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The French novelist claims he is the world’s best. Now he has curated a show of his own photographs. By Simon Kuper
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Espagne #001 The exhibition opens with this photo taken from Houellebecq’s apartment window. In the reddish sky over Paris’s suburbs, Houellebecq sees a brewing conflict. That feeling is emphasised by a line from one of his poems: “Il est temps de faire vos jeux” (roughly, “It’s time to place your bets”). He says this image contains “a promise of civil war”.
Submission, his most recent novel, also evokes a possible French civil war. Houellebecq explains: “It’s an underlying idea among many Europeans that Europe is heading for a generalised civil war. I think the danger is real.”
Last year’s terrorist attacks on France confirmed his thinking. “Let’s say that the attackers’ objective is clear: to provoke a counter-reaction. The process will really have begun when there are murderous attacks on a mosque or halal business. Then we might fork off into real civil war. Then, objectively, it will be time to ‘place your bets’, to choose sides. I imagine a civil war with assassinations.”
Isis is merely the latest episode in a long story, he believes. “In my adult life I haven’t really known periods without terrorist danger. I think I will never take public transport without fear, without wondering if there’s a package somewhere. If I pass a rubbish bin I always look to see what’s inside.”
He first became aware of terrorism in 1972, with the Palestinian attack on the Munich Olympics. “I began to be personally marked by it after the Hezbollah attacks [in Paris], in 1984 to 1986, because I ought to have been killed by one of them. I was five minutes from the spot. From that moment on, I felt I would live with that as long as I stay in Europe.”
Children’s playground
Soon after Houellebecq bought his holiday home in Alméria, southeastern Spain, the financial crisis struck. Local construction of resorts pretty much ceased. That gave him the perfect view of a subject that fascinates him: failed mass tourism.
“It was a great failure,” he recalls. “Buildings were stopped mid-construction. Those that were finished never found buyers.” Hence this photograph (in screaming colours, like his other photographs of mass tourism) of a children’s playground without children. Houellebecq says that abandoned places “have a very post-apocalyptic aspect”.
He muses, “I saw a film made by a Frenchman, I think, about Detroit. I’m not saying this cynically, but it makes you want to take pictures. It’s the end of the automobile industry, if I understood rightly. If you want to say it in more general or theological terms, it raises a question I often ask myself: ‘What will remain of humanity after humanity?’”
He answers himself: “Some objects will remain. There’s a text in one of my novels about the Rolleiflex camera. I think a double-objective Rolleiflex will last for centuries. It’s really well made. I’m much less sure about the iPhone.”
Europe
Some time in the early 1990s, Houellebecq visited Calais with members of the eloquently named movement “les banalystes”. He took this photograph at the “Europe” shopping mall. In the exhibition catalogue he says of the photo: “There’s both a coercive side, and a rapid degradation process, which nicely sums up what I think about Europe.”
Now he adds: “What’s very amusing is that the opening of the exhibition will coincide with a possible Brexit. It’s June 23 [when the UK holds its referendum on membership of the European Union]. It’s going to be hot!”
He is rooting for Brexit: “I’d love it. I’d love it if the English gave the starting signal for the dismantling. I hope they won’t disappoint me. I’ve been against the [European] idea from the start. It’s not democratic, it’s not good.
“I really like England, I really like the fact of it having been the only country, for quite a while, to have resisted Hitler. I’d really like it to leave, to signal the independence movement.”
But his political engagement doesn’t extend to the US: “Trump I don’t care about. We have to disconnect from the US. They aren’t the masters of the world anymore. They aren’t our bosses. Now there are other countries, there’s China, India. American problems aren’t mine. Trump is dreadful but he’s their problem. But England is a bit my problem.”
Avallon suburbs:
Despite suffering from vertigo, Houellebecq took this photo from a hot-air balloon over Avallon, in the Yonne region of northern France. The vantage point in the sky is the one he occupies in his frequent dreams of flying.
In his photographs as in his novels, Houellebecq is drawn to France’s unlovely modern exurbs. “I don’t love them,” he explains, “but those are the places I know the best. That’s where I grew up. So I get my bearings easily. I know how these places are organised – well, they aren’t very organised, but I know what happens there.
“Where I spent my adolescence was a peri-urban zone at the time. It was about 50 kilometres from Paris. I went back there, and in the meantime they had built Euro Disney. It had become very, very bizarre, because there were lots more train and bus lines and yet there weren’t really any shops. It’s a bit chaotic. I didn’t know all these new bus lines, there were zones that hadn’t been built when I was there, new neighbourhoods. It’s disturbing.
“The peri-urban, for me, is the kind of chaos that has been much expanded in recent times. It starts about 20 kilometres from Paris, and ends 100 kilometres from Paris. It’s in this kind of place that most people now live.” And yet, he complains, few novelists write about such places. “It’s true that they are more difficult to describe.”
Rich Parisians are expected to live in the city’s chic old neighbourhoods but Houellebecq says: “I’m not in love with Paris. Often they tell me I should live in SaintGermain-des-Prés but I don’t feel like it.” Instead, he lives in one of Paris’s few highrises, near the Place d’Italie, close to the ring road. ▶ 41
France #014
France #033
JUNE JUNE 18/19 2016 2016
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