Without God Read online

  Without God

  Without God

  Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror

  Louis Betty

  The Pennsylvania State University Press

  University Park, Pennsylvania

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Betty, Louis, author.

  Title: Without God : Michel Houellebecq and materialist horror / Louis Betty.

  Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Summary: “Addresses the religious, metaphysical, and existential dimensions of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s work. Argues that Houellebecq is the foremost contemporary chronicler of the spiritual anxieties of Western and specifically French modernity”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016002369 | ISBN 9780271074085 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Houellebecq, Michel—Criticism and interpretation. |

  Religion in literature. | Materialism in literature.

  Classification: LCC PQ2668.O77 Z57 2016 | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002369

  Copyright © 2016

  The Pennsylvania State University

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  Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48-1992.

  For Kaylin

  Nothing more surely underlines an extreme weakness of mind than the failure to recognize the unhappiness of someone without God.

  —Pascal

  God doesn’t exist, and even if you’re stupid you end up realizing it.

  —Houellebecq (my translation)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: The Houellebecquian Worldview

  1 / Materialism and Secularism

  2 / The Future of Religion

  3 / Religion and Utopia

  4 / Materialist Horror

  5 / Liberalism Is God and the West Is Its Prophet

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has been many years in the making, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the persons and institutions that have helped contribute to its final form. First I would like to thank Robert F. Barsky, a professor at Vanderbilt University, for his relentless support of my scholarship, as well as fellow members of the Vanderbilt French faculty, particularly Lynn Ramey and Virginia Scott. I also extend my gratitude to Michael Bess, Paul Lim, and Michel Pierssens, who provided valuable criticism during the earliest stages of this project, as well as to Vanderbilt University and the Department of French and Italian for their moral and material support of my work. Additionally, I want to convey my thanks to my employer, the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, and specifically to Marilyn Durham and David Travis, who granted me valuable leave from teaching so that I could put the finishing touches on this book, and to my Whitewater colleagues who have supported my scholarly efforts, especially Jonathan Ivry. Finally, I want to thank the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, and specifically Susan Friedman, for giving me the opportunity to work as a research fellow at the institute during the 2014–2015 academic year; Kendra Boileau and Penn State Press for their careful stewardship of this project; and the reviewers who provided helpful and decisive feedback on an earlier version of this book.

  Introduction

  The Houellebecquian Worldview

  Writing a book about Michel Houellebecq is a daunting task, if only because the scholarship dedicated to his work is in a constant state of evolution. When I began this project several years ago, there were no English-language monographs on Houellebecq; now there are at least four and probably more on the way. The present volume is intended as an addition to the scholarly contributions that came before it, some of which are of the highest quality. But it also aims to be more than that, as the pages that follow will bear out. It should come as little surprise that much of the work devoted to Houellebecq’s fiction has centered on its sociopolitical meaning; the Anglo-American academy is still very much enamored of the political causes and controversies that shaped academic life beginning in the 1980s, and this is perhaps nowhere better reflected than in the contemporary study of literature. Carole Sweeney, for example, in her 2013 monograph, Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair, has this to say about the essential significance of Houellebecq’s work: “Houellebecq offers a withering critique of neoliberal late capitalism [ . . . ]. His fundamental concern is the encroachment of capitalism in its neoliberal biopolitical form into all areas of affective human life” (ix). By the term “biopolitical,” Sweeney points to the sense in which market forces have supposedly tended to impose a kind of objectifying logic on domains of human existence, especially sexuality, that were formerly determined by more fluid, less rational criteria.

  Houellebecq makes this point in his early fiction and nonfiction, perhaps most forcefully in Whatever (see 2009, 29–31, and 2011, 98–99), and it may in many respects be considered the cornerstone of the critique of neoliberal, late capitalist culture that we encounter in his texts. Indeed, as Bruno Viard has written in his book Houellebecq au laser: La faute à Mai 68, “Far from being a banality, the parallel traced [ . . . ] in Whatever between economic and sexual liberalism is totally unusual, and [ . . . ] constitutes the matrix of the Houellebecquian vision” (2008, 41, my translation). Other writers have echoed this sort of sociopolitical or politico-affective reading of Houellebecq’s work, both in English- and French-language scholarship. In her article “L’Affaire Houellebecq: Ideological Crime and Fin de Millénaire Literary Scandal,” Ruth Cruickshank contends, “The crime [of The Elementary Particles] is to challenge the dominant ideology depicted in the novel: the pursuit and production of desire in late capitalist society, an ideological foundation that can never bring satisfaction, but breeds isolation, competition and hatred” (2003, 113). On a similar note, Sabine van Wesemael has argued that Houellebecq is a reactionary novelist bent on using fiction to champion a return to traditional values: “The author takes pleasure in proclaiming a neoconservative reaction and pleads for adjustments to economic and sexual liberalism. Only a return to traditional norms and values (stay-at-home moms, restoration of the family and religion as the cornerstones of society) and a belief in the importance of science and technology for the improvement of the human species can save our expiring society” (2005, 89, my translation). From the very beginning, Houellebecq’s fiction has raised interesting and often alarming political questions, with many scholars assigning themselves the difficult task of elucidating Houellebecq’s often ambiguous and at times seemingly ambivalent engagement with both left and right.1

  Of course, not all existing scholarship on Houellebecq is wholly given over to political and economic critique, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that such a way of reading Houellebecq is facile in comparison to other approaches. Douglas Morrey’s 2013 analysis of Houellebecq’s work as a contribution to contemporary debates about posthumanism, along with related French-language readings by such authors as Jean-François Chassay
(2005), Laurence Dahan-Gaida (2003), and Kim Doré (2002), clearly demonstrates the diversity of responses that Houellebecq’s fiction is able to evoke, especially at the intersection of science and literature. Similarly, a nearly exhaustive amount of work has been undertaken tracing the aesthetic and ideological debts Houellebecq owes to novelists and philosophers of the past. Zoë Roth (2012) has published a comparative study of Houellebecq and Bataille, while Gerald Moore (2011) has uncovered Houellebecq’s problematic relationship with Nietzsche. Elements of intertextuality between Houellebecq and Baudelaire and between Houellebecq and Zola have received treatment from, respectively, Katherine Gantz (2005) and Sandrine Rabosseau (2007); another author has even suggested a similarity between Houellebecq’s fiction and pro-religious discourse in Maximilien Robespierre’s speech of 18 floréal an II (see Betty 2012).

  In a more contemporary vein, Houellebecq’s fiction has elicited comparisons with such present-day writers as Maurice Dantec, Richard Millet, Benoît Duteurtre, Philippe Muray, and Jonathan Littell. François Meyronnis (2007), for example, has written about the theme of extermination in these authors’ works (most relevant for Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island and, for obvious reasons, in Littell’s The Kindly Ones), while François Ricard (1999) has characterized Houellebecq, Muray, and Duteurtre as writers bent on producing novels that are “against the world,” that is, that take great care to skewer political correctness and the hypocrisy of both left and right, as well as to condemn our cultural obsessions with fun, insouciance, and endless festiveness. Yale French Studies has produced an issue subsuming work by Houellebecq, Dantec, and others under the heading Turns to the Right?, which wonders whether Houellebecq’s apparent antifeminism or Dantec’s gnostic apocalypticism do not constitute a reactionary element in contemporary French letters (see Johnson and Schehr 2009). The volume of writing on Houellebecq is so vast that I cannot possibly give a full account of it here; suffice it to point out that such sustained interested in a living European writer is rare in our time. Houellebecq’s oeuvre is so broad in intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic content that he continues to appeal to a wide array of scholarly interests.

  Nonetheless, my sense is that little complaint would be made in academic quarters if I were to suggest, in whatever context, that the concerns that have motivated the bulk of scholarship on Houellebecq tend to be social, political, economic, and essentially secular. Very little has been written about Houellebecq’s complicated relationship with religion. Morrey (2013) has given the subject significant treatment, while Viard in Les tiroirs de Michel Houellebecq (2013b) has elucidated the importance of Comte and his Religion of Humanity in the exegesis of Houellebecq’s texts. Cuenebroeck (2011), Chabert (2002), and Lloyd (2009) have addressed, respectively, the biblical structure of The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq’s debts to positivism, and the redemptive power of love and Christian virtue in Platform and other Houellebecq texts; for my part, I have argued (2013) that Houellebecq’s treatment of religious decline in his novels can be interpreted as a novelistic mise-en-scène of classical secularization theory. Aside from these few efforts, however, the religious, spiritual, and metaphysical dimensions of Houellebecq’s fiction have gone largely ignored in the existing critical literature, with the religion question representing the principal blind spot in both English- and French-language academic treatments of Houellebecq’s work. My purpose in this book is to correct this oversight, for I contend that Houellebecq is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer even if, as is clear from his numerous nonfiction remarks about God, he is probably agnostic himself. My interest in this volume is therefore to place Houellebecq’s fiction in a much more metaphysical context than what has until now been attempted and to argue that the ills that plague his fictional universe stem less from (late) capitalism and the attendant social conditions to which it gives rise and more from the metaphysics of materialism that continues to enshrine and enable them.

  Two works have called attention to the issue of materialism in Houellebecq’s fiction, and though they do not go to the lengths I do in this book, they nonetheless accomplish the important task of setting a precedent for the reading I pursue. The first, Aurélien Bellanger’s Houellebecq, écrivain romantique, includes a short chapter entitled “La dépression comme physicalisme” in which Bellanger makes a critical link between depression in Houellebecq’s novels and the materialist, or physicalist, worldview that pervades them. With characters such as Djerzinski and Whatever’s narrator in mind, Bellanger writes, “The depressive experiences the world and himself as nonseparate: life for him no longer represents an exception in the universe, everything possesses the same nature [ . . . ]. Depression is nothing other than the awareness of scientific descriptions of the world. It is an emotional reaction to scientific knowledge” (2010, 162, my translation).2 In a world where everything can be reduced to physical description, where free will yields to mechanism—where, as Bellanger adds, “[c]onsciousness is but a relatively recent cry in the dreadful tragedy of atoms” (162)—depression is the natural result of one’s coming to terms with the facts of the physical universe. “Physics describes a world where everything is certain, where nothing is possible” (163). Life whittled down to the play of atoms thus represents a kind of materialist horror, and characters unable to see the world in anything but physicalist terms are inevitably prey to depression and suicide.

  Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism offers an equally judicious verdict on the existential havoc wrought by materialism in Houellebecq’s fiction. Jeffery writes,

  The villainy of materialism is that it undermines [things that find their best expression in nonbiological, nonmaterial terms]: for instance, when it tells us that love is only a disguise for the urge to reproduce. Along this road we lose the use of a very fundamental and comforting terminology, or at least are obliged to admit that it gives a false or misleading account of human behavior. It emerges that there is basically no getting over yourself, no escaping your skull—and the more you are led to feel this way the more inclined you are to see life as isolated and vanishing. (2011, 34)

  Materialism not only eradicates spirituality and transcendence, but also destroys the comforts of ordinary language. Terms such as “love,” “friendship,” and “affection” become meaningless; commonsense humanistic language is exposed as an unreliable system of description, which in due course will yield to a purely evolutionary or neurobiological account of human behavior. Moreover, the reduction of the human to the material, of the spirit to the body, vastly diminishes the meaning that one can assign to a given life. Jeffery adds, “Houellebecq’s men don’t think about God. All they think about—all there is—are the dictates of their biology, and their diminishing capacities to meet them. It is as if to say: the facts are what they are. So long as the facts are in your favor you can be happy, but there’s nothing else to it” (34). As I demonstrate later on, this simple calculation—that the capacity for happiness rests solely in the body’s ability to satisfy its instincts—lies at the heart of the existential despair that many, and likely most, of Houellebecq’s characters endure.

  One of the principal contentions of this book is that Houellebecq’s novels represent a kind of fictional experiment in the death of God. And this experiment is best understood as a confrontation between two radically opposed domains: the materialism of modern science and the desire for transcendence and survival, which is best expressed in and through religion. The term “experiment” naturally evokes a comparison with the experimental style of Zola, but I want to distance myself from such an association. Zola’s interest was to confront his characters with the inexorabilities of their biological and environmental conditioning. Houellebecq shares this interest to some degree, but only insofar as the implied determinism can be placed under a broader metaphysical canopy. Heredity and environment are not, to be exact, Houellebecq’s central concerns; he is interested in God’s absence and the submission to matter t
hat such absence demands, which deprives human life of a meaning that might escape its immediate conditioning. In this sense, Houellebecq might be considered, if only to a limited extent, a more metaphysical Zola. The term “experiment” also accomplishes the useful task of curbing the quantity of realism one may feel compelled to read into Houellebecq’s work. However realist in style they may be, novels such as The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island should only very cautiously be taken to offer representative portrayals of contemporary European religiosity. As is now common knowledge, most Europeans remain “religious” in various ways, and since the 1980s sociologists of religion have been forced to admit that modernity and religion are not so mutually exclusive as was believed in the nineteenth century. These are points I expand on later; for now, it is sufficient to point out that approaching Houellebecq’s novels as experiments will help to avoid the thorny issue of having to assess the truthfulness of their polemical content. Whether Houellebecq is “right” in his assessments of religion in Europe—or, for that matter, of contemporary sexuality or of the cultural consequences of May 1968—is not of chief concern. Rather, his novels serve as a means to explore the social and psychological consequences of a possible interpretation of historical, philosophical, scientific, and ideological developments in Western civilization and the cultural climate they have allegedly produced. In other words, Houellebecq’s universe is intelligible from a certain point of view, even if it is not accurate.

  I hope that my insistence in this book on the religion question compels scholars to think differently about Houellebecq as a writer and also about the stakes involved in the study of religion and literature. Throughout his career, Houellebecq has identified himself as either an atheist or an agnostic, and perhaps scholars have taken this as an indication that the treatment of religion in his novels is unworthy of serious investigation. Additionally, Houellebecq’s fiction seems at least more overtly to be about other, somewhat more politically, sociologically, or anthropologically titillating subjects: sex tourism, cloning, the atomizing forces of capitalism, the shortcomings of feminism, to name only a few. Nothing, however, runs through Houellebecq’s novels more clearly than his Comtean intuition that a society cut off from religion cannot survive, which Houellebecq affirms in a 2015 interview with the Paris Review. Herein lies the deep transgressiveness of Houellebecq’s work: the suggestion, utterly antithetical to the French doctrine of secularism (laïcité), that religion is a necessary element of social cohesion and happiness. And not just any sort of religion, either. Here again, Houellebecq sins against contemporary sensibilities. For instance, much writing on secularism in literature or the postmodern sacred has attempted to recuperate the notion of “sacredness” in a post-theological and postdoctrinal cultural landscape in which traditional constructs such as an all-powerful, all-loving God, the existence of an eternal soul, and the supernatural more generally have fallen out of favor. Amy Hungerford’s (2010) notion of a “belief in meaninglessness,” for instance, provides a case in point: rational, empirical constructs such as “deity” and “soul” may have been discredited, but one can still uncover novel forms of sacredness in language, metaphor, nature, and the human hunger for transcendence. Worthy as such efforts may be, Houellebecq will have nothing to do with them. Instead, he brings the religion question back to what he believes to be its heart: a concern not with sacredness but with survival. A religion that does not promise victory over death is doomed; we may sanctify all we want, but without a promise of material survival, we can hope to save neither the world nor ourselves.