Lhe number of readers who bite their fingers for having believed that Michel Houellebecq was an important writer increased further after the publication of his dialogue with Michel Onfray in the supplement of the journal Popular Front, where both go on a crusade for the West, emasculated by individual emancipation. It remains to save the writer from the ideologue, Céline still serving as a convenient model.
Of this debate, the only one that is valid if one likes the literature which reveals to us, whatever it has to reveal to us, The world reported: on December 4, Jean Birnbaum recommends annihilate, of Houellebecq, among the “best books of the year” ; on December 16, Marc-Olivier Bherer analyzes “the radicalization of a successful author” and, eight days later, Michel Guerrin returns to it in his column titled “Ernaux and Houellebecq, by their cold distance, by showing without demonstrating, are just as disturbing and precious”.
The ideological cause of the novelist being henceforth and finally heard, we preserve his sociological realism, by being satisfied with his narrow grid of description. If she was “prophetic”, as we have often repeated, it was the result of a generalized all-out-the-camp that paved the way for the political negation of the other. Let us remind our two worried about the West that contempt for the other was the definition of sin inaugurated by Christ.
Nostalgia for authoritarian oppression
It is surprising that it took us a long time to see that the Houellebecquian narrator, always the same from one novel to another, therefore constitutes the spokesperson for his author. If we must not confuse narrator or character and author, this applies to the latter and not only to the reader. Conversely, what makes the troubled force of the M the Cursed (1931), by Fritz Lang, who foresaw the beginnings of Nazism, is not this grim character, but his visionary interlocking.
The function of literature is to “show without demonstrating”. The problem is that this relevant criterion does not work, here again, and there was no need for Houellebecq to spill the beans: his sociological vision, allegedly revealing the darkness of the current world, is sociologizing, because systematized by his execration of everything which, in our democracies, whatever he thinks of it, frees us from the authoritarian oppressions he longs for, with the violent spinelessness of the repressed. Example, his umpteenth charge against the ” replacement “ Muslim, who outrages the Great Mosque of Paris: what bothers Houellebecq and his identical narrators is never radical Islamism, and for good reason, since it opposes our freedoms that Houellebecq dedicates to his barbeque irony.
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