un monstre

It's a strange mix of comfort and creepiness when someone articulates your deep muddled thoughts...

 Excerpt from Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206

Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written that one source of inspiration is the stories people tell you about their lives. Apparently, strangers like to confess things to you.

HOUELLEBECQ

I think I could have been one of the best psychiatrists in the world because I give the impression
 of being nonjudgmental. Which isn’t quite true. Sometimes I am very shocked by what I’m being 
told. I just don’t show it.

 INTERVIEWER

What is your concept of the possibility of love between a man and a woman?

HOUELLEBECQ

I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the 
question of God’s existence in Dostoyevsky.

INTERVIEWER

Love may no longer exist?

HOUELLEBECQ

That’s the question of the moment.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you are “cyclothymic.” What does that mean?

HOUELLEBECQ

It means you go back and forth from depression to exultation. But in the end, I doubt 
I’m really depressive.

INTERVIEWER

What are you then?

HOUELLEBECQ

Just not very active. The truth is, when I go to bed and do nothing, I’m not badly off. 
I’m quite content. So it isn’t really what you would call depression.

INTERVIEWER

But what stops you from succumbing to what you have said is the greatest danger for you, which is sulking in a corner while repeating over and over that everything sucks?

HOUELLEBECQ

For the moment my desire to be loved is enough to spur me to action. I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite that.

Of course, there’s no guarantee this will last.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think is the appeal of your work, in spite of its brutality? 

HOUELLEBECQ

There are too many answers. The first is that it’s well written. Another is that you sense obscurely that it’s the truth. Then there’s a third one, which is my favorite: because it’s intense. There is a need for intensity. From time to time, you have to forsake harmony. You even have to forsake truth. You have to, when you need to, energetically embrace excessive things. Now I sound like Saint Paul.

 INTERVIEWER

 You once wrote in your biography of H. P. Lovecraft “No aesthetic creation can exist without a certain voluntary blindness.” 

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, it’s true that you have to choose your family, so to speak. You have to exaggerate a little. 

INTERVIEWER

Who would you say is your family? 

 

HOUELLEBECQ

It may surprise you, but I am convinced that I am part of the great family of the Romantics. 

INTERVIEWER 

You’re aware that may be surprising?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes, but society has evolved, a Romantic is not the same thing that it used to be. Not long ago, I read de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I am certain that if you took, on the one hand, an old-order Romantic and, on the other
hand, what de Tocqueville predicts will happen to literature with the development of democracy—taking the common man as its subject, having a strong interest in the future, using more realist vocabulary—you would get me.

INTERVIEWER

What is your definition of a Romantic?

HOUELLEBECQ

It’s someone who believes in unlimited happiness, which is eternal and possible right away. 
Belief in love. Also belief in the soul, which is strangely persistent in me, even though I never stop saying the opposite.

INTERVIEWER

You believe in unlimited, eternal happiness?

HOUELLEBECQ

Yes. And I’m not just saying that to be a provocateur.

Source: The Paris Review via Our Youth