capsule reviews

ben lerner, michel houellebecq

Nov 19, 2024

For once I remembered to use affiliate links again… if you buy from a Bookshop link, I make a bit of money. The government makes me tell you this.…

10:04 (Ben Lerner, 2015)
The Hatred of Poetry (Ben Lerner, 2016)

I’d always avoided Ben Lerner’s work on the grounds that I would probably find it annoying. Whenever I asked people who loved it what they loved about it, they always gave the precise same answer—that it was “the sentences.” I was unmoved by this answer. A novel is not the sum of its collective sentences, surely.1

Having now read 10:04, I actually thought it much less annoying than I expected, but I also feel as if I’ve read the book everybody acts like Sally Rooney’s books are: hyper-self-consciously political in an impotent way, full of vague relationships, autofictional, directionless etc. The narrator of 10:04 is like so many self-reproaching liberal figures in being somebody who does what he wants but compensates by making sure he feels a little bad about it all the time. A real type, obviously—but tiresome.2 In two separate parts of the book, for instance, the narrator dwells at length on what a shame it is to eat a baby octopus that has been massaged to death, as octopodes are so smart—then he eats it anyway. (What are you supposed to do—not eat the baby octopus?)

What I had not been told about 10:04, however, is that it’s often very funny. There’s a scene where for instance the narrator has a conversation with an imaginary child he may or may not have with his best friend in the future; the child’s name keeps changing and their conversation becomes abstract and combative:

“How much does IUI typically cost?”
“Great question. According to the rate sheet, and because they recommended some injectable medications for your mom, and because we did some ultrasounds and blood work, probably five thousand a pop.” I regretted saying, even though I hadn’t said anything, “a pop.”
“What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?”
“Four thousand nine hundred and forty U.S. dollars, but I think that’s an unreliable measure of quality of life and I’d dispute the relevance of the fact, Camila.”

The humor of these parts of 10:04 derive partly from the way in which the tone of the book never really changes; sometimes these self-lacerating moments are meant straight, sometimes they’re a joke, sometimes they are sort of both (as when the narrator sizes up a woman whose shape is “consistent with normative male fantasy” even though he’s embarrassed to be “automatically taking in the dimensions of her body”). Still, I finished the book with the strong sense that for large sections of it Lerner was deliberately wasting my time—that is, he wanted me to sense my time being wasted and have that feed back into the experience of reading the book. And I resented this; it felt, in the end, a little cheap.

About The Hatred of Poetry I don’t have much to say except that a few times in the book he seems to base his case that we all hate poetry on the fact that

Every few years an essay appears in a mainstream periodical denouncing poetry or proclaiming its death, usually blaming existing poets for the relative marginalization of the art, and then the defenses light up the blogosphere before the culture, if we can call it a culture, turns its attention, if we can call it attention, back to the future. But why don’t we ask: What kind of art is defined—has been defined for millennia—by such a rhythm of denunciation and defense?

But surely an objection here is: all of them are so defined, or at least, all the ones that have existed for millennia.3 Not only do such attacks on, for instance, novels appear regularly, novels themselves are also full of characters whose stupidity is underscored for us by their repulsive habit of reading novels. The Hatred of Poetry is most interesting when it takes the hatred for granted and explores from there, and at its least convincing when it tries to prove it exists.

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Michel Houellebecq, 1991)

This book is fantastic, which is a big problem for me. Does this mean I need to go back to Houellebecq’s novels and give them another shot? I read Submission back when it was the big “discourse” book4 and really felt like all right, that’s it, we can pack it up here, no more Houellebecq needed. On the other hand, critical insight has never corresponded to being “good at fiction” (or vice versa really) so maybe it’s not something I really need to worry about.5

Houellebecq’s characterization of Lovecraft as motivated by “absolute hatred of the world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular” seems clearly true—and, surprisingly to me, Houellebecq dedicates quite a lot of this fairly short book to the ways in which Lovecraft’s racism manifests in his stories instead of passing over this in silence.6 What I found so interesting about it, however, what its attentiveness to how Lovecraft’s stories really function—in other words, once you set aside everything that Lovecraft’s work is not, you are left with the task to describe what that work is. And in describing what the work is, Houellebecq is exceptional.7

Take, for instance, this part, where he starts to discuss the importance of architecture to Lovecraft’s stories:

One discovers architecture progressively and from a variety of angles; one moves within it. This is an element that can never be reproduced in a painting nor even in a film; it is an element Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s stories successfully reproduced in somewhat stupefying fashion.

The rest of this section of the book is dedicated to exploring what it means that in a Lovecraft story we move “within” architecture; you notice that Houellebecq never tries to explain how it is that books can do what paintings and films can’t—he just makes an assertion—but you roll with it to see where it gets you. (Lovecraft really does spend a huge amount of time on architecture, after all.) Viewing his stories as something you are similarly stuck inside, “free” to move about but unable to grasp the whole, does really illuminate something not only about how he uses architecture but even the wider world of his mythology, which it is evident no person can actually grasp; and then after finishing the book you are left to think about how this book too is a kind of architectural tour of Lovecraft’s work, not a summation of the whole but a looking at first this part and then that.

At one point Houellebecq suggests an affinity between Lovecraft and Kant,8 but he leaves this as a suggestion only; if you are interested in something that explores that affinity a bit further, though, Adam Roberts’s book The Thing Itself is worth a look.

Actually I think this statement might be a point of difference between me and some of my friends but I am unsure.

White liberal guilt is not an inexhaustible artistic subject and this book feels very much like an artifact of its specific time in taking it for granted that it is not only very interesting but also universal among its presumed readership.

This observation, on the other hand, I quite liked:

Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. There are varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word “poetry”—to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or, à la Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to defeat the language and value of existing society; to propound a measure of value beyond money. But one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems.

I remain convinced that almost nobody discoursing about Submission actually read it.

And on the other other hand (eldritch biology), some of Houellebecq’s bugaboos which are fully present in Submission are noticeable here, as when he characterizes snobby readers of Lovecraft, who praise his stories but deplore his style, as “suffragettes.” Why? I could not tell you.

I also enjoyed that the translator, Dorna Khazeni, has notes at the end in which she is compelled to list several quotes Houellebecq uses that have no English source that she can find. “Houellebecq was also unable to assist in locating or identifying these citations,” she writes, which I like to imagine represents several frustrated and un-replied-to emails from her side. It raises the intruiging possibility that where he could not find the right quote to fit into a passage, Houellebecq opted instead to simply make one up, though it is of course much more likely that he just took careless notes etc. However instead of undermining the book I felt it made it better, as if the dark fertility of Lovecraft’s writing was reproducing itself.

And funny—I’m sorry that I care so much that things be funny, but I do:

Many authors have dedicated their work to elaborating the reasons for this legitimate aversion. Not Lovecraft. For him, hatred of life precedes all literature. He was to remain steadfast in this regard. The rejection of all forms of realism is a preliminary condition for entering his universe.
If an author were to be defined, not by the themes he addresses, but by those he avoids, then we would be forced to agree that Lovecraft’s position is rather unique. In his entire body of work, there is not a single allusion to two of the realities to which we generally ascribe great importance: sex and money. Truly not one reference. He writes exactly as though these things did not exist.

Just as Kant hoped to set the foundation of a valid ethical code “not just for man but for all rational beings,” Lovecraft wanted to create a horror capable of terrifying all creatures endowed with reason. Apart from this, the two men had commonalities; both were extremely thin and had a weakness for sweets, both were suspected of perhaps not being fully human. Be that as it may, what the “loner of Königsberg” and the “recluse of Providence” have in common is the heroic and paradoxical desire to go beyond humanity.