A French Pose?

I spent some time in France as a young American music student, and some (not all) aspects of traditional French pedagogy were for me just plain insufferable.  The teacher’s first goal was to show me that I knew absolutely nothing and was basically a worthless piece of shit.  But if I was submissive and unquestioning of their authority, wisdom, and methods, I could gradually build myself into something of value. For me it was a hypocritical pose that was more often than not just an excuse for bad behavior and laziness on their part, and I wanted no part of it. I had enough insecurities of my own and didn’t need a pompous authority figure reinforcing my own self-doubts.

There seems to be a similar pose in some French writing these days.  Instead of simply writing about experience and feeling, some authors are compelled to interject intellectual theory stated as fact.  For me it often comes across as exaggerated and out of place.  I have that reaction to Bernard Henri Levy.  I often want to ask him to stop preaching at me and just say what he has to say in a more modest way.  The ideas are often fascinating if speculative.  But to state them as fact to me is off-putting.  The author claims to have all the answers (even if the answers contradict each other); the reader knows nothing.

So with some trepidation I decided to revisit Michel Houellebecq, whose ‘Platform’ I had read years ago when it first came out.  ‘Platform’ is a fascinating novel that focuses on sexuality and predicts the inevitable conflict between strains of conservation Islam and Western society.  In some ways it’s an outrageous book, full of exaggeration to the point of parody.  Nonetheless, the ideas themselves are captivating.

‘The Elementary Particles’ is another well reviewed Houellebecq novel.  Again sexuality plays a major role in the book. Ideas are prominent, often to the detriment of the fiction itself.  The juxtaposition of narrative and something like pedagogy in this passage is typical:

‘Just after writing this, Bruno had slipped into a kind of alcoholic coma.  He was woken some hours later by the screams of his son.  Between the ages of two and four, human children acquire a sense of self, which manifests itself in displays of megalomaniacal histrionics.  Their aim in this is to control their social environment ... ‘

For me the sudden shift from fictional narrative to a lecture on child psychology is jarring.  The lecture takes me out of the world of fiction as experience and puts me in a different mode, back in the place of that music student that was forced to accept pearls of wisdom from the know-it-all pompous music professor. Can’t the author find a way to make us understand what he wants to express without resorting to a lecture?  Can’t we stay in the realm of experience and feeling?

OK, so the conflict between human feeling and a more objective reality is part of the point of the book.  I get that.  And those ideas are very interesting indeed.  There are many insights here into human experience that are well worth reading and worth thinking about long after finishing the book.  But why do the ideas have to be framed in such a sterile intellectual context? It’s strange to read about life (in a story) and be analyzing life, drawing cerebral conclusions about it, and often making fun of it all at the same time.   Why be haughty?  The characters have real issues, and they experience pain and suffering.  When the author breaks the narrative with these ‘objective truths’ he implies that he’s above the suffering, understands the larger issues in ways that his unfortunate and limited characters cannot, and therefore can live himself by different rules.  Hence for me the basic hypocrisy of the pose itself. 

I’m much more at home with the Philip Roth approach in which the author is clearly just as confused and helpless as his characters.  There are no objective truths that can make sense of the suffering or place any of us above it.  We’re all in the same mess.

How sad that there are no new Philip Roth novels coming our way.  It will be hard to stop anticipating the next one.