Here’s part one of an essay I wrote about Michel Houellebecq:

For all the noise and hullabaloo his fiction has generated in person Michel Houellebecq is, somewhat ironically, a rather quiet and unassuming individual who shuffles awkwardly into and out of crowded rooms surrounded by plumes of blue/grey cigarette smoke bellowing from his nostrils in that ever-so-French way, his belongings (cigarettes, lighter, notebook presumably) carried with him in a nondescript polythene bag. His hair always parted; his face distant, unmoved and stoic, the eyes almost always bored – a curt little man ill at ease with the world. Unlike Salman Rushdie, who himself has ruffled a few feathers in the Muslim world, Michel Houellebecq likes to shun the limelight. Michel Houellebecq is not at his happiest in the company of his own species (although he has been known to drunkenly demand sex with female interviewers on the rare occasion). You can almost sense him wanting to gag in the corner when no one is looking – or so one imagines.

It was his second novel Les Particules élémentaires (Atomised over here in the UK) that first hit hard, both with calculated intent and loud vitriol – an attack on the very foundations of our pampered genus and littered with pornographic sex for added clout. It managed to just about upset everyone; both the left and the right, Christian and Muslim; a reaction that most writers can only dream of – and this was just the start of things to come. It won the French Prix Novembre for its literary “insolence”, a book thought to be deeply routed in the tradition of Voltaire, Camus, Sartre, Tournier and Becket to name but a few. Atomised is Houellebecq’s philosophical attack on the emptiness of modern society and all that had led us to this moment, a sledge-hammer of a novel used with force to show us for who we are: a fragile species which vaingloriously denies our own mortality whilst blindly pursuing banal attempts at unearthing sexual gratification at all costs. Atomised is, provocatively, dedicated to “all mankind”. Little was known then of his first novel Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (curiously given the title Whatever over here), which told of the breakdown of our commercial domain; an environment smothered in information and terminology no one really knows the meaning of, a work-force drudgery dominated by a consumer-driven urge that demands we attain the unreachable whatever it may be, the end result being breakdown. Even less was known about his first ever book, written in 1988 and published in France in 1991, and published for the first time in English last month by Believer Books.

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the world, against life is a personal excursion through the life and work of American horror writer extraordinaire H.P. Lovecraft who, it seems, has been a major influence in Houellebecq’s life since he first read him aged sixteen in France. Ultimately a treatise written in short bursts of digestible insight; lending itself to neat, well-packaged paragraphs and aphorisms in an almost bullet-point-like fashion, Houellebecq fondly calls this book his “first novel”. It is certainly not essayistic in its approach and is more a statement of intent, rather than a stodgy critique on another’s literary output. Better still is Stephen King’s explanation in his interesting introduction to the new American English translation:

“H.P. Lovecraft: Against the world, against life is a remarkable blending of critical insight, fierce partisanship, and sympathetic biography – a kind of scholarly love-letter, maybe even the world’s first truly cerebral mash-note.” [Against the world, against life Pg 9]

But it is more than just one writer’s “scholarly love-letter” to and for another, this book is something much deeper and is as much about its author, if not more, as it is its subject: it is Houellebecq’s own fiery manifesto, a red hot poker thrust into the tender flesh of our literary climate, one young writer’s burning letter of intent displaying a philosophical doctrine of his own making. Everything packed into this rather flimsy book sets out the intentions of his future literary output and now that these titles exist, it is easy to pinpoint the mythical comparisons and theoretical lineage embedded within Houellebecq’s work from Whatever onwards. And for this reason alone it makes for unparalleled bravura and, more importantly, insightful reading not seen since Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

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When writers are young they are eager to convey their innermost literary desires to just about anyone who will care to listen. They want to be understood and, more importantly, they want to be admired. On balance they want to create something new, fresh and unheard of that will utterly astound all that cross its path. So, they write narcissistic manifestos in the vain hope that someone will listen, these guiding principles rarely, if ever, see the light of day of course. But some invariably do. Michel Houellebecq has had the intelligence [others would say gall] to disguise his as a scholarly critique of another’s oeuvre, concentrating on another person’s desires, tools of the trade and frame of mind thus, craftily, removing himself from the picture – but, as they say, the clues are there and Houellebecq can be found lurking in the shadows on every page. Both H. P Lovecraft and Michel Houellebecq are complicated individuals indeed and it’s probably Houellebecq, for the reasons just stated, who is the more complicated of the two. Having not read much H. P Lovecraft I have, however, read a lot of Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq first started H.P. Lovecraft: Against the world, against life in 1988 and even then his mixed intentions were ostensible from the outset:

“In hindsight, it seems to me I wrote this book as a sort of first novel. A novel with a single character (H.P. Lovecraft himself) – a novel that was constrained in that all the facts it conveyed and all the texts it cited had to be exact, but a sort of novel, nonetheless.” [Against the world, against life Pg 21]

Although, I would tend to disagree with the above proclamation. Houellebecq is not being truthful and is trying to pull the wool over our eyes; he is disguising his own, deeply thought out, intentions. The central character is not H. P. Lovecraft but Houellebecq himself and all the “facts” he conveys and all the “texts” he cites are those of his own desire, all designed to grandly serve as a lone caterwaul, a call to arms if you will – the choice fragments and paragraphs put together in a direct manner to openly reveal Houellebecq’s own core and underlying philosophies. All this is determined by how we choose to read the book, and this is its strength, enabling the book to exist in whatever realm we choose to interpret it.

Of course, it helps that Houellebecq is an extremely clever man, in the French manner, and unashamedly so. The whole book serves as a mask for Houellebecq to hide behind if need be. Yet, this mask does not at any singular moment detract from Houellebecq’s intrinsic love for H.P Lovecraft’s work. In this outpouring we learn a lot about our surface subject:

“In 1908 at the age of eighteen, he [Lovecraft] suffered what has been described as a ‘nervous breakdown’ and plummeted into a lethargy that lasted about ten years. At the age when his old classmates were hurriedly turning their backs on childhood and diving into life as into some marvellous, uncensored adventure, he cloistered himself at home, speaking only to his mother, refusing to get up all day, wandering about in a dressing gown all night. What’s more, he wasn’t even writing. What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can’t even be sure of this. His biographers have in fact had to admit that they don’t know much at all and that based on appearances it would seem that at least between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three he did absolutely nothing” [Against the world, against life Pg 28]

So why does Houellebecq hold such a fascination with Lovecraft’s own inertia and, in particular, the deep foreboding weariness he sees hovering above us all? To understand Houellebecq’s own feelings toward this most pessimistic allure we have to take into account his own formative years. Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958 on the French island of Réunion near Madagascar as Michel Thomas. He spent his early childhood in a town near Paris. His father was a mountain guide and his mother an anaesthesiologist. Houellebecq was an unhappy child and this was confounded by his mother and father being less than ideal parents. At the age of six, after his mother left to marry a Muslim, converting to Islam in the process, Houellebecq was abandoned and sent to live with his grandmother whose surname, Houellebecq, he adopted. And that basically was it. Give or take a mental institution or two. It seems that Houellebecq resents his childhood and even more so as an adult, the idea that nothing can be changed, that one can never turn back seems to have galvanised in Houellebecq’s mind a deep routed pessimism that is literally unshakable – a what’s-the-point-in-trying-we’re-all-left-hung-out-to-dry-anyway attitude, a misanthropy born in the years when he was too young to understand it. Which, in turn, leads us to Houellebecq’s dreary conclusion that:

“Adulthood is hell…Perhaps Lovecraft actually could not become an adult; what is certain is that he did not want to. And given the values that govern the adult world, how can you argue with him. The reality principle, competitiveness, permanent challenges, sex and status – hardly reasons to rejoice.” [Against the world, against life Pg 29]

It is interesting to see that Houellebecq shares this aversion to the adult world too, but unlike Lovecraft, who unerringly hides from the adult world within life and his fiction, Houellebecq uses his own hatred of this same world, a world he sees as mere folly, as a battering ram within his fiction. Houellebecq hides from no one in his fiction. Whereas Lovecraft writes about the adult world being infiltrated and corrupted by other forces beyond our powers, Houellebecq dives head-first into our world and retrieves our failings, for all to see, from the bottom of a murky riverbed of gluttonous vanity and decrepit desires. Houellebecq does not trust adults and he finds the adult world littered with falsehoods and shallow pursuits. This emptiness surely stems from his own vacant childhood, the failing of his own parents to build a solid footing for him to spring from, and he wants us to know that our own desires, just like his parents were, are mostly materialistic and sexual, entirely ephemeral, meaningless and without merit and that they can be snatched away from us within the blink of an eye. One only has to read Atomised or his later Plateforme (published in the UK as Platform) to realise this. In Houellebecq’s world, adult life is futile and its core desires as antediluvian and utterly useless as slime mould. It is interesting that “sex and status” are grouped together. In our modern world they are interchangeable pleasures; we try to attain and conquer both, a pursuit repeated ad infinitum. In Houellebecq’s eyes we have learnt nothing, and nor do we continue to. We are basic animals in this respect. Whereas Lovecraft avoided sex at all costs in his fiction Houellebecq’s is literally saturated with it. Sex, Houellebecq feels, is the one thing we cling onto in a modern world devoid of meaning. It is mechanical and primitive and we are obsessed with it. The sex scenes in both Atomised and Platform are Houellebecq’s reaction to the same underlying principle behind Lovecraft’s puritanical aversion to it. Houellebecq is as repulsed by its banality as Lovecraft was. Only Houellebecq chooses to include it within his deeply pessimistic fictions. A true misanthrope, he never shies away from what disgusts him the most: our self-absorbed pursuits. It is placed before us on a slab like a piece of meat for us to prod and inspect, for example:

“Valérie parted her thighs above my mouth. She was wearing a pair of sheer tanga briefs in purple lace. I pushed the fabric aside and wet my fingers in order to stroke her labia…At that moment, I saw a maid sweeping the sand from the terrace. The curtains and the window were wide open. As her eyes met mine, the girl burst out laughing. Valérie sat up and motioned her to come in. She stayed where she was, hesitant, leaning on her broom. Valérie got up, walked towards her and held out her hands. As soon as the girl was inside, she started to open the buttons of her blouse…” [Platform Pg 212]

If one cares to open any page of Platform at random then this is what one will be invariably met with. The sex scenes are frequent and monotonous, the pistons of an engine driving the entire narrative. The sex scenes are mechanical, always from a male point of view, never complicated, never awkward and all parties are always complicit. Women never say no and men always rise to the occasion. It is not real. It is not how we perceive sex to be. It does not happen like this. It is as pointless has not having sex in a work of fiction at all – the paradox being it is Lovecraftian in design. It is a world as unreal as the demented landscapes in Lovecraft’s own fiction. It is an escape. When one reads or hears of people being utterly repulsed by the gratuitous sexual bouts strewn within Houellebecq’s narrative it is easy to envisage him sitting back, albeit rather bedraggled and dishevelled, in a large leather arm chair, counting his royalties with a cigarette and a glass of fine red, a wry smile forming, but never quite materialising, in the spittled corner of his mouth, inwardly laughing at such readers being nauseated by the one thing he wants us to be: ourselves.