The Battle for Hope
Michel Houellebecq’s infamous novel Submission features Francois, a middle-aged literary scholar who functions as a postmodern rendering of Durtal, the main character of J.K. Huysmans’s turn-of-the-century decadent novels. Francois’s academic and personal fascination with Huysmans leads him to explore whether Durtal’s journey from the dark excesses of Western decadence to exuberant faith and hope in the Eternal is still possible 100 years later. In the end, Francois doesn’t manage to find the light.
Among the most divisive characters in today’s literary scene, Houellebecq repels some for his crudely pornographic sex scenes, his toying with sexism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, and his largely nihilistic worldview. He attracts others for giving voice to the disillusionment brought on by the West’s nosedive into technocratic secularism. The lack of meaningful labor, the power of indifferent bureaucratic systems, and a neurotic fixation on diversity–which ends up having more of a homogenizing effect than one that appreciates the real differences between cultures, religions, and genders–has left many feeling utterly helpless. Houellebecq’s sex-addicted, politically incorrect protagonists legitimize his fans’ gripes with the current state of affairs.
Is Houellebecq merely a self-indulgent misanthrope whose moral weakness hinders him from finding a path toward the light as did Huysmans and his characters a century ago? Or is his nihilism merited? Perhaps there are indeed no vestiges of hope left for us to cling to in our atomized, deracinated age…and Houellebecq is simply unveiling a disappointing but very real fact.
While I have no authority to judge the state of another man’s soul, the recently translated debut novel of Italian writer Daniele Mencarelli both converges with Houellebecq’s bleak outlook while challenging whether it’s really as opaque as he imagines it to be.
Known best for his numerous collections of poetry, Mencarelli’s largely autobiographical novel tells the story of “Daniele,” a deteriorating alcoholic whose desperate parents get him a job as a custodian at the Vatican-run Bambino Gesu children’s hospital in Rome. The House of Gazes, translated by Octavian MacEwan (originally La casa degli sguardi published in 2018 by Mondadori), is–like Houellebecq’s novels–littered with blunt lamentations about the apparent meaninglessness of contemporary European life.
As much as Daniele bemoans the coldheartedness of middle managers in his workplace, the cruelty of a God who allows innocent children to suffer and die, and his own selfishness and moral fragility, his feeling of emptiness is not a dead end, but rather the catalyst for a journey. Instead of taking the darkness of the world around him as a conclusive indication that everything is hopeless, he keeps alive the infinitesimal embers of a desire for hope in his heart, transforming his disillusionment into an open question.
His struggle with addiction is masterfully weaved into the plot of the novel. On one hand, Daniele’s physically arduous job at the children’s hospital provides him a temporary distraction from his addiction. Yet on the other, his raw glimpse at the children’s suffering and their parents’ grief fuels his impulse to drink. He is stopped in his tracks, however, by his encounters with people in the hospital.
While cleaning the windows one afternoon, a young boy knocks on the glass to get Daniele’s attention. He waves hello to be friendly to the poor sickly kid, only for him to give Daniele the “cornetto,” an Italian hand gesture which is used to mock someone for being a “cuckold,” as he mouthed out the words to him with devilish pleasure. This became a routine of sorts, which warmed Daniele up to “Knock-Knock,” as he began calling him affectionately. Curious to know the kid’s story and what kind of ailment he was suffering, he attempted to go into his room to meet him, only to be chased out by a gruff nurse.
The next time Daniele encountered him, Knock-Knock was lying lifeless in a coffin, wearing an angelic white suit. He curses himself for not having tried more earnestly to get to know Alfredo–Knock-Knock’s real name, according to a nurse who explained his death to Daniele. As much as he wants to drown out his anger at himself for his “spiritual poverty,” for hesitating to “truly sink into other people’s lives and pain,” he allows his anger to give way to remorse and to cry out for mercy.
Later, he runs into a mother holding her three-year-old, whose face is severely disfigured with “holes of red flesh in place of a nose and mouth.” Daniele forces himself to look away, deciding he’s had “enough with this hospital, with all the sick, crippled, shapeless, and dead children.” But as he turns to walk out, he sees an elderly nun rush toward the child. “‘You’re mummy and daddy’s handsome little boy, aren’t you!’ She takes one little hand and kisses it. Perhaps ticklish, he bursts out laughing…‘Hear that laugh of his? This boy doesn’t have silver inside. He has gold, living gold.’”
“Stunned,” Daniele “can’t understand or decipher” what he just witnessed, “something simultaneously human and alien, like a ritual from a faraway land.” Unable to stop dwelling on the memory of what he saw, he determines that despite lacking the language to articulate the impact it had on him, “we don’t need to understand, to comprehend.” The only explanation he could manage to muster up was that the nun was a sign of “a beauty that knows no decay…a supremacy of love” that “only those who never retreat when faced with reality, never closing their eyes” would be able to reach.
In this moment, Daniele recognizes the choice he is faced with: either continue attempting to drown out his frustration with the world’s darkness, or risk keeping his desire for meaning alive and keeping his eyes–and heart–alert for such glimpses of “answers,” of inexplicable yet undeniably beautiful moments like the one he saw between the nun and the toddler.
As Pope Paul VI once insisted, “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers.” Thus, if anyone is “converted” by Mencarelli’s hopefulness, it will be because his writing consists not of abstract arguments or ideological polemics, but of a vulnerable and frank recounting of a (profoundly modern) man’s experience. Above all, Mencarelli witnesses to the fact that the human desire for hope is so deeply rooted in us, that to completely snuff it out is an act nearly as laborious as it is in vain. This reality is so incontrovertible, so innate in the human soul that even Houellebecq in his final novel Aneantir cannot help but feel moved by seemingly superman acts of tenderness carried out by the broken human beings he meets.
The House of Gazes is a profusely optimistic novel that will challenge even the most determined nihilist to affirm and grapple with the existence of drops of beauty–however small–in the abyss of our seemingly indifferent universe. Unlike more simplistic, feel-good writers, Mencarelli is not one to sugar-coat or gloss over life’s ugliness. He denies none of life’s most horrifying scandals, and instead prefers to look them in the face. And it is precisely this intense, open-eyed gaze that enables him to perceive the nuggets of gold at the bottom of the trenches.
Stephen G. Adubato is a writer and professor of philosophy based in New York. He is also the curator of the Cracks in Postmodernity blog, podcast, and magazine. Follow him on Twitter @stephengadubato.
