by Louis Betty
Embodiment, especially of the carbon-based kind, pushes toward desire and separation, and so long as we remain corporeal beings, happiness eludes us. And yet this sort of existence still strikes Daniel25 as preferable to that of the neohumans, who attempt to elude suffering through a kind of genetically facilitated mortification of the flesh. Caught between these two unappealing forms of life, it is little wonder that Daniel25 elects to live out the rest of his “obscure existence as an improved monkey” (336), as an overgrown amoeba, content to laze thoughtlessly in pools of salt water as his organism imbibes nutrients: “I bathed for a long time under the sun and the starlight, and I felt nothing other than a slightly obscure and nutritive sensation. Happiness was not a possible horizon. The world had betrayed. My body belonged to me for only a brief lapse of time; I would never reach the goal I had set. The future was empty; it was the mountain” (337).
Between desire and sorrow, community and solitude, existence and nonexistence, Daniel25 is able to carve out a narrow space in which his organic functions can persist, a kind of permanent bestial stupefaction, impermeable to thought. I find it difficult to say which of Houellebecq’s solutions to existential malaise is more dismal, Daniel25’s abrutissement or humanity’s disappearance. In the latter case the reader is spared the ideological queasiness associated with posthumanism, but in the former Houellebecq indulges in a kind of prehumanism, a return to animal brutishness and insensibility whose outcome would hardly be more favorable.
The Possibility of an Island marks the end of Houellebecq’s utopian ambitions, at least when considering those utopias that embed a religious clause. The immortality promised by cloning has led only to boredom and the desire to revert to a previous state, thus signaling a point of closure in Houellebecq’s attempts, if only in fiction, to propose an alternative to the religious world-views that materialism has supposedly eradicated. But this is not the end of the story. The Map and the Territory, published after Possibility, moves in a surprisingly new direction, implicitly suggesting that the possibilities for utopia lie not in the realm of technological progress but rather, curiously, in the potential economic gain afforded to France by its tourism industry. After spending years secluded on an isolated estate in central France, Jed Martin emerges from his monasticism to find a French countryside that has been transformed by profits from foreign tourists:
[Jed] had only a vague memory of Châtelus-le-Marcheix. It was, as far as he could remember, a decrepit, ordinary little village in rural France [ . . . ]. But after his first steps in the streets of the small town, he was filled with amazement. First of all, the village had grown a lot [ . . . ]. Everywhere on the main street, shop windows were selling regional products and arts and crafts; over one hundred meters he counted three cafés offering low-price Internet connections. [ . . . ] [T]he departmental council had financed the launch of a geostationary satellite in order to improve the speed of Internet connections in the department. (2012, 260)
In addition to the material prosperity now blessing this formerly isolated and backward part of France, the previous inhabitants of the village have been replaced by educated urbanites eager to exploit the region’s tourist potential: “Obviously, France had changed a lot. Incomers, from urban areas, had replaced them, motivated by a real appetite for business and, occasionally, by moderate and marketable ecological convictions. They had set about repopulating the hinterland—and this attempt, after many other fruitless attempts, based this time on a precise knowledge of the laws of the market, and on their lucid acceptance, had been a total success” (261). In this image of an economically renewed France, the suffocating hegemony of the état providence has disappeared, capitalism has finally managed to overcome the entrenched welfare state, and the country has been turned into what Houellebecq refers to in Public Enemies as a “tourist brothel” (Houellebecq and Lévy, 2011, 117). The focusing of commerce on tourism and the countryside has put an end to industrial production in France, thus prompting a steep decline in immigration and the insecurity often associated with it. Of France’s newfound economic prosperity, Houellebecq writes: “Having become a mainly agricultural and tourist country, France had displayed remarkable robustness during the various crises which followed one another [ . . . ] in the preceding twenty years [ . . . ]. Having scarcely anything to sell except hôtels de charme, perfumes, and rillettes—what is called an art de vivre—France had no difficulty confronting these vagaries” (2012, 262). And apropos of the effects of the end of immigration and the welfare state: “This new generation turned out to be more conservative and more respectful of money and social hierarchies [ . . . ]. The birth rate had [ . . . ] actually risen in France, even without taking into account immigration, which, anyway, had fallen to almost zero since the disappearance of the last industrial jobs and the drastic reduction of social security coverage” (263).
And so France is cured of all its current ills: the unaffordable welfare state, burdensome immigration and the dangers of Islamicization, the social atomization provoked by antipathy between the generations, the environmental hazards of industrial production, and the financial insolvency of a population with a declining birth rate. This is a veritable materialist utopia—though one much more likely to appeal, I suppose, to the French right. Otherwise, the emphasis on the economic exploitation of the French countryside and on the image of France’s more traditional past (Belle Époque furnishings, country hotels, luxury products, etc.) is not purely of Houellebecq’s invention. Gilles Lipovetsky, one of France’s most eminent theorists of postmodernity, describes the trend in his 2004 essay Hypermodern Times (Les temps hypermodernes), writing of the commercial value of France’s cultural heritage, “The vogue of the past can also be read in the success of antiques, fine china, retro, vintage, products stamped ‘authentic’ that inspire nostalgia. More and more, businesses refer to their history, exploit their heritage, invoke the past, launch ‘memory products’ that ‘bring back to life’ former times [ . . . ]. In hypermodern society, the old and the nostalgic have become selling points, marketing tools” (86, my translation).
The Map and the Territory imagines a France that has become keenly aware of its cultural heritage and natural beauty and has learned to exploit its past in order to guarantee its economic future. Utopianism exists in a material sense—France has survived the collapse of industrial and financial capitalism by concentrating its economy on a sort of “capitalism of the countryside,” able to withstand the vicissitudes of the global market—suggesting a more modest attempt on Houellebecq’s part to remedy the perceived woes of modernity, be they spiritual, existential, or economic. Gone is the preoccupation with immortality that formed the utopian firmament of much of Houellebecq’s previous work; gone too is any mention of the existential burdens of godlessness and disbelief. Has Houellebecq embraced materialism, in both its philosophical and market senses? Or has he subtly suggested, by placing France’s hopes for redemption in a return to tradition (if only for the purposes of profit), that spiritual renewal might too depend on a reinvestment and rejuvenation of France’s religious past?
It would be difficult to deny that a “return to tradition” in the French sense would also connote some rehabilitation of Catholicism as a socially-structuring institution. Catholicism is one of the principal jurisdictions of France’s cultural heritage (one has only to visit the cathedral at Chartres to realize this), and Houellebecq’s evocation of a “more conservative” generation of French men and women who are more respectful than ever before of the social order seems almost to demand some mention of a reawakening interest in the Catholic Church. France, after all, saw hopes for a Catholic renaissance, both in literature and in culture more generally, come and go in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, attracting some of the most renowned novelists and intellectuals of the time. Figures including J.-K. Huysmans, François Coppée, Ferdinand Brunnetière, and Adolphe Retté produced novels, memoirs, and essays recounting their experiences of conversion, their an
tipathy toward contemporary individualism and materialism, and their nostalgia for a lost golden age of faith (the Middle Ages) that contrasted in the most gross manner with the modern world.9 The era also saw the appearance of “digest versions” relating the various stages of the cross and the ultimate conversion of prominent intellectuals, while others offered compilations of the best Catholic writing of the time.
Works such as Jean Calvet’s Le renouveau catholique dans la littérature contemporaine (1927) and Jules Sageret’s Les grands convertis (1906) explore the spiritual preoccupations and conversion experiences of Huysmans, Paul Bourget, Coppée, and Brunnetière, while Louis Chaigne’s Anthologie de la renaissance catholique (1940) anthologizes poetry by Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, and others. Frédéric Gugelot describes the world-view typical of these “great converts”: “The historical vision of the converts developed a total refusal of the society issuing from the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the revolution of 1789. This rejection was strengthened by hatred of a time dominated by individualism, rationalism and the secularization of thought and of the state. Nostalgia for the Middle Ages participated in this intransigence toward the contemporary world” (1998, 394, my translation). In his widely celebrated 1897 book, La bonne souffrance, François Coppée offers a glimpse of the enthusiasm that attended expectations for a Catholic renaissance in France: “Official atheism must resign itself. We are beginning to abandon these schools of falsehood, where there is nothing for the heart. We are finally realizing that they are populating France with the prideful and the desperate, and, from all quarters, brilliant signs allow us to presage a victorious Renaissance of the Christian Idea” (224–25, my translation).
The Houellebecquian critique of contemporary culture’s reckless individualism, heartless rationalism, and unchecked secularism not only echoes but shares in the essential spirit of the Catholic intellectuals of a century or more past. The death of God is only shortly followed by the death of France; no society can sustain itself on atheism, no matter how imbued with the humanistic spirit, and France, along with all of the West, stands on a precipice from which only supernatural succor can save it. Could it then be that Houellebecq, in The Map and the Territory, has dared to imagine, if only in the subtlest way, a Catholic renaissance for the twenty-first century, in which a return to economic and social traditionalism will be accompanied by a swelling of interest in a previously neglected and nearly obsolete Catholicism?
The answer is both yes and no. Curiously, conversion in The Map and the Territory is limited to the fictional Houellebecq, who chooses to be baptized not long after he moves back to his childhood home in the Loire Valley and not long before his gruesome murder: “It had been discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that the author of The Elementary Particles, who throughout his life had displayed an intransigent atheism, had very discreetly been baptized, in a church in Courtenay, six months before [his death]” (202). Houellebecq’s conversion is not, however, depicted in any sense as part of a more general trend toward a return to Catholicism; more than anything else, Parisian church officials use it during Houellebecq’s funeral as a means of proselytizing (202), having resorted to exploiting the deaths of celebrities as a “disheartening solution” to the “regular progress of atheism” (202). The Map and the Territory thus merely hints at the Catholic renaissance that writers such as Coppée and Retté imagine in more certain terms.
By linking the fictional Houellebecq’s conversion with a return to his “ancestral home” in Loiret, the novel suggests a connection between the rehabilitation of France’s countryside and its traditions and the religious life that used to animate them. “However freely they mock,” writes Somerset Maugham in The Razor’s Edge, “most Frenchmen, when the end comes, prefer to make their peace with the faith that is part of their blood and bones” (1944, 255). Does the future French society of The Map and the Territory prefer to make such a peace? Houellebecq does not say either way, and certainly the mention of the “regular progress of atheism” (202) shows that Houellebecq is still writing within a secularizing paradigm. However, what this very cautious overture to Catholicism does accomplish is to move us away from the techno-utopianism encountered in previous works and to place the question of religious revival in the context of extant faith traditions. The Map and the Territory represents a rupture with the techno-religious discourse of The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island, leaving the door open for a more traditionally religious solution to contemporary existential malaise. In this respect, the novel serves as a bridge between the utopian disappointments of Houellebecq’s previous texts and the triumph of Islam in Submission.
4
Materialist Horror
The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human.
—Houellebecq 2000a
As I have argued throughout, Houellebecq’s novels may in large part be read as tales of the social and psychological consequences of a thoroughly materialist worldview. Without God, transcendence, or sacredness to guide them, Houellebecq’s characters all too often abandon themselves to hedonistic perversions, wither away in isolation from the rest of humanity, or commit suicide. Love and art do at times play a redeeming role; one might consider the belated relationship between Michel and Annabelle in Particles, which sustains them both for a time, or the artistic success that allows Jed in The Map and the Territory to attain a state of mind that, while “joyless,” is nonetheless “peaceful” and “completely neutral” (167). The redemption that love and art might provide is, however, fleeting: Annabelle’s death is a grim reminder of nature’s indifference to human concerns, while Jed’s final art project—a series of videos in which human beings are devoured by plants—is a resolutely Houellebecquian display of apocalyptic horror.
Houellebecq is an author who “glimpses the end in everything,” as the late French novelist and cultural critic Philippe Muray pointed out in his 1999 review of The Elementary Particles. And that end, whatever form it takes, always reflects a kind of horror about the human condition, a sense that, whatever temporary reprieve humanity may discover from the inconveniences of organic life, we are all nonetheless doomed to stink and rot, with no God to save us. The horror of Houellebecq’s novels is thus a materialist horror, the product of an experimental approach to literature in which a distraught and defenseless humanity is relentlessly confronted with the inexorabilities of material existence and the indifference of the natural world. The following passage from H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life describing the Lovecraftian universe might just as well be a summary of Houellebecq’s method:
Of course, life has no meaning. But neither does death. And that is another thing that curdles the blood when one discovers Lovecraft’s universe. The deaths of his heroes have no meaning. Death brings no appeasement. It in no way allows the story to conclude. Implacably, HPL destroys his characters, evoking only the dismemberment of marionettes. Indifferent to these pitiful vicissitudes, cosmic fear continues to expand. It swells and takes form. Great Cthulhu emerges from his slumber. (2005, 32)
In the following section, focusing in particular on Whatever, I present what are, in my view, some of the most exemplary instances of materialist horror in Houellebecq’s fiction. However, I want to insist that such instances represent, precisely, horror stories, and like all horror stories their purchase on reality is only partial. The value of such writing lies not so much in conveying the real as in reminding us of the desperate places our intellectual and spiritual commitments may take us in the worst of circumstances—circumstances like physical decline, disease, ugliness, abandonment, rejection, and death. Houellebecq prompts his readers to consider the stakes involved in the renunciation of God, of the soul, and of transcendence, even if he has very little to place in their stead.
Dangerous Credibility
One of the most persistent themes in Whatever (1994), Houellebecq’s debut novel, is human ugliness. Three characters in particular fin
d themselves burdened by a repulsive appearance: Raphaël Tisserand, the narrator’s partner during a business trip, who looks like a “frog in formaldehyde” (2011, 98); Catherine Lechardoy, the narrator’s liaison at the French Ministry of Agriculture, who is “beyond trying it on with a man” (26); and the pitiful and ironically named Brigitte Bardot, a sort of metafictional character whom we encounter in one of the novel’s animal fictions, who has the aspect of a “sow” (87).
Houellebecq is systematically unsparing in his depiction of each of these unfortunate souls’ physical loathsomeness, using language that evokes not only the arbitrariness of nature but also the indifference of the Ultimate. Of Lechardoy, he writes, “She’s not all that pretty. As well as prominent teeth she has lifeless hair, little eyes that burn with anger. No breasts or buttocks to speak of. God has not, in truth, been too kind to her” (26). Obviously there is no question of this middling office worker having anything like a sex life. At a meeting between the narrator and several representatives from the ministry, during which the two parties are to lay out a plan for teaching a “specialized software” (15) to employees in the countryside, the narrator observes: “The third Ministry representative is Catherine Lechardoy. The poor thing has a slightly sad air this morning [ . . . ]. Her ugly little face is glum, she regularly wipes her glasses. I even wonder if she hasn’t been crying; I can just picture her breaking into sobs in the morning as she gets dressed, all alone” (33). If this were not bad enough, when the narrator briefly considers coming on to Catherine during an office party, he becomes physically ill: