Holidays in Hell
Platform by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00
Somewhere in the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, an argument breaks out among visitors to a hardcore S&M club over whether torture and humiliation are normal aspects of human sexuality. "It’s completely disgusting," says one voyeur, an artist who has gained some fame for his own revolting exhibitions. "...But it’s precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me."
Ditto the author. Like his previous novel, the 2000 The Elementary Particles, Platform is a shallow, contrary, moralistic, pornographic, and oddly powerful novel of ideas; a story of the pursuit of self-gratification that is also a sour reflection on freedom, and what amounts to a no-win battle between democracy and fundamentalism.
The protagonist, Michel Renault, presents himself as a middle-age bureaucrat with tastes and ambitions to match. A glum little man who works as an accountant for the French Ministry of Culture, his job is to finance contemporary art exhibits whose meanings elude him: "I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager," he tells us. "Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing." For all his self-effacement, Michel is not the type of fictional character who parades his unexamined life for the reader’s smug enjoyment; he’s too smart and self-conscious for that. During a vacation, he looks at himself wearing jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt: "My anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing, and I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on vacation, trying to pretend he’s young; it was pretty demoralizing." The closest he ever gets to a human relationship is his daily visit to the local porn shop (“Watching pussy in motion cleared my head”) or, if need be, hiring a prostitute.
Michel is so jaded by his admittedly passionless existence that not even the murder of his estranged father -- at the hands of the jealous Muslim brother of his father’s girlfriend -- moves him beyond an initial blast of spite. His inheritance does, however, allow him to take a vacation to Thailand, which proves something of a revelation; everyone there, like him, basically wants sex. They see the usual sights and indulge in the exotic foods, but basically they all want to connect, however briefly, with another human -- whether a call girl, a stripper, a masseur or each other. As Michel well knows, sex becomes increasingly difficult to acquire as you age; luckily for him, there’s the young and beautiful fellow tourist Valerie, who hooks up with him after the trip is over and proves to be at least as devoted to the pleasure principle as he is.
Valerie, an executive with the travel firm that arranged the trip, has what Michel can’t seem to find in anyone else: the power to give pleasure unselfishly. When she moves from her up-and-coming firm to working at a major resort industry, Michel inspires her with the idea of setting up a worldwide business based entirely on sexual tourism -- resort hotels in poor or underdeveloped countries where local prostitution is allowed to flourish. As Michel explains it, it’s pure supply and demand: wealthy westerners with everything in life but a good lay meet poor people with nothing left to sell but their bodies. For neither Michel or Valerie is profit the sole motive; they want the world to have what they have -- as well, presumably, as the sheer stamina to blow, lick, wank, fondle or bang each other on every other page. As the resort idea proliferates, it eventually thrusts both of them into the line of fire against radical religious terrorism.
Here, of course, is the nub of the problem in the modern world – a freedom-loving progressive society at war with Dark Age theocracies who are only modern in their weaponry. Echoing both Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade, Houellebecq’s novel-length suicide note suggests that the Western triumph over religious terrorism won’t be any victory at all. Chattering away at full trot as only a drunken Frenchman can, Houellebecq sees the freedom to pursue pleasure as a meaningless substitute for God -- even one you believe to be dead. Pleasure is so limited and people are so faceless as to be mere repetions of each other; any life, especially the good life, is basically just one agonizingly long dry hump. As Michel puts it, "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."
Like its predecessor, Platform arrived in this country on the heels of considerable controversy in the author’s native France. Where the earlier novel alienated both liberals and conservatives with its weird stew of reactionary politics and sexual excess, the new one was cited in a case where the author was charged with slandering Islam -- which you can apparently do in France, of all places -- in some comments he made in an interview. As could perhaps be predicted, the only thing the case achieved was to make Houellebecq a cause celebre among the international literary community.
It also, to my mind anyway, raised some question as to what Houellebecq’s aggressors were thinking. It’s easy enough to spot the scattered lines that might give offense -- "Muslims on the whole aren’t worth much," Michel says at one point -- but it’s just as easy to respond to them: Michel is frankly a racist, and he hates Islam because, at either end of the book, Muslims kill people close to him. The things he says aren’t supposed to be taken as a true reflection of the author -- or are they? Are the concerns of the fictional Michel all that different, in essence, from the author Michel – who changed his given name after his mother converted to Islam? In a stirring defense last year in the London Guardian, Salman Rushdie rightly said that a novel has a right " to be considered on its own terms … If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly." Still, it’s the kind of question you often find yourself asking with Houellebecq, who has no interest of coming down on the right, humane or conventionally correct side of anything.
Houellebecq’s nihilism isn’t the deep, rich, full-roast Nietzschean brew; it’s cranky, petulant, and so by-the-numbers bleak as to be almost quaint -- had the titles not already been taken, he could have just as well called the book Nausea, No Exit or The Fall. But despair for a world that edges ever closer to its own destruction never really goes completely out of style and Platform, like The Elementary Particles, is a book of and about its time. For all its sloppiness and pages of goopy sleaze, it has a power that’s hard to shake -- you sense a book that has its sweaty fingers on the pulse of the beast of the apocalypse. It’s easy to dislike, hard to dismiss, and impossible to put down.
Saturday, December 27, 2003
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Thursday, August 21, 2003
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Saturday, April 05, 2003
Artist of the Missing World
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.