Without God

by Louis Betty

  He had hesitated a couple of seconds too long: poor Christiane. Then he had hesitated a couple of days too long before calling her; he knew she was alone in her low-income apartment with her son [ . . . ]. There was nothing forcing him to look after a cripple, that’s what she’d said, and he knew that she hadn’t died hating him. Her broken wheelchair had been found at the bottom of the stairs near the mailbox. Her face was swollen and her neck broken. Bruno’s name was on a form in the box marked “in the event of an accident, please contact . . .” She had died on the way to the hospital. (205)

  Wracked by guilt after Christiane’s death, Bruno commits himself to life in a mental institution, where a regimen of lithium and other psychotropic drugs effectively castrates him. However, even medication is not enough to quiet Bruno’s sexual obsessions. As he says to Michel while on a short leave from the hospital to bury the two men’s mother: “They’ve got me on lithium. [ . . . ] I’m not going back to the clinic just yet. I’ve got another night left. I’m going to a whorehouse [ . . . ]. Since they put me on lithium I can’t get it up at all, but that doesn’t matter, I’d still like to go” (216).

  Michel, on the other hand, is a brilliant but deeply alienated biophysicist who lives his life at a distance from other human beings. Michel has avoided serious relationships all his life, but when at age forty he crosses paths with his high school sweetheart, Annabelle, the two begin dating and she becomes pregnant. Annabelle is an exceptionally beautiful woman who has paradoxically had little success with men. She tells Michel one evening after dinner:

  I haven’t really had a happy life [ . . . ]. I think I was too obsessed with love. I fell for guys too easily; once they got what they wanted, they dumped me and I got hurt [ . . . ]. In the end, even the sex started to disgust me; I couldn’t stand their triumphant little smiles when I took off my dress, or their idiot leers when they came and especially their boorishness once it was all over and done. They were spineless, pathetic and pretentious. In the end, it was too painful to know they thought of me as just another piece of meat. (192)

  Sadly, soon after the pregnancy is discovered, Annabelle is diagnosed with uterine cancer, which quickly spreads to her intestine: “On 25 August, a routine examination revealed metastases in the abdomen [ . . . ]. Radiation therapy was a possibility—in fact, it was the only possibility—but it was important to realize that it was an arduous treatment and the chances of success were only fifty percent” (230). Preferring to avoid a painful and likely futile course of treatment, Annabelle takes her life by overdosing on painkillers, leaving her family in a state of incomprehension. “I don’t understand,” says Annabelle’s mother. “I don’t understand how life can be like this. She was a lovely girl, you know, always very affectionate, she never gave me any trouble. She never complained, but I knew she wasn’t happy. She deserved better from life” (234). After Annabelle’s death, Michel, heartbroken yet strangely composed, leaves France to pursue his research in Ireland, where after a period of ten years he makes discoveries in genetics that will soon allow the human race to replace itself with a species of immortal and asexual clones:

  At the end of 2009 there could no longer be any doubt: Djerzinski’s conclusions were valid and could be considered to have been proven. The practical consequences were dizzying: any genetic code, however complex, could be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated from disturbances or mutations. This meant that every cell contained within it the possibility of being infinitely copied. Every animal species, however highly evolved, could be transformed into a similar species reproduced by cloning, and immortal. (258)

  At the novel’s end, the narrator, whom Houellebecq reveals to be one of the future clones, praises the human race for its perseverance despite itself and dedicates the story of Bruno and Michel to a now nearly extinct mankind: “As the last members of this race are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, an homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind” (264).

  Bruno’s and Michel’s tragedies run deeper than the losses of their lovers and their mother’s poor parenting. Houellebecq is not an author who is satisfied with solely psychological descriptions; his characters are as much the symptoms of broad cultural and historical tendencies as they are individual agents responsible for their own suffering: “Was it possible to think of Bruno as an individual? The decay of his organs was particular to him, and he would suffer his decline and death as an individual. On the other hand, his hedonistic worldview and the forces that shaped his consciousness and desires were common to an entire generation [ . . . ]. His motives, values and desires did not distinguish him from his contemporaries in any way” (148). Bruno’s egotism, his lovers’ fates, and his mother’s negligence are superficial causes of his malaise; his ultimate undoing lies in his unwitting subjugation to the prevailing materialism of his time. In Bruno’s view, the loss of belief in immortality lies at the root of religion’s decline in Western civilization, and subsequently it has given rise to a cult of youth in which he, now middle-aged, is forbidden to participate. During the trip to their mother’s deathbed in southern France, Bruno explains to Michel, “As soon as people stop believing in life after death, religion is impossible. If society is impossible without religion [ . . . ] then society isn’t possible either [ . . . ]. Man has always been terrified by death—he’s never been able to face the idea of his own disappearance [ . . . ] without horror. Of all worldly goods, youth is clearly the most precious, and today we don’t believe in anything but worldly goods” (212–13).

  Aware of the depravity and wickedness of his world, Bruno does nothing to change it. Rather, he wallows in his own dissipation, and in the end he fails to understand why his life has been destroyed. After Christiane’s suicide, we read, “He knew his life was over, but he didn’t understand the ending” (206). Rather than commit suicide, Bruno is institutionalized, and the last the reader sees of him is at his mother’s death, when he promises to urinate on her ashes every day (211). Michel, meanwhile, manages to avoid insanity, though he makes a quick exit from life once his work is complete. Djerzinski is a man for whom being itself is a burden; as soon as he has left instructions for how the species is to put an end to its torment, he hurls himself into the sea. Speaking on behalf of the new race of clones, the narrator of the novel explains, “We now believe that Michel Djerzinski died in Ireland [ . . . ]. We also believe that, having completed his work, and with no human ties to bind him, he chose to die. Many witnesses attest to his fascination with this distant edge of the Western world [ . . . ] where, as he wrote, ‘the sky, the sea and the light converge.’ We now believe that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea” (253).

  The number of suicides in Particles is one of the most memorable and troubling aspects of the text. The death of Annick, Bruno’s first adolescent fling, whom Houellebecq describes as “not very pretty” and as someone whom Bruno “would have been embarrassed to be seen with [ . . . ] on the street” (127), is a particularly gruesome example of a suicide committed out of loathing for one’s own body:

  Two policemen were trying to disperse a small crowd gathered outside Annick’s building. Bruno went a little closer. The girl’s body lay smashed and strangely twisted on the sidewalk. Her shattered arms seemed to form two strange limbs around her head. Her face, or what was left of it, lay in a pool of blood [ . . . ]. At that moment an ambulance arrived and two men got out carrying a stretcher. As they lifted her body he saw her shattered skull and turned away. The ambulance drove off in a howl of sirens. So ended Bruno’s first love. (128)

  Houellebecq’s second novel is suicidal ideation pushed to the extreme. Not only are there the deaths of Michel, Annabelle, Christiane, and Annick, but there is also the outright, consensual eradication of the human race and its replacement by an improved species: “It has been surprising to note the meekness, resignation, perh
aps even secret relief with which humans have consented to their own passing” (263). Annabelle’s self-justification for administering herself a lethal dose of painkillers is exemplary of the prevailing mentality in the novel: “her body had taken a turn which was unfair and unexpected, and now could no longer be a source of joy or pleasure. On the contrary, it would gradually but quite quickly become another source of pain and embarrassment to her and others. And so she would have to destroy her body” (231). Annabelle offers one of Houellebecq’s clearest demonstrations of materialism’s inexorable logic: there is only the body, and reason dictates that once the body can no longer be counted on to provide pleasure, it is to be abandoned. The great injustice in the Houellebecquian universe is not sexual inequality, maternal abandonment, or capitalism; the great injustice in these novels is matter, and without recourse to the promise of the immaterial—the soul, God, eternity—the injustice is final.

  The “sinfulness” of suicide lies in the person’s disregard of divine will: God has a plan for human life and determines the moment of death for each of us, and trespassing against the Almighty in this respect risks everlasting damnation, or at best an extended stay in purgatory (for Catholics, at least). In Particles, however, the divine prohibition on suicide is a historical curiosity not unlike other anachronistic theological prohibitions on “sinful” behavior such as fornication or blasphemy. Whether to live or die is, at least theologically speaking, purely an individual matter, and what determines that choice is the state of the body. Where the body suffers, life is worthless; where the body rejoices, life is worthwhile. Suicide for Houellebecq’s characters is simply a remedy for what they perceive to be needless suffering; any consideration of its sinfulness is almost shockingly absent.

  The decision of Jed Martin’s father in The Map and the Territory to be euthanized provides something of an apology for this secular rendering of suicide. Jean-Pierre Martin, who has had a highly successful career as an architect but is now afflicted with cancer and living in a nursing home, conveys to his son during a visit, “What [Jed] had to get into his head was that he could no longer be all right anywhere, that he couldn’t be all right in life generally [ . . . ]. If he was going to keep on going they would have to change his artificial anus; well, he thought he’d had enough of that joke. And what’s more, he felt pain. He couldn’t bear it any longer, he was suffering too much” (2012, 217). Not long after Jed’s visit, Jean-Pierre goes to Zurich to be euthanized at the hands of a for-profit assisted suicide venture called Koestler, which charges five thousand euros per lethal injection of pentobarbital sodium. Surprisingly, in The Map and the Territory Houellebecq mounts a stunning show of opposition to euthanasia in the person of Jed, who after meeting with the doctor who has overseen his father’s suicide brutally attacks her in her office:

  The woman took back the file, obviously thinking their conversation was over, and got up to put it away in the filing cabinet. Jed stood up as well, approached, and slapped her violently. She made a stifled moan, but didn’t have time to consider a riposte. He moved on to a violent uppercut to the chin, followed by a series of sharp cuffs. While she wavered on her feet, trying to get her breath back, he stepped back so as to kick her with all his strength at the level of her solar plexus. At this she collapsed to the ground, striking a metal corner of the desk as she fell; there was a loud cracking sound. The spine must have taken a blow, Jed thought. He leaned over her; she was groggy, breathing with difficulty, but she was breathing.7 (240)

  In Houellebecq’s novels, the effort to alleviate human suffering has shifted from a more traditionally religious or Christian attempt to encourage sufferers to find meaning in their pain, to a focus on altering or simply eliminating the body so that suffering, both physical and mental, can be avoided as much as possible. Jean-Pierre’s suicide (not to mention the creation of races of neohuman clones in Particles and Possibility) is the unsurprising consequence of this transformation, which despite Jed’s protest still prevails in the ethical landscape of Western modernity in Houellebecq’s fiction.

  Materialism and suicide are causally linked in Particles and indirectly so in The Map and the Territory, with materialism providing the philosophical groundwork for the justification of suicide. With the divine prohibition on suicide lifted, it is only individual objectors like Jed who are left to mount an opposition to self-slaughter. Houellebecq’s fiction presents a nexus of causality linking, on the one hand, secularization, materialism, and irreligion with, on the other hand, euthanasia and suicide (along with sexual liberation, free market economics, and a host of other modern ills). From a sociological point of view, something in this vision of terminal social decadence is surely exaggerated, but what Houellebecq’s novels speak to, I suggest, in their mise-en-scène of secularization theory is not contemporary spiritual sentiment but rather the social and institutional decline of Europe’s traditional religious institutions, French Catholicism in particular. By creating a universe of materialist horror in which suicide enjoys a broad cultural apology, materialism is the dominant worldview, and sexual freedom is nearly total, Houellebecq’s novels are able to explore the consequences—in experimental form—of the decline of Catholic morality in French culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  Materialist Horror and Moral Secularization

  A major advantage of contemporary reappraisals of secularization theory is that they have allowed scholars to avoid analyzing secularization as an all-or-nothing monolithic process whereby religiosity declines in every sense—from the political to the social to the personal. Rather, secularization can be viewed as a phenomenon that can operate on certain levels without necessarily operating on all of them. Social secularization may not augur or directly reflect secularization on a personal level, but it might be taken to indicate the emergence of a kind of “fuzzy fidelity” (see Voas 2009), where individual conviction suffers not from the internal pressure of private doubt but instead from the decollectivization of belief. By adapting Houellebecq’s portrayal of “post-religious” Europe to this conception of secularization, where the absence of a socially-structuring religious world-view, such as Catholicism in France, might harm the confidence or fervor associated with individual belief, the link between materialist horror and a genuine commentary on moral secularization and personal incredulity becomes discernible. Houellebecq’s description of the priest Jean-Pierre Buvet’s loss of faith in Whatever is a telling example of the fate of religion without a community context. Near the end of the novel, Buvet describes the collapse of his parish to the narrator:

  I’d told you Vitry wasn’t an easy parish; it’s even worse than you can imagine. Since my arrival I’ve tried to set up kids’ groups; no kids ever came. It’s three months now since I’ve celebrated a baptism. At mass I’ve never managed more than five people: four Africans and an old Breton woman; I believe she was eighty-two, an ex- employee of the railways. She’d been widowed for ages; her children didn’t come to see her anymore, she no longer had their address. On Sunday I didn’t see her at mass. I passed by her house, she lives in a high-priority housing area [ . . . ]. Her neighbors told me she’d just been attacked; they’d taken her off to hospital, but she only had slight fractures. I visited her; her fractures were taking time to mend, of course, but there was no danger. When I went back a week later she was dead. I asked for explanations, but the doctors refused to give me any. They’d already cremated her body; nobody in the family had bothered to attend. I’m certain she’d have wished for a religious burial; she hadn’t said as much to me, she never spoke of death; but I’m certain that’s what she’d have wanted. (138)

  On the next page the reader learns that the doctors at the hospital have euthanized the old woman, whom they considered to be an “unnecessary burden” (139).

  Interestingly, the young nurse who had administered the lethal dose comes to see Buvet in confession a few days later, claiming she is unable to sleep. Patricia, who “knew nothing about religious matters�
� (139), begins to visit Jean-Pierre nearly every night, and the two develop an affectionate though chaste relationship. Buvet is tempted to break his vows, but any hope of sleeping with Patricia evaporates when she announces she has begun seeing someone else. Buvet explains to the narrator, “She told me we wouldn’t see each other again, but that she was glad to have known me; she really liked changing boyfriends; she was only twenty. Basically she liked me a lot; but no more than that; it was mainly the idea of sleeping with a priest that excited her” (140). Buvet gets drunk as he tells his story and expresses a reluctance to say mass the next morning: “Tomorrow I must say mass. I don’t see how I can do it. I don’t think I can cope. I no longer feel the presence” (140). The narrator responds by asking “what presence?” (140), but Buvet does not answer. The narrator calls a cab and leaves; Buvet does not reappear in the novel.