Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  Like many of their contemporaries, the brothers belong to what Houellebecq calls a ‘sacrificed generation’, one whose destiny lies not in the kinship relations of family and its attendant duties, affiliations and inheritances, but in an almost obligatory hedonism and sexual promiscuity that leaves little to pass on to future generations, something Bruno realizes in relation to his son: ‘I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him […] By the time he grows up, the rules I live by will be meaningless—the world will be completely different’ (A, 201). Bruno attempts to join in the over-fired sexualized atmosphere in which he reaches adolescence. However, lacking the necessary physical allure to compete successfully in this new sexual marketplace, he spends most of his time watching enviously from the sidelines. While Bruno obsesses over getting women to have sex with him, Michel lies alone in his bed, staring at the radiator and thinking, not about sex but about the particle composition of the universe, his world view growing increasingly ‘pitiless and mechanical’. Freed from erotic distraction, he can reflect on what his brother’s sexual obsessions might mean in sociological and philosophical terms. Michel recognizes that Bruno is representative of his generation; ‘his hedonistic world view and the forces that shaped his consciousness and his desires were common to an entire generation’ (A, 212). It is, however, a hedonism devoid of much real pleasure.

  Sharing a mother and united by the experience of parental abandonment, Michel and Bruno represent two opposing ‘solutions’ to the sexual predicament thrown up by the ‘unrestrained economic liberalism’ of their times and the saturation of culture by the ‘compulsive, almost fetishistic desire for prepackaged pleasures’ marking the era of sustained material prosperity in France spanning the years 1945–75: Les Trente Glorieueses (A, 27). This period saw major economic transformations in which France changed from being a largely rural, Catholic country into an industrialized and secular modern nation state. Noting that during this time there was a discernible ideological ‘movement inward’, Ross points out that the processes of modernization were regarded by some contemporary critics, such as Cornelius Castoriadis and Lefebvre, as encouraging an increasing ‘privatization’ that originated in the ideologically deadening energies of la société de consommation. This inward movement, suggests Ross, was ‘echoed on the level of everyday life by the withdrawal of the new middle classes to their newly comfortable domestic interiors … ’; from this tastefully decorated life there developed a depoliticized ‘ideology of happiness built around the new unit of middle-class consumption’.24 Atomised articulates something similar, suggesting that the private space of the ‘heart and home’ was the last remaining fortification, a private bulwark, against the market: ‘It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” is usually portrayed as a communist utopia whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the rise of the individual […] the couple, and the family were to be the last bastion of primitive communism in a liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit separating the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day’ (A, 136).

  The Manichean weltanshuung of Atomised entertains only two, equally unsatisfactory, rejoinders to this ‘merciless’ sexual marketplace: complete withdrawal into isolated rationalism or a self-indulgent and self-destructive, libertine participation. As noted above, either way these two responses lead to monadic solitude; death or madness. As the unhappy progeny of the first post-’68 generation, Bruno’s and Michel’s lives, then, are representative of the two, equally unappealing, ways in which to respond to sexual liberation. Should one simply profit from the availability of all forms of transgression on offer and fully participate in the sexual carnival? Or should one, in a gesture of complete asceticism, withdraw wholly and refuse the proliferation of desire in all its forms? These two alternatives are regarded by some critics as consistent with the ‘either/or’ moral universe of the seventeenth-century moralistes.25 The opposition has been insightfully glossed by a number of the more perceptive Houellebecq critics. Jack Abecassis holds that Houellebecq is suggesting an antithetical opposition of St Paul against the Marquis de Sade, an idea taken up by Jerry Varsava who develops the idea of the Pauline/Sadean binary in an argument on contrasting ideological types of communitarianism.26 Reformulated in more philosophical terms, Gerald Moore regards the opposing tendencies in Houellebecq’s work as that of Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer. The lack of any position between these two equally dismal choices leads us finally to a feeling of despair. What is to be done? If both paths lead to the same end, that of complete deprivation of sensual and bodily life, are we with Bruno or Michel?

  On the one hand, then, there is Michel, the monkish scientist whose legacy is the eradication of sexual desire through biotechnical means leading to the creation of a new asexual species. In many ways like a prototype of the affectless clones that his biogenetic work will eventually create, Michel becomes increasingly defined throughout his life by his inability to interact in any meaningful way with his fellow human beings: ‘emotion would pass him by, sometimes tantalizingly close; others would experience happiness, and despair, but such things would be unknown to him, they would not touch him’ (A, 99). Growing up in the small village of Charnay in the Yonne, Michel spends an idyllic, if lonely childhood, generously and lovingly raised by his grandmother. In December 1968, after the tumult of that year had passed by the villagers in Charnay, Michel and his grandmother move to just outside of Paris to Crécy-en-Brie. An introverted child, Michel’s tastes tend early on towards moral and epistemological curiosity and as a small boy he ‘feeds on knowledge’, spending long hours reading The Universe Explained, a scientific journal aimed at children, and comics like Pif gadget, in which he identifies very closely with ‘Black Wolf, the Lone Indian’, the romantic hero-savage who ‘instinctively came to the aid of the weak’ and the figure who could always be counted on to explain the ‘transcendent ethic which underpinned his actions’ (A, 37).27 Graduating to natural history television programmes, Michel watches transfixed by scenes of natural selection in action, a pitiless round of the strong against the weak in which gazelles and antelopes spend their days in ‘abject terror’ of the lions and panthers who ‘lived out their lives in listless imbecility punctuated by explosive bursts of cruelty’. His intellectual imagination and moral indignation developing apace, he is given a chemistry set and begins his experiments examining the ‘mysterious and strange science’ that seemed to offer an escape from the ‘repulsive cesspit’ of the natural world (A, 38, 40). Missing out on love with his childhood sweetheart, the beautiful Annabelle, he becomes more profoundly isolated and withdrawn during his student years, often taking to his bed for weeks at a time to ponder how society can function without religion. Without ‘Christian notions of grace and redemption’, Michel sees the human spirit, and his own, turning cold and mechanical. Over dinner one night in a Chinese restaurant with Bruno, Michel puts down his chopsticks and holds forth on the role played by sexual desire in a world where the link between sex and reproduction has been broken, a society no longer driven by material lack and physical danger:

  … any philosopher worthy of the name knows that, in itself, desire – unlike pleasure – is a source of suffering, pain and hatred. The Utopian solution – from Plato to Huxley by way of Fourier – is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately. The opposite is true of the sex-and-shopping society we live in, where desire is marshalled and organized and blown up out of all proportion. For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more until it fills up their lives and finally devours them … (A, 191–2)

  For Michel, any utopian vision must be one that is free from desire and, by extension, from its regressive human expression, sexuality.

  While Bruno throws himself with abandon into trying to access the spoils of an overblown and brash sexual marketplace, lo
sing weight and working out to improve his physical appearance, Michel grows increasingly indifferent to the possibility of any sensual experience and, despite a late and fleetingly brief sexual reunion with Annabelle that ends with her death from ovarian cancer, he is happy to retreat into isolation in the rarefied, predictably rational world of bio-molecular science. Following Annabelle’s death, he moves to the Galway Centre on the remote West coast of Ireland where he begins working obsessively on his biogenetic project, soon thereafter withdrawing permanently from any social contact. Seeking a technical ‘cure’ for desire and the suffering that it causes, Michel finally creates a new species of beings who have surpassed individuality and separation. Bioengineered asexual clones are Michel’s answer to this ‘sex and shopping’ (or sex as shopping) society and ‘doing away with desire’ is precisely what he attempts in his biogenetic experiments. No longer characterized by any sexual difference or sexual reproduction, the clones are freed from the commercialization of desire and no longer need any other body to fulfil sexual desire. This ‘cure’ for sex comes far too late, however, for Bruno who goes through a series of painful and humiliating sexual encounters leading him, like the narrator of Whatever, to the confines of a psychiatric clinic.

  The ‘omega’ male

  The complete opposite of Michel, Bruno is wholly defined by his society’s excessive emphasis on desire and, as such, he is characteristic of his generation in that his sexual destiny is closely linked to economic conditions: ‘While he was a teenager, the fierce economic pressures which France had suffered for two hundred years had abated’. With the decline of material scarcity in the ‘great middle-class of labourers and office workers’ sex became ‘a new sport in which to compete’ (A, 73, 74). Michel observes that most of the middle-class people he knows are broadly similar to Bruno; affluent, professionally and creatively fulfilled, they see life as kind of shopping mall where, as one desire leads to another, they need never be without what they desire. Such people, notes Houellebecq in Interventions, are governed by the ‘logic of the supermarket’ that inevitably leads to ‘a dissipation of desires’. Should sexual appetite wane, however, one could just as easily channel this ever-consuming desire into ‘gourmet food and wines’ (A, 211).28 In contrast to his quietly bookish half-brother, Bruno’s early childhood in Algiers demonstrates an inclination towards more fleshly pursuits. While Michel ‘feeds on knowledge’, Bruno’s appetites as a young boy are already gravitating towards the more sensual pursuits of food and girls. ‘If Michel has given up on individuation through desire and satisfaction’, Abecassis notes, ‘his brother Bruno seems to have invested himself completely in individuation through sex.’29

  Also bought up by his grandmother but then sent to a boarding school, Bruno experiences a more traumatic childhood than that of Michel. More profoundly and somatically affected by maternal rejection, his earliest memory is one of intense humiliation at nursery school where he fails to complete making a necklace to present to the girls: ‘How could he tell them that he too needed love?’ (A, 41). As previously detailed, Bruno suffers sexual assaults at the hands of the other boys who, beneficiaries of the post-’68 policy of autogestion and more relaxed disciplinary educational regimes, are effectively given the run of the school. Turning to food to sate his early libidinal urges, Bruno feasts daily on his grandmother’s lavish cooking; saddle of hare with olives, stuffed aubergines and a plate of hors d’oeuvres for main courses before finishing off the meal with boxes of pastries and sticky-sweet confectionery. Unsurprisingly, he soon becomes a ‘fat, fearful child’ who experiences episodic bouts of bulimia often brought on by trauma and overwhelming feelings of lovelessness; he confesses ‘I wanted to be a sinner, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt like I’d been robbed of my childhood’ (A, 45, 210).30 On reaching adolescence, his bulimia transfers into obsessive masturbation as he realizes that he occupies a lowly rank in the male sexual hierarchy; he is an ‘omega male’ and will be a loser in the equally ferocious sexual economy outside of boarding school. Constantly comparing his sexual success with other males. Bruno sees his omega sexual status reinforced at every turn. On a school holiday, Bruno experiences one of his earliest episodes of desperate sexual exhibitionism. Jealously noting that on the holiday ‘… Patrick Castelli, a young French boy in his class, succeeded in fucking thirty-seven girls in the space of three weeks. Over the same period, Bruno managed to score zero. In the end he flashed his prick at a shop assistant in a supermarket; luckily, the girl broke out laughing and did not press charges’ (A, 77 ).

  Overweight, physically unattractive and devoid of anything resembling charm, Bruno is a more fully realized version of the hapless Tisserand in Whatever, who is ‘so ugly that his appearance repels women, and he never gets to sleep with them. He tries though, he tries with all his might, but it doesn’t work. They simply want nothing to do with him’ (W, 53–4). Bruno understands that he is not going to get very far in this ‘strict hierarchy’ and very early on in his adolescence begins to feel the intense sexual ressentiment that will shape him into the ‘embittered, middle-aged cynic’ he will eventually become (A, 42, 51). ‘Bruno jerked off at least three times a day […] he was surrounded by the vulvas of young women, sometimes less than three feet away, but Bruno realized that they were closed to him: other boys were bigger, stronger, more tanned’ (A, 69). As an omega male he is forced to watch from the excluded sidelines as the alphas have their fill of the available women, a Darwinist scenario reminiscent of nothing so much as one of Michel’s wildlife programmes. Unable to get any girls to go out with him, Bruno begins an adolescence of frenzied masturbation over any vaguely erotic scenario or object, including a Kafka novel and, in one memorably disturbing scene, his sleeping mother’s vagina. Although he does later have a wife and a son, neither play much part in his life as he continues to lust after every woman that crosses his path. As not one of these women reciprocates his feelings, he resorts to paying regularly for sex. In an unsettling scene that replays his own childhood of parental abandonment, Bruno is left in charge of his son one night. He puts sedative drugs into some jam and feeds it to the child in order that he may slip out of the flat to have sex with a prostitute in a room above an all-night bar. After some sneeringly cruel comments on his wife’s post-natal body in erotic lingerie, Bruno divorces her and continues to pay for sex until he meets Christiane at the New Age camp, the Lieu de Changement.

  The relationship between Bruno and Christiane takes place at a historical point in the West where there are few restrictions on erotic behaviour; they have several outlets for the satisfaction of their sexual pleasure and for a time enjoy their participation in this new middle-class ‘sport’ where ‘pleasure is a right’ (A, 118).

  In the liberal system which Bruno and Christiane had joined, the sexual model proposed by the dominant culture […] was governed by the principle of adventure: in such a system, pleasure and desire become part of the process of seduction, and favour originality, passion and individual creativity (all qualities required of employees in their professional capacities). In concentrating on the physical aspects of seduction to the exclusion of the intellectual and moral considerations, regulars at such clubs were led to a fantasy version of the dominant culture: the Sadean system. (A, 293)

  As their sexual passion wanes, Christiane and Bruno venture into the sex clubs of Paris. In these clubs échangistes (swingers’ clubs), ‘adventurous’ Sadean couples diligently work their way through a whole gamut of sexual permutations on offer, but Bruno is not a popular a choice of partner as what he has to offer in the visually overdetermined world of the pornographic gaze is a penis which simply does not measure up to industry standards. The laws of the sexual market place prove even more exacting and ruthless than the economic one and Bruno is regularly passed over in orgies as potential sexual partners quickly note that ‘he did not come close to the minimum size they required’ (A, 118). To Bruno’s dismay, these new sexual outlets are based more on seduction, which has
, Houellebecq argues, replaced ‘natural’ desire and pleasure and requires sustained effort rather than sensuality or eroticism. The techniques and discourses of seduction in the sex clubs are comparable to those of the workplace; indeed, as Morrey observes, the ‘discourses of work and sexuality appear increasingly inseparable, each borrowing and re-employing the key terms of the other’.31

  The Sadean system to which Bruno desperately wants to belong, one that Houellebecq views as the logical outcome of a commodified sexuality, requires that its participants view sexual experience as a purely mechanical exchange of bodies and sensations. When sex becomes another market transition, it responds to precisely the same demand and supply dynamics as any other commodity and it is crucial that ‘the narcissistic gratification that accrues to the individual is a function of the desirability of the partner’.32 Therefore the delivery of quantity becomes paramount, something that Bruno observes in the sex clubs: ‘couples quickly abandoned their search for pleasure (which required time, finesse and sensitivity) in favour of prodigal sexual abandon’ (A, 292). His relationship is not to be a lasting one with Christiane, and, like so many sexual relationships in Houellebecq’s work, ends in tragedy when she kills herself when she becomes paralysed after a sexual orgy.

  If sex is only a commodity among others and is stripped of any sense of erotic jouissance, sexual relations are subject to the same commercial ethos as the wider market and become as banal as any other commercial exchange. This proposition is taken to its logical, if satirical, conclusion in Houellebecq’s next novel Platform. If sex is a commodity and youth is the ‘most precious of all worldly goods’, Platform controversially, some say satirically, explores Bruno’s assertion that in this kind of sexual marketplace he did not have to have sex with women his own age (42) but was prepared to go ‘to the end of the earth’ (to Bangkok, in fact) for ‘young pussy wrapped in a mini-skirt’ (A, 124).