An oasis of whore in a desert of boredom: “La carte et le territoire”
Houellebecq, in the end, will probably be remembered as the kind of writer who never forgot to tell us how much an upscale prostitute charged extra for anal sex in the third millennium: these memento mori, this museum of finely registered decay, this dystopian travel guide for the reader of the future–for this, Houellebecq will be read, but more often remembered than read, in a Europe that will have a longer lifespan than he would have hoped (a question: does Houellebecq desire the death of Europe, or only its moral death? Is he not less of a prophet than a hormonal nihilist, like the snot-nosed hysterical agitators we find in The Possessed, devoid of courage, adenoidal, starved for the shriveled tit of his motherland?). I can imagine what they will say: “An interesting specimen of impotent machismo, of the talent of worthless vision that results from a middling intelligence aligned to a supernumerary sex drive, who for all that showed us a type, etc.” We will forget, in all likelihood, Houellebecq the provocateur, Houllebecq the pornographer, Houellebecq the loather of his own mother, Houellebecq the darling of the chauvinist right and the demented left, Houellebecq the would-be Balzac, Houellebecq the occasional Feuerbach, the even more intermittent Schopenhauer, Houellebecq the disciple of Lovecraft, Houellebecq the AK-47 intellect, Houellebecq who made us laugh, but only ethically, and as we know the ethical laugh is the lowest category of laughter. It will be a shame if he is only talked about and not read fifty years from now, because there are various little pleasures in the novels themselves. For instance, it is always easy to identify the various moments in the composition of his novels in which he has just finished masturbating. The libidinous rancor, the lazy scientism, the lazier psychologizing, the faecal penumbra of the sociological detail–these things give way to something pathetic, something boyish, to a posturing and therefore genuine pessimism: “They don’t amount to much, anyway, human relationships,” he types, his hands pungent with the after-odor of semen, dank nocturnal semen mingling with the memory of Irish siesta semen, with the sharp aroma of cognac, with shit. A man whose hands smell this way is capable of a very peculiar tenderness.
Evidently, from his latest novel, he wants to be memorialized as an ethnographer of late capitalism, a gentle autist who murmured elegies, from the vantage of a mist-shrouded and vacillant future, to a disappearing world, a man who compensated for his indifference to the emotional shadings of a specific human destiny with a rigorous dialectics of destiny in general, putting into practice an aesthetics of spiritual materialism (aesthetics is the wrong word: aesthetics is an accident, a laughable accident, that befell him in the course of his days). Evidently, he wants us to believe that he is instinctually sluggish, apathetic even, in matters of sex, that it was his passion that won over the interminable series of willing, voluptuous, maternal, and somewhat decerebrated women that populate his novels. He wants us, perhaps unfairly, perhaps to his own detriment, to forget the misanthrope, the priapic clown, or to honor him only as a persona, forgetting that personae and people are indistinguishable, abdicating his own principle that character is product, that marketing is fate. Bruno as the Mr. Hyde to his true Dr. Michel: fair enough. But I will miss the right-wing onanist, the alcoholic frequenter of new-age sex communes, the sarcastic thoughtless intelligent: there is a certain magnetism there, a certain undeniability which we might call a world-view. The harmless martyr, the corporealized absence who works methodically towards the salvation of mankind (Houellebecq the scientist, the painter, Houellebecq who never was)–let us say he was a good boy, too.
“I dreamt I was an old and ill detective”: The Afterlife of Roberto Bolaño
The last boddhisatva is a Chilean snuff pornographer who is personally emptied of desire. He is somewhat of an artist, he has a smattering of hermetic learning, and his violence is neither real nor staged but carnivalesque; his sodomized carcasses are more than apparently dead, but always rise anew with fey smiles, with hyaline tears, with frozen grimaces that are an eagerness for more carnal miracles. When I wake up from the coma of the id, though I rarely do, I realize that sex is nothing: nothing not as logical negation, but nothing as the vibrations of fate are nothing, nothing like the space left behind when the kabbalists’ God retired into his monarchical slumber. Tzimtzum was the pornographer’s final movie, though it was also his first. In 2017, he was murdered in his bedroom while working on post-production (the only part of the profession he enjoyed, given his love of solitude and his formal monomania; he was, like Robert Bresson, quite indifferent to his actors, except to their phalluses, that strangely luminescent fauna, the worm-life of a vast, dead planet). The killer was a tramp he had employed sometime in the past in the part of a priest, a scrappy, rheumatic man with an average-sized cock but with a prodigy’s intuition for torture. The pornographer was found with a tremendous, almost mythological erection due to rigor mortis, the first erection he had ever been known to have. Angel lust, I’m told it’s called. Soiled ornament of the sephirot, or perhaps the tree of life itself. When he opened his eyes in the dark, it amused him to imagine himself as the following: an ubermensch from a Ukrainian shtetl; a giant born of parthenogenesis of Baltic seaweed; a German deviant; a Mexican poet; a Romanian general with a supernatural member; a beautiful, amoral whore; Borges’ fornicating anarchist brother; a woman at a cosmic gang-bang, sobbing with shame and delirious joy; Blaise Pascal, which is to say the same thing; a fetus’s vigilant eyeball, plotting to avenge its twin who was impaled by their father’s cock, his father who was the whole continent; his father; his mother; a mourner at his own funeral, a mourner who had barely known the guy, but they had discussed Ezra Pound and Sade one night until four in the morning, in between bouts of hieratic fucking.