Impolitic

In The Design of Everyday Things author and researcher Donald A. Norman makes a shrewd observation of man-made objects that has profound applications to the human condition at-large. “The difficulty of dealing with novel situations,” he argues, “is directly related to the number of possibilities.” In other words constraints—physical, semantic, cultural, logical—are a hallmark of good design that allow and encourage experimentation and enterprise. Too many options—the “tyranny of choice,” as psychologist Barry Schwartz has described the phenomenon—can, instead of satisfaction, generate symptoms of unhappiness: regret, unrealistic expectations, paralysis. (“Dank meme” aficionados—and “Weird Al” Yankovic—call this a “First World problem.”) Anyone old enough to have witnessed television’s transmogrification from coaxial cables and “two-four-six” to today’s glut of programming understands the bewildering effect. (Thanks in no small part to the advent of digital streaming there were, in 2019, over 500 scripted series presented in the United States alone.) Passive non-participation has become too much work. (Our eyes are only so wide.) It is exasperating—blessed though we are—to drink from the proverbial firehose. (Our mouths are only so plastic.) God forbid we must surf it.

Every age has certainly aspired to maximums, to the crossing of thresholds, to perfection. (The Toy Story mantra, “To infinity! And beyond!” is, however trite, perennially apropos.) And each has encountered (and, largely, respected) limits—natural, intellectual, technological, theological. Ours is certainly the first to have achieved a state of abundance, complexity and idyll that—in wanton betrayal of any deference to said restraints—far outstrips the finite abilities of the mind and body to comprehend, experience, consume and organize it. By contemporary norms the hard and software that ships with the standard-issue human being is not enough. (“If it turns out there is a God,” goes the joke in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, “I don’t think He is evil. I think the worst thing you can say about Him is that He is an underachiever.”) Our age is a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity and temptation—everywhere, all of the time, conveniently. And our passions, being fathomless, and imaginations, being singularly cunning, have evolved accordingly, if not asynchronously with our flesh. Almost three-quarters of Americans are overweight. Half are obese. A third—of the men—say they’re addicted to pornography. Six hundred and fourteen are billionaires, each of whom owns, on average, nine homes and nineteen cars. At least one allegedly bedded over 20,000 women, about the population of Laguna Beach, California. The historically sound practices of people in a state of lack (conservation, cooperation, thrift, abstinence, moderation), which describes almost the totality of the homo sapien adventure, appear démodé to our extravagant, individualistic sensibilities. The gift is deficient—we reject it, as it rejected us, the “children of disobedience,” from Eden. (“Freedom,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, “is what you do with what’s been done to you.”) Instead it—this remaking, this so-called Anthropocene (literally, the “Human Age”)—is the rapid oasification of desert by desire, specifically the desire to have, to be satiated in aeternum, of which we now dream.

And yet one gets the impression (via headlines, polls, Twitter feeds, osmosis, self-checkout kiosks, embryonic telepathy abilities maybe) that everyone benefiting—I suppose I can only credibly speak for mine own countrymen—is miserable. (This depression long predates the global blues occasioned by the novel coronavirus and exacerbated by its sister social cataclysms, however.) “You have people in Zimbabwe more optimistic than the French,” says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet of The Telegraph. Indeed you have whole hemispheres with high-speed wireless internet; high-definition televisions in each room; high-inducing personal apothecaries of state-sanctioned pharmacological marvels; high-end meats and whiskeys made in laboratories; highbrow conceptions of civil and human rights, air conditioning, leisure, love. You have people drunk with desire—“so as not to be the martyred slaves of time,” as Baudelaire put it—and endowed with fantastic good fortune and wealth without the presumed concomitant of happiness. The conundrum is a coelacanth of spiritual philosophy. 

Karl Marx explained the paradox this way: humanity’s perceptual powers—“the senses five” that William Blake called “the chief inlets of Soul in this age”—had to wither to an “absolute poverty” in order that our individual troves of experiential “inner wealth” could be turned inside out and committed to external, material demands. (President George W. Bush’s counsel, in the bleak days following 9/11, to “go shopping” could be the reductio ad absurdum of this evolution in consciousness.) This deracination of an entire system of metaphysics did not happen overnight, of course, and it was not a clean split. (We still carry the anthropological memory of what we were.) The divorce, in other words, was not amicable—it placed sadness in the pit of the human experience, sadness for the loss of being once wedded to the circular rhythms of the cosmos, sadness for the ebbing of ignorance, serendipity, mystery and disorganization. (Insert René Descartes’ maniacal laughter, or Adam’s tears, here.) The linear ruling regime of civilization and progress, despite the obvious advantages, still chafes. It is, for many, still our wont to wax nostalgic for what was, though we know of it only through hearsay, cultural refuse and an inchoate residual memory that in combination is dissociating, otherworldly. 

Happiness, wrote novelist Milan Kundera, is “the longing for repetition.” Ritual, order, expectancy, presence—intrigues of the Old World, a place without maps (ergo, without a future). “The supreme absurdity of the modern world,” said Chesterton, is “that it imagines that it can introduce anarchy into the intellect without introducing anarchy into the commonwealth,” into us, into our very bodies. As Nicholas Kristof observes in a recent edition of The New York Times, that predilection for disorder is evident even in a man’s sperm, which increasingly “loll aimlessly in circles, rather than furiously swimming in pursuit of an egg.” (His reporting blames a suite of chemicals known as endocrine disrupters.) Our sexual wells may in fact be poisoned, but the sperm also exhibit the behaviors of the melancholic—perhaps the life-disgust of Sartre’s schizotypal Roquentin—who has mistaken mirage for truth, sand for a spring. (The Empty Quarter is—the Bedouins know—rather empty after all.) Time, instead of something to which we submit and ride like a carousel, is to our hubristic intuitions a force to be manipulated and tamed. Anna Bowman Dodd envisioned such a society over a century ago, one in which, tête-à-tête, “the entire population seems to have but one really serious purpose in life—to murder time which appears to be slowly killing them.” 

“All is vanity,” King Solomon posits in Ecclesiastes. (I imagine millions of sperm pondering the merits of existence on their fitful pilgrimage through uterine moil to the Temple of Life.) He’d traversed Blake’s roads of excess, tasted every sweet ambrosia and arrived at the (understaffed) ramparts of the palace of wisdom. The Isa Upanishad, the Tao Te Ching, Christ and Muhammad too—all warn of the folly of indulgence in transient stuff. In Charles Allan Gilbert’s pun-laden memento mori of the same name a beautiful woman sits at her, ahem, vanity and together with her reflection in a large round mirror composes a Rorschachian image of a skull. It gives futility a face, that of death, the shadow side of pleasure. (In France, for example, the post-intercourse comedown is often referred to as la petite mort—“the little death.”) His is a seductive mien, enchanting even. “It can never fail to be exciting,” author Graham Greene argued, “this curve up to success and down to death.” (He had in mind the disgraced arc of an infamous con man, Sweden’s “Match King.”) But is this really the face we seek? To have and to hold, till death do we realize our imprudence. Why, then, given the option of an escape—of a glamorous suicide—choose its austere antipode, life? 

The particulars of that riddle are the concern of Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin, whose narrator—“protagonist” feels too generous, too heroic a descriptor in this instance—has come, like Querry of Graham Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case, “to the end of everything.” Like his spiritual forebear Henri Michaux, Houellebecq gives the impression he is “writing to you from the end of the world.” Where Michaux found leaves (“There is nothing between them and the tree any more”), Houellebecq finds (or searches for, at any rate) women—lost loves—and a not dissimilar cleft between expectation and experience. (“I felt nothing, radically nothing,” says Serotonin’s aforementioned antihero, Florent-Claude Labrouste.) The novel, in other words, is haunted by a palpable aura of disappointment, the attendant suffering and its inevitability. (Oh, and drugs—every trauma of this “generally inhuman and shitty age” is soothed with mind-altering palliatives.) As Greene learned, it is “something which will always be provided when it is required” (the grief, I mean, not the drugs, though perhaps both are reliably in season nowadays).

Existence unadorned, straight—the given—offers Florent only pain. It must be disturbed. (Even his name, which he thinks in its hyphenated form is effete, is indefensible.) He is, in this regard, an inheritor of Thomas De Quincey’s “desperate adventures of morality” in mind alteration and eudaemonic sojourning. The “moral ulcers” oozing from his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater introduced to Georgian era society a dissonant chord that Houellebecq has carried into what he believes is the coda for, broadly, protean, end-of-history liberalism. (Not incidentally do both Serotonin and its predecessor, Submission, begin in essentially the same fashion—in a mise en abyme allusion to the West—with each narrator realizing “that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me.”) The archetype of the jaded hunter of “authentic experience”—the worldly person who Max Weber says is unable to “take a side” or face the tests of ordinary routine “because the various different value systems in the world are in irresolvable conflict”—is now a common fixture on the page (and the street), but Houellebecq seems preternaturally disposed to drawing-up its paragons and dancing them like double-jointed marionettes through the psychologically napalmed and morally equivocal, pluralist vacuums of end-stage epicureanism, just as Theo Van Gogh was and did for the silver screen. (Both, perhaps unsurprisingly, have expressed nationalist and nativist loyalties—“Nationalists can talk to one another,” Houellebecq wrote in Harper’s—and one was assassinated as a consequence.)

The first thing we learn of Florent—the book’s curtains have parted but a smidge—is that waking is peak-suffering. Coffee and a cigarette are of little comfort. He presumes the second act of his life will mimic the first in its “flabby and painful” descending course, and tells us his greatest consolation is “a small, white, scored oval tablet” called Captorix. The antidepressant is his—and the book’s, literally—Alpha and Omega, his god, supplemented with a pantheon of lesser gods (calvados, Grand Marnier, various wines). In a potent dose of irony and ideological symbolism the pill renders the sex-obsessed civil servant impotent. While his perversions fail to reach the seedy heights of previous creations in the Houellebecq canon—see Bruno of The Elementary Particles and Platform’s Michel Renault, especially—Florent is nonetheless a man inarguably guided by his crotch and an errand to locate its perfect complement. (“Perhaps I will be rebuked,” he predicts, “for placing too much importance on sex.”) In a Foucauldian sense he is convinced the meaning of his life will be (and had been) revealed through orgasm, that the promise (and sentiment) of this dream is, per Shakespeare, “giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel,” that his die is cast—that death, as Georges Bataille writes in Story of the Eye, will be “the sole outcome of my erection.” 

Only our subject, remember, is now a eunuch, a plainly unlikeable one. (“He put a repulsive character at the heart of the novel and set about making him compelling,” says Graham Greene’s biographer of the writer’s debut, A Man Within.) His modus operandi is one of retreat—from confrontation, from love, from humanity, from duty. “Nothing,” he admits, could stop his entropic social descent “to zero.” It is kismet. And yet Houellebecq repeatedly presents the man with salvific opportunities, ripe possibilities, new beginnings. “Assume responsibility,” Houellebecq seems to command of Florent, “now. Do it now.” But he is untethered and adrift, happily (perhaps there is a better word), in a miasma of his own making. Florent’s type is the offspring, if not the begetter, of liquid modernity, a term popularized by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He is committed to nothing, no one, resigned to the fate of a leaf, hurled about by great social forces of which he is primarily a voyeur, hardly a player. (His bumper sticker philosophy could be summed-up as, “save your own arse.”) For much of the book Florent is a guest of an old friend who runs a dairy farm and lets a collection of bungalows for additional income. The man’s wife has ensconced to London with a home-wrecking pianist, management of the farm has become untenable and he drinks, heartily, beginning at breakfast. He organizes a protest of government malfeasance in the pricing of milk, and there, at the zenith of his despair—the unforgivable sin—takes his life in a performance not unlike those of Tibet’s self-immolating monks. (In non-fictionalized “real life,” according to a state report, every other day one French farmer does the same for largely the selfsame objections to the “gallows of globalization,” as one union leader starkly illustrated the situation.) “What are we going to do with the cows?” Florent asks investigators the next day. (Their keeper is dead, the particulars of their care suddenly in doubt.) “In the end it was their problem, not mine,” he concludes and departs. “Who was I to imagine I could change the course of the world?” 

God, thinks Florent, “is a mediocre script writer.” Indeed, as one reads of him eating pork sausages and watching midnight mass on television, alone, on Christmas it is difficult to argue with his thesis. (If—in a clever puncturing of “the fourth wall”—by “god” he has in mind instead his author, Houellebecq himself, Florent isn’t necessarily wrong, either.) He is incapable, it seems, of beholding life as anything but a sequence of preordained entertainments, most of which hold his attention for only as long as they stimulate him erogenously. “I needed love,” he admits, “and love in a very precise form, I needed love in general but in particular I needed a pussy, there were so many pussies—billions on the surface of a moderate-sized planet, it’s crazy how many pussies there are when you think about it, it makes you feel dizzy.” (Sentences with more elegant structure and logical punctuation have been composed with crayon in wide ruled notebooks and bathroom stalls.) Words fail him, women fail him, strangers fail him. “Something in heaven,” he thinks, will intervene. In wanting to have life happen to him, to have his circumstances improved without an attendant improvement within, Florent cannot conceive—with any nuance, at least—of his autonomy, even as he wanders aimlessly from place to place, partner to partner in what the Mundaka Upanishad calls “the paths of unwisdom.” (An encounter with a “chestnut-haired” Hebe—“probably the last possibility of happiness that life had placed in my path”—and the lukewarm self-contempt that he repeatedly stokes in the aftermath of his non-action speaks volumes about his temperament.) He is yoked to externalities, to their manipulative essences—alien, says James Allen, to the real “gaolers of Fate,” his own thoughts. (Serotonin, paradoxically, rarely emigrates from the confines of Florent’s skull for anything beyond the flimsiest sketch of dialogue.) He is, alas, emblematically beheaded, a man simultaneously of and estranged from his time.

And Houellebecq, perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, is hailed as its unflinching chronicler (and, some critics argue, most gifted clairvoyant). The early reviews of Serotonin conspiratorially connected the work to the gilets jaunes, the proletarian “yellow vest” campaign roiling France at the time of its publication. Houellebecq was again hailed for his Nostradomus-like faculties—Submission’s theme and publication on the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris eerily foreshadowed the red-hot debate about Islam and immigration—which certainly moved units, but by its publication in English almost a year later the movement had simmered, and reading it now—stateside, at least, and distracted by an Iliad of other social calamities—the prophecy lacks potency. In fact, nothing resembling the gilets jaunes enters the novel until page 208, and a hundred later the whole thing is over. (The event, in other words, plays a bit part.) The habit of marketers to first distill a work’s relevancy to the au courant is understandable, but the critic who regurgitates such an interpretation reflexively isn’t entitled to such license—it is her job to examine a text and its asteroid belt of publishing junk, to judge it against an appropriate oeuvre of literary accomplishments, to find (or fail to find) in it a raison d’être that justifies its place in a reader’s hands. One has a duty. And it is in the shirking of it that one recognizes the condition afflicting the forgettable bulk of this generation: a deficit of courage. In its prognosis of that Serotonin is a coup de maître, searing and exact. Prescience alone, however, does not a master make.

Houellebecq’s novels are not a joy to read—they don’t dazzle or test their audiences with innovative plot devices or showcase the phenomenological possibilities of the craft. (He is certainly not a “writer’s writer” in the vein of, say, a James Salter or a Clarice Lispector—stardom has closed that door.) His aesthetic is a sterile forcemeat of rational minimalism, operating manuel-ese and plodding reportage often arranged with a beguiling clumsiness. (Slate’s Cody Delistraty has deemed it an “anti-style.”) In English, at least, he is not inclined to the artful construction of sentences, to poetic flourishes or emotional heft, nor does he catalyze the focused collaboration of faculties that, on rare occasions, elevates a mere book into the realm of literature. (The marked resemblance of Shaun Whiteside’s Serotonin translation to Lorin Stein’s handiwork on Submission in technique and tone suggests the same is true of the original manuscript in the French, but I’m speculating.) Take, for example, his odd repetition of the word “parallelepiped”—to me an unfamiliar, clunky mangling of English that nonetheless communicates something not wholly unlike its dictionary definition. (“In geometry, a parallelepiped is a three-dimensional figure formed by six parallelograms.”) The first time it appeared in the text it stood up on the page, like a zit. A new word! (I keep an ever-growing compendium of unfamiliar ones on my tablet.) I may have smiled. The second time, it being such an unusual expression, I winced. (“It could, perchance, be only an oversight,” I thought to myself.) When it appeared again, mere pages later, I suspected the translator—or perhaps Houellebecq himself—of gross malpractice. To employ the same word—particularly one so gangly—thrice (hell, twice) within such a small window or perhaps in the same book, or even—if the word is peculiar enough, as this one is—in the course of a literary career, is foolish. It is like telling the same dirty joke to different groups of people at a party—too inconspicuous. Someone will overhear it on multiple occasions and think you an imbecile. Once is, in fact, often too much. Parallelepiped, in other words, is a miscalculation, especially as it is employed to describe things as wildly disparate as an iPad, a hifi speaker and a shopping mall. My memory of Serotonin is forever wedded to (and bruised by) it.

Houellebecq’s works are, in a sense, thrillers, page-turners, beach reads with a veneer of astute social commentary and existential philosophy. They are monologic, internal affairs—his dialogue is fragmented, stilted and adds little color to his characters. So commanding is the narrator’s—Houellebecq’s—voice that when someone else speaks one still hears his, albeit in costume. It is a kind of ventriloquism. (“They do not live,” said a reader of Storm Jameson’s characters.) He seems an ungracious deity, inhospitable to the autonomy of his creations. Instead of existing within the world he’s made, oblivious to the maker’s hand, they seem less inventions than recruits—movie “extras”—privy to (and noticeably bored with) its moving parts. (I sense they wish, instead of getting boshed with cowardly bureaucrats in the 5th arrondissement, that they’d studied something practical—education, nursing or computer science—and that they dream of the rural life.) It is unnatural to take pity on the sadist, on the debauched and the damned—even the fictional, perhaps especially the fictional—but with Houellebecq it is also impossible; he doesn’t provide the scaffolding, the requisite dimension for such a feeling. Florent postulates that society, endlessly iterating and reprising and transforming, “[is] a machine for destroying love”—I wonder if Houellebecq is himself such an instrument, if not its hapless custodian. I wonder if his own avowed impotence of influence—“You can only observe and describe,” he told The Paris Review, regarding sweeping social changes—is only an aversion to culpability.

Serotonin—from an oblique angle, in the right light—wears the visage of a veiled, belated mea culpa. How much guilt should a man like Houellebecq, or Florent, bear for the descent of civilization into “a call for oblivion?” If, as Bataille said, “the depiction of happiness is boring,” what is the cost of an artwork—and a life—modeled on (and infatuated with) misery? What is the accumulative effect of such habits on a culture? These are echoes of questions asked long ago, and Houellebecq is certainly not the first to disguise them in the shape of a novel, the perfect vehicle for the examination of our radical fidelity to ambiguity. But, says filmmaker Adam Curtis in his new series Can’t Get You Out of My Head documenting our political stalemate and polarization, “These strange days did not just happen—we and those in power created them together.” Querry, Greene’s man who has “come to the end of everything,” nonetheless continues vacantly “practising pleasure” because it is all he’s known. (It’s his “end of the bargain” with society.) Likewise Florent is unable to observe life through anything but the lens of hyper-sexuality—an ideology reinforced by his doctor, who assumes his malaise is primarily a symptom of his genital dysfunction (not the inverse). His slavish devotion to it, to past scenes of coital triumph—an “existential configuration which I had not left, which I would probably never leave, and which, to tell the truth, I had no intention of leaving”—is his undoing, his bugbear of desire. And this is condoned by the moral authorities. (“You do you,” is the instruction of the moment.) Querry, however, seeks an escape, a transition to an existence concurrently elevated and reduced—to possess “a simple and uncomplex heart,” perhaps a kindling of faith—but is exiled in his unbelief, in the flotsam of a culture that has rejected Him. He is a boy raised by wolves—ambivalence is all he’s known. 

“From society in general I have had nothing.” It will, in return, have nothing from Florent. What he manifests is not a life of piteous and quiet desperation—that implies effort and investment. No, he personifies in his mask of unexceptional affability something much more sinister and infuriating. The coward. The ingrate. The quitter. As a reader it is benumbing to not only encounter but inhabit a character as pathetic as Florent. Chickenshit defeatism is tolerable, even compelling under the stewardship of a writer like John Updike—I’m thinking of his hotshot screwup Rabbit Angstrom—or Charles Jackson—see Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend—or John Fante—his alter-ego Arturo Bandini. There is an absurdist sheen to each of these creations that, in the tragicomic tradition, courts sympathy, and each is worthy of it because there remains in his peril the slim possibility of redemption. Houellebecq—in girding Florent with a predicament so unceasingly dour and contrived—denies him it. (What is the utility of hopelessness?) Florent is instead burdened with an unscalable self-consciousness—he is less a subordinate than the author’s peer. He is—in spite of the leveling effects of his “small, white, oval, scored tablet”—impressively cerebral, scholarly, a thinker of rare erudition. Perhaps that—the habit of the intellectual to obsessively scrutinize and overthink—is the provenance of his perversions, his impenetrable ego, his suicidal fatalism. (Does it really matter?) He is, at any rate, ensnared by “the mechanism of unhappiness”—the most primordial stimulus for his debasement that is endemic to this kingdom. “I was hoping he’d escape in the direction of nobility,” writes Jean Giono of a radicalized friend in his wartime Occupation Journal. But the promise of disorder—of enmity and death—proves too alluring. His pacifist credo, his humanity, atrophies and is rewritten by his desires. Houellebecq is intimate with the temptation, how in its innumerable guises—the latest being the mouvements à l’américaine advancing like an invading battalion through French universities—deconstruction, i.e. self-negation, has entranced and foredoomed the West. (I must give the devil his due.) Appearances, however, are deceiving, no? Le bon Dieu est dans le détail—“the good Lord is in the detail”—said Flaubert. Look and see: of course the old giants of the Occident are only hypnotized—Serotonin discerns as much, but declines to intervene. Nobility? Pshaw! I was hoping our Florent would first escape the clutches of his creator and then himself, in the direction of sentience, for there will be no white knight. There will be no new drugs.

Image: Dalmeu, Andreu. Houellebecq smoking. N.d. Photograph. Shutterstock. Web. 6 March 2021.