A really really interesting book. The joke that it’s basically a long greentext is very apt. But I always find it fascinating to stare deeply into artifacts like this. Long manic forum posts, manifestos, books by people of questionable ethics. What does it mean when we can relate to some of the feelings of a self-professed monster? I think it’s important to engage with the elements here that are prescient. And to pretend that this book isn’t rife with prescience is to stick one’s head in the sand in my opinion.

Houellebecq’s autofiction follows an unnamed Self flitting inward and outward from Paris to its satellite cities on work assignment. He laments the modern condition of the world as he is consistently victimized by the emptiness that he diagnoses both in society and himself. He passes misanthropic bigoted judgement on people that he sees and invents motives for them that we have no reason to suspect are valid.

But this feeling of moving through the world as the only conscious entity within it isn’t necessarily evil, it’s part of the human experience. Who hasn’t felt uniquely isolated by information in modern society? Perhaps it’s the only common emotion everyone can share anymore. Certainly at the dawn of the dotcom booming nineties it’s the only sensible angle from which to approach alienated autofiction as Houellebecq did. And from my read, at no point is the joke on anyone but its miserable narrator. Like any other proper incel, he moves through a Hell of his own creation.

Some keys that I think turn this from pure narcissistic kvetching into good literature are the discussions of interiority/exteriority, pastoral/urban, and freedom/control. The book is speckled with these everywhere. The narrator’s main job is to bring rural agricultural government divisions into the 21st century via a nebulous data processing program called Maple. To do this he must travel outward from modern, internal, frenetic Paris to towns in the countryside and on the coast. As he traces this hub-and-spoke path through France on his company’s whim, his only expressions of freedom are: a manic cigarette habit that leaves him hospitalized with a heart condition, paid phone sex, writing stories about erudite conversations between animals about the sexual maladies of society, and vicarious violence.

I’m reminded of what little I know of Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society, where he discusses the importance of creative expression for people in a society and society’s facilitation of that creativity at scale. He says that when creative expression is suppressed we are left with people whose only subversive and creative outlets can be violence. That violence can be enacted against others or one’s self or, in Houellebecq’s case here, both. Like so many factory farmed sow biting the tails of their brethren in line for the slaughter.

The original French title is Extension du domaine de la lutte. Which translates to something like “extension of the domain of struggle” or, more idiomatically, “extension of the combat zone.” Certainly as long as young men to view the sexual market as a war zone we can expect them to have trouble extricating violence from the equation. I suppose the best reaction we could hope for from some of them who are too far gone is simply, “Whatever.”