Does Michel Houellebecq Still Matter? Part II: The H.P. Lovecraft biography

H.P. Lovecraft, 1937. (Public Domain, via Store Norske Leksikon)

In this column, Geordie Cheetham looks at the work of France’s most successful living writer, Michel Houellebecq. He explores how the author’s early works provide a framework for understanding his output over the last thirty years, and asks: what has made the former IT technician’s tales of modern anomie and despair so popular? And, more importantly: is Houellebecq’s detached pessimism still important for understanding modern France, or has the cynical novelist lost his edge?

‘An absolute hatred of the world in general, worsened by a particular disgust for the modern world’. This is how Houellebecq summarises the attitude of H.P. Lovecraft in his first ever published work, a biography of that same writer. Other writers, Houellebecq tells us, ‘have dedicated their works to explaining the reasons for this legitimate disgust’ – but not Lovecraft. Houellebecq argues that for the author of the Cthulhu mythos a hatred of the world per se takes precedence – this explains why Lovecraft rejected literary realism and lived a life ‘reduced to the minimum, in which all the vital forces were directed towards literature’. But this separation between Lovecraft’s general hatred of life and hatred of the modern world in particular is not as neat as it seems. Indeed, a conditional pessimism is also crucial to understanding Houellebecq’s own work: but to understand how, we’ll first have to explore the biography of his idol. Let us turn from our own object of study, then, to Houellebecq’s: who was H.P. Lovecraft?

H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890. Houellebecq does not bother to relate any details of his childhood; what is important is that Lovecraft suffers a nervous breakdown in 1908, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two he does ‘absolutely nothing’. He only somewhat recovers by 1918, although even then describes himself as ‘half-alive’ in a letter to a friend. This is a man with a profound distaste for life: ‘few beings’, Houellebecq tells us, ‘have been so impregnated, cut through to the bone, by the complete absence of any human aspiration’. Lovecraft found consolation in literature, but literature of a special type: ‘realist’ novels with their fine-grained analyses of places, groups and behaviours which can only ‘reinforce our slight feeling of disgust which is already provided in sufficient quantities by “real life”’ were anathema to him, and he preferred to revel in the terror of a purely material universe completely indifferent to the fate of man. With a characteristically dry understatement, Houellebecq addresses the lacunae in Lovecraft’s published writings: ‘we do not find in his work the slightest allusion to two aspects of reality which are generally recognised as important: sex and money’.

But this ‘absolute hatred of the world in general’ is not so detached as it might seem: a look at Lovecraft’s life suggests concrete factors determined a view which could have been otherwise. In the first place we ought to consider his marriage to Sonia Haft Greene. Biographers have struggled to explain why a man who felt so alien to all human sentiments, who admitted he could not understand love should get married, particularly since he was an avowedly antisemitic social conservative, and she was a divorced Jew. Houellebecq suggests, however, that Lovecraft was genuinely in love: his letters from the period are uncharacteristically sprightly, suggesting a man happy to be alive. As we will see, love is also a central – perhaps the central – barrier against terror and meaningless for Houellebecq’s characters. It is in this sense that Lovecraft’s pessimism seems less inevitable and more socially conditioned – an effect of his loneliness rather than its cause. But for Lovecraft, just as for Houellebecq’s characters, everything will come crashing down: two years after the wedding, Sonia lost her job, and Lovecraft himself was unable to find a source of income. Divorce only came in 1929, but they had been separated since 1926, the year which, Houellebecq tells us, marks the end of Lovecraft’s life ‘properly speaking’. But with that, his ‘true work’ – the series of texts for which he is today known – could begin.

One side of this ‘socially conditioned’ coin is that Lovecraft’s pessimism could be softened by love; the other is that it could be aggravated by the encounter with modernity. Specifically, Houellebecq highlights the time Lovecraft spent in New York, and the development of his now infamous ‘racial neurosis’, as crucial in his philosophic and aesthetic formation. No longer the run-of-the-mill, distant ethnic supremacy of the average WASP, in New York Lovecraft’s racial views became personal, visceral, terrifying. His ‘hallucinatory vision’ of the city’s racially diverse underclass, Houellebecq suggests, gives the Cthulhu cycle its ‘hideous and cataclysmic aspect’: only when terror at the uncaring universe was combined with an overactive capacity for disgust would Lovecraft’s philosophical vision find an apt aesthetic expression. The case of Lovecraft’s marriage and his racial anxiety are both, then, instructive: they show that a world-weary, apathetic pessimism, can be conditioned by determinate social conditions, that circumstances can both soften this pessimism and sharpen it into nihilism and aesthetic revelry in disgust. The social conditions of pessimism remain for all that aspects of Lovecraft’s biography: they help determine the form the literature takes, but are not directly expressed in that literature, which deals with terror in a cosmic, supernatural, detached sense.

Despite making his adulation for Lovecraft obvious throughout the biography, Houellebecq’s own novels do not resemble his idol’s tales of supernatural horror – indeed, they seem antithetical to Lovecraft’s approach to literature. There are two differences of note. The first is a return to realism: if neither Houellebecq nor Lovecraft discuss money in great detail, one cannot say the same for sex. Houellebecq is so alive to the small details of sexual practices that his works often blur the line between literary fiction and erotica. But more generally, his novels almost uniformly look at mundane, boring lives – of middle managers, IT technicians, academics researching Huysmans – and their mundane, boring aspects.

Why does Houellebecq, who had commended Lovecraft for abandoning a realism which can only ‘reinforce our slight feeling of disgust which is already provided in sufficient quantities by “real life”’, return to it in his own work? It is not completely unreasonable to suggest a difference of intention: Houellebecq revels in producing feelings of ‘slight disgust’, just as Lovecraft had revelled in producing feelings of terror. But I think there is more to it than that.

In the first place there is the historical difference. Houellebecq believes the conditions of modern life – by which he roughly means life post-1968 – represent a large-scale failed experiment in personal liberty which, by severing the individual from the stabilising forces of family and community, reintroduce existential dread into the heart of ‘normal life’. In this sense, modern life is worth writing literature about because it generalises the terror, loneliness and insecurity which Lovecraft only described through fantasy. But that cannot be a full explanation; as we have seen, Lovecraft saw plenty of ‘terror’ in New York through the lens of his racial neurosis, yet he did not write novels about it.

What I think accounts for Houellebecq’s turn to realism is his fascination with the boredom of modern life, a boredom Lovecraft would have rejected as philosophically uninteresting. He has a keen eye for everything dull about modernity - it is usually safe, quite repetitive, and there is the sense that nothing of great historical importance will ever happen again. Although his novels are set against a backdrop of rising crime, with perhaps an occasional murder, physical violence rarely takes centre stage. Sometimes, in opposition to the terror of individual freedom and the vices which follow it, his novels appear to actively praise the boring and mundane – conjugal love, the petty-bourgeoisie, physical safety and comfort are bulwarks against less restrictive social mores. As we shall see, they always do so in a somewhat self-conscious manner, making fun of this lack of heroism and ambition – what is important now is to note that this boredom, safety and security is a subject of fascination for Houellebecq, something worthy of study.

Modern life, then, has a contradictory character. In its isolation of the individual from familial and societal structures, in its predilection for liberty over safety and equality, it is terrifying; in its general material prosperity, its comforting homogeneity, it is insipidly secure. Nobody captures this absurdity than Houellebecq. One of the best examples comes from the description of a man who dies on the floor of a Nouvelles Galleries in Extension de la domaine de la lutte, which must be cited in French for its full effect – ‘On ne peut pas dire que c’ait été une mort très digne, avec tous ces gens qui passaient, qui poussaient leurs caddies’ [You can’t say it had been a very dignified death, with all these people who passed by, pushing their shopping trolleys]. The contrast between the man’s terrible fate – dying as people look the other way – with the non-descript, deodorised setting is striking. As is elsewhere the case in Houellebecq’s writing, the anglicism serves to represent all that is homogenous, safe and bland.

The first major difference between Houellebecq and Lovecraft was their approach to realism. The second is Houellebecq’s concern with the conditionality of pessimism. In his early essays, Houellebecq seems to follow Lovecraft’s insistence on suffering as inevitable and constant: the role of the artist is to channel it. Lovecraft’s own biography shows evidence of the conditionality of this pessimism: that it might be aggravated or softened by decidedly ‘unphilosophical’, irrational factors like falling in love or experiencing racial animus. Houellebecq uses this lesson from Lovecraft’s life in his own literature. His characters find solutions to the terror of modern life, whether by falling in love, finding religion, or even becoming immortal. Characters portray their pessimism as the result of the state of things in an abstract sense, but a more attentive reader can see beneath the posture; it is a specific social configuration which causes their misery.

There are, of course, two things to note here. The first is that this critique of ‘social configurations’ is not a critique of society in the leftist sense. Rather than economic inequality, it is sexual inequality which takes centre stage; psychoanalysis does not free people from oppressive mental structures but makes them calculating egoists, and so on. The second thing to note is that every character’s attempt to assuage the terror fails: that is the fundamentally pessimistic part of Houellebecq’s work. But they fail less because of life’s inherent injustice and more because of specific social causes; the more fitting response is thus not resignation but indignation.

We can now begin to understand Houellebecq’s position in relation to Lovecraft. For the latter, the only sincere response to the terror of an infinite universe which does not care about man’s finitude, which does not guarantee other-worldly retribution for his innate propensity for evil, is pessimism – one ought not to expect anything happy or good to come from existence, whose only consolation lies in our experience of awe at its cruelty. This awe can only come about in the realm of the imagination, in literature, far away from the delusions, petty concerns and small indignities of ‘real life’. But is this detached, socially unconscious stance really so separate from the humdrum humiliations of life as it is actually lived? In Houellebecq’s biography of his literary idol, he seems to suggest the contrary: social life could therefore be philosophically interesting. Furthermore, modern life is boring and safe, but revolutions in personal liberty have also made it terrifying: thus it can be an object of aesthetic interest. Tourism, food, sex, politics, science, religion: all deserve serious philosophic and aesthetic study. In other words, all deserve to be the focus of a work of literature. What those works of literature look like, and how they deal with these aspects of modern life, will now be the focus of our attention.