perfect, complete. You cannot really say that love appears; rather, it manifests itself. If you believe in reincarnation, the phenomenon becomes explicable. The joy of finding again someone you have already met, who you have always already met, forever, in an infinity of previous incarnations.
If you don’t believe in it, it is a mystery.


Jarryd Bartle is a writer, educator and consultant on vice regulation.

JarrydBartle 

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

22 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago

Yawn

I’m a perv. If I use lots of complicated sentences to describe my vacuity, I can make my shallowness a source of status within my “intellectual” circles.

Unfortunately these d I c k s are, increasingly, now setting the zeitgeist..

Alan B
Alan B
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

It’s over your head Martin

Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago

Highly graphic article, but somehow I have no idea what the message is.
By the way, if Bartle was in a corner office discussing banking issues, how did he recognise the face of the railee in a cubicle ?
wink, wink nudge nudge x
Besides, I happen to know that the volume of moaning is inversely proportional to the activity. It is compensatory. So the look on the railee was most likely disappointment.

Last edited 2 years ago by Julie Blinde
alan Osband
alan Osband
2 years ago
Reply to  Julie Blinde

Ha ha I love the way you’ve decided your own fake orgasms are the measure of all sexual ‘pleasure’

Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago
Reply to  alan Osband

Oh pleeeze.
Everybody knows that the best sessions take place in a frenzied silence

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago
Reply to  Julie Blinde

Only if the husband is within earshot.

With advancing years, loud wheezing also becomes a feature.

Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

… followed by fulsome apologies.

alan Osband
alan Osband
2 years ago
Reply to  Julie Blinde

How do your lovers know when your silence is the ‘frenzied’ kind and not because you’re too bored even to fake it?

alan Osband
alan Osband
2 years ago
Reply to  alan Osband

Give me a glimmer. Has it somethimg to do with being bound over to keep the peace ?

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  Julie Blinde

“Railee” ha ha! My comment using the b word is still awaiting approval.

Julie Blinde
Julie Blinde
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Your’e welcome. x

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

A fine article about a subject I didn’t expect to enjoy.
I was particularly interested in the author’s discussion of transgressive fiction. Like many people, I’ve read some of Burroughs’ work. It’s dated but at least there is an element of authenticity. Much of what passes as transgressive fiction today seems contrived; it’s written by people living safe lives who’re trying to shock or perhaps establish their credentials as the next enfant terrible in the making. And of course it’s hard to be transgressive in an age where you can readily find some quite disturbing content on Netflix or other streaming services.
For me, transgression in the modern age lies in the precarity of middle class life here in America; the frightening ability for fortunes to turn almost overnight and tip individuals or families onto the street and a downward path they can’t escape.
I once paused next to an alleyway one evening next to a bar only to see a bloated woman, who might have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old, her skirt hiked above her waist. She looked blearily at me and asked, “Is he done yet?” I wondered who could possibly find her sexually attractive? What did the person who paid for her services see in her? How and why did it make sense? Write honestly about that life from the perspective of someone who can’t escape that life, who has nothing more to look forward to. That seems transgressive enough to me, and I doubt Houellebecq would find much romance there, although Burroughs might.

Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I think we agree on the main point. Endlessly pushing the boundaries of sexual ethics is no longer transgressive. Trying to live a moderately moral life, in the cesspit our society is becoming, is to swim against the tide.

I didn’t find the article interesting. The authors and their output are part of the degeneration. They have little original to offer.

Tony Buck
Tony Buck
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

Houellebecq, unlike Bataille or Burroughs, is trying to see beyond the degradation and find hope and redemption.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago

I thought Submission was a well written novel, but Serotonin was a bleak, tedious book – I’m not keen to read any more Houellebecq after that one!

‘Transgressive’ authors needn’t try so hard to be so serious and heavy: think of Lolita – an absolutely delightful book to read, which makes it all the more transgressive!

“He [Houellebecq] is a hopeless romantic in a world of excess, a sentimentalist in a time of tech-mediated spectacle.” Sort of like Barbara Cartland then?

Last edited 2 years ago by Russell Hamilton
Tony Buck
Tony Buck
2 years ago

So believing in genuine love is to be a sentimentalist (and snob) like Barbara Cartland ?

That’s the attitude Houellebecq is trying to demolish.

Diana Durham
Diana Durham
2 years ago

I sometimes think that French writers. philosophers just need to cultivate cheerfulness.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
2 years ago

This kind of thing was done a long time ago by Lautréamont.

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
2 years ago

What began with Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid and Horace ends here, with only the buggery and bestiality remaining.

Craig Verdi
Craig Verdi
2 years ago

Well, I would just as soon not hear any of. Continue as they may, I don’t need to hear about sodomy. It will always be here as in Sodom. But let’s move on to better topics.

Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
2 years ago

Atomized is very good. Deep and ultimately, sad. His other books have been a slight disappointment for me.

Ludwig van Earwig
Ludwig van Earwig
2 years ago

What exactly did was “deep” about Atomized? I must have missed something there.