Fernando Arrabal: It would be more efficient to bomb with miniskirts

Fernando Arrabal:  According to the international media—from the New York Times to the Spiegel—"Michel Houllebecq´s publishers forbade him to be closer than one hundred meters to any journalist". Actually from September 5th you do not accept—or you cannot accept—any interviews. Are your publishers really scared of...

Michel Houellebecq: They have nothing to be scared of. I am not really courageous.

FA: Courage doesn´t seem to be a virtue to me. In "Libération" Catherine Millet complains that your publishers had "pitifully apologized" to those who want to erase you...

MH: ...and therefore her book is just after mine at the top of the "best-sellers’ list.

[We laugh while Clément, his corgi, bites the pretty box, signed and numbered, containing a Swatch.]

FA: Catherine Millet reminds us that Maurizio Cattelan wasn´t sued when, two years ago, he presented a pope´s effigy torn by a comet. "Oh! la la" said the director of the review Art Press, "What kind of scandal would occur if the gallery had surrendered to the Vatican". Today, are people as hard against you as they will be with you in a few years?

MH: Even though it would happen, I would not appreciate it as revenge. I have never felt revenge, even when, on the Champs Elysées, I met the guy who tormented me in my childhood and the toilets of the school... and had become a tramp.

FA: But "Miguel", the main character of your novel "Platform", is always dreaming of revenge after a terrorist group of fundamentalist Muslims kills 117 tourists. "Miguel" discovers the dead body of his beloved Valérie torn—and pieces all around.

MH: Long before you were in the surrealist group—in the 60s—André Breton announced that "Love will be convulsive or won´t be".

FA: "Miguel," traumatized in front of the massacred body of Valérie, understands that he will never be able anymore to "levitate between her lips". Driven crazy by sorrow he says the words which shocked so much: "I feel enthusiasm every time I hear that a terrorist was killed... I hate Islam... it destroyed my whole life".

MH: I do not share Michel’s desire for revenge ("Miguel" as you say) even though I understand that he could be driven by it.

FA: It is so childish to have revenge thoughts today! Tomorrow will always rise behind the wall of reversibility.

MH: But how will he express this reversibility, the one who wrote "Houllebecq´s novel is a libelous monster..."?

FA: The new inquisitors are creating for themselves goals between cops and fire. For me "Platform" is the moral treaty and the lyric poem of our time.

MH: For so many years now, you’ve judged me with a kindness that I do not deserve. And with you I can speak (for example) about the best living and hidden mathematician, Alexandre Grothendieck.  That´s why I publicly declared that more than an "ami" (friend) you are my "amythe"... I have seldom seen my father since I became an adult—last time it was 5 years ago. We have nothing at all to say to each other.

FA: But his name is René! The man who gave you life was re-né (re-born) or born twice and he named you Michel, after the archangel. The renaissance that you are announcing in a symbolic way will also occur by killing the dragon.

MH: But not by winning the Goncourt. You know that they erased me from the short list? For moral purposes!

FA: Robbe-Grillet...

MH: ...I have no opinion about this prize...Robbe-Grillet and I... we both studied in the same agricultural engineering school, with a lap of 40 years. It was a really good school; I do not deny the legacy.

FA: One day you brought me to spend few hours in a café named "Fernando". After...

MH: ... you understood that it was in front of my school?

FA: Yes, but a long time after... They say—is it to criticize you—that you put in your garden in Ireland, like rednecks, garden gnomes?

MH: I have just three.

Until my twentieth birthday I was lucky to be pampered by women: my grand-mother, my father´s mother, Henriette.

FA: I think that this name means: "King´s house".

MH: She was a voting communist... but she would like to see me living in the most beautiful palace.

FA: I am imagining her as the grand-mother all of us would like to have.

MH: For her there were no elections, no campaigns, and no political discussions... the only thing which mattered was her communist vote, by habit.

FA: What would she say today about Afghanistan?

MH: That this country would not be in this situation if it were a soviet republic.

FA: With the "new man"!

MH: But not with the "modern man". Our contemporary, obsessed by work, avoids love. Selfish, he cannot accept marriage but he doesn´t know how to love. He created a system in which it is impossible to live.

FA: ‘Morituri te salutant’ !

[And we laugh like we sneeze... to reduce our sorrow?]

MH: I do think that a missile, well directed, could destroy the black stone of Mecca.

FA: It is a provocation!

MH: My grandmother hated scandal. Like Stalin. As I do today. I want nothing but order. Maybe because my mother (my grandmother’s daughter-in-law) loved to provoke.

FA: Your mother... Jeanine... it means "God gives".

MH: I have a half-sister on her side : Catherine (‘khataros’: purity). I have never lived with my father, nor with my mother... I have not seen her for 10 years.

FA: I heard that she is preparing a book about you.

MH: In her sexual liberation and gauchist times I think she did everything, even an ant colonialist book under the pen-name of Leloutre.

FA: She hasn´t converted to Islam?

MH: She´s able to just to shit on others. I think she is not only doctor but anesthetist today.

FA: Did she come to visit you during your stays in psychiatric hospitals?

MH: I´ve never been visited by my family: my grand-mother had just died and I was already divorced.

FA: You... have been... so unbalanced by your family... that you cannot even measure your own sorrow. And today you are a victim of propriety, the result of the honeymoon of the righter of wrongs and the executioners.  Once the hunt is launched, you are the young poet brought to the court, on whose face everyone can spit.

MH: They even accuse me of being "The great pervert in the middle of the world".

FA: Your first wife "Jacinthe" (hyacinth), was she really a flower?

MH: She was a comet... Our marriage was really short: just long enough to have a son Etienne.... and to start my long journey to psychiatric hospitals.

FA: Etienne , the "crowned"... as if you gave him to the one who created your "king´s house", your grand-mother.

MH: All of this happened twenty years ago. But what a change! I was gifted in mathematics... and today, at 43, I need to fill myself up with pills to sleep a bit.

FA: Most of my best friends are dead. Beckett, Cioran, Ionesco or Topor, and you have a special space in my life.

MH: With you I can speak about theology, sex, philosophy, science and love... With the light gravity of humor.

FA: What you are conveying in "Platform", is it closer to you because you saw it through a mirror?

MH: On prostitution I just report.

FA: We are both laughing like we were using a nervous tic to protect us from your current wife, Marie-Pierre; have you been in partner-swapping clubs?

MH: Yes of course. And please do not think that she always did it just to...please me... only me.

MH: Can we merge the assassin in ‘Crime and Punishment’ with Dostoyevsky, or the doctor with Calderon?

FA: But gossip columnists pretend that the position of the main character of "Platform", "Miguel", is yours.

MH: I repeat with Balzac : "The more his life is infamous, the more man cares: it is then a protesting revenge of each instant".

FA: In your novel Miguel and Valérie discover real love.

MH: They taste the romantic exception perfumed with purity, altruism, tenderness and raspberry fellatio.

FA: But before being regenerated by this love Miguel is the prototype of the modest and modern parasite!

MH: He is a typical onanist guy, an un-militant racist and single without consistence. He goes regularly to peep shows, to change his mind and his paints. He has grey and limited dreams. When, time to time, he is trying to hit on someone, he has to drink gin and tonics to become brave enough. And he takes Viagra to not fall asleep. He is like most forty-year-old men.

FA: Due to this novel you were accused of being reactionary, but "Le Monde" defends you. You are rejected as a racist and therefore your novel begins by a portrait of the seductive Aïcha.

MH: I´ve never merged Arabs with Islamists.

FA: You are slandered as a "pedophile", but the Juliet of ‘Platform’ , the sublime Valérie, is far away from Lolita: she is thirty, smart, and antifeminist, a sex expert and altruistic like so many gifted women today.

MH: And the most devout atheists refuse to accept my characters’ right to have religious feelings.

FA: Shall I say : "Amen"?

MH: We have so few illusions left that we cannot thank God anymore?

FA: How many of us would like to believe without the fundamentalists claws of the scorpion!

MH: A religion which could match with scientists’ knowledge and uncertainty principles should rebuild us the arm of divinity.

FA: You have publicly declared: " The most dumbass religion is certainly Islam".

MH: Actually my motto, and maybe yours and the one of the majority of our science-thirsty contemporary should be: "Do not make wrongful use of his holy name".

FA: You are sharing more your doubts than your truths. Is it the reason why you are replying on TV shows by "infinite silences"?

MH: Today, since 11 am, and now it is 3 pm, we have stopped our conversation just to play with "Clément".

FA: I remember the last day, we ran all over Paris to find a Japanese puppet for "your" Marie-Pierre.

MH: We´ve finally found a Buddha in an Indian shop. But please do not say "your"  Marie-Pierre. It is I who am her slave in the Irish island where we are living with nothing  more than 200 other inhabitants and no public transportation.

FA: I know that you cannot drive but she can...

MH: ...she is so violent in her manic crises that she can put fire to the curtains as well as leave Clément without food for a week. Our species could transform itself into another one, immortal, close, and able to regenerate through cloning.  Truth and beauty will still be myths of art and science, but without the sting of emergency or vanity.

FA: You and I, like Umberto Eco, who was here the other day, are Africans. In fact, you were born close to Madagascar and I at Melilla... (And Eco at Alexandria).

MH: La Réunion is geographically African but Asian by its inhabitants. I lived over there during the short time I spent with my mother. "In the middle of the world".

FA: As you wrote on the cover...

MH: "In the middle of the world" is the subtitle of my last two books Lanzarote and "Platform".

FA: "Miguel" of Platform regrets living in one of these so-called civilized countries where a lot of relationships are indifferent and sometimes cruel.

MH: Debauchery, which spread through gregarious behavior since the 60s, brought a loss of illusions of a world which calls itself "civilized".

FA: But you do believe that altruism is a human virtue able to struggle through men´s fear? That´s the reason why all your characters surrender when they face tenderness... and, when they do not find it, use "sexual tourism".

MH: It is the journey of the disconsolate looking for relief, the world´s future!... but also  euthanasia of the richest countries. Rich men and women are less and less complex using sexual services in third-world countries, like in Cuba. By the way, I would like to visit Castro. I have an economic-sexual offer which can financially save the island.

FA: In our societies do you think that we are as unhappy or frustrated in love?

MH: We are living among "thought police" and cops who order us to "do everything". In front of us there are millions of people who had nothing to sell but their bodies. That´s a perfect situation for exchange!

FA: In an activity blocked by misery!... ‘The Iliad’ is a divine and human story (as is "Platform") ... The fate of existence is ironic and unreachable.

MH: Please remember that the main character in ‘Lanzarote’ writes to the narrator: "sexuality is a major power... I´ve decided to embrace religion... by renouncing to a kind of individual freedom... This has always been interpretated as a dramatic personal failure.

FA: The truth is not plausible, even though plausibility is not truth.

MH: We are all carrying a traitor within us, vanity, which disappears... in the shadow of God?

FA: We can certainly accede to the knowledge after falling in the abyss. And as reality is fake and the world an illusion, the colleagues of the humanistic cop in one of your books organize a pious orgy. Everyone participates in this sacred eroticism, without care of age, sex of familiar’s relationships.

MH: We can dream against logic and against our own convictions. In the sect you’re talking about elders have a kind of beauty because they are approaching God.

FA: Lies can appear as truth is the best virtual world. The last pages of "Platform" happen in the future as in many of your other books.

MH: This flash forward... expresses a lot...

FA: The shepherds of backpackers haven´t seen it. They can visit nothing but the emptiness cast by shadows. But literature is the mirror of an epoch.

MH: "Platform" was published just 18 days before 9/11...

FA: ...Ash Tuesday. In the middle of propaganda the novelist—as our mutual friend Milan Kundera says— looks sharp and has the duty of communicating his laughs and doubts.

MH: Only silence is the killer, racist and obscene.

FA: When the novelist is getting to the limits of logic, the world starts to be created in his own image.

MH: It would be more efficient to bomb with miniskirts rather than with missiles. The weakest link of Muslim society is pussy. That´s strategy.

FA: " The Weakest Link" of the weak is the sex of the "Weaker Sex".

MH: But I cannot imagine a society without religion.

FA: Are you dreaming of a world government based upon kindness and brotherhood?

MH: A society ruled upon principles of morality would exist as long as the universe.

FA: And therefore, you are accused of "denying humanity".

MH: The neo-Kantians will defend my ideas as soon as the ebb of Nietzschean wave ends.

FA: What are we asking Grothendiek, René Thom, Hawking, Prigogine, Trin Xuan Thuan, or to philosophers, artists and scientists focused on transcendence?

MH: Fix the conditions for a possible ontology.

FA: Being properties...

MH: ...Clément will change the world!

[As I am approaching the door "Clément" is trying to convince me with a human look, but... of what?].

Translated from the French by Guillaume Basset