Michel Houellebecq: “The future always arrives late, especially in this world where the left has become ultra-evil”

“It is true that this world in which we struggle to breathe / now breathes upon us only manifest disgust, / a desire to flee without looking back / and we no longer read the headlines of the daily newspapers.”  Michel Houellebecq wrote these lines several years ago in a poem entitled "Confronto" (Confrontation). In Pordenone, where at the twenty-seventh edition of "Pordenonelegge" he is presenting "Si perde sempre", the complete works of poetry bringing together his verse and new texts published by "La Nave di Teseo", that poem seems to come from a time just before our own. 

Houellebecq belongs to that rare category of writers whom the present continues to prove right, without this making them any more satisfied. For decades, his writing has explored the breakdown of relationships, the commodification of desire, the loneliness of the individual, technological transformation and the gradual loss of a common language. One of his best-known books, "The Elementary Particles", had already, back in 1998, depicted a society in which the sexual revolution and individualism were producing a new form of desolation. "Submission", seventeen years later, would instead turn its gaze towards France and its political and cultural fragility. That 2015 novel, which became an international bestseller, imagined a France in 2022 transformed by the electoral rise of a Muslim party and recounted how institutions and cultural elites adapted to the new order. The book was interpreted as a prophecy. “Me, a prophet?” he says. “It makes me laugh, but perhaps that’s how it was (he really does laugh, ed.). I prefer, however, to play down the title of ‘prophet’, because prophets are those of the Bible, capable of spending hours imagining all manner of calamities. I’ve imagined fewer, and in any case I prophesy calamity only to challenge modernity, but I’m less severe and didactic than Ezekiel. My prophecy, after all, consists of always taking trends seriously before they become obvious”.

This is another reason why the writer loves science fiction, “my great passion, particularly that of the 1970s, which has been unjustly forgotten”. “As a young man,” he adds, “I read it a great deal and even considered myself a great expert on the genre – a level of expertise that required hard work. Today, some of those scenarios imagined by science fiction are beginning to become reality, from artificial intelligence onwards.” “The future? It often has the flaw of arriving a few years behind my novels.” Moving on to discuss today’s France and the rise of the right, Houellebecq observes a trend he now considers to be European in scope. “One of the consequences, in my view, concerns the left, which has become extremely hostile.” “When I was young,” he says, “the left enjoyed such vast cultural dominance that it could afford a certain freedom of behaviour. The shift in the balance of power and the challenge to that dominance have, in my opinion, made it more focused on control and surveillance.”

“As for the German run-off, I avoid painting apocalyptic scenarios and look at Italy with a certain curiosity. I don’t get the feeling that the country is heading towards fascism, but others may, of course, have a different opinion to mine.” This is a typically Houellebecqian way of engaging with politics: a clear-cut statement, immediately accompanied by an awareness of its own partiality. Then literature returns. “Every book also arises from the mistakes discovered in the previous one. The writer nurtures the illusion of one day arriving at the perfect book and thus being able to stop for good. But then the gaps, the shortcomings and the chasms re-emerge. Some areas still remain difficult for me, such as my relationship with my father.” “The motivation for writing,” he says, “has changed. Poetry, on the other hand, follows a more mysterious path. Poetry strikes me as a spontaneous language, whilst the novel demands a different kind of discipline.”

This is an important distinction for understanding Si perde sempre, the book that today places him at the centre of contemporary French poetry. “One always loses: everything is destined to end; every surge carries its own dissolution within it,” he is keen to point out. “And yet, within this certainty, life persists, and even if it is rare, happiness remains a possible horizon.” “We always lose, and we lose from the very beginning,” he adds, quoting another of his poems. “The battle that is definitively lost, however, is the one against death. So I ask myself: what is the point of fighting? The answer I’ve given myself is that, probably, we don’t know how to do anything else. Resignation to death, however, strikes me as a silly idea and, above all, it gets on my nerves.” “One of the remedies is Buddhism,” he suggests, “I like Buddhist monks; they still exist, they welcome visitors to their monasteries and often seem happy.” “The digital world, on the other hand, offers the opposite: you only need to go online round the clock to be overwhelmed by a strong sense of revulsion. After all, my writing has always had a close connection with this saturation of the present and the overload of information, the excess of stimuli, too many desires and too much loneliness. So I’m left with a longing for a more reassuring image of nature.” In the meantime, he thinks and writes, “Yes, but more novels than poems, because with poetry you never really know where the inspiration comes from.” There he is, then: the supposed prophet returns to being simply a writer, because whilst the prophet claims to know what is to come, the poet waits for something to arrive; and he – in his white and brown python-print shoes and a crumpled jacket, not exactly the height of style – still seems suspended between these two states: with one eye fixed on the catastrophe he glimpses and the other on the phrase that, suddenly, he manages to utter.