Michel Houellebecq and character
In the best pages of Atomised and Whatever, Houellebecq’s vision of a disposable humanity has been enough to justify his self-description as a writer of ‘materialist horror stories’. But on the whole his fiction has seemed an ambiguous achievement, as much a symptom as a diagnosis of the condition it attacks: often indifferently written, and plotted in half-hearted obedience to melodramatic cliche, it has also been a characterological wasteland. Houellebecq has sometimes been wittily self-conscious about this. As the narrator of Whatever explains, ‘there are some authors who employ their talent in the delicate description of varying states of the soul, character traits etc. I shall not be counted among these. All that accumulation of realistic detail, with clearly differentiated characters hogging the limelight, has always seemed pure bullshit to me.’
Moreover, ‘the simple play of historical forces’ made the post-individual approach increasingly realistic, as human personalities became more uniform. But Whatever also pictures one of Houellebecq’s sexual paupers with a comic vividness rare among the characters (if that isn’t too strong a word for these narrative time-servers) of the later books: ‘The problem with Raphael Tisserand — the foundation of his personality, indeed — is that he is extremely ugly. So ugly that his appearance repels women, and he never gets to sleep with them … He has the exact appearance of a buffalo toad — thick, gross, heavy, deformed features.’ Not much foundation for a personality maybe, but enough that the reader can feel a certain pang when this toad is squashed on the highway — ‘I was never to see Tisserand again; he was killed in his car that night’ — and remember him after the book is shut.
Houellebecq’s descriptions of female beauty — not to speak of female personalities — have been, by contrast, of a remarkable nullity. This is striking in a writer whose male characters can be divided into alter egos and non-entities, and whose alter egos mainly want to get laid: ‘His only goal in life had been sexual,’ Bruno reflects in Atomised. The sex scenes in that novel, like the many similar orgy and sex-club episodes in Platform and The Possibility of an Island (2005), are so cliched that they might have been composed by a blind male virgin who’d read a lot of smut by Braille and knew about women only that tits should be firm and pussies tight. And the love objects bestowed on the male heroes of the middle three novels acquire hardly more individuality than the human sex toys going up and down as they pass by like plastic horses on a carousel.
