Here’s part two of my essay on Michel Houellebecq:

From the very first sentence in Against the world, against life Houellebecq is clear in his intent:

“Life is painful and disappointing.” [Pg 27]

Like Lovecraft, Houellebecq sees no value in modern life. He splits us into two separate camps and from the outset, and again like Lovecraft, Houellebecq firmly marks his territory:

“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the presence of those who are a little fed up with the world” [Against the world, against life Pg 28]

The following paragraph is fundamental in understanding the core philosophy that both drives and consumes Lovecraft and, more importantly, Houellebecq. It is paramount in understanding the myriad machinations that lie beneath both author’s fictions and is basically a blueprint for the entire structure of Houellebecq’s Atomised and many of Lovecraft’s shorter fictions. Ultimately, it is simply impossible to ignore when trying to decipher Houellebecq’s intent:

“The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant” [Against the world, against life Pg 30]

All this may very well, to most readers, reek of juvenilia and petty angst but I feel Houellebecq’s pessimism, drawn as it is from the Lovecraftian landscape, runs deeper than just a clever regurgitation of mere teenage folly. There is an intrinsic, and wholly important, literary intent especially when taken into account alongside Houellebecq’s collected fictions. The above paragraph is deeply elegiac, as is most of Against the world, against life. It reads like well-oiled prosody in a novel of affectation and urgency, uttered vivaciously from the mouths of central characters in darkened, smoke-filled rooms, deep within the underbelly of the city. In other words it is atmospheric and incredibly good writing; such posturing does not encumber his intended message and although these words and sentences shine throughout, Houellebecq still manages to write from below, and it doesn’t interfere with the books initial façade: the collected fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. And yes, Houellebecq certainly likes to hide in this manner but it certainly doesn’t stop him from being heard. It is quite understandable now we begin to understand: that death plays a major role in both Lovecraft and Houellebecq’s work:

“Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And this is another thing that curdles the blood when one discovers Lovecraft’s universe. The deaths of his hero’s have no meaning. Death brings no appeasement” [Against the world, against life Pg 30]

Again, Houellebecq may very well be talking about his own fiction. Exactly the same can be said when first reading Whatever, Atomised and, notably, Platform. Death is used in Platform to show that life can be snatched away at any given moment. When Houellebecq tackles death his is darker and more daring than most and takes off where Beckett left off. This post Beckettian slant is as damning as it is electrifying. We already know that much of Houellebecq’s fiction shows us the horrid minute particulars of an empty, barren modern world and that he is steadfastly determined in his views sex is central to this vacuous existence – that love, in fact, does exist but is made the more forlorn because it is unreachable. But it is how Houellebecq treats death that leaves the bitterest taste on our pallets. And in this we see Houellebecq at his most Lovecraftian. In the same way that Lovecraft uses a puritanical and stable society put at risk by invading unstable forces i.e. half-breed monsters, ghouls, morally corrupt beings. Houellebecq uses the idea of a decadent and unstable society put at risk by prevalent stable enemies ie sex, tourism, religion, money. Death, as with Lovecraft, permeates throughout Houellebecq’s fiction. Both seem to gain pleasure from its presence. Death is throwaway; it is the single and only inevitable outcome. Happiness can never be fully achieved because death is the final conclusion. Whereas in Lovecraft’s landscapes characters are mercilessly consumed by death in its myriad guises and forms life is snatched from the aimless hoards in Houellebecq’s gloomy fiction. For Houellebecq death takes without warning, it is as omniscient as the air we breathe, it grabs and snatches when and wherever it wants and it is usually a consequence of our own vanity and greed. The crux of Platform is the pursuit of love, an idea of love which is idiosyncratically Houellebecq’s own, but love all the same. When the narrator Renault (a nod and a wink to Camus’ very own cog in the system Meursault) falls in love with Valérie this brief moment of happiness is cruelly taken away. Death, it seems, governs all.

Of particular note is the frequency of these tragic deaths that befall the majority of Houellebecq’s key characters, especially his women. Most either commit suicide or meet grim ends and even mother’s do not escape, or fathers for that matter. Unlike Lovecraft, in this respect, who treats death as a fantastical other-worldly occurrence in his fictions, Houellebecq’s deaths materialize rather matter-of-factly, his prose-style terse and unassuming, yet still challenging enough to shock. The end result is still the same though, humanity is taken down a peg-or-two and both authors take immense pleasure in this. Take this take on Camus’ L’Etranger in the opening paragraph from Platform:

“Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult…As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker…’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not everyday you have a death in the family.” [Platform Pg 3]

Compare this with the overblown bombast used to describe a death in the opening paragraphs of a typical piece of Lovecraft fiction:

“The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.” [The Lurking Fear, H. P. Lovecraft, 1922]

These two narrative voices can not be more diametrically opposed to each other in style and timbre, but they do share that same sense of enjoying the reader’s discomfort, that same desire to repulse and compel, that same distain for their species.

Many people have commented on Houellebecq’s macabre enjoyment only being carried out on his female characters. This is not a misogynistic act by Houellebecq, it is quite simple really: the ultimate goal for an individual in his fiction is love, yet his narrators are always male, heterosexual and single. Their sole aim is the possibility of love gained from a sexual encounter with the opposite sex. But Houellebecq, just as he likes to kill people off, doesn’t want this fulfilment to materialize, he wants a sense of it, a sniff, so he sides himself with kismet and takes this goal away from under the noses of his characters in a way that is both horrifying and futile: death.