On Roth, Houellebecq, and Hedonism

Most of the time when I see something about Michel Houellebecq, I sigh deeply, read the first couple paragraphs, and then completely lose interest. He’s always seemed like the kind of writer that would interest me, but most of the criticism concerned with his writing tends to follow the same cliches and make the actual books sound more or less dreadful. It’s along the lines of “That hateful bad boy Houellebecq. He’s written another dispiriting, nearly suicide-inducing book that has defamed the French Muslim community while encouraging men to batter women and have lots of non-procreative sex.”

So when I saw the Houellebecq essay in the new issue of The Point, I almost ignored it, which would have been a bad thing. In about ten pages Ben Jeffery manages to diagnose one of the problems of contemporary lit being written in developed nations, show how Houellebecq’s works fit into it, and finally argue for their worth in overcoming it.

Here’s a decent summary of Jeffery’s diagnosis for this variant of the contemporary novel:

Over 45 years ago Susan Sontag wrote that redundancy—an experience of joblessness or irrelevance—was the chief affliction of modern life, a verdict that has yet to fall out of date. Insignificance and redundancy make special problems for a writer. Speaking generally, what a novelist aims to do is to convey or impose meaning, and meaning is what redundancy undermines—precisely why irrelevance is one of the natural and insoluble terrors of writing. If you were looking for a neat expression for the awful sense of uselessness that anyone with a commitment to the written word must feel from time to time, then Philip Larkin’s phrase would be hard to better: “Books are a load of crap.” “Depressive realism” (a clinical term) becomes an occupational hazard for the author and reader. It talks like this: you hide from life; you make it up; your claims to deeper meaning are a charade; you lie; you are stupid. Take it as given that something in the nature of the modern world—its superabundance, perhaps; the overload of information and of competing leisure options—makes it especially difficult now to write pertinent fiction. Literature is anyway a deeply confused business, based on a kind of basic fraudulence. And asking what it is for is like asking what life is for (which is to say: have your pick of answer, good luck finding any proof). Consequently, depressive realism is impossible to inoculate oneself against. It is horrible and hard, and entirely un-abstract in its horribleness.

As to the answer that Houellebecq provides, you’re going to have to read the article, because it’s not the kind of thing that can be summed up in a nice blockquote. But I will say that it springs from the unabashed hedonism–led, of course, by elevating sexual gratification to the most privileged position possible–that lies behind a lot of what passes for happiness and self-fulfillment in most developed nations.

In one of those oddly nice moments that can occur when you’ve read a really great piece of writing, as I began to see the point of what Jeffery was saying I realized that it synced up perfectly with Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theater, a book that has remained a sort of sore point ever since I finished reading it over a year ago. Like Jeffrey’s description of Houellebecq, Sabbath’s Theater essentially demonstrates the futility of hedonism (especially hedonism borne of sex), and in fact goes so far as to show how awful a life built on hedonism becomes once people without God and without youth and beauty realize that they’re no longer part of the great spectacle. Jeffrey’s reading of Houellebecq speaks beautifully to this book that has bothered me ever since I read it because it is so ugly and so miserable, and yet s completely engrossing and true.

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