Reviews
Michel Houellebecq is a thoughtful overview of the writer's corpus to date, paying attention not only to the major novels but also his poetry and essays (many of which have not been translated into English). And, ...this is a valuable resource for Houellebecq's English-language readership, covering a great deal of the French critical commentary around his work as well as offering a careful interpretation of an author who sometimes seems to enjoy making it difficult for readers to take him seriously. TLS 20130621 Where Are We Now? Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath Liverpool University Press, 212pp, GBP70.00, ISBN 9781846318610 reviewed by Nicolas Padamsee What should an artist feel towards life? For Michel Houellebecq, the answer is simple: 'profound resentment.' The author of five novels, five poetry collections, a novella, a poetic manifesto, a critique of HP Lovecraft and a set of letters with Bernard-Henri Levy, he has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Prix Novembre, the Grand Prix National des Lettres, the Prix Interallie and the Prix Goncourt. Meantime he has met with a salvo of accusations and been subjected to a risible court case concerning his opinion on Islam. He is one of Europe's most controversial living writers: influenced by science fiction, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer and Balzac, he is also our regnant ideas novelist. According to Sabine van Wesemael, sex is 'almost the sole theme of his narratives.' And this is where we begin in Douglas Morrey's incisive and luculent work Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath. Having analysed several amorous episodes and expatiated on the pattern of 'blame attributed and punishment meted our to women' that runs through Whatever (1994) and Atomised (1998), Morrey refines this formulation: 'these are novels, more than anything else, about people not having sex.' This is spot on. The marrow of Houellebecq's oeuvre is not sex. It is sexlessness. Hideous and bereft of charm, Raphael Tisserand - the deuteragonist in Whatever - belongs to an underclass of embattled sexual mendicants. As the narrator notes: 'just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never ... It's what's known as the law of the market.' With no erotic capital, to borrow Catherine Hakim's memorable phrase, Tisserand has no chance: he can do nothing but numb his concupiscence and weather the public exhortations to have more and more sex - now the salient pleasure, the salient means of narcissistic succour - with hollow hope. Atomised's Bruno is another member of the underclass. And it is this lifetime membership that leads to the characters' objectification and denigration of the opposite sex: 'the sluts were wearing nothing under their tee shirts ... his cock ached.' Morrey asseverates: 'in the tradition of true misogynists, Houellebecq's narrators define women immediately and exclusively by their sexuality and at the same time appear angered or offended by that sexuality.' (Nota bene: we must always remember - and some critics have not - that such observations as 'blow-job lips' or 'nothing beautiful about this pair, the frumps of the department' are the observations of Houellebecq's narrators, not of Houellebecq; excision would disarticulate the novels.) The sexual revolution, then, led to alteration of access, of spirit, of impetus: a result of the concurrent rise of individualism. Now the family unit has broken down (an undue limiter of one's freedom), senescence is seen as disastrous, and love has been laughed out of relations: we have, in other words, become perpetual kids. But the dissatisfied, the marginalised - what to do with them? The 'radical, utopian' answer explored in Platform (2001) is discussed in Morrey's second chapter, 'Work and Leisure.' This answer is sex tourism. Michel, the novel's narrator, explains: You have several hundred million westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don't find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality ... It's an ideal trading opportunity. This has proved controversial. Why? First, because implementation of the idea is plausible tomorrow: unlike that in Atomised it relies on no scientific advances. Second, because, as Morrey states, the notion of 'a mass regulated sex tourism revives a colonialist relationship between the west and the developing world.' Third, because this portrait of prostitution bears no scars, no furrows and sets aside the issue of compulsion. (On this last count, Morrey somewhat exonerates Houellebecq; in response to Pierre Varod, he stresses that as the novelist is an acolyte of Auguste Comte and subscribes to the view that 'everything is forced ... it would be a truism to suggest that prostitution is forced ... Houellebecq's novel implies ... even those women who may choose sex work as a quick, efficient and relatively enjoyable way of making money would doubtless not choose to sleep with all these men if they could easily make as much money doing something else.' This chimes with the corpus's post humanist donnee; but in his Paris Review interview, when asked, 'what about the more commonly held idea that these women are victims who are forced into these circumstances?' he answered, 'it's not true. Not in Thailand. It's just stupid to have objections about it,' casting some doubt on this implication.) Ultimately, the novel's force inheres in its simplicity, its composure, its coolly averring that our disapproval of sex tourism will dissipate 'under the imperious influence of needs that cannot be otherwise met by the market economy,' as Morrey puts it. In his work on Lovecraft, Houellbecq writes: 'no aesthetic creation can exist without a certain voluntary blindness.' This is true, and supported by Platform's success. The second half of 'Work and Leisure' centres on The Map and the Territory (2010). Sown with references to Charles Fourier, William Morris and Alexis de Tocqueville, the narrative reflects on our relationship with labour. It opens with boiler trouble. After phoning 'Plumbing in General,' 'Simply Plumbers,' and 'Ze Plumb,' none of which are able to offer assistance, the protagonist, Jed, finds a Croatian workman who can do 'a sort of repair.' The artisan 'spoke of valves and siphons' and 'gave the impression of knowing a lot about life in general.' Alas, even he is planning to abandon this 'noble craft' to return home and 'rent out noisy and stupid machines to stuck-up rich kids,' a prospect that inspires an 'obscure sense of human disappointment' in Jed. This disappointment is reiterated. Yet the set of portraits he paints, Professions, evinces more amorphous sentiment: with a horse butcher, a bar-tabac manager, a remote maintenance assistant, an architect, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all represented, the works, in Morrey's words, seem to be 'imbued with a kind of nostalgia for the present or recent past,' and intimate 'that the history of capitalism they trace is coming to end.' Without a foreseeable replacement. The Map and the Territory also looks at the relationship between France and the world. The inexorable ascent of Asian powers - represented in the novel by the Abu Dhabi hotel in the background of Jed's portrait of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst; the Indian telecommunications mogul who purchases the portrait of Michel Houellbecq (a character); and the respect attached to Wong Fu Xin's art criticism - means that 'western hegemony over cultural discourse is just another thing we will have to learn to live without.' France's future? A move towards the hyperreal, towards 'maintenance of a loosely defined art de vivre that can be sold to representatives of emerging economies in the form of potted meats and four-star hotel breaks.' Drawing on Umberto Eco, Morrey adds, 'in hyperreality ... it is more important that a place, an object or an experience should seem real than that it should actually be real.' Thus, we are left with villages that are as if they had been 'recreated for a television series.' Chapter three, 'Science and Religion,' concentrates on Houellbecq's fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island (2005), which has been rubbished by some critics, but which Morrey considers the 'most representative book, the fullest expression of his vision.' Schopenhauer theorises that 'the life of the individual is a constant struggle' against will. A desideratum - even the most diminutive - rends happiness and mantles fortune, as mewls of desire reverberate around one's consciousness. And satisfaction? It achieves nothing more than boredom: it leaves one with nothing more than what Heidegger termed 'the will to will.' This thesis - that, as Morrey's writes, 'suffering can only be overcome through a rejection of individual desires, which would ultimately entail the relinquishing of individual identity' - is the foundation of the novel. It imagines a Utopia, a thousand years hence, in which neohumans inhabit private compounds. Sociability and its attendants - love, mirth, passion, tears - have been dispensed with in search of 'perfect serenity.' Born into an adult body, the clone Daniel 24 spins out his days reading Daniel 1's life history (and engaging in sterile virtual contact with Marie 22). Daniel 23 did the same. So did Daniel 22. Daniel 25 is the first to make an undirected decision; disillusioned with the 'sadness, melancholy ... and mortal apathy' of his life, he leaves the compound in search of a rumoured neohuman community in Lanzarote. He finds none. In toto, the success of this Utopia is equivocal: the loneliness and listlessness of neohuman life is confirmed by Daniel 25's choice. Yet it is counterpoised by the sybaritism, callowness, resentment and 'pure fascination with limitless youth' in Daniel 1's depiction of 21st-century life (the bulk of the novel). Is Daniel 25 exceptional? Is this etiolated world still preferable? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Morrey surmises: 'Like earlier generations of utopian writers, Houellebecq uses his hypothetical futures in order to point up the problems and contradictions of the present.' Finally, something must be said on style. The novels are melds of genres - bildungsroman, romance, science fiction, dirty realism - and feature a variegated register that zips from the Latinate to the colloquial, which Morrey remarks has a 'flattening' effect on the prose and is 'a kind of extension of the protagonists' depressive lucidity.' He also highlights the shedload of litotes, the 'short, neutral, resigned sentences' which so often close paragraphs, and the marvellous non sequiturs, such as 'David took up jogging and began to hang out with Satanist groups.' Still, he is perhaps too kind on this count. The oeuvre has its fair share of leaden sentences, lackadaisical metaphors, and weak symbolism. For example, in The Possibility of an Island's 'eerily beautiful' epilogue, Daniel 25 spots a knot of savages; the two oldest are dragged into 'a sort of arena' and forced to fight to the death. Once 'the fat one' has fallen, the rest 'cut off bits of flesh' and begin to 'devour the body of the victim directly, to lap his blood, the smell of which seemed to intoxicate them.' The chief of the tribe, presiding over this sanguineous melee, is tricked out in an 'Ibiza Beach T-shirt,' his sexual organs on show. This is crude (and how did a T-shirt survive a thousand years?). The prose is serviceable, but it is not the main attraction here. 'You can't do anything about major societal changes,' Houellbecq has said: 'You can only observe and describe.' His aim is to 'show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.' And this he continues to do with thumping force. Yes, the novels are claustral. They are cold. They are bleak. But they produce a rare sensation: that of relevance. And we should never make the facile mistake of labelling them depressing. As Martin Amis writes, 'achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.' His pronouncements have the power to excite; and for this reason alone he should be read. In Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath Douglas Morrey provides us with a pellucid overview of his oeuvre: his influences, his themes, his hopes. Nicolas Padamsee is a postgraduate student in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He writes and reviews fiction. Review 31 2013 In 'Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath' Douglas Morrey provides us with a pellucid overview of his oeuvre: his influences, his themes, his hopes. Review 31 2013 This is the second monograph in English to consider Michel Houellebecq's work (John McCann's Michel Houllebecq: Author of our Times (Bern: Peter Lang) appeared in 2010), and the first to offer a systematic analysis of the provocative social questions it raises. For Douglas Morrey, Houellebecq is most interesting because of his insight into the contemporary human condition: he allows us 'to see ourselves in a new light, to diagnose our problems more clearly and to feel them more keenly' (p. 153). Morrey's approach is to consider Houellebecq's fiction, with occasional reference to his poetry, through a rigid conceptual framework structured around the narrative perspectives he has located therein. In particular, Houellebecq 'has a significant contribution to make to debates about the posthuman ' (p. 8). In his writing this represents both a literary technique and a philosophical position. Indeed, Houellebecq's narrating voices frequently present their societal analysis from a point beyond the extinction of humankind, which legitimizes his texts' extensive sociological and historical contextualization. Morrey also argues that Houellebecq's work interrogates traditional notions of humanity through a radical posthumanist position that ultimately considers 'the extent to which human cultural evolution might be consciously guided or directed by humans themselves' (p. 158). Such a perspective repeatedly undermines any notion of the uniqueness of humanity and suggests an attentive thinking through of the potential of science; this is most distinct in the way that Les Particules e'le'mentaires and La Possibilte' d'une i le consider human cloning and genetic modification. Morrey's analysis is original in that it argues that the major themes of Houellebecq's oeuvre, including sex, work, and leisure, can also be understood through the author's posthuman frame. Particularly welcome too is Morrey's attention to the broader range of critical challenges posited by Houellebecq's work. For example, it is often difficult to pin down a consistent textual attitude with regard to the social questions Houellebecq's writing holds up for critical consideration; Morrey attributes this to an issue of perspective and notes that 'Houellebecq continues to waver between fully posthumanist and residually humanist understandings of the world' (p. 149), often resulting in his narratives' ambiguous tone of 'impotent compassion' for its protagonists (p. 45). In considering Houellebecq's much discussed writing style, Morrey concludes that, rather than the 'blankness' for which it has been critically derided, the 'mixture of registers' it displays accounts for its overall 'troubling, unstable tone' (p. 38). He also looks at how Houellebecq's media persona, which has frequently obscured critical readings of his work, is brought to bear within his writing, particularly in the Prix Goncourt-winning La Carte et le territoire, which Morrey regards as both a 'self-conscious reflection on the process of artistic creation and a hilariously mocking selfportrait (p. 7). Houellebecq is a critically divisive figure in the French literary landscape. Morrey's study of some of the most provocative aspects of his work is conducted dispassionately and, as such, is not clouded by authorial provocation. As a result, this is an important and enlightening examination of the social dimension of Houellebecq's novels. -- Russell Williams French Studies, vol 68, no 1 201401 Houellebecq is a critically divisive figure in the French literary landscape. Morrey's study of some of the most provocative aspects of his work is conducted dispassionately and, as such, is not clouded by authorial provocation. As a result, this is an important and enlightening examination of the social dimension of Houellebecq's novels. -- Russell Wiliams French Studies, vol 68, no 1 201401
Michel Houellebecq is a thoughtful overview of the writer's corpus to date, paying attention not only to the major novels but also his poetry and essays (many of which have not been translated into English). And, ...this is a valuable resource for Houellebecq's English-language readership, covering a great deal of the French critical commentary around his work as well as offering a careful interpretation of an author who sometimes seems to enjoy making it difficult for readers to take him seriously. TLS 20130621
Michel Houellebecq is a thoughtful overview of the writer's corpus to date, paying attention not only to the major novels but also his poetry and essays (many of which have not been translated into English). And, ...this is a valuable resource for Houellebecq's English-language readership, covering a great deal of the French critical commentary around his work as well as offering a careful interpretation of an author who sometimes seems to enjoy making it difficult for readers to take him seriously. Where Are We Now? Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath Liverpool University Press, 212pp, GBP70.00, ISBN 9781846318610 reviewed by Nicolas Padamsee What should an artist feel towards life? For Michel Houellebecq, the answer is simple: 'profound resentment.' The author of five novels, five poetry collections, a novella, a poetic manifesto, a critique of HP Lovecraft and a set of letters with Bernard-Henri Levy, he has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Prix Novembre, the Grand Prix National des Lettres, the Prix Interallie and the Prix Goncourt. Meantime he has met with a salvo of accusations and been subjected to a risible court case concerning his opinion on Islam. He is one of Europe's most controversial living writers: influenced by science fiction, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer and Balzac, he is also our regnant ideas novelist. According to Sabine van Wesemael, sex is 'almost the sole theme of his narratives.' And this is where we begin in Douglas Morrey's incisive and luculent work Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath. Having analysed several amorous episodes and expatiated on the pattern of 'blame attributed and punishment meted our to women' that runs through Whatever (1994) and Atomised (1998), Morrey refines this formulation: 'these are novels, more than anything else, about people not having sex.' This is spot on. The marrow of Houellebecq's oeuvre is not sex. It is sexlessness. Hideous and bereft of charm, Raphael Tisserand - the deuteragonist in Whatever - belongs to an underclass of embattled sexual mendicants. As the narrator notes: 'just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never ... It's what's known as the law of the market.' With no erotic capital, to borrow Catherine Hakim's memorable phrase, Tisserand has no chance: he can do nothing but numb his concupiscence and weather the public exhortations to have more and more sex - now the salient pleasure, the salient means of narcissistic succour - with hollow hope. Atomised's Bruno is another member of the underclass. And it is this lifetime membership that leads to the characters' objectification and denigration of the opposite sex: 'the sluts were wearing nothing under their tee shirts ... his cock ached.' Morrey asseverates: 'in the tradition of true misogynists, Houellebecq's narrators define women immediately and exclusively by their sexuality and at the same time appear angered or offended by that sexuality.' (Nota bene: we must always remember - and some critics have not - that such observations as 'blow-job lips' or 'nothing beautiful about this pair, the frumps of the department' are the observations of Houellebecq's narrators, not of Houellebecq; excision would disarticulate the novels.) The sexual revolution, then, led to alteration of access, of spirit, of impetus: a result of the concurrent rise of individualism. Now the family unit has broken down (an undue limiter of one's freedom), senescence is seen as disastrous, and love has been laughed out of relations: we have, in other words, become perpetual kids. But the dissatisfied, the marginalised - what to do with them? The 'radical, utopian' answer explored in Platform (2001) is discussed in Morrey's second chapter, 'Work and Leisure.' This answer is sex tourism. Michel, the novel's narrator, explains: You have several hundred million westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don't find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality ... It's an ideal trading opportunity. This has proved controversial. Why? First, because implementation of the idea is plausible tomorrow: unlike that in Atomised it relies on no scientific advances. Second, because, as Morrey states, the notion of 'a mass regulated sex tourism revives a colonialist relationship between the west and the developing world.' Third, because this portrait of prostitution bears no scars, no furrows and sets aside the issue of compulsion. (On this last count, Morrey somewhat exonerates Houellebecq; in response to Pierre Varod, he stresses that as the novelist is an acolyte of Auguste Comte and subscribes to the view that 'everything is forced ... it would be a truism to suggest that prostitution is ""forced"" ... Houellebecq's novel implies ... even those women who may choose sex work as a quick, efficient and relatively enjoyable way of making money would doubtless not choose to sleep with all these men if they could easily make as much money doing something else.' This chimes with the corpus's post humanist donnee; but in his Paris Review interview, when asked, 'what about the more commonly held idea that these women are victims who are forced into these circumstances?' he answered, 'it's not true. Not in Thailand. It's just stupid to have objections about it,' casting some doubt on this implication.) Ultimately, the novel's force inheres in its simplicity, its composure, its coolly averring that our disapproval of sex tourism will dissipate 'under the imperious influence of needs that cannot be otherwise met by the market economy,' as Morrey puts it. In his work on Lovecraft, Houellbecq writes: 'no aesthetic creation can exist without a certain voluntary blindness.' This is true, and supported by Platform's success. The second half of 'Work and Leisure' centres on The Map and the Territory (2010). Sown with references to Charles Fourier, William Morris and Alexis de Tocqueville, the narrative reflects on our relationship with labour. It opens with boiler trouble. After phoning 'Plumbing in General,' 'Simply Plumbers,' and 'Ze Plumb,' none of which are able to offer assistance, the protagonist, Jed, finds a Croatian workman who can do 'a sort of repair.' The artisan 'spoke of valves and siphons' and 'gave the impression of knowing a lot about life in general.' Alas, even he is planning to abandon this 'noble craft' to return home and 'rent out noisy and stupid machines to stuck-up rich kids,' a prospect that inspires an 'obscure sense of human disappointment' in Jed. This disappointment is reiterated. Yet the set of portraits he paints, Professions, evinces more amorphous sentiment: with a horse butcher, a bar-tabac manager, a remote maintenance assistant, an architect, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs all represented, the works, in Morrey's words, seem to be 'imbued with a kind of nostalgia for the present or recent past,' and intimate 'that the history of capitalism they trace is coming to end.' Without a foreseeable replacement. The Map and the Territory also looks at the relationship between France and the world. The inexorable ascent of Asian powers - represented in the novel by the Abu Dhabi hotel in the background of Jed's portrait of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst; the Indian telecommunications mogul who purchases the portrait of Michel Houellbecq (a character); and the respect attached to Wong Fu Xin's art criticism - means that 'western hegemony over cultural discourse is just another thing we will have to learn to live without.' France's future? A move towards the hyperreal, towards 'maintenance of a loosely defined art de vivre that can be sold to representatives of emerging economies in the form of potted meats and four-star hotel breaks.' Drawing on Umberto Eco, Morrey adds, 'in hyperreality ... it is more important that a place, an object or an experience should seem real than that it should actually be real.' Thus, we are left with villages that are as if they had been 'recreated for a television series.' Chapter three, 'Science and Religion,' concentrates on Houellbecq's fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island (2005), which has been rubbished by some critics, but which Morrey considers the 'most representative book, the fullest expression of his vision.' Schopenhauer theorises that 'the life of the individual is a constant struggle' against will. A desideratum - even the most diminutive - rends happiness and mantles fortune, as mewls of desire reverberate around one's consciousness. And satisfaction? It achieves nothing more than boredom: it leaves one with nothing more than what Heidegger termed 'the will to will.' This thesis - that, as Morrey's writes, 'suffering can only be overcome through a rejection of individual desires, which would ultimately entail the relinquishing of individual identity' - is the foundation of the novel. It imagines a Utopia, a thousand years hence, in which neohumans inhabit private compounds. Sociability and its attendants - love, mirth, passion, tears - have been dispensed with in search of 'perfect serenity.' Born into an adult body, the clone Daniel 24 spins out his days reading Daniel 1's life history (and engaging in sterile virtual contact with Marie 22). Daniel 23 did the same. So did Daniel 22. Daniel 25 is the first to make an undirected decision; disillusioned with the 'sadness, melancholy ... and mortal apathy' of his life, he leaves the compound in search of a rumoured neohuman community in Lanzarote. He finds none. In toto, the success of this Utopia is equivocal: the loneliness and listlessness of neohuman life is confirmed by Daniel 25's choice. Yet it is counterpoised by the sybaritism, callowness, resentment and 'pure fascination with limitless youth' in Daniel 1's depiction of 21st-century life (the bulk of the novel). Is Daniel 25 exceptional? Is this etiolated world still preferable? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Morrey surmises: 'Like earlier generations of utopian writers, Houellebecq uses his hypothetical futures in order to point up the problems and contradictions of the present.' Finally, something must be said on style. The novels are melds of genres - bildungsroman, romance, science fiction, dirty realism - and feature a variegated register that zips from the Latinate to the colloquial, which Morrey remarks has a 'flattening' effect on the prose and is 'a kind of extension of the protagonists' depressive lucidity.' He also highlights the shedload of litotes, the 'short, neutral, resigned sentences' which so often close paragraphs, and the marvellous non sequiturs, such as 'David took up jogging and began to hang out with Satanist groups.' Still, he is perhaps too kind on this count. The oeuvre has its fair share of leaden sentences, lackadaisical metaphors, and weak symbolism. For example, in The Possibility of an Island's 'eerily beautiful' epilogue, Daniel 25 spots a knot of savages; the two oldest are dragged into 'a sort of arena' and forced to fight to the death. Once 'the fat one' has fallen, the rest 'cut off bits of flesh' and begin to 'devour the body of the victim directly, to lap his blood, the smell of which seemed to intoxicate them.' The chief of the tribe, presiding over this sanguineous melee, is tricked out in an 'Ibiza Beach T-shirt,' his sexual organs on show. This is crude (and how did a T-shirt survive a thousand years?). The prose is serviceable, but it is not the main attraction here. 'You can't do anything about major societal changes,' Houellbecq has said: 'You can only observe and describe.' His aim is to 'show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values.' And this he continues to do with thumping force. Yes, the novels are claustral. They are cold. They are bleak. But they produce a rare sensation: that of relevance. And we should never make the facile mistake of labelling them depressing. As Martin Amis writes, 'achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.' His pronouncements have the power to excite; and for this reason alone he should be read. In Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath Douglas Morrey provides us with a pellucid overview of his oeuvre: his influences, his themes, his hopes. Nicolas Padamsee is a postgraduate student in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He writes and reviews fiction. In 'Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath' Douglas Morrey provides us with a pellucid overview of his oeuvre: his influences, his themes, his hopes. This is the second monograph in English to consider Michel Houellebecq's work (John McCann's Michel Houllebecq: Author of our Times (Bern: Peter Lang) appeared in 2010), and the first to offer a systematic analysis of the provocative social questions it raises. For Douglas Morrey, Houellebecq is most interesting because of his insight into the contemporary human condition: he allows us 'to see ourselves in a new light, to diagnose our problems more clearly and to feel them more keenly' (p. 153). Morrey's approach is to consider Houellebecq's fiction, with occasional reference to his poetry, through a rigid conceptual framework structured around the narrative perspectives he has located therein. In particular, Houellebecq 'has a significant contribution to make to debates about the ""posthuman""' (p. 8). In his writing this represents both a literary technique and a philosophical position. Indeed, Houellebecq's narrating voices frequently present their societal analysis from a point beyond the extinction of humankind, which legitimizes his texts' extensive sociological and historical contextualization. Morrey also argues that Houellebecq's work interrogates traditional notions of humanity through a radical posthumanist position that ultimately considers 'the extent to which human cultural evolution might be consciously guided or directed by humans themselves' (p. 158). Such a perspective repeatedly undermines any notion of the uniqueness of humanity and suggests an attentive thinking through of the potential of science; this is most distinct in the way that Les Particules e'le'mentaires and La Possibilte' d'une ile consider human cloning and genetic modification. Morrey's analysis is original in that it argues that the major themes of Houellebecq's oeuvre, including sex, work, and leisure, can also be understood through the author's posthuman frame. Particularly welcome too is Morrey's attention to the broader range of critical challenges posited by Houellebecq's work. For example, it is often difficult to pin down a consistent textual attitude with regard to the social questions Houellebecq's writing holds up for critical consideration; Morrey attributes this to an issue of perspective and notes that 'Houellebecq continues to waver between fully posthumanist and residually humanist understandings of the world' (p. 149), often resulting in his narratives' ambiguous tone of 'impotent compassion' for its protagonists (p. 45). In considering Houellebecq's much discussed writing style, Morrey concludes that, rather than the 'blankness' for which it has been critically derided, the 'mixture of registers' it displays accounts for its overall 'troubling, unstable tone' (p. 38). He also looks at how Houellebecq's media persona, which has frequently obscured critical readings of his work, is brought to bear within his writing, particularly in the Prix Goncourt-winning La Carte et le territoire, which Morrey regards as both a 'self-conscious reflection on the process of artistic creation and a hilariously mocking selfportrait (p. 7). Houellebecq is a critically divisive figure in the French literary landscape. Morrey's study of some of the most provocative aspects of his work is conducted dispassionately and, as such, is not clouded by authorial provocation. As a result, this is an important and enlightening examination of the social dimension of Houellebecq's novels. Houellebecq is a critically divisive figure in the French literary landscape. Morrey's study of some of the most provocative aspects of his work is conducted dispassionately and, as such, is not clouded by authorial provocation. As a result, this is an important and enlightening examination of the social dimension of Houellebecq's novels.
