Am more or less recovered from the Copenhagen trip, but I'm still way behind on sleep. Crazy schedule now - I'm switching jobs in three weeks and need to package up the the projects I'm working on before I can go.
Not much time to write - I've had some good ideas for the book but am just trying to scribble down some notes I can hopefully pick up on later. I need a couple of days off so I can process this, but slim chance of that these days.
I just finished The Elementary Particles. Marcella lent it to me in San Francisco to get my take on Houellebecq's psychology. I don't think a book has left me feeling so uneasy since I tried reading de Sade ten years ago. Marcella couldn't decide if Houellebecq was a mysogynist himself or if he was being knowingly offensive as part of his writing style.
After kicking the story around in my head around for a while, I think the book isn't so much mysogynist as just anti-humanist. He certainly seems to despise men just as much as women if not more so. While de Sade rejected the dogmatic morality of his time and embraced sadism (or "libertinism," as he called it), Houellebecq rejects both morality and hedonism as bankrupt and ultimately futile philosophies.
Even relatively non-offensive New Age philosophy, or the non-dogmatic impulse to be "good," is reviled as pathetic and weak-minded, though the impulse to assign value and find meaning in life is something he picks up on at the end. I won't describe where he goes with that impulse as the book closes because it's just too shocking - I really didn't see it coming, though there were some hints throughout the story. And if you just read it described in a few sentences without reading the first part of the book it would lose all its effect.
Reading this, it sounds like I'm saying that the whole book was a treatise on abstract philosophy, and it's not. It's just a fiction story told in a very peculiar voice. Like de Sade, The Elementary Particles was difficult to read in places, but it was thick with ideas that underlay the images (and these ideas can't be rejected quite as easily as one can reject de Sade). It's been hard to stop thinking about this book.
So I just started Mason & Dixon when I was in Denmark. Pynchon recounts the mostly fictional adventures of the real astronomers Mason & Dixon, taking place in the late 1700s. Like most of Pynchon, you have to read everything twice or three times before you see what he's on about, but there are moments in there as brilliant as staring at the sun.
The Crying of Lot 49 was over too soon (though it was enough to give me weird dreams of the Trystero for weeks!). So it left me still needing my Pynchon fix.
Posted by case at January 24, 2008 08:51 PMThrough the first half of the book I thought Houellebecq might have been some kind of ultraconservative because he kept attacking hedonism and liberalism, in contrast to earlier times where the mass-consciousness was more grounded in a coherent belief system. But by the end of the book I had a feeling that he didn't spend a lot of time attacking dogmatic religion because he felt it just wasn't worth spending his time discrediting any more than it already was.
And he's not completely against religion - there's that comment about the Buddhists being able to accept Djerzinsky's ideas because they were non-dogmatic.
I'm still really confused about the ending though - I mean, I "get it," but was the ending supposed to be a completely nihilistic rejection of all humanism, or was it supposed to be his idea of the ultimate utopia?
That kind of future would be horrifying for those of us that believe there's something worth preserving in secular humanism and individuality, but if you were born into that post-Djerzisnky world you would think it was paradise. And it *would* be paradise - that's what does my head in about it!
Posted by: Case at January 28, 2008 10:28 PMthat book totally fucked me over. i hated it until the very end, when i realized what i had been reading.
quite brilliant! i get the anti-uman stuff. but he's no nihilist. so what lies beneath? could be that somewhere in there a xenophobic,ultraconservative agenda is hiding?