Anti-Matter by Ben Jeffery

Author:Ben Jeffery
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846949234
Publisher: zero books

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Decades on from a seismic shift in the public’s perception of how art is meant to work – the ‘transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values’, in Wallace’s words – there’s self-evidently still no shortage of fake, hypocritical, trashy culture to oppose. The underbelly of consumer capitalism is not something hidden. And yet the durability of a culture that panders to self-centredness isn’t hard to fathom either, since, to say nothing else, it has one singular phenomenological fact on its side – the unshakable illusion possessed by everyone that they are each at the very centre of creation, alone. Fiction with a nihilist bent is (in one way) just a natural progression from postmodernist satire, pitting itself against everything except, finally, what appears undeniable: basic instincts, and the isolation of the self. Instead of any high-flown ‘making strange’, Houellebecq tries to make the reader feel the way they do already, only much worse. It’s not that all his theories are plausible. The ambience of his books is what really tells – their dull, bone-deep bitterness. Taking it as axiomatic that there’s a current of frustrated desire Western culture feeds on and intensifies, Houellebecq ramps up the resentment – at the failure of life to live up to its billing; at the distance between virtual attractions and everyday landfill; at the creeping feeling that there’s a gigantic party going on all the time somewhere that you haven’t been invited to; at a cultural nervous system toxified by wanting and not having, having and not wanting anymore; and at all (to quote Wallace once again) ‘the really rather brilliantly managed stress everybody is made to feel about staying fit and looking good and living long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second’. Instead of trying to fight past cynicism and weariness, Houellebecq conducts energy straight through them. The most forceful moments are always the most certain. The moral is always you know this all already.

But Houellebecq’s books aren’t as self-assured as they seem, and this returns to the blind-spot that depressive realist art has about itself. If what the characters in Houellebecq say is true, it seems to cancel the art’s reason to be; but it’s the author’s skill, his art, that makes them sound true. If their solipsism and self-interest are compelling, it’s only because the reader can sympathise. It’s an inconsistency exhibited within the novels, too, filled up as they are with characters who constantly assert the uselessness of writing but who keep on producing it themselves. The narrator of Whatever writes philosophical parables. Bruno composes essays and poems. Michel Djerzinski completes a book of philosophy. Daniel writes love poetry. Near the end of both Platform and The Possibility of an Island the narrative is revealed to have been a written memoir. Atomised, too, turns out to be a composition – the story has been written by a neo-human. Acts of writing, as much as the disgust for writing, are everywhere in Houellebecq’s fiction.

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