Without God

by Louis Betty

  It is precisely this vision that motivates Djerzinski’s work in genetics. By sharing the same genetic code, his clones have achieved at least in some figurative sense the nonseparability of united electrons. Furthermore, in doing away with sexual reproduction, the sexual alienation that plagued the humans of the “age of materialism” has yielded to free love, pleasure liberated from jealousy and fear of rejection, and infinite belonging to and in the bodies of others. In his fictive monograph, Meditations on Interweaving, Djerzinski writes, “Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal” (251). If readers and critics alike can accept this vision for what it is—an idealistic, often satirical, yet heartfelt fantasy about the future of human relations—rather than dismiss it for its fuzzy use of science, Houellebecq’s quantum future, far from coming off as clownish or absurd, should furnish a significant and thought-provoking counterpoint to the imperfect and imperfectible social relations of our time and, indeed, our species.

  But does The Elementary Particles truly augur the transition from a materialist to a postmaterialist age? In both Particles and his nonfiction writing, Houellebecq has identified materialism writ large with the description of reality issuing from classical Newtonian mechanics—what one might think of as the materialism of a high school chemistry textbook, with electron orbs rotating around a red and blue clump of protons and neutrons. In “Lettre à Lakis Proguidis,” Houellebecq argues that quantum physics constitutes a refutation of this kind of materialism: “The twentieth century will also remain that paradoxical era where physicists refuted materialism, swore off local determinism, totally abandoned [ . . . ] this ontology of objects and of properties, which at the same time was spreading among the general public as the basis for the scientific vision of the world” (2009, 152, my translation). Particles offers a nearly identical commentary: “materialism had had a historical importance: to break down the first barrier, which was God. Man, having done this, found himself plunged into doubt and distress. But now a second barrier had been broken down—this time in Copenhagen. Man no longer needed God, nor even the idea of an underlying reality” (249). In both of these passages, the propensity seems to be to conflate matter (what we generally think of as solids, liquids, and gases) with the broader notion of the material, which includes all that exists in the observable universe. The quantum wave function may not be material in the macroscopic sense—that is, in the way that a table is material—but to say that it is not material in the broad sense is mistaken. If anything of interest to the nonspecialist can be taken away from quantum mechanics, it is that the ultimate nature of the physical universe is stunningly mysterious. Much of the stuff of the universe is in fact energy: energy is not material in the commonsense understanding of the word, but no one would claim that its nature is not physical. The Elementary Particles therefore ends up reaffirming the materialism that it attempts to subvert. While one may, and in fact should, understand its finale metaphorically as an optimistic vision of a world no longer plagued by social atomization, it is important to avoid the understandable temptation to read it as a scientific program shrouded in a fictional guise.

  Lifting the Sacred Canopy

  Houellebecq’s novels depict a West in which religion, and specifically Christianity, have succumbed to the rationalizing forces of modernity. Faith has yielded to science, dualism has yielded to materialism, and materialism has created a culture in which humanity is no longer able to find meaningful responses to existential questions about death, eternity, and ultimate value. Religion is ever in danger of being vanquished by the vicissitudes of history. Daniel1 explains in The Possibility of an Island:

  In countries like Spain, Poland, and Ireland, social life and all behavior had been structured by a deeply rooted, unanimous, and immense Catholic faith for centuries, it determined morality as well as familial relations, conditioned all cultural and artistic productions, social hierarchies, conventions, and rules for living. In the space of a few years, in less than a generation, in an incredibly brief period of time, all this had disappeared, had evaporated into thin air. In these countries today no one believed in God anymore, or took account of him, or even remembered that they had once believed; and this had been achieved without difficulty, without conflict, without any kind of violence or protest, without even a real discussion, as easily as a heavy object, held back for some time by an external obstacle, returns as soon as you release it, to its position of equilibrium. (2007, 245)

  Consumerism prospers in this post-religious civilization, since only it appears capable of furnishing the distractions that can divert human beings from the oppressive awareness of their mortality. Naturally, none of this can make up for the fundamental absence of spirituality haunting modernity, as Jean-Pierre Buvet, the priest in Whatever, explains to the narrator: “In the century of Louis XIV, [ . . . ] official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently [ . . . ] that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse [ . . . ] would no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvelous and exciting; and it’s abundantly clear that we rather doubt this” (2011, 30).

  In Houellebecq’s novels, not only are we confronted with the social and psychological consequences of religion’s decline, but we are also told that the decline is irreversible. All changes in social values turn out to be irreparable, as Daniel25 declares in Possibility apropos of the rise of Elohimism and the collapse of Islam and Christianity: “When a social system is destroyed, this destruction is definitive, and there can be no going back; the laws of social entropy, valid in theory for any human-relational system [ . . . ] had already, for a long time, been understood intuitively” (247–48). In the case of religion, materialism has destroyed the legend of the creator God, but surpassing materialism will depend not on a return to traditional religion, but on the surpassing of humanity itself. “The establishment of physical immortality,” Houellebecq writes in “Positivist Preliminaries,” “by means belonging to technology is without a doubt the necessary step to once again make religion possible” (2009, 252–53, my translation).

  Where does this vision of religiosity in Houellebecq’s novels come from? Is it a credible depiction of prevailing mentalities among Europeans? In fact, Houellebecq entertains in fictional form the advanced stages of an intellectual dogma known as classical secularization theory—the claim that with modernity comes the decay and disappearance of religion. Peter Berger, one of the most important modern proponents of secularization theory, writes in his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy,

  By secularization we mean the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols. When we speak of society and institutions in modern Western history, of course, secularization manifests itself in the evacuation by the Christian churches of areas previously under their control or influence—as in the separation of church and state, or in the expropriation of church lands, or in the emancipation of education from ecclesiastical authority. When we speak of culture and symbols, however, we imply that secularization is more than a social-structural process. It affects the totality of cultural life and of ideation, and may be observed in the decline of religious contents in the arts, in philosophy, in literature, and, most important of all, in the rise of science as an autonomous, thoroughly secular perspective on the world. Moreover, it is implied here that the process of secularization has a subjective side as well. As there is a secularization of society and culture, so there is a secularization of consciousness. (105)

  Secularization theory was a cornerstone of sociological thought for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in recent decades numerous scholars have argued that its principal contention—that modernity and religion are mutually exclusive, the former
leading to the demise of the latter—is not only inadequate to describe current trends in Western religiosity, but on some accounts may simply be mistaken.5 Evidence for the theory’s failure is, moreover, entirely empirical: religion simply persists in spite of modernity (see European Commission 2005). Contemporary reformulations of secularization theory have tried to place the emphasis not on the decline of religious belief but rather on the decline of the authority of religious institutions (see Chaves 1994), but the question that is unanswered in such analysis is whether, despite a decline in the social or political importance of religion, people are less pious, spiritual, or religious than they were in the past. From the perspective of many scholars, and in view of certain empirical data, the answer is a clear no.

  Despite these modern reappraisals, Houellebecq’s novels seem to insist that religion cannot survive, and indeed has not survived, the onslaught of modernity and the rationalizing and bureaucratizing forces unleashed by industrialization and the scientific revolution. As Desplechin explains in The Elementary Particles, “The West has sacrificed everything to this need [for rational certainty]: religion, happiness, hope—and, finally, its own life” (221). Houellebecq’s novels do not, however, categorically celebrate the demise of religion, even if they often treat faith and spirituality with a considerable degree of contempt. As Douglas Morrey (2013, 114–51) has made clear, Houellebecq’s novels retain a kind of vestigial nostalgia for religion and its psychosocial utility, and it may be for this reason that Houellebecq has been so keen to imagine quasi- or pseudo-religious alternatives (i.e., cloning cults) that could take the place of Christianity in a thoroughly secularized twenty-first-century Europe. Informed and perhaps inspired by Auguste Comte’s views about religion’s social function, Houellebecq has suggested that something in the religious vision of the world is necessary if civilization is to prosper. As Djerzinski muses to himself in Particles, “How could society function without religion [ . . . ]. It seemed difficult enough for an ordinary human being. For several days he studied the radiator beside his bed. It was a useful and ingenious device—when it was cold, the pipes filled with hot water—but how long could Western civilization continue without some kind of religion?” (135). Houellebecq has expressed this point of view in his nonfiction as well; he writes to Lévy, “Obviously, it is impossible for me to establish that for a society to cut itself off from the religious is tantamount to suicide; it is simply an intuition, but a persistent intuition” (2011, 161).

  Houellebecq’s intuition is not unfounded, and his novels—The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island in particular—address what is an undeniable fact about many European countries: the importance of Christianity as an institution that structures social existence has waned dramatically. In France, for example, only 12.3 percent of French men and women attend church once or more per month, while in the United States the figure is 61.1 percent (Pfaff 2008). Sociologists of religion do not agree, however, on how to interpret this decline in religious practice, and their debates tend to center on precisely how the concept of secularization is to be understood. Does the secularization of Europe simply mean the faltering of religious institutions’ political authority and influence on social organization? Does it denote the disappearance of overtly religious behavior, such as church attendance or having children baptized? Or is it rather the erosion of privately held belief, followed by the loss of individual faith?6 These discussions have taken on a considerable degree of nuance in recent decades, but in Houellebecq’s fiction the classical version of secularization theory is somewhat monolithically maintained, with secularization understood to function at every level of human reality. Houellebecq’s novels tell the tale of religious decline from the viewpoint of total secularization—at once private, institutional, and political—in which the onset of modernity brings about the disappearance of religion tout court. In his early essay “Approches du désarroi,” Houellebecq writes,

  The death of God in the West constituted the prelude to a tremendous metaphysical soap opera, which continues to this day. Any cultural historian would be able to piece together the details of the process: let us say in summary that Christianity was able to pull off this masterstroke of combining fierce belief in the individual [ . . . ] with the promise of eternal participation in the absolute Being. The dream having vanished, various attempts were made to promise the individual a minimum of being; to reconcile the dream of being that he carried within himself with the obsessive omnipresence of the future. At present, all these attempts have failed, and sorrow has continued to spread. (2009, 41, my translation)

  Below, I explore how this view of contemporary European religiosity finds life in Houellebecq’s novels. I also suggest that, despite the problems of the classical secularization model, the secularizing ethos of Houellebecq’s fiction should be understood not as bad sociology but rather as a kind of experiment in the death of God, wherein characters experience predictable outcomes—the most frequent of which is suicide—based on their metaphysical assumptions.

  Materialism and Suicide: Logical Consequences of the Death of God

  Houellebecq’s novels track the demise of a moribund West whose hedonistic preoccupations and irreligious ethos have pushed civilization to the brink of extinction. While The Elementary Particles deals specifically with the ways in which materialism has ravaged the lives of two characters—half brothers Bruno and Michel—the later work The Possibility of an Island speculates on the future of religion in the West and depicts the birth and rise of Elohimism, a new religious movement that supplants European Christianity and goes on to vanquish Islam and the other world faith traditions. Of particular interest in regard to the victory of materialism portrayed in Houellebecq’s novels is their persistent representation of suicide. Confronted with aging, ugliness, chronic sexual dissatisfaction, or an obsessive and brooding disgust about humanity, characters both major and minor in Houellebecq’s fiction have few ethical qualms about putting an end to their lives. The willingness to commit suicide on the part of many of Houellebecq’s characters constitutes a litmus test for the demise of the Christian worldview and the concomitant spread of materialist ontology, for it is always—or nearly always—the case for Houellebecq’s suicides that the calculation involved in self-slaughter only involves a reckoning about the prevention of pain. There is no consideration of the moral or theological connotations of suicide. With God absent from the Houellebecquian text, the divine prohibition on suicide is lifted. I focus below on the suicides in The Elementary Particles and on the euthanizing of Jed Martin’s father in The Map and the Territory, since they present, to my mind, the most telling examples.

  Houellebecq’s award-winning second novel, The Elementary Particles, which appeared in 1998, tells the story of the half brothers Bruno and Michel, one a sex-obsessed, embittered high school literature teacher, the other a depressive, self-absorbed biophysicist, whose lives unravel as they enter middle age. Bruno and Michel are the sons of Janine Ceccaldi, an aging libertine who abandoned both children to their respective grandmothers in order to pursue a life of sexual freedom. Janine’s negligence in caring for her children is truly disturbing: “Pushing open the door of one of the upstairs bedrooms, he [Marc Djerzinski, Michel’s father] smelled a retch-inducing stench. The sun flared violently through the huge bay window onto the black and white tiles where his son crawled around awkwardly, slipping occasionally in pools of urine or excrement [ . . . ]. Sensing a human presence, the boy tried to escape; when Marc picked him up, the child trembled in his arms” (2000a, 24). Forcibly removed from his mother’s care, Michel is sent to live with his paternal grandmother in the Yonne, while the four-year-old Bruno ends up with Janine’s mother in a low-rent apartment in Marseilles, where the old woman begins to go insane:

  [Bruno] remembered his grandmother, sitting on a suitcase in the middle of the kitchen on the day they arrived in Marseilles. Cockroaches scuttled between the cracks in the tiles. It was probably then that she began
to lose her mind. The litany of troubles in those few short weeks had overwhelmed her: the slow agony of her husband’s death, the hurried departure from Algiers and the arduous search for an apartment, finding one at last in a filthy housing project in the northeast of Marseilles. She had never set foot in France before. Her daughter had deserted her, and hadn’t even attended her father’s funeral. Deep down, Bruno’s grandmother felt certain there had been a mistake. Someone, somewhere, had made a dreadful mistake. (32)

  Bruno and Michel are both marked by their mother’s abandonment, with Michel opting to avoid relationships with women altogether and Bruno sublimating his dereliction in the form of sexual obsessions.

  An unattractive, forty-something divorcé who rarely sees his son, Bruno is a frequenter of nudist resorts, New Age camps, and sex colonies. Finally removed from his post as a teacher after coming on to a student, Bruno is reassigned as an administrator and divorces his wife, Anne, with whom he has a son named Victor. During a holiday at the Lieu du Changement—a sort of New Age colony where sexually frustrated forty-year-olds go to fornicate with strangers—Bruno meets Christiane, also an aging libertine (a soixante-huitarde, as she calls herself, referring to her sympathies for the student revolts of 1968), whom he begins to date seriously. Bruno is so focused on his sexual satisfaction with Christiane that everything else in his life, including his work and his son, ceases to have any meaning: “His colleagues, the thought-provoking seminars, the social development of the adolescent, multiculturalism . . . none of it had the slightest importance for him anymore. Christiane sucked his cock and looked after him when he was ill; Christiane was important. At that moment, he knew he would never see his son again” (198). However, when Christiane, who suffers from spinal necrosis, is paralyzed from the waist down in a macabre swingers club accident, Bruno hesitates in offering to take care of his now sexually nonfunctional lover, leading to Christiane’s suicide: