Francois Hollande

In covering Francois Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, American and British mainstream media discussed market reaction. The headlines were different variations of Markets to Drop on Fears of European Elections. What the market does, how it reacts, is now one of the main angles for any news item. Investment is the domain of the wealthy, and these headlines emphasize their interests and opinions. From now on, who you elect, how you regulate, what you earn, what you pay, when and where you war--everything you do should satisfy those interests.

Something about "Whatever" by Michel Houellebecq

This novella begs comparison to Camus' The Stranger. But the 21st century is a subject in Whatever. Contrary to reviewer consensus, I imagine the story making a temporal statement more so than a generational one. In this reading, the hypothesis that unfolds is that Camus' mid-20th century model French Existentialist would today be a Nihilist, his banner of authenticity battered, beaten to shreds by the perceived ceaseless normalization of personalities and scripting of roles, the sweeping away of the work-life balance, the abandonment of intellectuality in favor of "being informed," and the overall digitizing of experience and of perspective.*

Whereas Camus' man suffered the conditions of Absurdity and Freedom and the indifference of the Universe, Houellebecq's suffers needlessness, minor inconvenience, and isolation (that is self-imposed to a degree). Here, the main character, almost subconsciously, and unconsciously, articulates in writing the need for human connection:

Early on certain individuals experience the frightening impossibility of living by themselves; basically they cannot bear to see their own life before them, to see it in its entirety without areas of shadow, without substance...It is sometimes enough to place another individual before them, provided he is taken to be as pure, as transparent as they are themselves, for this insupportable fracture to resolve itself as a luminous, tense and permanent aspiration towards the absolute inaccessible. Thus, while day after day a mirror only returns the same desperate image, two parallel mirrors elaborate and edify a clear and dense system which draws the human eye into an infinite, unbounded trajectory, infinite in its geometrical purity, beyond all suffering and beyond the world.

Camus' The Stranger is, to my mind, a work of literature, then a work of philosophy. Houellebecq's Whatever is literature, and secondly a work of social or cultural commentary. This was thoroughly enjoyable.

Notes:

• * My describing those trends doesn't quite capture the totality (or maybe lack of totality) of the Modern that Houellebecq cynically evokes.

• I felt considerable empathy reading this book.

• The prose isn't elegant—not in the traditional sense, anyway, but this is nice:

  Doubtless I have some vague existence today in a doctoral dissertation, alongside other real-life cases. The thought of having become an item in a file calms me. I imagine the volume, its cloth binding, its slightly sad cover; I gently flatten myself between the pages; I am squashed.