John Sturrock

When statistics start horning in on our language, or the way we use it, the results are seldom quite what we’d be happy to hear. To be told that, day in, day out, we rely on some wretchedly skimpy proportion, a bare few thousand, of the uncommonly luxuriant word-hoard available to us anglophones, is chastening, leading us at best into sporadic efforts to stretch our working vocabularies by bringing into play delightful words we’ve always known but have somehow never got around to airing in public. This is one way of warding off that nasty feeling that we could perfectly well get by in life with a starveling lexicon, that no one would even notice the repetitions, in an age that long ago rewrung the neck of eloquence.

The first work of fiction to which Proust returns in A la recherche du temps perdu – and also the last, one complete, 2500-page orbit later – is George Sand’s François le champi, the first ‘real’ novel the narrator remembers having read. Or rather, remembers having had read to him, by his mother on that seminal evening of anxiety when she fails to come up and give him a goodnight kiss. The emergency recital is a success, the book’s ‘crudities’ and ‘very common prose’ notwithstanding, so sedative is the effect of his mother’s voice on her jumpy son. Poor George Sand, on the other hand, a victim yet again, as she said she’d been too often in her life, finding herself condescendingly banished to the shelf where the literary tranquillisers go, taken down only to be read by bourgeois parents to their children on grounds of her ‘goodness and moral distinction’ – qualities, Proust can’t resist observing, that aren’t necessarily rewarding to read about even if held to be admirable when met with in people.’‘

Cape Y2K once safely rounded, and we shall be faced in short order by 2002, a date that stands suggestively out to the numerological eye as a palindrome. We’re allowed only one of these amphisbaenic years per century, though we lived through the last of them a bare eight-some ago, in 1991. Lived through it and failed for sure to spare it a glance. In France, it was not so. There, the members of the Oulipo took due notice of a calendrical windfall and laid plans for some suitably reversible celebrations, such as inviting President Menem of Argentina to come and address audiences in the towns of Noyon and Laval, and ‘consecrating’ Léon/Noel, Eve, Anna, Otto, Bob and Ava as ‘given names of the year’. It was in keeping with the principles of the Oulipo that these should have remained as theoretical events, conceived of without any taking of steps for their realisation, for this ever-amiable groupuscule’s founding articles lay down that it should explore potentiality irrespective of whether reality can be managed so as to give it house-room: or as the Compendium has it, ‘it has been concerned not with literary works but with procedures and structures capable of producing them.’ Indeed, one of its two founders and chief manifesto-writer, François Le Lionnais, was an extremist who thought that the potential procedures and structures which members invented were diminished rather than validated by being put into practice.‘

The writer in France is having a good winter, whose autumn novel is no sooner out than it is being roundly abused on all sides for its dubious attitudes, and is then passed over by the jurors of the Prix Goncourt, who would rather argument turned, as by custom it does, on the forgettability of the novel they have picked, not on any bad smell given off by its contents. Les Particules élémentaires is only the second novel that Michel Houellebecq has written, but a book as boldly out of tune with the times as this will have no trouble outliving the flush of suspect publicity that might have led to its swift eclipse. It is aggressive in thought, often enough tacky in deed, and driven by a radical intolerance of the ways and means of a society that the novelist sees as terminally degenerate. He is likely to enjoy a lonely celebrity, with few from the left, right and certainly not the peace-loving centre anxious to risk association with his broadly misanthropic views. On the evidence of this novel, and of some of the sour answers he’s reported as giving when interviewed, Houellebecq has been accused of occupying several shunnable political or intellectual positions, Fascism, nihilism, Stalinism and eugenicism among them. How seriously he occupies any one position at all is open to question, but he has clearly stirred things up to promising effect among the dozing adherents of what I’ve lately seen referred to in France as ‘la pensée unique’, which makes it sound as though that once heroically fissile community can no longer raise the intellectual energy to dispute the premisses of the liberal consensus.‘