the book of my life
NoonAugust 13, 2022 – 08:33
There is loneliness, desire, illness, estrangement: what mixes lives
from Peppe Fiore
As the book of my life I choose Michel Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles only because it is his best known text. In truth, I consider all the work of this immense author, in its entirety, as one of the most important legacies of literature to humanity, one of the most successful attempts – among those I know – to bring literature into the future and to try to answer to the question that literature has always dealt with, always the same, that of Foster Wallace: What it means to be a fucking human being.
But let’s go in order. Elementary particles the story of the parallel lives of two French brothers born in the second half of the twentieth century. Michel is a genetic biologist, Bruno is a literature teacher. The former conducts research in a laboratory, nothing in the least adventurous, all day genome sequencing and sad business dynamics among office colleagues (activities that will incidentally lead him to the Nobel Prize). The other lives a life of sexual frustration: squeezed between the nagging desire and the inability to satisfy it. Bruno painfully aware of being placed in a low rung of the social ladder and, therefore, of possessing a limited market value on the procreation marketplace. The term market is not accidental: one of the basic theses of the novel that relations between people in the West are governed by laws of give and take as rigid as those that govern markets and geopolitics.
Houellebecqian neo-positivism, the idea of being able to interpret the behavior of the average male in the European metropolis who would like to mate but cannot, applying stricto sensu pieces of Comte’s sociology. And it’s not just Comte. One of Houellebecq’s trademarks is precisely the mixture of non-fiction parts (in his books you will find the corporate biography of the Mercure hotel chain, detailed digressions on Autogrills, on the French counterculture, on the evolution of agricultural policies of the government and of course the most beautiful pages always on mass tourism), and narrative parts that tend to tell the torment and depression of the protagonists. This generates an effect that is both universalizing, alienating and surprisingly very ironic.
The irony of Houellebecq one of the first things that made me fall in love with him. Houellebecq treats the human as a case study, with the cold and definitive gaze of the social scientist – or indeed of the depressed. At the same time the matter of which that human made is so alive and bleeding that it is impossible not to feel compassion for it. The human cases (here the literal definition) of Houellebecq tend to be made up of loneliness, desire, illness, estrangement, in short, the material that mixes lives in the West. Bruno and Michel are nowhere at home, precisely because they look at the human experience with the eyes of the author, of the sociologist, or of the entomologist, they constantly feel strangers to it and can do nothing but submit to universal laws. that the author looks ruthlessly, ending up crushed. In this they manage to be even desperately comical, as in the memorable scene in which Bruno masturbates on the homework of one of his students.
Because then, of course, there is sex. Everyone knows that it is impossible to talk about Houellebecq without talking about sex. I am sure that much of his editorial success depends on the fact that the novels are full of sex and that, from a certain point of view, you can approach Houellebecq as a writer of erotic novels. I myself was obviously mesmerized by it right away. Houellebecq perhaps the greatest living writer of sex scenes, yet these are incredibly dry, gynecological, often pure descriptions of the mechanism of the sexual act – in this Houellebecq has found a brilliant way to be porn without being morbid, by treating sex like the definitive way to access the absolute.
Another of the things that made me fall in love with Houellebecq was the enlightenment that in a novel one could deal with situations that, apparently, had nothing to do with romance. Monoprix supermarkets, Minitel (when Minitel still existed in France!), Cheese brands, gray office life, shopping ordered over the phone. And in general the internal views of the characters, the apathy, the quiet hopeless despair, still the loneliness, the not wanting to live anymore. I distinctly remember the shocking impression that made me read those pages for the first time: was it really possible to make literature with that stuff? Yet it was all desperately current, it was all desperately human. I had only experienced a similar sensation as a kid reading Aldo Nove’s books with shampoo brands and mutatis mutandis with Autechre (could you really make records with those alien sounds?). Elementary Particles was the novel that unhinged literature from the prestigious place that I thought was hers, the shelf that looks at the world from above, to throw it with a radical gesture into life like a grenade, which then what it should try to make every novel if only programmatically.
Every time I reopen these pages I find my fellow men, I rediscover the isolation, the sexual frustration, the Schopenhauerian peremptory affirmation that life is pain, and that pain would be enough to explain everything. But also the profound proximity of this author to the core of human experience. Which is, assuming the pain, in not giving up anyway, in always tending to gasp towards a further plane, whether through sex or the experience of nature or, finally, through love that, despite everything, continues to shine like a little light somewhere at the bottom of this boundless dark space.
13 August 2022 | 08:33
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