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.”
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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..
It’s over your head Martin
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.
Ha ha I love the way you’ve decided your own fake orgasms are the measure of all sexual ‘pleasure’
Oh pleeeze.
Everybody knows that the best sessions take place in a frenzied silence
Only if the husband is within earshot.
With advancing years, loud wheezing also becomes a feature.
… followed by fulsome apologies.
How do your lovers know when your silence is the ‘frenzied’ kind and not because you’re too bored even to fake it?
Give me a glimmer. Has it somethimg to do with being bound over to keep the peace ?
“Railee” ha ha! My comment using the b word is still awaiting approval.
Your’e welcome. x
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.
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.
Houellebecq, unlike Bataille or Burroughs, is trying to see beyond the degradation and find hope and redemption.
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?
So believing in genuine love is to be a sentimentalist (and snob) like Barbara Cartland ?
That’s the attitude Houellebecq is trying to demolish.
I sometimes think that French writers. philosophers just need to cultivate cheerfulness.
This kind of thing was done a long time ago by Lautréamont.
What began with Homer, Theocritus, Virgil, Ovid and Horace ends here, with only the buggery and bestiality remaining.
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.
Atomized is very good. Deep and ultimately, sad. His other books have been a slight disappointment for me.
What exactly did was “deep” about Atomized? I must have missed something there.