Well Beckoned

Saw an interesting Paris Review interview with French slipstream author (and Lovecraft scholar) Michel Houellebecq.  I was interested in part because the guy’s process is so different from mine.

I wake up during the night around one a.m. I write half-awake in a semi-conscious state. Progressively, as I drink coffee, I become more conscious. And I write until I’m sick of it.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have other requirements for writing?

HOUELLEBECQ

Flaubert said you had to have a permanent erection. I haven’t found that to be the case. I need to take a walk now and then. Otherwise, in terms of dietary requirements, coffee works, it’s true. It takes you through all the different stages of consciousness. You start out semicomatose. You write. You drink more coffee and your lucidity increases, and it’s in that in-between period, which can last for hours, that something interesting happens.

INTERVIEWER

Do you plot the novels?

HOUELLEBECQ

No.

Which explains a certain quality to the novels, I think.  Written in a half-dreaming state, and not plotted ahead of time.

Houellebecq is a literary author who writes about science fictional ideas, and who is well-known for saying perfectly outrageous things that may actually be true.

INTERVIEWER

So what made you write your first novel, Whatever, about a computer
programmer and his sexually frustrated friend?

HOUELLEBECQ

I hadn’t seen any novel make the statement that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happens and you have to pretend to be interested in your work. And, furthermore, that some people have a sex life and others don’t just because some are more attractive than others. I wanted to acknowledge that if people don’t have a sex life, it’s not for some moral reason, it’s just because they’re ugly. Once you’ve said it,
it sounds obvious, but I wanted to say it.

(While I had always thought that entering the workforce was like entering the grave, it never occurred to me to actually say it.  And as for the thought that some people don’t get sex because they’re physically unattractive . . . hey, it never occurred to me to say that, either.    That’s why I’m not a world-famous literary provocateur.)

INTERVIEWER

According to the narrator in Whatever, “one hates the young.”

HOUELLEBECQ

That’s the other part of the trap. The first is professional life, the fact that nothing else is going to happen to you. The second is that now there’s this person who will replace you and who will have experiences. This leads to the natural hatred of the father for his son.

INTERVIEWER

The father and not the mother?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes. There is some kind of physiological and psychological change in a woman when she gets pregnant. It’s animal biology. But fathers don’t give a shit about their offspring. Hormonal things occur, things that no culture can do anything about, that generally make women like children and men basically not give a damn.

INTERVIEWER

What about marriage?

HOUELLEBECQ

I think that there is a sharp contrast for most people between life at university, where they meet lots of people, and the moment when they enter the workforce, when they basically no longer meet anyone. Life becomes dull. So as a result people get married to have a personal life. I could elaborate but I think everyone understands . . .

INTERVIEWER

Of course, it was the numerous sex scenes that got you a lot of attention in the media.

HOUELLEBECQ

I’m not sure that there are such an unusual number of sex scenes in my novel.
I don’t think that’s what was shocking. What shocked people was that I
depicted sexual failure. I wrote about sexuality in a nonglorifying way. Most of all I described a basic reality: a person filled with sexual desire who can’t satisfy it. That’s what people don’t like to hear about. Sex is supposed to be positive. Showing frustrated sexual desire is obscene. But it’s also the truth The real question is, Who is allowed to have sex?

He just says this shit, y’know?  And I don’t think he’s trying to be outrageous, I think he’s just saying what always seemed obvious to him.

You know what else you can’t say?  You can’t say that people are stupid.  When someone comes up with some total claptrap about Obama being a secret Muslim terrorist or the Moon landings being fakes, for some reason you’re supposed to engage with this idiocy instead of just saying, “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard.  You must be a moron!  You haven’t got the brains that God gave a turnip!  Your parents must be deeply ashamed of having produced someone like you.  I bet your children won’t be seen in public with you for fear you’re going to say some nonsensical shit like this!”

Nor can you say that people are crazy.  “What, you think that your religion is being persecuted because the State won’t teach that the world is six thousand years old?  You’d have to be crazy to believe something like that!   Have you ever had a psychiatric evaluation?   You should check into an asylum and not come out until your kids are grown and you can’t do them any more damage!”

Maybe I’ll just write a book calling stupid people stupid and crazy people crazy.  Maybe I’ll get an international reputation or something.