Very often in the novels, despite the ‘pitiless and mechanical’ reading of the human condition, it seems as if science is the closest we might have in the way of secular redemption in its offer of a genetic solution to the ‘flaws’ of this ‘vile, unhappy race’ (A, 104, 379). Thus, any kind of future ethics might only be possible through science. Such an explicitly post-ideological or post-political solution is consonant with a quasi-Comtean approach to social and cultural theory which posits that humanity passes through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and, finally, that of the positive which represents the supremacy of scientific knowledge and endeavour. In Atomised Michel Djerzinski, a scientist with an unusually passionate interest in metaphysics, is an attentive reader of Comte, and his genetic experiments with the concepts of human happiness and love are profoundly influenced by the Comtean conviction that only ‘a relational, structural positivism can promise improvement’.36 This faith in a Comtean positivism is also, however, far from unequivocal, as the novels also seem to advocate a reading in which science and the technocracy arising from its sovereignty are anti-metaphysical, positivist extensions of the sexual Darwinism that has emerged out of neoliberal logic. As Cruickshank notes, ‘scientific breakthrough is linked to intellectual failure’, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this intellectual failure is in fact a symptom of the wider political failure of the new world order of neoliberalism that everywhere commodifies human life.37
An interview Houellebecq gave to the Paris Review in 2010 may go some way to clarifying the ambiguous view of science presented in the novels. Explaining that the scientific inspiration for Atomised came from reading about Alain Aspect’s experiments in 1982 demonstrating the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (EPR) paradox in which science is used to undermine its own certainty, he says:
… when particles interact, their destinies become linked. When you act on one, the effect spreads instantly to the other, even if they are great distances apart. That really struck me, to think that if two things are connected once, they will be forever. It marks a fundamental philosophical shift. Ever since the disappearance of religious belief, the current reigning philosophy has been materialism, which says we are alone and reduces humanity to biology. Man as calculable as billiard balls and completely perishable. That worldview is undermined by the EPR paradox.38
The interdependent mixture of science and philosophy suggested here seems to revolve around an apparently paradoxical proposition. On the one hand, it seems to advocate a wholly materialistic explanation of the world, but this is countered by a residual belief in human interconnection that is not solely determined by biology and the molecular arrangement of particles. Both Atomised and Possibility seem to turn around these two apparently mutually incompatible positions. The genetic rectification of certain human ‘flaws’ that have been exacerbated, and in some cases actually produced, by the ubiquity of the desire-compulsion of capitalism is proffered, although, as noted, not as straightforwardly as it might first appear. Is Houellebecq really suggesting biotechnology as the sole remedy for existential disillusionment? Is science’s ability to catalyse a ‘metaphysical mutation’ really a ‘less depressing alternative to materialism’, as he once suggested?39 As a writer whose work is habitually undecidable, it so often the case in his novels that ‘facetious parody’ becomes one of the only conditions of ‘sincerity’, and so Houellebecq’s scientific ‘solution’ must be read with some question as to whether it is endorsement or condemnation. Is this a lament for the falling away of philosophy? As one critic puts it, ‘It remains unclear whether Houellebecq’s narrator[s] favour the supersession of philosophy by science, or whether the indictment of philosophy serves as a nostalgic call for its renewal beyond the confines of what is knowingly – paradoxically – reduced to the homogenous mass of French Theory’.40
The thesis propounded in his novels is that Western modernity is a world in which the traces of Christianity, while faintly present in parts of some European countries, have, for the most part, disappeared, replaced by the demythologizing forces of secularism and consumerism which have offered the paltry consolidation of individualism as substitutes for the religious and the spiritual. Both of these novels, then, push this paradigm of disenchantment to its extreme in order to point up where we might be heading in a technological sense, but also to demonstrate that the parts that sex and shopping cannot reach – love, compassion, altruism – are simply not being nurtured in any substantial way. Compassion plays an important role in the conceptualization of love in both novels. In Public Enemies, Houellebecq suggests compassion, creaturely human sympathy, is a vital but imperilled quality of human nature:
It remains a mystery that Schopenhauer alludes to only with a vague terror to the origin of compassion. For after all compassion is merely a feeling, something fragile on the face of it, although it seems to be reborn, naturally, from generation to generation […] What if compassion disappeared? I think, in that case, humanity would disappear […] And that the disappearance of humanity would be a good thing.41
Both novels suggest, then, that the only hope for a future humanity bound together by compassion, fraternity and love, lies in its technical management which, as becomes apparent in The Possibility of an Island, is no real hope at all.
Contemptus mundi: Lovecraft meets the Moralistes
Eschatological meditations on modernity in perceived terminal cultural and social decline, both Atomised and Possibility affirm that, in one way or another, ‘humanity must disappear’, a disappearance that will be achieved through the ‘egalitarian’ and ‘transcendent ethics’ of biogenetics, and in particular the ability to modify human DNA coding (A, 28, 29). Humanity gives way gradually to a new species of cloned ‘neo-humans’ in whom desire, jealousy, egotism and cruelty have been permanently eradicated and sexual difference is but a distant memory. Such genetic modification necessitates the ontological disappearance of extant human beings, a situation that Houellebecq, on the surface at least, finds not at all disturbing, as evidenced by his professed admiration for the ‘weird fiction’ writer H. P. Lovecraft in his 1991 book, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Contre le monde, contre la vie) (1991, 2005), borrowing, in fact, the title of Atomised (elementary particles) from Lovecraft’s writing. The endlessly repeated scenarios of human and geological apocalypse integral to Lovecraft’s forbidding materialist attitude suggest a cyclical entropic movement in which humanity and the notion of free will play a minuscule part in the unfolding of the cosmos:
The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition towards chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty traversed by the feeble light of the half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. “Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure Victorian fictions.” All that exists is egoism. Cold, intact, and radiant.42
While Houellebecq’s reading of morality and human sentiment differs in some important ways from those in the abject universe of Cthulhu, his work shows an unmistakeable appetite for the Lovecraftian-inspired maxim that ‘life is painful and disappointing’ and, further, that ‘we generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us’.43 Unremittingly bleak and evacuated of any human warmth, Lovecraft’s fictional universe is a ‘desolate cosmos’ of posthumanity in which those who survive have a stark choice either ‘to be pulverized’ or ‘devoured’.44 Houellebecq’s attraction to this world-view demonstrates a fear, palpable in both Atomised and Possibility, of an entropic return to nothing; a notably more abstractly metaphysical fear than that which underpins his anxieties around sexual competition, the decline of religion and the spread of ‘unrestrained’ neoliberalism a
nd one that is expressed very clearly in a passage from Public Enemies in which he defends himself against charges of being a reactionary:
… if there is an idea, a single idea that runs through all of my novels, which goes so far as to haunt them, it is the absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay once they have begun. Whether this decline concerns a friendship, a family, a larger social group, or a whole society; in my novels there is no forgiveness, no way back, no second chance: everything that is lost is lost absolutely and for all time. It is more than organic, it is like a universal law that applies also to inert objects; it is literally entropic.45
This fear of entropy, of the changing and falling away of all things, is reminiscent of the view of the non-static world intrinsic to the processes of the dialectic as expounded by Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1878) that places ‘nature at large’ and ‘the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity’ within a larger cosmic ‘picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and combinations, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being, and passes away … ’. Engels notes that it was the Greek philosophers, in particular Heraclitus, who first alighted upon this ‘primitive, naïve but intrinsically correct conception of the world’ in which ‘everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away’.46 Interestingly, once again we find Houellebecq’s ideas keeping strange and reluctant company with aspects of Marxism, but it is finally with Lovecraft’s very un-Marxist misanthropic ‘hatred of life’ and pathological ‘aversion to the modern world in particular’ that he chooses to align himself.47 Both Lovecraft and Houellebecq possess a profoundly non-ideological contemptus mundi presented through the medium of ‘apocalyptic teleologies’ emerging from a ‘common Christian source’.48
Producing severe bouts of nausea in various protagonists in each of Houellebecq’s novels, this contemptus mundi is not a provocation to action or to a heightened sense of moral or political responsibility in the Sartrean sense; Houellebecq’s characters are emphatically not in the mould of Roquentin. The recognition that ‘life is shit’ produces, not a desire for social change or political insurrection, but only more of the same; a maintenance of the ‘rancorous cataloguing’ of the shit that assumes a post-ideological guise.49 Each of his protagonists retreats from what they see as the execrable taint of the world into a Pascalian ascetic isolation; a move that, as more than one of Houellebecq’s most perceptive critics have pointed up, owes much to the work of the seventeenth-century Moralistes, and in particular to the work of François de La Rochefoucauld (1631–80) and Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96).50 ‘In reading Atomised, Abecassis says, ‘you know that you are, at heart, in the presence of a Moraliste of the French Augustinian variety (Arnault, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld). His is the infernal lucidity of a thinker who has thought through his subject and who cannot shake off his insights, for better or worse’.51 Going on to describe the technique of cultural criticism in this novel as one in which ‘the seventeenth-century French Moraliste meets the nano-cyber-molecular engineer’, he concludes that this novel produces a ‘very sophisticated grafting of Pauline and Pascalian anthropology’ onto the moral and cultural topography of the late twentieth century.52 The Moraliste methodology typically involves a close scrutiny of the flaws of contemporary society that unmasks vice underneath the patina of virtue and thus demonstrates the progressive and inevitable decline and disintegration of society in ways that are not explicitly political. Houellebecq’s take on contemporary culture and society might indeed, in these terms, reveal him to be a modern Moraliste.
Bruno Chaouat has written of a pervasive atmosphere of ‘metaphysical moroseness’ in post-war France that is, he suggests, a reaction to a post-ideological, neoliberal age, a symptom of the ‘fading away of an anthropological regime grounded in the shadow of the transcendent Other, the nation, the Republic, the state and the emergence of forms of communities yet to be determined’ that I have been describing.53 One might even say it is a moroseness tinged with melancholic longing for the old days of a structured Gemeinshaft; communities of belonging and social and kinship bonds that are so radically absent in le monde houellebecquien in which affective relations disappear to nothing. All of this, then, produces an unrelenting feeling of acedia; a pervasive sense of lifelessness and existential lassitude causing a movement away from any otherness or difference that is rehearsed in the idea of eternal repetition inherent in genetic cloning; a repetition, understood by Gerald Moore as the literalization of the Nietzschean concept of eternal return. Suggesting that Possibility presents a ‘parody of the science of cloning as reconstructed eternal return’, Moore sees the ‘interweaving narratives’ in the novel as ‘meditations or variations on eternal return that are ultimately condemned to fail’.54 Tracing the death of laughter through Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Henri Bergson’s Le Rire, Moore argues that Houellebecq’s novels communicate a pervasive sense of anaesthetized flatness and an ontological folding in of the self; a view that resonates with Daniel Heller-Roazen’s ideas on subjectivity and sentience, in particular with a condition he calls coenesthopathy, a feeling where ‘the sense of sensing has all but disappeared’.55 Not quite the same as depression with which it shares some common features, this feeling of unresponsiveness is rather a profound sensual detachment from the materiality of the world. It is existence in a state of only partial sentience and anaesthetized affect.
The repeated scenarios of the falling away of all forms of vitality, but most particularly of that of desire and feeling or affect, into a profound state of impassive anaesthesia in Houellebecq’s work comes hard on the heels of an intensive eroticism that is heavily charged with the possibility of intense suffering, always threatening to tip from the high of Eros into the not-quite-Thanatos of affective death. Without exception, pleasure turns into suffering, which in turn prompts a radical retreat from the physical world of sensuality and feeling. This is not precisely a deflation of sexual desire as some critics have suggested, but the realization that desire in its subsumed commodified form thwarts any potential for genuine human sociability and thus for love. ‘If desire no longer justifies being’, as Abecassis argues, ‘then the last transcendental grounding of the modern individual has been pulled out from under his feet’,56 a scenario posed in slightly more anxious terms by Žižek when he suggests that the end of sexuality of the cloned posthuman entity ‘far from opening up the way to pure spirituality, will simultaneously signal the end of what is traditionally designated as the uniquely human spiritual transcendence’. 57
I turn now to examine the specific ways in which Atomised and Possibility trace this movement away from social and affective attachment into the realm of the posthuman where all difference and otherness – alterity – has been written out of human ontology. I consider the ways in which Houellebecq presents the restructuring of DNA as means of constructing a ‘genetically egalitarian utopia’ based on the ‘freedom of indifference’ and perfect ontological similitude that offers the possibility of overcoming the unruly, creaturely materiality aspects of the human body and, in so doing, quelling its metaphysical anguish.58 Beginning with Michel Djerzinski’s early experiments with human cloning that occupy the latter parts of Atomised, I then move on to examine The Possibility of an Island where the ‘ontological overhaul’ begun in Atomised is more fully developed.
A technical solution?
Atomised
Described by Žižek as ‘the story of radical desublimation’ and by others as a ‘deeply cynical view of human possibility’, Atomised takes its title from modern physics via H. P. Lovecraft, namely, the discovery of sub-atomic particles in quantum physics, informed by Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity.59 Depending on its disciplinary location, the word atomization has two definitions: the first, a term used in atomic physics to describe a process during which a particle a
nd its anti-particle collide and subsequently disappear, thus releasing energy. The second definition is drawn from modern sociology where it describes the breakdown of strong social and familial ties in society. These different, but interrelated, definitions provide a structural schema for the novel as they are reflected, to a large extent, in the divergent but corresponding responses of Bruno and Michel. As discussed, the half-brothers represent two alternative paths through the changed sexual environment of late modernity. Despite their divergent life trajectories, both Bruno and Michel arrive at more or less the same conclusions: the world in which they live is too painful to endure. More specifically, each comes to the realization that in a world where sexuality and sexual desire are traded as commodities, the possibility of love can no longer exist and that sex is the root of all human unhappiness. Having considered the libertine solution personified by the priapic Bruno Clément’s attempts to join in the sexual carnival, which drives him clinically insane, let us turn now to his half-brother Michel Djerzinski, a melancholic and reclusive molecular biologist working at the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Almost wholly asexual and socially reclusive, Michel wants ‘nothing more than to love’ and his tragic-romantic view of love spurs on his work in biogenetics, searching for a ‘metaphysical mutation’ that will redefine concepts of sexuality, free will and human individuality (A, 100). While Bruno’s search for human fellowship and intimacy takes the form of a rampant, ultimately illicit, quest for increasingly elusive erotic sensation, Michel has one brief but tender relationship with his childhood sweetheart Annabelle. Like Valérie, she too kills herself, in this case after a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, bringing the total number of female suicides in this novel to three. Women have to die in Houellebecq’s work so that the real task of masculine despair may begin and so it is only after Annabelle’s death that Michel can begin in earnest to find a solution for ‘the failure of the Event of love in contemporary Western societies’.60
Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair Page 26