by Louis Betty
Particularly notable about the Cthulhu mythos is the utter absence of any supernatural quality in the assortment of monsters, aliens, and other hideously described organisms that the reader discovers in Lovecraft’s tales. Joshi writes, “Lovecraft was, above all else, a scientific rationalist. His tales appear to put on stage a bewildering array of outlandish monsters [ . . . ] but Lovecraft, as his letters attest, was a materialist and an atheist who had the highest respect for scientific fact and who saw nothing but pitiable folly in the delusions of religion, spiritualism, and occultism” (2008, xiii). The materialism of Lovecraft’s cosmology is not lost on Houellebecq. In his introduction to H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Houellebecq writes,
It is possible, in fact, that beyond the narrow range of our perception, other entities exist [ . . . ]. But this is not necessarily good news. What makes us think that these creatures [ . . . ] will exhibit any kind of a spiritual nature? There is nothing to suggest a transgression of the universal laws of egotism and malice. It is ridiculous to imagine that at the edge of the cosmos, other well-intentioned and wise beings await to guide us toward some sort of harmony. In order to imagine how they might treat us were we to come into contact with them, it might be best to recall how we treat “inferior intelligences” such as rabbits and frogs. In the best of cases they serve as food for us; sometimes also, often in fact, we kill them for the sheer pleasure of killing. (2005, 33)
The horror of Lovecraft’s fiction, eloquently expressed in Houellebecq’s account, lies in its evocation of a despiritualized cosmos, where galactic powers stand in the same relation to humanity as humanity stands to “lower” animals like rodents and amphibians. Cosmic fear emerges when man beholds, if only elusively, the immense, alien forces of nature that rule the universe; and his only chance of sanity lies in his ignorance of them. As Thurston elaborates at the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu,”
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (Lovecraft 2008, 354)
Houellebecq’s characters do not exactly occupy the “placid island of ignorance” for which Thurston pines, scientific knowledge having already stripped protagonists like Djerzinski, Bruno, Michel, and Daniel1 of the theological assurances of a putative golden age of faith. In Houellebecq’s novels, cosmic fear is already complete (assuming, of course, that one allows for the absence of alien monsters from the depths of space), and no hope exists of a flight into the “peace and safety of a new dark age.” An intuition of humanity’s threatened existence, of an end to the human through either extinction or replacement (or both), forms an essential component of the psychology of Houellebecq’s protagonists. Near the finale of The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq describes Djerzinski and Annabelle’s doomed relationship:
They sometimes were sad, but mostly they were serious. Both of them knew that this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together. They had a great respect and profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse the end. (197)
The “gray shadow” moving over the earth in Lovecraft’s cosmology is Great Cthulhu, who awakens from an eons-old slumber at the bottom of the sea to once again bring the planet under his spell. In Houellebecq’s novels the shadow is the less cosmic but no less horrible certainty of death and nothingness, and only through Djerzinski’s discoveries in genetics at the end of Particles will Annabelle’s death come to have any meaning. What Houellebecq and Lovecraft share most is their sensitivity to the fleetingness of the human in view of the broader forces of nature that determine our destiny, be those forces agential, as in the case of aliens, or mechanical, as with physical law. Near the end of Particles, Annabelle is diagnosed with uterine cancer and undergoes a hysterectomy: “After the third week she was allowed out, and would take short walks along the river or in the surrounding woods [ . . . ]. The grass on the riverbank was scorched, almost white; in the shadow of the beech trees, the river wound on forever in deep green ripples. The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human” (228–29). The evil agency of Lovecraft’s monsters is transformed in Houellebecq’s fiction into the indifferent though no less inhuman agency of an arbitrary nature, which visits sickness and death on humanity without any need of intelligent outside forces and which for this reason may be even more horrifying. Houellebecq and Lovecraft not only succeed in conveying the fleetingness of human life in the larger theater of nature, they also effect a memorable and frightful demonstration of human beings’ helplessness in the face of an inhuman otherness, be it cosmic or terrestrial.
In some ways, Houellebecq is Lovecraft sans the ornate cosmology of ageless creatures and ancient races. Only in the clones of The Possibility of an Island does the reader confront anything resembling the cosmic powers inhabiting Lovecraft’s universe; and the clones’ indifference to the welfare of the human race—the “human savages” in Possibility—is perhaps on a par with that of the Yithians and the Great Old Ones of the Lovecraftian weird tales.2 Daniel24, for instance, admits in his life story to feeling “no pity” for or “sense of common belonging” (18) with the savages roaming the countryside at the outset of the fifth millennium. While he will leave his compound in order to rescue an injured dog or rabbit, the idea of helping a human being is unthinkable. Daniel24’s indifference to humanity thus approaches that of a Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, and offers perhaps the clearest parallel with Lovecraft’s fiction in Houellebecq’s work.
Nonetheless, Lovecraft’s oft-deplored bombast and endless parade of extravagant, extraterrestrial monsters make too strict a comparison of him and Houellebecq problematic. Lovecraft, as Houellebecq points out in H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, wants very much to go beyond the human, to eschew realism and enliven the monotony of the day-to-day with unholy rites, gruesome murders, and cosmic horrors beyond description (29). Houellebecq’s approach is more often than not rooted in the mundane lives of characters whose only escape from ennui and angst lies in television, midline consumer products, sex, and regular visits to the neighborhood Monoprix.3 The roots of materialist horror sink deeper than Lovecraft’s fiction and, I argue, are better traced to the seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal and the proto-cosmology of the Pensées.
Of the many memorable thoughts contained in the Pensées (the most philosophically enduring no doubt being number 680, the famed “wager” argument), pensée 230 is perhaps the most significant in relation to Houellebecq. In this lengthy discourse on the “disproportion of man,” Pascal asks, “What is man in infinity?” (1995, 66)—both the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small, the infinity of limitless space and of the eternally contracting microcosm of the atomic (and subatomic) world. Of space, Pascal writes,
Let the earth appear a pinpoint to us beside the vast arc this star describes, and let us be dumbfounded that this vast arc is itself only a delicate pinpoint in comparison with the arc encompassed by the stars tracing circles in the firmament. But if our vision stops here, let our imagination travel further afield. Our imagination will grow weary of conceiving before nature of producing. The whole of the visible world is merely an imperceptible speck in nature’s ample bosom [ . . .]. (1995, 66)
And of the inconceivably minute,
Let us see
in [this miniature atom] an infinity of universes, of which each has its own firmament, planets, and earth in the same proportion as in the visible world, in this land of animals, and ultimately of mites, in which we will find the same thing as in the first universe, and will find again in others the same thing, endlessly and perpetually. Let us lose ourselves in these wonders, which are as startling in their minuteness as others are in the vastness of their size. (67)
Instead of wonder, however, man’s knowledge of his intermediate nature—a being occupying an ontological space somewhere between the atom and the galaxy—leads to a sense of terror: “Whoever looks at himself in this way will be terrified by himself, and, thinking himself supported by the size nature has given us suspended between the two gulfs of the infinite and the void, will tremble at nature’s wonders” (67). Even Pascal, a man of great faith, is frightened by the sheer scope of nature: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” (73). Humanity’s only solace in the face of cosmic immensity and atomic minuteness—in a world where “what we have of being hides from us the knowledge of the first principles which emerge from nothingness,” but where “the scant being we have hides from us the sight of infinity” (69)—is our ability to think: “All our dignity consists therefore in thought. It is from there that we must be lifted up and not from space and time, which we could never fill” (73). Because man is a “thinking reed” (72), he is nobler than the universe: man “knows that he is dying” (73) and that “the universe has an advantage over him” (73). But the universe “knows nothing about this” (73), and thus through thought—and in Pascal’s case, the sort of thought leading to Christian faith—man can overcome his disadvantage and escape being swallowed up by infinity through the act of joining his being to an infinite creator.
What Pascal offers in pensée 230 is a cosmology of liminality: a view of humanity’s place in the cosmos according to which we inhabit an awkward middle space, affording us neither an understanding of the void from whence we came nor a meaningful grasp of the infinity that encloses us. “The end of things,” writes Pascal, “and their beginning are insuperably hidden for [us] in an impenetrable secret” (67). Humanity knows neither where it comes from nor where it is going; and the result of our ignorance is terror. Houellebecq recalls his first brush as a teenager with Pascal, and with this terror, in a passage in Public Enemies:
Pascal, if one takes into context the original violence of his writings, can produce a greater shock to the system than even the heaviest of heavy metal groups. The famous phrase “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me” is too well known and has lost its impact, but it must be remembered that I was reading it for the first time [ . . . ] and I took it full in the face. The terror of infinite, empty space, into which one tumbles for all eternity [ . . . ]. After Pascal, all the suffering in the world was ready to surge into me. I began to close my shutters on Sunday afternoon to listen to France Culture radio, [ . . . ] to buy records by the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, to read Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and soon after, Balzac, Proust, all the rest. (Houellebecq and Lévy 2011, 135–37)
Houellebecq’s early encounter with Pascal finds its most obvious expression in The Elementary Particles, for in this novel the concept of space—understood as “separation, distance, and suffering” (251)—constitutes the entire existential dilemma of an atomized human race grown weary of its existence. “Uneducated man,” Djerzinski comments near the end of the novel, “is terrified by the idea of space; he imagines it to be vast, dark and yawning [ . . . ]. Terrified of the idea of space, human beings curl up; they feel cold, they feel afraid. At best, they move in space and greet one another sadly. And yet this space is within them, it is nothing but their mental creation” (251). Djerzinski is able to bring relief to humanity by undoing, if only in a metaphorical sense, the very intuition of space that, in the Kantian view, forms the basis of our perception. The race of clones that appears in Particles’ closing pages has transcended the illusion of separation thanks to a few propitious changes to the human genetic code and, moreover, has adopted the worldview of an “ontology of states,” based on an application of quantum mechanics to macrophysical systems, which replaces the “ontology of objects” that prevailed during our current “materialist age.” The whole of The Elementary Particles can be read as an attempt to transcend the Pascalian conception of space—not only philosophically, as Kant did in the eighteenth century by identifying space as a “mere” psychological intuition, but concretely, through a reconstruction of the human genome according to a postmaterialist conception of the physical world.
Houellebecq’s other novels can be read along similar lines: surely, something in the fear of separation and the loneliness afflicting characters such as Daniel1, Michel of Platform, and the narrator of Whatever can be traced to a more general existential horror of the void. In the last entry in his life story, Daniel1 writes,
We are in September, the last vacationers are about to leave; with them the last breasts, the last bushes; the last accessible microworlds. An endless autumn awaits me, followed by a sidereal winter; and this time I really have finished my task, I am well past the very last minutes, there is no more justification for my presence here, no more human contact, no more assignable objective. There is, however, something else, something terrible, which floats in space, and seems to want to approach me. Before any sadness, any sorrow, or any clearly definable loss, there is something else, which might be called the pure terror of space. (296)
Space is the primordial terror, the first separation, and the last destiny. With no more “breasts” or “bushes” to connect him to humanity, Daniel1 is swallowed by the eternal silence of the infinite.
Here again, however, too strict a comparison of Houellebecq and his antecedent begins to encounter problems. Pascal was aware, and frightfully so, of humanity’s clumsy station between the massive and the minuscule, of our galling ignorance of ultimate causes and ultimate ends. But he had a ready cure for his terror—his belief in God—and Houellebecq can boast no similarly and immediately effective remedy (so long as we grant that tampering with human genetics represents a cumbersome, paltry, and otherwise ethically fraught alternative). Houellebecq borrows all the terror of Pascal’s cosmology but none of its solace, and to call Houellebecq Pascalian in any full sense would be like calling a person Christian who believes in the Fall but not in the redemption of the cross. Pascal has ready words to describe a person like Houellebecq. In pensée 681, which appears under the heading “A Letter to Further the Search for God,” he writes: “I have nothing but pity for those who sincerely lament their doubting, who regard it as the ultimate misfortune, and who, sparing nothing to escape it, make of this search their most principal and most serious occupation” (1995, 159). Pascal has open contempt for those who brag of their indifference to the Ultimate, accusing such prideful doubters of “supernatural sloth” (162) and of being “deranged” (160); but for those who seek in spite of doubt, who doubt despite seeking, he has both respect and great sympathy: “there are only two sorts of people who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all their heart because they know him, and those who seek him with all their heart because they do not know him” (163). Houellebecq is this second sort of person—if we extend Pascal’s comment from its Christian context into a more universal seeking for salvation from the ways of the world. Houellebecq is a writer who, as Pascal puts it, sees in the news of the soul’s extinction “something to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world” (163), and for this reason he becomes worthy of Pascal’s pity.
Like so many other students of the human condition (one might think of Tolstoy in his Confession, or even the Buddha), Houellebecq is concerned most primarily in his work with conveying the horror and tragedy of human life stripped of its metaphysical consolations. A full appreciation of Houellebecq’s oeuvre requires a certain existential bravery, a willingness to grant that the world described by much of science an
d contemporary philosophy—a world without soul, without spirit, in which a human being is at best a happy biological accident—is a morally and existentially unacceptable world; that a civilization in which the human being, liberated from his or her traditional fetters, is paradoxically reduced to a unit of economic and sexual exchange is morally insufferable; and that, most contentiously of all, such a world, such a civilization, cannot hope to endure for long, but is prone to replacement by an order capable of better satisfying our existential needs. How long can the West—can any civilization—continue without God? This question lies at the heart of Houellebecq’s fiction, and it receives its most definitive answer in what is Houellebecq’s most provocative novel, Submission.