Soumission by Michel Houellebecq

I feel a little sorry for Michel Houellebecq. In recent interviews he doesn’t look well at all. On the 7^th January, the day his new novel, Soumission, was due to appear, the Charlie Hebdo attacks took place. The victims included Bernard Maris, a friend of Houellebecq who had written the book, Houellebecq Economiste which appeared in France last year. To tie in with the release, Charlie Hebdo had devoted that day’s front cover to him. And the subject of the book? – an imagined France of the future governed by an Islamic party. Small wonder he cancelled his promotional tour and adopted a low profile.

Not that it has affected sales. Conceivably the terrible events of that week provided an uncomfortable promotional boost, with print runs exhausted and 120 000 copies flying off the shelves and through the Amazon warehouses. So, now that things have thankfully quietened down, what to make of this latest addition to his often controversial oeuvre?

First of all, like everything he’s done, it very readable. He’s an accomplished stylist and can tell a story, this time within a more literary framework than usual given that his narrator, François, is a university lecturer at the Sorbonne, whose area of expertise is the late 19th century decadent turned Catholic convert, J.K. Huysmans.

Huysmans (who I’ve never read but think I should) becomes an alter ego, in some part like Le Grand Meaulnes – “For all the years of my sad youth, Huysmans remained for me a a companion, a faithful friend”, the book opens – and in another way, like Sartre’s Rollebon, a doppelganger whose hold needs eventually to be relinquished. (Though Huysman’s religious conversion is salient to the plot in an unexpected way.)

François is the typical Houellebecq protagonist, a solitary, something of a depressive who nevertheless seems to enjoy a series of liaisons with a variety of young students.

 There is the usual ration of graphic  sex scenes, and the usual pessimism about the possibility of fulfilling or lasting relationships. Against this background, he presents us with a scenario where a moderate Islamic party, La Fraternité musulmane has grown, by 2022, to be one of the largest in France, challenged only by the Front National. As the elections approach, polling stations are attacked by armed gangs, his latest girlfriend escapes to Israel as Jews decide to abandon France, and he leaves for a journey of escape from Paris with no destination in mind.

This takes him to Martel in the Lot where he watches events unfold until order is restored, the Fraternité musulmane come to power and a new order is established. A chance meeting with a Péguy-quoting ex-secret service man prompts him to visit the nearby ancient pilgrimage site of Rocamadour, with its shrine of the Black Virgin. Verses of Péguy’s mystical vision of a sacred France resonate in his thoughts as he begins his journey. Which sounds, and is, rather contrived. But the contrivance is there to cement the theme of belief, and submission to it, a novel turn for a novelist more noteworthy previously for what Julian Barnes famously termed his ‘insolence’.

Not that insolence is entirely absent though, and François’ visits to Rocamadour and later, in imitation of Huysmans, a monastery, prove disappointing. But they indicate where he is headed, and as the situation calms and a de-laicised France submits to an Islamic government, he finds himself more at home than he might have expected.

I won’t give away any more, but while the tone is less embittered (or insolent) than usual, the tired but serene acceptance of what happens is not that far removed from the imagined science fiction conclusion of La Possibilité d’une île for example. Houllebecq and his not too distant narrators in their depression and their dissatisfaction are never heroic. They do things without passion, conviction or even much sense of agency. Postmodern to that extent, they nonetheless remain too clever, too in touch with older solider narratives not to present a sometimes viciously ironic, nakedly honest perspective on the way things are. Small wonder he isn’t looking too well.

And again...

...an unsourced quote from an page by Occupy Theory http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421440326/tidal

Diving in again...

"We have been up all night, beneath electric lamps whose fluorescent souls are bright as the smell of ocean, because like them, we are breathing our last breaths before the plunge in search of a world that fits all worlds.

These damn streets. This crawling pavement. These birds finally waking up. Welcome Spring."

Underwater (again)

Two poems. The first, one of my own that gave the title to this blog, the second, a marvellous resonance of coincidence, as quoted by Richard Rohr in this wonderful talk and which he uses for the title and theme of his book Breathing Under Water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8o6_IqKdy8

UNDERWATER

Heart is full of nothing

Need to start again

Bleed it full of feeling

And start to answer when

Head is full of trouble

Life is not alive, so

Devour a new intention

Learn to swim and dive

And seek out new confusion

Design, deserve, delight,

Desire, descend, re-surface;

Maybe, get it right...

And the second, which I won't try and interpret in any depth, but which I think Richard Rohr would say is about moving into the second half of life, by Sr Carol Bieleck RSCJ:

BREATHING UNDER WATER

I built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you;

not on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

by a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbors.

Not that we spoke much.

We met in silences.

Respectful, keeping our distance,

but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always, the fence of sand our barrier,

always, the sand between.

And then one day,

-and I still don’t know how it happened - the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome, even

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,

less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but coming.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.

And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.

And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbors,

Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbors,

And you give your house for a coral castle,

And you learn to breathe underwater.

Starting Over

Maybe I need to revive this. Here's a bit of very simple stuff. Maybe it says something...

Simple Really

What is there?
-what there is
what will change?
Only tears

who will care?
who will mind?
who will be
more than kind?

what makes sense?
what makes none?
what will be
when this has gone?

Charlie Gillett

Musically I've always needed a DJ to guide me, and Charlie, who has just died, was perhaps the best. Although I came to him pretty late in 2001 in fact, his programmes were a touchstone of good taste and pure love of music, respect for the artists, respect for the best of the old and the most interesting of the new.

The astonishing list of tributes on his website is moving not only because of the sheer numbers of people who've taken the trouble to say something, but also for the depth of feeling, the warmth, the respect, the feeling that they had not only been inspired or entertained musically but touched by a decent human being, a good man. That is rare and very worthy of record.

http://soundoftheworld.com/

Underwater (again)

The word 'underwater' came into a poem and then suggested itself as the title for all this stuff (and nonsense) - but why?

I discovered one certain source the other day, Robert Bly's superb Iron John, one of the books I go back to again and again. Not a perfect book; the style irritates, it's a bit too slick and American, but it recasts modernity poetically and mytholgically in a way that still resonates.

Modernity/postmodernity = lack of depth (so where do we go for depth? you've guessed!) and Bly frames the thesis around the Grimm Brothers story of the Wild Man discovered underwater. A book for men quite deliberately and explicitly, yet poetically/mythologically inclined females might like it too..

Reminded me of Hopkins too -"What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

You need to read the whole thing. Perhaps you also need to read a lot of poetry first, but here's a taste:

"...going down through water to touch the Wild Man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and seems even more so now, when the corporations do so much work to produce the sanitised, hairless, shallow man. When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I'll call the "deep male", he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different kind of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what's dark down there, including the nourishing dark..."

And I thought too of Excalibur, a sword caught, and taken underwater. Something else I'm diving to find.

Rant

The culture has been dumbed and dumbfounded, the language has been cheapened and blunted and everybody thinks they have to be so gawdam nice. No you don't. Be true, be good, be yourself. Be brave, be splendid, be ridiculous, anything.

Using big words is more offensive to some people than using bad words. They think you're putting one over on them.

The hardest thing to deal with is the truth. Power dictates its own, the New Labour spin machine set the template and so politics and business (two sides of the same bent coin) monopolise a soundbite vocabulary trying to tell you how it is, with all their dreadful cliches and jargon, "going forward"...(erm where exactly?) (Experience teaches that we experience things more in circular and cyclical fashion anyway - there is always change, but "progress" is a tired old myth.)

We need the truth and its cognate (?), trust to keep us sane. Not in the George Washington never-tell-a-lie way (tactful white mendacity has its place) but in order to maintain relationships, advance common purposes, even do business. Decent business, not glib customer service on a first name how-are-you-today basis. (You may wish me good day and establish that our relationships starts on good-mannered terms, but how I am, to you, a complete stranger, is neither here nor there and quite beside the point. We are effecting an impersonal transaction after all, not getting to know each other.)

I have been lied to so much that some basic honesty, even when it hurts, refreshes the soul. At least I know where I stand, even if I don't like it. If I'm not wanted, well, it may hurt a bit, I may smart and sulk, regret the loss of a connection that seemed sweet and valuable. But there are others. Soon come.

"Is it wrong to want to live on your own?" sang Morrissey. Well probably, but perhaps it's necessary to maintain sanity. "I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another's", wrote Blake, who Yeats so memorably described as "beating against the wall/Till truth obeyed his call."

It is a hard option, staying true to yourself in a society full of niceness and nonsense and bloody lies, risking isolation, being misunderstood or half understood or having people think you're an eccentric fool. Make a living, make a life. Combine them? Still haven't cracked it. Or as Joni sang, "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling" Still.