Without God Read online

  Finally, I should say something about Houellebecq’s place in the landscape of contemporary French letters, since it is in many respects unique. A consensus has emerged among many in the French literati that today’s hexagonal literature is, to put the matter bluntly, not very good: it is mired in an obsession with hollow formalisms and stylistic trivialities; it is self-absorbed, solipsistic, and fails to engage society, religion, and politics; and, perhaps most damningly, its self-referentiality and more general failure to have anything to say makes it “too French,” that is, totally “inexportable” (Bardolle 2004, 13). The reasons assigned to this literary atrophy are multiple. Tzvetan Todorov (2007), for instance, blames the legacy of structuralism and its excessive preoccupation with language.3 Olivier Bardolle (2004) and Donald Morrison (2010) bemoan the triviality of the plots and characters that animate the average French novel, where often the most exciting action the reader can expect arises from a love triangle, a love quadrangle, or whatever geometrical configuration in which the protagonists may choose to erotically disport themselves. Pierre Jourde (2002) insists that French literature lacks guts, while Bruno Viard in Littérature et déchirure makes the shattering claim that “it is not certain that, since the Renaissance, French letters have known such discredit” (2013a, 11, my translation). Houellebecq has added to these refrains, writing in Interventions II,

  I have never been able to witness without a pang of anguish the technical extravagancy put to use by such and such a formaliste-Minuit4 for such a paltry end result. In order to cope, I’ve often repeated this phrase of Schopenhauer: “The first and practically only condition for good style is having something to say.” With its characteristic brutality, this phrase can be helpful. For example, during a literary discussion, when the word “writing” [écriture] is uttered, you know that it’s time to relax a little bit, look around, order another beer. (2009, 153, my translation)

  As I hope to show throughout, Houellebecq is an author who very clearly has something to say—about social life in contemporary France, about the economic future of Europe in the twenty-first century, about sexuality, and, most important for my purposes, about religion. This is not to suggest that Houellebecq is the only French author of his time to escape the solipsism and stylistic fetishes that Todorov and others deplore.5 He is, nonetheless, the most en vue, both in France and abroad, among his like-minded contemporaries—hence this book.

  Materialist Horror and the Question of Capitalism

  In pursuing the reading I have outlined, I do not, of course, mean to imply that the critique of liberalism—and specifically of American liberal economics—that is found either implicitly or explicitly expressed in Houellebecq’s fiction is less worthy of scholarly consideration. Indeed, central to the Houellebecquian worldview is the contention that the economic and sexual liberalism that emerged in France in the wake of the 1960s (and that, one might argue, marked the end of the Trente Glorieuses) has been a disaster for French culture and that the blame for this disaster rests squarely with the United States of America. At multiple places in his texts, Houellebecq unequivocally associates the process of Europe’s “Americanization” with the liberal sexual practices exported to Western Europe by the American entertainment industry. For instance, in The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes,

  It was precisely at this time [the 1960s] that the consumption of prurient mass-market entertainment from North America [ . . . ] was spreading all over Western Europe. Along with the refrigerators and washing machines designed to make for a happy couple came the transistor radio and the record player, which would teach the adolescent how to flirt. The distinction between true love and flirtation, latent during the sixties, exploded in the early seventies in magazines like Mademoiselle ge Tendre and Vingt Ans, and crystallized around the central question of the era: “How far can you go before you get married?” The libidinal, hedonistic American option received great support from the liberal press. (2000a, 47)

  The link suggested here between a liberal, consumer-driven economy and liberalized sexual practices informs perhaps the entirety of Houellebecq’s complaint about sexuality in an Americanized Western Europe. The liberalization of sexuality is simply the next step in the evolution of capitalism: as soon as the market enshrined the individual as the basic economic unit of society, it was only a matter of time before the logic of competition was extended from the economic to the affective sphere, thus creating a new domain of struggle where a minimum of sexual satisfaction is no more guaranteed than a minimum of material comfort. In a much-cited example, the narrator of Whatever, having not made love for two years, laments the commodification of eroticism and the phenomenon of sexual pauperization that it has produced:

  In societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as “the law of the market.” (2011, 99)

  Houellebecq’s dour treatment of American liberalism closely accompanies his portrayal of contemporary sexual practices. Individualism and free choice, the ideological cornerstones of liberal economics, have produced a generation of Westerners who are so focused on their own individual needs and rights that they no longer know how to give pleasure to others. Unable to experience sexual gratification, men and women in Houellebecq’s fiction turn to sadomasochism or the humiliations of group sex,6 or, as in Platform, they abandon Europe to seek physical gratification among the prostitutes of Southeast Asia: “Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that’s what Westerners don’t know how to do anymore [ . . . ]. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights. [ . . . ] we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that, we’re obsessed with health and hygiene. These are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love” (2002, 174–75). The liberal American model has not simply created an unjust economic system. Sexuality, too, has succumbed to radical individualism and an ensuing narcissism with the result that sexual satisfaction, which is dependent on intimacy, sharing, and a feeling of dependence, has become, to again evoke Whatever’s narrator, progressively impossible.

  As compelling as this interpretation may seem, it would no doubt be simplistic to assume that the Houellebecquian critique of liberalism begins and ends with a treatment and subsequent repudiation of American liberal economics. At least superficially, Houellebecq’s depiction of the miseries of “liberated” sexuality (that is, sexuality subject to the laws of the market) suggests a causal scenario in which the commodification of eroticism brought about by Europe’s Americanization post-1968 has led to the “materialist horror” of a completely liberal sexual economy, where both currency and flesh are traded on the open market. In other words, a burgeoning materialism, especially in the domain of the erotic, would seem to follow on the heels of liberalism. Houellebecq often indicates as much, as this passage from Interventions II demonstrates:

  In terms of romantic relationships, the parameters of sexual exchange had also for a long time stemmed from a hardly reliable system of lyrical, impressionistic description. It was once again from the United States that the first serious attempt at defining standards was to come. Based on simple, objectively verifiable criteria (age, height, weight, waist-to-hip-to-chest ratio for women; age, height, weight, size of erect penis for men), it was first popularized by the porno industry and quickly adopted by women’s magazines. If simplified economic hierarchy was for a long time the object of sporadic opposition [ . . . ] it’s to be noted that erotic hierarchy, perceived as more natural, was rapidly internalized and became straightaway a matter of broad consensus. (3
0, my translation)

  However, the causality I propose, which does justice to the totality of the Houellebecquian worldview, is one in which materialism—conceived of as a generalized belief in matter, which in its political manifestations contributes to the rise of ideologies as diverse as communism, fascism, and liberalism—represents the true menace to human relationships and sexuality in Houellebecq’s novels. From this point of view, the gradual erosion of the theological conception of the human being, which began with the scientific revolution and reached its apex in the twentieth century, has given rise to a social order in which the value of human life is restricted to the parameters of economic exchange—that is, the human being is understood in essentially economic terms. One’s attractiveness and even lovability are determined by indisputable criteria of market value, as if the human being were no different, in principle, from any other consumer product. This economic reduction of human value is fed by the materialism of modern science, which dismisses the possibility of free will and reduces the human being to a haphazard, fleeting collection of elementary particles. Humanism, which attempts to assign people rights in the absence of a deity capable of legitimating the moral order, does not stand a chance in these conditions. In the epilogue to The Elementary Particles, the novel’s clone narrator laments the impotence of atheistic humanism: “It is important to remember how central the notions of ‘personal freedom,’ ‘human dignity’ and ‘progress’ were to people in the age of materialism [ . . . ]. The confused and arbitrary nature of these ideas meant, of course, that they had little practical or social function—which might explain why human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration” (258–59).

  Aside from modern liberalism, all humanistic attempts to organize society according to nontheological principles (Marxism, socialism, communism, etc.) have been failures, and if the liberal model has succeeded, this is only because it is the most natural form of social organization, and thus the worst (see Houellebecq 2011, 124–25). The unbinding of humanity from God lies at the heart of the historical narrative the reader encounters in Houellebecq’s work: lacking a set of moral principles legitimated by a higher power and unable to find meaningful answers to existential questions, human beings descend into selfishness and narcissism and can only stymie their mortal terror by recourse to the carnal distractions of sexuality. Modern capitalism is the mode of social organization best suited to, and best suited to maintain, such a worldview. Materialism—that is, the limiting of all that is real to the physical, which rules out the existence of God, soul, and spirit and with them any transcendent meaning to human life—thus produces an environment in which consumption becomes the norm. Such is the historical narrative that Houellebecq’s fiction enacts, with modern economic liberalism emerging as the last, devastating consequence of humanity’s despiritualization.

  “Materialist horror” is the term most appropriate to describe this worldview, for what readers discover throughout Houellebecq’s fiction are societies and persons in which the terminal social and psychological consequences of materialism are being played out.7 It is little wonder, then, that these texts are so often apocalyptic in tone. The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island, for example, depict the outright disappearance of a depressive and morally derelict human race. Desplechin, Djerzinski’s colleague in Particles, says of the decline of Western civilization at the turn of the twenty-first century: “There is no power in the world—economic, political, religious or social—that can compete with rational certainty. The West has sacrificed everything to this need: religion, happiness, hope—and, finally, its own life. You have to remember that when passing judgment on Western civilization” (221). Similarly, in The Map and the Territory, Jed’s final art project throws a veil of extinction not just on Western civilization but on humanity in general:

  The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin’s life can be seen [ . . . ] as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the industrial age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation [ . . . ]. The feeling of desolation, too [ . . . ] as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming [ . . . ] to make themselves the symbols of the generalized extinction of the human species. They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total. (2012, 269)

  The Map and the Territory is in many respects the culmination of an evolution that begins with the posthuman, utopian ambitions of The Elementary Particles and ends in this novel with a repudiation of utopian dreams in favor of a premodern and traditionalist solution to contemporary existential malaise. As I argue in chapter 3, the evolution across the span of Houellebecq’s novels can be best understood as a progressive disenchantment with utopianism, accompanied by an ever-increasing sense of the oppressiveness of matter. The result of this evolution, as it is somewhat tentatively expressed in The Map and the Territory but then much more radically in Submission, is a wholesale abandonment of liberalism as a guiding principle for the organization of human social ife.

  Before moving on, I should also say something about Houellebecq’s reception in the United States, since this monograph is (to my knowledge) the first American attempt at a book-length study of Houellebecq’s work. Houellebecq’s novels have enjoyed broad success in the United Kingdom, a fact that no doubt explains the proliferation of studies on the author by British scholars. In the United States, however, much of the engagement with Houellebecq’s work has come from reviewers who have generally been so repulsed by his fiction that they have had difficulty concealing their contempt. In his review of The Possibility of an Island, John Updike (2006, n.p.) writes that Houellebecq’s “will to generalize smothers the real world under a blanket condemnation,” and “the sensations that [he] gives us are not nutritive.” Janet Maslin in the New York Times (2003) has described Platform as a “polarizing, audacious document rather than a viable novel,” while Michiko Kakutani, also in the New York Times, says of The Elementary Particles, “As a piece of writing, [it] feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read” (2000, n.p.). These reviews overlook much of the aesthetically and intellectually noteworthy qualities of Houellebecq’s work and may bespeak, at least at some level, a typically American, perhaps even puritanical, response to a literary exercise steeped in irony, cynicism, and decadent excess. Even so, it remains true that few authors working today demonstrate the consistent ability to displease that Houellebecq has mastered, not to mention his eagerness to flout the benchmarks of political correctness.

  Houellebecq’s novels engage delicate social and political issues head on—Islam, sexual liberalism, technology, posthumanism, immigration, and violence in the banlieue, to name but a few—and in their treatment of those issues these texts often manifest a bullying lack of concern for the presumed political sensitivities of their audience. Indeed, it is difficult not to feel a certain ideological discomfort when Daniel says of Esther in Possibility of an Island that “[l]ike all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking” (2007, 152), or when the openly racist character Robert in Platform praises the “elasticity” of certain components of Thai women’s anatomy (2002, 80). Similarly, when, in The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq describes a West African housekeeper a
s “cantankerous and nasty” (2012, 8) and suggests that she “most probably stole from the shopping allowance” (8), the ideological censor in all of us cannot help registering some degree of alarm.