Interventions 2020

Michel Houellebecq

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781509549962, 9781509549955
• eBook ISBN: 9781509549979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity's masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom, doomed to follow advertising's every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread.

We can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves, however, by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our smartphones, stop buying stuff and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds.

This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.

1
Jacques Prévert is a jerk

Jacques Prévert is someone whose poems you learn at school. It turns out that he loved flowers, birds, the neighbourhoods of old Paris, etc. He felt that love blossomed in an atmosphere of freedom; more generally, he was pretty much on the side of freedom. He wore a cap and smoked Gauloises; he sometimes gets confused with Jean Gabin. Also, he was the one who wrote the screenplay for Quai des brumes, Portes de la nuit, etc. He also wrote the screenplay for Les Enfants du paradis, considered to be his masterpiece. All of these are so many good reasons for hating Jacques Prévert – especially if you read the scripts that Antonin Artaud was writing at the same time, which were never filmed. It’s dismaying to note that this repulsive poetic realism, of which Prévert was the main architect, continues to wreak havoc – we think we’re paying Leos Carax a compliment by identifying him with this style (just as people make out that Rohmer is undoubtedly a new Guitry, etc.). In fact, French cinema has never recovered from the advent of the talkies; one day these talkies will finally kill cinema. Too bad.¹

After the war, around the same time as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Prévert enjoyed enormous success; one can’t help being struck by the optimism of that generation. These days, the most influential thinker is more likely to be Cioran.² At that time, people listened to Vian, Brassens …³ Lovers smooched on public benches, there was a baby boom, and plenty of low-cost housing was built to accommodate all those people. Lots of optimism, faith in the future, and a certain amount of bullshit. Obviously, we’ve got a lot smarter since then.

With the intellectuals, Prévert was less fortunate. Yet his poems are full of those silly puns that are so entertaining in Boby Lapointe …⁴ Still, it’s true that the chanson is, as we say, a ‘minor’ genre, and even intellectuals need something to relax to. But when they focus on written texts, their real livelihood, they become harsh critics. And Prévert’s ‘textual work’ remains embryonic: he writes with clarity and a real naturalness, sometimes even with emotion; he’s not interested in writing as such, nor in the impossibility of writing; his main source of inspiration, it seems, is life. So on the whole he hasn’t provided fodder for postgraduate theses. Today, however, he has entered the Pléiade, which constitutes a second death.⁵ There his work lies, complete and frozen. This is an excellent opportunity to wonder why Jacques Prévert’s poetry is so mediocre – so much so that one sometimes feels a sort of shame when reading it. The classic explanation (his writing ‘lacks rigour’) is quite wrong; through his puns, his light and limpid rhythms, Prévert actually expresses his conception of the world perfectly well. The form suits the content, which is the most that can be demanded of a form. Moreover, when a poet immerses himself so much in life, in the real life of his time, it would be an insult to judge him by purely stylistic criteria. If Jacques Prévert writes, it’s because he has something to say; that’s all to his credit. Unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid; sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. There are pretty girls with no clothes on, and middle-class men who bleed like pigs when their throats are cut. The children are charmingly immoral, the thugs are alluring hunks, the pretty girls with no clothes on give their bodies to the thugs; the middle-class men are old, obese, impotent, and decorated with the Legion of Honour; their wives are frigid; the priests are disgusting old caterpillars who invented sin to stop us from living. It’s all very familiar; one can be forgiven for thinking that Baudelaire does it better. Or even Karl Marx who, at least, doesn’t miss his target when he writes that ‘the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand […] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation’.⁶ Intelligence is of no help at all in writing good poems; it does however stop you writing bad ones. If Jacques Prévert is a bad poet, this is mainly because his vision of the world is commonplace, superficial and false. It was already false in his own time; today its inanity is so glaring that the entire work seems to be the expansion of one gigantic cliché. On the philosophical and political level, Jacques Prévert is above all a libertarian; in other words, basically, an idiot.

We’ve been splashing about in the ‘icy water of egotistical calculation’ since our earliest childhood. We can live with this situation, we can try to survive it; we can also just let ourselves sink. But what it’s impossible to imagine is that freeing the powers of desire alone is likely to melt the ice. The story goes that it was Robespierre who insisted on adding the word ‘fraternity’ to the motto of the French Republic; we’re now in a position to gauge the full irony of this anecdote. Prévert certainly saw himself as a supporter of fraternity; but Robespierre was not an opponent of virtue – far from it.

Notes

1. 1. Houellebecq’s summary of the reasons for Prévert’s notoriety includes references to the films directed by Marcel Carné for which Prévert wrote the screenplays, including Quai des brumes (1938), starring Jean Gabin, Les Enfants du paradis (1945), and Portes de la nuit (1946). Antonin Artaud seems to have written fifteen screenplays for films, of which only one was made (La Coquille et le clergyman, Germaine Dulac, 1928). As a director, Leos Carax – whose films include Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and Holy Motors (2012) – is noted for his ‘poetic’ style, if not exactly for his realism. Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) was noted for his talkative films, part of the French New Wave; and Sacha Guitry (1885–1957) was active in theatre and then cinema: he decided that the advent of the talkies was a boon for film and became a prolific cinema director.
2. 2. Emil Cioran (1911–1995), born in Romania, settled in Paris in the Second World War and became known as a French writer of pessimistic essays and aphorisms.
3. 3. Boris Vian (1920–1959) was talented in many artistic fields, well known as a singer and songwriter; Georges Brassens (1921–1981) was also a famed singer and songwriter.
4. 4. Robert (known as Boby) Lapointe (1922–1972) was a humorous chansonnier and actor known for his word play.
5. 5. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is a collection of (mainly French) writers deemed to be classics; to ‘enter the Pléiade’ is a mark of literary consecration.
6. 6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, available online: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.

2
The Mirage by Jean-Claude Guiguet

Acultivated middle-class family on the shores of Lake Geneva. Classical music, short sequences with a great deal of dialogue, cutaways to the lake; all of this might give one the impression of déjà vu. The fact that the girl is painting intensifies our worries. But no, this isn’t the twentyfifth Eric Rohmer clone. It’s, oddly, much more than that.

When a film constantly juxtaposes the maddening and the magical, the magical rarely wins out; yet that’s what happens here. The actors, somewhat hit-and-miss in their approach, have a hard time interpreting a script that seems overwritten and sometimes borders on the ridiculous. People will say they haven’t found the right tone; this may not be entirely their fault. What’s the right tone for a sentence such as ‘The fine weather has come to join us’? Only the mother, Louise Marleau, is perfect from start to finish, and it’s undoubtedly her magnificent love monologue (it’s an amazing thing in films, the love monologue) that elicits our unreserved approval. We can soon forgive some of the dubious dialogues, some of the rather heavy-handed musical punctuations; in any case, none of this would get noticed in an ordinary film.

Starting with a theme of tragic simplicity (it’s spring and the weather is fine; a woman of about fifty aspires to experience one last carnal passion; but if nature is beautiful, it’s also cruel), Jean-Claude Guiguet has taken the maximum risk: that of formal perfection. The film is as far removed from the TV advert effect as it is from sputtering realism and arbitrary experimentalism; here, the sole pursuit is that of pure beauty. The way it’s cut into sequences, classic, refined, tenderly daring, corresponds exactly to the impeccable geometry of the framing. It’s all precise, sober, and structured like the facets of a diamond: a rare work. It’s also rare to see a film where the light so intelligently suits the emotional tone of the scenes. The lighting and decoration of the interior scenes are profoundly right, infinitely tactful; they remain in the background, like a discreet and dense orchestral accompaniment. It’s only in the outdoor scenes, in the sunny meadows bordering the lake, that the light bursts out, playing a central role; and this too is perfectly in line with the film’s purpose. There is a te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 1 Jacques Prévert is a jerk
• 2 The Mirage by Jean-Claude Guiguet
• 3 Approaches to distress
• 4 Staring into the distance: in praise of silent cinema
• 5 Interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtelet
• 6 Art as peeling
• 7 Creative absurdity
• 8 The party
• 9 Time out
• 10 Opera Bianca
• 11 Letter to Lakis Proguidis
• 12 The question of paedophilia
• 13 Humanity, the second stage
• 14 Empty heavens
• 15 I have a dream
• 16 Neil Young
• 17 Interview with Christian Authier
• 18 Technical consolation
• 19 Sky, earth, sun
• 20 Leaving the twentieth century
• 21 Philippe Muray in 2002
• 22 Towards a semi-rehabilitation of the hick
• 23 Conservatism, a source of progress
• 24 Prolegomena to positivism
• 25 I’m normal. A normal writer
• 26 I have read my whole life long
• 27 Soil cutting
• 28 The lost text
• 29 Interview with Frédéric Beigbeder
• 30 A remedy for the exhaustion of being
• 31 Interview with Marin De Viry and Valérie Toranian
• 32 Interview with Agathe Novak-Lechevalier
• 33 Emmanuel Carrère and the problem of goodness
• 34 Donald Trump is a good president
• 35 Conversation with Geoffroy Lejeune
• 36 A bit worse. A response to a few friends
• 37 The Vincent Lambert affair should not have taken place
• Sources
• End User License Agreement