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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Of course, there will always be some smartass around, devoid of the ability to make distinctions, who will claim that sounds just like America under Bush. Though it should be pointed out that the ability to complain of Bush's erosion of the separation of church and state implies a society where the distinction exists. But try to find equivalents for the stories that keep turning up in the papers. The New York Times reported last week on a 9-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and who has since then been beaten every day by her brothers for bringing shame on the family. Try to find our equivalent of the Bangaldeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who has had a fatwa on her head since 1994 for protesting the persecution and torture of women in Bangladesh. Or an equivalent for the Nigerian woman sentenced to be stoned to death for having a child out of wedlock. Or the Saudi girls who burned to death in a fire at their dormitory because, having escaped, clerics sent them back into the building to cover themselves. This, Houellebecq rightly says, can have no meaning but barbarism and ignorance.
Houellebecq has been accused of being sneaky for, in Jenny Turner's words, putting his "nasty digs at Muslims in the mouths of friendly Arabs." But he's putting those digs squarely in the mouths of the people who have firsthand experience of Islamic fundamentalism. You have to consider just which characters make those remarks in "Platform." They include a North African woman whose Western lover is murdered by her brother ("They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around pretending to be the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them"); an Egyptian who feels that the restrictions of Islam have retarded Arab culture ("The closer a religion comes to monotheism ... the more cruel and inhuman it becomes"); and a Jordanian banker who delivers an eulogy for Islam.
"The paradise promised by the Prophet," the banker tells Michel, "already existed here on earth. There were places on earth where young, available, lascivious girls danced for the pleasure of men, where one could become drunk on nectar and listen to celestial music; there were about twenty of them within five hundred meters of our hotel. These places were easily accessible. To gain admission, there was absolutely no need to fulfill the seven duties of a Muslim nor to engage in holy war; all you had to do was pay a couple of dollars ... Already, young Arabs dreamed of nothing but consumer products and sex. They might try to pretend otherwise, but secretly, they wanted to be part of the American system. The violence of some of them was no more than a sign of impotent jealousy, and thankfully, more and more of them were turning their backs on Islam."
That passage is a melancholy version of the headline that appeared in the Onion a few weeks after Sept. 11: "Hijackers Shocked, Surprised to Find Themselves in Hell." If that passage is considered racist, then so too must Thomas Friedman's columns predicting that Western capitalism will eventually spell the end of radical Islam. (In Friedman's view, or in Houellebecq's, the temptations of a consumer culture become harder to resist when people to whom they seem a luxury get a chance to obtain them.) In fact, the further you get into "Platform," the harder it is not to think that Houellebecq's crime was to say these things as a white Westerner. Nobody accused Hanif Kureishi (who is on record as admiring the novel) of racism for his satire of the Muslims supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in his novel "The Black Album." Nor were there any charges leveled at Zadie Smith for her parody of Muslims in "White Teeth."
"Platform" was written before Sept. 11, before the murder of tourists in Bali, before the attack last October on the Moscow theater, before the kidnapping of Western tourists in Algeria. Because it includes an attack on Western sex tourists by Islamic terrorists, "Platform" has been called prophetic. That is to deny the power and clarity of Houellebecq's vision, to indulge in what Berman has identified as the Eurocentrism that, following the fall of Communism, led the West to conclude that all those exotic, funny countries posed no threat to us. It's ironic that a writer who has been accused of racism has written a novel in which, though his narrator proclaims he has no knowledge of the modern world, the fates of the West and East are inextricably linked. If there's anything prophetic in "Platform," it's the section that must have seemed satirical to Houellebecq when he wrote it: editorials in French newspapers condemning the attack but saying that the Westerners had it coming. "Faced," one of Houellebecq's fictional editorialists writes, "with the hundreds of thousands of women who have been sullied, humiliated, and reduced to slavery throughout the world -- it is regrettable to have to say this -- what do the deaths of a few of the well-heeled matter?" You can hear echoes of that in Noam Chomsky's lie that as many people were killed in the American bombing raid in Sudan as in the Sept. 11 attacks, or in Michael Moore's contention that this is what happens when Americans want their Nikes.
For all its intemperance, all of its giving in to invective, all of the things that Houellebecq's provocations leave out, there is irreducible truth in "Platform" and the satisfaction of seeing an author realize large ambitions without sacrificing his story. The imprecations against the book are worrying, not because they are so intellectually sloppy and as reactionary as they claim the book to be, but because they suggest a sense of diminished expectations for what a novel can be, a lack of belief that it's part of a novel's job to provoke and disturb and to confront us with what we don't want to know. "Platform" is also a book that, while abjuring sentimentality, believes in the redemptive potential of love, that aims to rescue sex from mechanization and put it back in the realm of mystery and ecstasy and even sacrament.
The end of that banker's story -- "He himself had been unlucky. He was an old man now, and he had been forced to build his whole life on a religion he despised" -- can also serve as the end of Michel's story, the Westerner in exile from the new religion of depersonalization loose in his homeland. There's an echo to be found, not only of Michel's pronouncement of his ultimate fate ("I'll be forgotten. I'll be forgotten quickly") but of the melancholy that settles over the end of this book in the lines that close Elvis Costello's album "All This Useless Beauty": "I want to vanish/ This is my last request/ I've given you the awful truth/ now give me my rest." Houellebecq earns those lines, but it seems unlikely he will vanish.
