Note: this short essay is the introduction to a much longer, forthcoming essay on five novels by Michel Houellebecq and the state of the novel today. This introduction is used to set the stage for the exploration of several themes prevalent in Houellebecq’s books, and then show how the novels “purpose” or importance in western culture has changed, and why Houellebecq is the quintessential writer for our time.
THE LITERATURE OF EXHAUSTION
In his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth claims that the novel has expressed all it had to say, and that there’s nothing left for a writer to do except resort to tricks and slights of hand. There was much talk in the first half of the 20th century about the end of the novel, though it must be understood that rather than the form disappearing, it was believed doomed never to express anything new. Considering the chosen term for the literary form in question, this would render anything beyond a certain point the walking dead, a Frankenstein’s monster . When that point was is impossible to say, though many argue that the ultimate modern novel was Joyce’s Ulysses, and perhaps the first post-modern work of literature was Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot.” Regardless of exactly when the ineffable threshold was crossed from modernism to post-modernism, or from living to undead, exactly what was meant by the end or death of the novel must be parsed out.
Gustave Flaubert was purported to have paced around his garden, in earshot of passers-by in boats on a nearby river, bellowing his lines of prose aloud to better experience its cadence and flow, much like bards of the past would sing or recite epic verse. “Verse is the quintessential form of ancient literature. All the combinations of poetry have been tried out. As for prose, far from it.” So if we accept Barth, whose essay was written roughly 100 years after Flaubert wrote this about prose, “all the combinations” of prose had been “tried out.”
This is far too technical an understanding of what the novel is, though there is a point to all of this. However that is, to an extent, what Barth meant. To paraphrase, he says that for a writer coming at the end of - or very late in- in the tradition of the novel, it’s nigh on impossible to find a way to say something new. Or a new way to say something old. In other words, everything has been written, so its better to write nothing. Heidegger makes a similar point somewhere (either in this book or in his Der Spiegel interview), that eventually philosophy brings you to the conclusion that silence is best - hence his early retirement to the Black Forest to chop wood and draw water. And in the Literature of Exhaustion essay, Barth evokes John Cages’ piece “4’33,” a totally silent orchestral work. Perhaps the point of this piece is that “all the combinations” of sound had been “tried out.”
Art and literature serve a number of purposes: a way to open up a plane of shared cultural experience, a repository for cultural memory, personal escapism, self-transcendence, and much more. So while Barth meant “exhaustion” in the technical sense that Flaubert meant “all combinations had been tried out,” cultural exhaustion sets in when a culture no longer has the reserves for artistic expression. It’s probably impossible to determine which comes first, formal artistic exhaustion or spiritual cultural exhaustion, but they certainly play off each other in a negative feedback loop. This cultural devolution results in mass-instant gratification, breeding people who eschew the hard work of producing, engaging with, and understanding serious art in favor of the quick dopamine provided by technology and sex (which go hand in hand these days).
This cultural exhaustion isn’t just “spiritual” however, nor is it merely physical. It is intellectual and creative, though again all these forms of exhaustion play off each other in a self-perpetuating spiral of decline and decadence. The literary epoch known as “post-modernism” is an exhausted period in that it’s anxiety over a loss of ways to express the human experience resorted to the employment of tricks and trinkets, just as Barth observed in his essay. John Cage himself had dabbled in “experimental” music that amounted, arguably, to little more than novelties, but probably the best exemplars of the post-modern “condition” in art were Barth himself and Andy Warhol. Barth’s short story collection “Lost In The Funhouse” and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans series are simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, commentaries on and victims of the post modern condition of exhaustion. In the digital era, even these last-ditch efforts to animate the corpse of literature have worn out.
And yet while art is exhausted, civilization grinds on. Novels continue being written and consumed. The only really thriving sector of novels now is genre fiction, a sewn-on limb of Frankenstein’s monster. If genre fiction is the only place where real money can be made by large numbers of people, imagine how much creative energy is redirected into writing the next “50 Shades Of Grey” instead of writing the next “Moby Dick.” It also brings charlatans into the field that of course are not Melville, but this begs the question: will there ever be - nay, CAN there ever be - another Melville? Do we even have the cultural conditions to produce one singular masterpiece like Moby Dick? Answering that question would require an entirely separate essay. But what we can say is that this creative dearth, this pop-deluge *itself* creates fertile ground for artistic commentary. Existing within the cultural phase of decadence and decline in art and creativity is a “condition,” one that comes *after* the post-modern condition, or in its wake.
The orgy of the twentieth century is over. The drugs have worn off. The novelties of post-modern art have gone stale. We finally passed out and have woken up with a terminal hangover. And the writer here to tell us about it, to hold up the mirror to our nature - our nature as it’s taken its course - is Michel Houllebecq.
Did your twitter account get nuked? I can not find it.