Houellebecq and Call.

[Mindful]

Bernard Maris was a well-known French economist of independent turn of mind who, before his death, wrote in (among other places) Charlie Hebdo. He was murdered in the attack on the magazine in 2015. But it was not from any sympathy for his legatees that I recently bought a little book of his titled Houellebecq Économiste, which hardly needs translation.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/Theodore_Dalrymple/Houellebecq_and_Call/

 

[Mindful]

*Michel Houellebecq is possibly the best-known living French novelist, a man detested by many but not easy to ignore. His theme is the emptiness of modern life in consumer society, an emptiness which he describes with an unparalleled acuteness. He puts his finger precisely on the sore points of our existence, or at least on those points that seem merely anaesthetised until someone like him presses on them. He reminds me of the surgeon in Eliot’s poem:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

In Huellebecq’s world people buy without need, want without real desire, and distract themselves without enjoyment. Their personal relations reflect this: they are shallow and no one is prepared to sacrifice his or her freedom, which is conceived of as the ability to seek the next distraction without let or hindrance from obligation to others. They are committed to nothing, and in such a world even art or cultural activity is just distraction on a marginally higher plane – though it is a natural law in this kind of society that the planes grow ever closer, ever more compressed.

For Houellebecq, the institution that best captures the nature of modern existence is the supermarket, in which people wander between stacked shelves making choices without discrimination or any real consequences, to the sound of banal but inescapable music. This music is like the leprous distilment that Claudius pours into the ear of Hamlet père as he sleeps in his garden once of an afternoon. The shoppers in the supermarket are not asleep, of course, but they are sleepwalking, or behaving as quasi-automata. At any rate, they are certainly not alert (most of them don’t even have a list of what they need, or think they need), and the drivelling music makes sure that they do not awake from their semi-slumber.

The whole of modern life is an existential supermarket, in which everyone makes life choices as if the choices were between very similar products, between Bonne Maman jam, say, and the supermarket’s own brand (probably made by the same manufacturer), in the belief that if they make the wrong choice it can simply be righted tomorrow by another choice. Life is but a series of moments and people are elementary particles (the title of a book by Houellebecq).*

 

[yiostheoy]

Robert Pirsig in his first philosophical novel talks about alienation too.

Then in his second novel he talks about striking it rich with a bestseller book deal and cruising down the Chesapeake in his 50 ft yacht.

He picks up girls along the way and has fun (fun here having the meaning of sex).

He remarried and had another kid.

I presume he is living happily ever after now.