The Western Abyss

Reviewed by Benjamin Kerstein

The Possibility of an Island
by Michael Houellebecq
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 352 pages.

Similar criticisms were raised regarding Platform. Writing in the Guardian, Michael Worton proclaimed that the novel was “weakly conceived, badly structured and in narrative terms simply not convincing.” Charles Taylor at Salon.com dealt with The Elementary Particles in near-Houellebecqian terms:

I stopped reading Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, The Elementary Particles, right around the scene where the narrator bashes in the head of a cat after the animal has watched him masturbating. By then, I felt I’d been watching Houellebecq masturbate for pages, and I escaped while my own noggin was still intact.

These are not shallow critiques. (Or most of them, anyway: Oddly enough, Taylor goes on to say that he enjoyed Platform, a novel which is, if anything, even more onanistic than its predecessor.) They question the foundation of Houellebecq’s reputation, the assertion that, however much one may despise him and his books, he cannot be ignored. Like the parent who ignores the petulant child because indulgence will only invite further disobedience, Houellebecq’s strongest critics are those who simply dismiss him.

One cannot dismiss this dismissal. Much of what Houellebecq relates is not new; existential despair and the ubiquity of crisis have been staples of European literature since Nietzsche, and the author to whom Houellebecq is most often compared, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was at the height of his powers in the 1930s. Houellebecq is, perhaps, simply another installment in the long tradition of European transgressive fiction, which becomes more transgressive and thus more banal with each new incarnation. It is not, after all, such a difficult thing to shock people.

Nor is Houellebecq’s rebellious persona entirely sustainable. For him to be the most widely discussed author in France, someone in the literary establishment must embrace him. Perhaps the author’s public antics and the deliberately provocative nature of his work are simply a vicarious amusement for the chattering classes he despises. Or perhaps Houellebecq is an establishment jester, a court clown whose excesses are indulged because they disturb the boredom of everyday privilege. And as for his critique of the 1960s generation, it has been the staple of conservative thought since the 1960s themselves. Bashing the soixante-huitards may be frowned upon in some circles, but it is undoubtedly fashionable. Ultimately, it is hard to claim that an author who is so widely popular and influential is, in fact, genuinely transgressive.

These critiques are substantial, but they cannot be accepted. Houellebecq is more than the sum of his transgressions. He is the author of a coherent universe, one that crosses the line of literature and engages that phenomenon which has lamentably been termed “the human condition.” This is not a shallow accomplishment, nor is the substance of this engagement redundant. Houellebecq may be part of a trend in European literature, but he is not of it. One sees little of Nietzsche or Céline in his books. The more recent works of Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, and Emmanuel Carrère are, on the other hand, instantly recognizable influences. Moreover, Houellebecq’s work is journalistic in a way that the work of Céline, Camus, or Sartre is not. And despite the accusations of masturbatory writing, Houellebecq is undoubtedly curious about the world outside his own head. His books contain as much material gleaned from his own observations as from his narcissistic perversions; many of his most controversial scenarios are based, in some measure, on basic reportage.

Nor can Houellebecq’s critique of the 1960s be easily dismissed. As opposed to the puritan conservatives bemoaning the collapse of Western civilization, he writes as a participant, indeed as a factor in the collapse itself. Houellebecq is, after all, a sexual libertine. He rejects the facile moralism of the puritan, the hypocrisy inherent in condemning pleasure. He writes about sex as a painfully self-aware Marquis de Sade. If one must speak of sex, he says, speak also of the damage done. Sex in Houellebecq is an inscrutable complexity, simultaneously beautiful and disgusting; it is spoken of in terms of its messianic power and its proximity to destruction. The 1960s are condemned not for liberating sex, but for turning sex into idolatry.

Ultimately, Houellebecq is controversial not because of his transgressions, but because of the impossibility of his vision. One who senses an undeniable truth in Houellebecq’s work must face the question of whether one can accept such a vision and still continue to live. Houellebecq’s answer is a despairing one, but it nonetheless contains some hope: Despite their constant humiliations, frustrations, and inevitable destructions, Houellebecq’s characters are unmistakably possessed of an always unspoken but nonetheless palpable will to live. So palpable, in fact, that it ultimately takes form in the dream of immortality itself.

Houellebecq’s heroes are creatures desperate for life in a world rent by the will toward death. Houellebecq’s humanity is doomed not only to annihilation, but to a desire to continue to live, and thus be trapped in an eternal struggle between modernity’s urge toward its own annihilation and our will to resist death—even to the point of abandoning our genetic code to the science of immortality. The Possibility of an Island is thus a consummation, the cri de coeur of a man who cannot live and yet cannot bring himself to die. This is the hope that springs from enlightened despair; it is, perhaps, the only true hope in a world in which we all live under an absurd sentence of death. It is the belief that, like Camus’ Sisyphus, we may yet find worlds in the crags of that eternal rock.

There have always been those who cannot live. But it is the rarest among us who cannot live and cannot cease to live, for whom neither life nor death is capable of salving their inscrutable wounds. Their self-penned epitaphs remain among the monuments of the human race, testimonies to our capacity to continue. Michel Houellebecq, whatever else he may be, is one of them. As such, he points, perhaps, to a way up from the discontents of our age: The embrace of life with eyes wide open to its undeniable ugliness.

Having destroyed the human race and declared the desolation of its successors, it is difficult to imagine where Houellebecq can go next. Perhaps he will join Lovecraft and repair to the world of the purely fantastic. He may, as he has sometimes threatened, simply stop writing. We should pray that he does not, for if so, we and our despairingly fragmented, technologically tyrannized age will have lost something altogether more fragile and precious than a literary legacy: the voice of a human being.

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Benjamin Kerstein is a writer, blogger, and student of Jewish history. He lives in Beersheva.