A Remedy For The Exhaustion Of Being: Five Novels By Michel Houellebecq

analysis and review

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A REMEDY FOR THE EXHAUSTION OF BEING

PART 1:

ACCELERATING IN A VOID

The Elementary Particles, The Possibility Of An Island, and Serotonin

In Jean Baudrillard’s essay “After The Orgy,” he asks if “Progress” can progress forever, or if we progress to a certain point and then stop. What happens when we’ve reached the end of Progress, a point of total liberation; utopia realized? He argues that we have reached this terminal point of Progress, and now all that’s left is “pure circulation,” pure simulation. We’ve only to act out the conditions of utopia like they’ve never happened, over and over again, as if the crescendo of civilization could be held forever. What becomes of a civilization whose peak is in its recent past and whose values have reached their limits, refuses to recalibrate its value system? According to Michel Houellebecq, this is cultural suicide. In The Elementary Particles he says of two lovers “in the midst of the suicide of the west, it was clear they had no chance,” and in Submission a Frenchman whose converted to Islam observes that “civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.” The novels of Michel Houellebecq detail what becomes of individuals and society as a whole once the orgy of liberation is over, the drugs have worn off, and we wake up with a terminal hangover.

One major, perhaps the fundamental component of modernity is the sexual revolution and feminism. It came laden with many promises to women, but only one to men: unlimited pussy. Women, on the other had, were supposed to be “liberated,” “free,” “empowered,” and fulfilled in all sorts of ways previously deprived them by motherhood. I read five of Houellebecq’s books, from The Elementary Particles to Serotonin, excepting Platform, and I would argue that if there is one overall theme to all of his work, it’s the poverty of the sexual revolution. The West was sold a lie that we welcomed enthusiastically, only to be left with variable forms of misery, loneliness most prevalent and, as such, most important.

While it may be a fools errand to reduce the “purpose” of the novel to one function, for the sake of this review we will do so. The novel can be thought of as an attempt to connect the subject to the greater whole, by way of depicting the journey of the protagonist in his quest for this connection. This is more or less Campbell’s “heroes journey” and Jung’s “individuation.” If the protagonist does not complete the journey, or fails to individuate, he is plagued with problems or trapped in some form of neurosis, unable to mature beyond a certain stage of psychic development. Hell has been described as permanent separation from God - total isolation. This is the status of all of Houellebecq’s protagonists, and even some side characters in many of his novels. They are unable to make another human connection, unable to subsume themselves within the whole, either of God, humanity, society, or simply another person. And in the instances when they do achieve a sincere connection, or the opportunity for one, they waste it.

The opposite of progress is regress, the inversion of progression is regression. That, in a sense, is what his novels are about. He says as much in an essay on pedophilia collected in the anthology Interventions 2020, and I would argue the purpose of all of his work is to demonstrate this state of regression. The trap of modernity is to create relentless desire while promising to fulfill it all, which is of course impossible. In fact, he claims, certain cultural standards actually deny men specifically the fulfillment of these desires, after a certain point. What this does to men, he asserts, is a form of infantilization, encouraging them to psychologically regress to the stage of perpetually horny teenage adolescence. So in that sense modernity “adolescentizes” men. He puts it this way in the essay:

Between childhood and the status of adult is a crucial stage, which is adolescence. Adolescence in our contemporary societies in not a secondary, transient state; on the contrary, it’s the state in which, as we gradually age in our physical being, we are today condemned to live, practically until the day we die.”

He claims in the essay that this gives rise to pedophilia, and he expresses this in the novel The Possibility Of An Island, where he puts these observations in the mouths of two characters in a conversation about Nabokov. The character of Isabelle remarks that Nabokov got Lolita’s age wrong, “was five years off” in that most normally sexually adjusted men don’t want prepubescent girls because they’ve not become sexual beings yet, they want girls who’ve just entered into the beginning stages of sexual maturation. The point of this, I believe, is to show the inevitable conclusion of sexual liberation, that by feminisms own logic these girls should be available on the sexual marketplace. They are denied to adult men, and engaging with them sexually turns them into pedophiles only by way of a malfunction in language, or perhaps by a lag in the legal system.

When progress is understood in terms of liberation, then we really have come to what may be its terminal point, in that pedophilia is the only sexual taboo left. The French are famous for battering at the walls of this taboo, justifying and making excuses for a famous French author open about his pedophilia, defending Roman Polanksi, and issuing a petition in favor of legalizing pedophilia, signed by a number of prominent French intellectuals. Houellebecq uses it, I think, as a way to starkly reveal to us the plight of men (and women) in a society ruled by the sexual revolution. Much proverbial ink has been spilled ridiculing the graphic sex in Houellebecq’s novels, or else claiming he wants to elicite sympathy for the mythic heterosexual “privileged” white male, but I don’t believe thats exactly what he’s doing, I don’t see him asking us to sympathize with any of his protagonists. Rather, he puts on display for us the curse of buying into the sexual revolution. All of his protagonists are men just entering middle age, and many of them run into the same problem: total isolation. Therefore, I believe what he’s trying to do is demonstrate the predicament a man finds himself in, after a certain point, if he buys into the promise of sexual liberation and allows it to dictate his life.

Pedophilia, the last taboo, comes up explicitly in three of the novels I read. First in The Elementary Particles when Bruno, one of two main characters, comes on to one of his students. This scene is played very comically, and I won’t attempt to do it justice here, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s funny. He teaches in a private high-school, and he’s being driven mad by the revealing clothing and sexuality emanating from his students. He finally decides to make a move on one, and while it initially seems she’s interested, he either bungles his approach or had misread her the whole time. Either way, he ends up masturbating in front of her, more or less because he’s already gone this far, and she laughs at him. This lands him in a mental institution.

The most important part of this scene, as it relates to the discussion we’ve been having, is that while it takes place in his life at 35, it appears in the narrative after a barrage of depictions of Bruno’s sex life in his early 40’s. Although Bruno is something of a late bloomer when it comes to sexual experience, he wastes all his money, his first marriage, and his fatherhood, on prostitutes. Then, once single and in his forties, he visits a sex retreat, a sort of hippie commune where he meets Christiane, also around 40. The scene with the underage student takes place in time between these two phases of his life. He and Christiane turn their lives into one big orgy, quite literally. The sex scenes in this book are relentless and graphic, and one can’t help feeling disgusted. How much time in your life do you have to dedicate to reading graphic descriptions of sex? I would’ve previously answered “zero,” but here I am reviewing 5 of Houellebecq’s books.

Christiane ends up paralyzed from the waist down due to a degenerative spinal disease, but she makes sure to suck dick and get fucked up until the last possible moment, when she is condemned to a wheelchair. There was a brief display of compassion in Bruno, indicating that he actually had emotions for Christiane when he offers to move her in with him, but we never get to see him tenderly caring for her because she kills herself. One must ask, at least rhetorically, if she kills herself because of the general horror of facing life as an invalid, or because this condition will deprive her of orgasms, apparently her one reason for living. I was also left questioning whether or not the disease itself was caused by her sex life because the degeneration began in her coccyx, which she subjected to decades of pummeling through all of her sexual encounters.

Bruno describes his attempt to fuck his student - commit pedophilia - in the past-tense to Christiane, so that while the event took place in time prior to their relationship, we don’t find out about it until we’ve been subjected to pages and pages of his orgies with her and other middle-aged people. Understanding what Houellebecq is doing, and maybe finding an artistic excuse for all of the graphic sex, hinges on understanding where the scene occurs in the timeline of his life. At that point, he’d already wasted his first marriage and disowned his child in favor of constant masturbation and solicitation of prostitutes, many of whom were much younger than him. In other words, we have clear indications that he is a sex addict in the truest sense of the word. His addiction is pathological, and it has real consequences for his life, his relationships, and his happiness. In other words, when he engages in orgies, he’s already certifiably mentally ill and he’s already been “adolescentized.” Houellebecq is indicating quite clearly that living a life like this is form of mental illness, and of course in the case of Christiane, it kills her.

As the novel progresses, Bruno goes on to deal with his mothers death - the death of the main characters parents is another recurring theme in Houellebecq - and ends up back in a facility and heavily medicated. A parallel storyline follows his half-brother Michel and his partner Annabelle. While these are interesting characters who deserve to be explored in greater detail, their stories relate to the themes being discussed here when we consider their ultimate fate. Michel is a molecular biologist whose work eventually leads to human cloning, however he never finds this out because he’s already killed himself. He had “no human ties to bind him,” because he had no children and his partner, Annabelle, had also killed herself. Now Bruno, despite never really having a relationship with these people, is quite literally alone in the world.

Annabelles story, like Christiane’s, is one of sexual promiscuity, though both are poorly told. In fact, this is the least well-written book of Houellebecq’s I’ve read, and ultimately his weakness is on display in his attempt to juggle multiple characters in a single narrative. He makes up for this in all his other novels by focusing on one main character and, with one rather irrelevant exception, seeing all the other characters from his perspective. Annabelle’s promiscuity is handled much differently than Christiane’s, though that wont concern us here. What will is why she kills herself. Annabelle was Michels first girlfriend in adolescence, and they reunite when she is around 40. By this point, she’s already had two abortions, and her decision to be with Michel feels somewhat sterile, not based on intense passion or undying love, but on a seemingly rational, even resigned decision that he would be the ideal father of a child and partner for her through motherhood, the window of opportunity for which is about to close. However, a complication arises during the pregnancy, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer and forced to have her third abortion, though for the first time involuntarily. She has her reproductive organs removed, but the cancer had already spread. She was too late in trying to have a baby, and now she was too late in catching the cancer. Instead of undergoing “arduous treatment” with “chances of success [that] were only fifty percent,” she, like Christiane, commits suicide.

While many of these themes are repeated again in his subsequent novels, The Elementary Particles sufficiently communicates Houellebecq’s basic insight into the sexual revolutions’ terminal point, and the exhaustion of the west. Annabelle and Christiane, after a life of sexual libertinism, are left diseased and childless, with no reason to live and terrified of facing their respective fates. The only character with a child, Bruno, is also the only character who doesn’t kill themselves but, as we’ve mentioned, his sex addiction ruins his relationship with his son, along with everything else in his life. In fact, Bruno’s relationship with his son is so negligent it’s hard to read, but Houellebecq’s point is well made. All of these characters, except Michel, choose sex over true maturation, and are completely unable to deal with the normal stages of adulthood as they mature. They’ve lived lives of regression until biology disallows them from carrying on.

Another failing of this book, in my opinion, is Houellebecq’s rather half-hearted yet heavy-handed attempt to relate the inability of these characters to find catharsis within the materialistic reduction of life to mere atoms, blindly bumping around in space with no meaning or purpose. This nihilistic view of the world is expressed through Michel’s disposition, and he comes across as somewhat autistic, in many ways the extreme opposite of Bruno. This connection between the theme and the plot detail of molecular biology read, to me at least, as unnecessary, Houellebecq already makes the point as these characters lives and relationships play out. However, it does help give insight into his next novel, The Possibility Of An Island, which reads like a sort of sequel or companion book.

Human cloning is achieved over the course the novel, and clones live on a changed Earth once humans have gone extinct or, more likely, devolved into a savage race of uncivilized apes. The chapters go back and forth between present-day Earth with real humans and Earth far in the future populated by clones. Here, Houellebecq does an excellent job depicting something he tried to convey, and in my opinion failed at, in The Elementary Particles. The clones are considered a superior race, at least by their creators and, in some vague sense, it’s implied that they’re superior by our own standards. They are emotionless and undying, they’ve transcended suffering and death at the expense of pleasure and joy. Their lives, rather than some oblique metaphor inferred by plot details, are quite literally “atomized” (the alternative, English translation title of The Elementary Particles).

The clone characters are all numbered Daniels, whose name is followed by a number in sequence for its individual iteration of Daniel 1, the real human being whom all subsequent clones are copied from. These clones all live isolated lives, but in this novel they are quite literally isolated, unlike all of Houellebecq’s other protagonists who condemn themselves to a sort of mental and emotional self-isolation. The clones here live in rooms alone, never seeing other clones except through video screens. They live in the ruins of a shattered Earth, not only with decaying and crumbling cities, but amid bodies of water that have all dried up, including the Atlantic ocean. Here, Houellebecq depicts a life in which the physical conditions represent the emotional and interpersonal conditions he wants to convey, by other means, in other novels. The clones are only one of two parallel plots in this novel, and they will concern us more later. For now, the first Daniel, the human Daniel, continues some of the themes we’ve been discussing.

Quite a lot transpires during Daniel’s plotline, and I cannot recommend this novel strongly enough. In fact, I’ve noticed it to be his least discussed novel, which is a shame because it is one of his best. Far better than The Elementary Particles, which is one of the most discussed and, by casual observation at least, the most often recommended as the ideal starting point if you’ve never read him. One of the rationales I’ve seen put forth for this is that it includes all or most of the themes he revisits throughout his career, that it hits all of the important observations and insights he has about the plight of western civilization. Possibility Of An Island, in its own way, provides a key to Houellebecq’s intentions as a writer overall, and I think it too hits all of his central themes, so I would suggest at least reading the two in tandem, but Possibility if you only read one. Its simply a far better, more enjoyable novel. If you must read The Elementary Particles first however, Houellebecq scholar Louis Betty makes a good case for why (even though I disagree). He wrote a book on Houellebecq called Without God, and if you’re interested in Houellebecq, even if you haven’t read him, you should listen to his interviews:

Here I will only be discussing the plot points that relate to our discussion, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I’m leaving out a great number of details that go a long way to making this one of my favorite books of his. First of all, it’s his funniest I’ve read by far, in fact I believe it is the second funniest book I’ve ever read, the first being Infinite Jest (note: a friend tells me Platform is funnier, but I haven’t read it). Secondly, Daniel is involved in a cult with such a large worldwide following it becomes a major religion, and they use their substantial revenue to fund human cloning research. The development of the cult and its rise to prominence is a compelling, well thought-out story, in fact its almost even exhilarating at a certain point, which I think is the only instance of exhilaration I had reading Houellebecq. In any event, the third compelling plot point concerns Daniels relationship with his second important girlfriend, Belle. We’ve already mentioned Daniels prior girlfriend, Isabelle, with whom he discussed Lolita.

When he meets Belle (whose real name is Esther), he is 47 and she 22. This is a legal relationship, there is no way to spin this as pedophilic, and his engagement with her sexually is not a form of regression. However, her youth and sexual vibrancy causes him to fall hopelessly, pathetically in love with her, a love that is in no way reciprocated. Daniel is a rich and famous man in show business while Belle is an aspiring actress. Although it’s never made explicit, and while she does display some seemingly genuine attraction for him, one can’t help but understand that Daniels fame and influence in the industry plays a role in her motivations for being with him. Houellebecq does a fantastic job depicting an old, out of touch man trying to keep up with a hip, fashionable, desirable young socialite. It’s one of the sources of humor in the novel, and we are never meant to sympathize with Daniel, though any man whose ever had a girl lose interest in him while he’s still madly in love can certainly relate.

Instead, Daniel comes off as pathetic, and the way their relationship ends explicates some of the themes we’ve been talking about. Daniel is horrified of aging, and he - like all the other protagonists - has given up on life. Immediately prior to meeting Belle, he feels he’s come to the end of his career and all out of creativity, describing himself as “finished, washed out, inert,” and that the success of his career was merely commercial, and though he attacked life violently, it only ended up “spitting its filthy lucre back at” him, and he bitterly remarks “never, never will it give you back joy.” But the very next time we hear from him he tells us that Belle gave him back happiness, though it comes with the caveat that he’d entered the “second stage” of his life, wherein one anticipates the loss of happiness simultaneously with the experience of the happiness itself. The “third stage,” according to him, is when this anticipation of loss “prevents you from living.”

I was left wondering what the point of his earlier conversations with Isabelle on pedophilia had to do with the greater plot, why he decided to transcribe, almost word for word, his insights from the essay on pedophilia we quoted earlier. The interpretation I’ve decided upon is that Daniels relationship with Belle is intended to make a similar insight, and serve a similar purpose, as Houellebecq’s insights into pedophilia. While Daniel’s relationship cannot, in my opinion, be described as a “regression” exactly, we can say that he was vicariously reclaiming that sexually robust period of his life by proxy through his younger lover. Daniel, independently wealthy and at the end of his career at 47, should have been entering retirement, starting another career, or watching and supporting his children as they matured into adulthood. We can, by the way, say exactly the same for Bruno when he embarked on his orgiastic lifestyle with Christiane. Instead, Daniel dotes on his much younger lover who wouldn’t text him back or take his calls when they were apart, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Daniel, by the way, was married prior to Isabelle, and they had a son who committed suicide. This all comes retrospectively, and transpires prior to the beginning of the novel. The parallels continue with Bruno, for long after Daniel loses his son, he and Belle’s relationship culminates in a sprawling orgy that takes place over several days. This scene is quite funny, and involves Daniel being rejected several times by near comatose 20-somethings, and ends with him watching Belle, whose just gotten very annoyed with him and fled, having a threesome with two young men, one on each end. Again we have the recurrence of the theme “after the orgy.” What does one do after the orgy? Daniel has been definitively rejected by Belle by this point, though she does make it formal, which Daniel doesn’t accept and never comes to terms with. His last few scenes depict him in complete denial that the relationship is over, and he simply fades away and disappears. Modern man doesn’t know what to do with himself once the orgy ends, at which point he’s spent his life attempting to prolong the adolescent phase of sexual voracity for as long as possible.

The theme of pedophilia comes up yet again in Serotonin, whose protagonist Florent-Claude shares as much with Daniel and Bruno as all his other characters do with each other. One might find repetitive characters boring or exasperating, but my experience reading these carbon-copy/boilerplate characters made me feel like I was reading one long magnum opus or epic, like a Roshomon for overly horny, lonely middle-aged men. Another way to look at it would be like Monet repainting the same garden of water lilies over and over, watching the creative process of an artist trying to find the best way to express one profound idea. By way of doing so, of breaking an epic into several novels or expressing the same thing from different perspectives, he gives us a panoramic picture of modern life. This is an admittedly generous way to characterize a writer who writes the same character over and over again, if he was less insightful, less funny, and weaker at evoking what it really feels like to be a man suffering through fleeing relationships and pining after younger women, one might simply dismiss this quality as a deficiency. He’s good enough that we can say that these are the only types of characters he chooses to write about.

Serotonin is also a very strong, worthwhile novel whose multiple other compelling subplots will have to be ignored to stick with our themes. Make no mistake I’m doing this on purpose, and will continue for the remainder of the essay, because all of the mainstream reviews of Houellebecq discuss the more “sensational” aspects of these works, like the similarities between the farmer protests here and the yellow vest protests in real life France. Here we’re looking to discuss more subtle and, dare I say, more important themes in his work. Once again we find a man who is trying to find a way to live “after the orgy” and once again, like Daniel, he disappears. This time, he makes the decision explicitly and consciously, unlike Daniel who sort of fades away. The narrative follows Florent-Claude as he tries to disappear. My perspective on Houellebecq’s intentions with the discussions of pedophilia and the relationship between Daniel and Belle are reinforced by one of Florent’s experiences, absurd even for Houellebecq.

As the story plays out, Florent is reliving all of his past, failed relationships as he takes steps to disappear from society completely, and through these stories we find a man who refuses the chance to find happiness with another person in favor of younger women and continued sexual experiences. He does this over and over again until it culminates in his last, much younger girlfriend, and his discovery that she’s been cheating on him by way of making copious amounts of pornography, some involving bestiality. This is the event that prompts his disappearance from society. While he’s hiding out, or on his way to, he begins spying on another, similarly isolated neighbor, and discovers a man who, like himself in his late forties, is engaging in the production of pornography with a ten year old girl.

This disturbing scene serves two purposes, but before I explain it away, let me say in no uncertain terms that it is gratuitous and difficult to read. All of the sex in Houellebecq is gratuitous and difficult to read, but this scene really brings it to another level, and one can’t help but wonder if he is purposefully pushing the limits of what a general audience would tolerate, and intentionally pissing off the feminists and critics who’d been attacking him for decades. After going in depth with Houellebecq, I’ve decided that he is intentionally provocative quite a lot of the time, both in public statements and with the content of his novels, though he most often probably really means the things he says. For example, when he called Islam “the dumbest religion,” he said in retrospect that he didn’t expect it to be so controversial, he simply thought it was obviously true. He said this in 2001, and continues to stir up controversy with his comments and novels up until the present day. He can’t possibly be this oblivious, and I encourage anyone concerned with his work, or interested in looking into him for the first time, to keep this in mind at all times.

Firstly, the scene reveals Florent-Claude’s character, because he plans to expose the pedophile and bring him to justice, but when confronted he breaks down, more or less begs and pleads to be allowed to leave, and swears not to tell. The more important, less overt purpose of this scene is to combine it with a perhaps even more absurd scene, when Florent takes aim with a high-powered sniper rifle at the 4 year old son of Camille, a former lover (these two scenes are probably the first and second most absurd scenes of any book of his I’ve read yet). At this point, we see that Florent has gone insane, at least been gripped by a temporary insanity, for he seeks out this former lover with the intention of rekindling their relationship, but once he finds her he understands that her son will always be her first priority. In other words, he was too late, his chance at love and happiness and making another person happy had passed him by.

In the process of scoping out his snipers nest and studying the patterns of Camille’s routine, his mind begins to wander:

One evening, while was I running through the parameters of the murder in my mind, I was pierced by the memory of an evening in Morzine…the first New Year’s Eve that my parents had let me stay up till midnight…what I remembered…was my absolute intoxication at the idea that we were entering a new year, an absolutely new year in which every action, however anodyne - even drinking a bowl of Nesquick - would in a sense be accomplished for the first time; I might have been five years old then, a bit older than Camille’s son, but at the time I saw life as a succession of joys that could only get greater - only give rise in the future to more varied and bigger joys - and it was as that memory came into my mind that I understood Camille’s son, that I was able to put myself in his place, and that identification gave me the right to kill him (italics added).

While it’s quite clear Florent has gone mad - though temporarily - Houellebecq uses his deviant insight to reveal his intentions as a writer. As mentioned earlier, pre-pubescent children are totally innocent, and engaging them sexually robs them of their youth, it prematurely terminates childhood and plunges them into adolescence. Conversely, the murder of Camille’s son would be a termination of his very life, depriving him both of a childhood and a future. Neither child will ever be able to get them back. The adult cannot regain his childhood, cannot regain his period of innocence, and Florent can no longer regain his position as the object of Camille’s admiration. Molesting the girl or murdering the boy wont accomplish anything, though both monstrous acts are those of men trapped in a regressive loop. Florent lingers for far too long on Camille’s son with the rifle and first begins to tremble before collapsing to the floor in a fit of convulsions. It is at this moment that he accepts his fate, that he finally admits to himself that he has already lived his life, this is what it has come to, and he can never go back to a time - like in the memory - when he was happy:

I understood that it was over, that I wouldn’t shoot, that I wouldn’t manage to alter the course of things, that the mechanism of unhappiness was the strongest of all, that I would never regain Camille and that we would both die alone, unhappy and alone, each in our own way

After this breakdown Florent comes to his senses, so to speak, and decides to go back on his anti-depressant (a fictional Prozac), and decides to commit suicide.

It is here that we see the message of all of Houellebecq’s works we’ve been discussing laid bare. The fate of Florent is the fate of West, it is the life we’ve chosen to lead and the values we’ve adopted catching up to us when its far too late. I kept thinking that the lesson in all of this is to have a family, to enter this stage of your life ready for the looming aloneness and obscurity and stave it off for as long as possible by surrounding yourself with those you love. It seemed so obvious, why wasn’t he pointing this out? My first thought was that he himself is middle-aged and alone, and that his work is a symptomatic reflection of his own unhappiness. It was in this moment that I became fed up with him and momentarily rejected him as irretrievably nihilistic. Since then it has dawned on me that while that may be true to an extent, the real reason there is no redemption in Houellebecq is because there is no redemption for western civilization. The childless characters in Houellebecq are the falling birthrates, the parents who abandon their children or whose children kill themselves are the divorced parents, absentee fathers, and young people lost to drugs and hedonism. The characters who kill themselves are the “suicide of the west,” and the utter solitude and insanity of his characters are the nihilism and madness of 21st century western life. Perhaps Baudrillard best sums up the plight of the protagonists in Houellebecq, and the plight of the west in general, when he says that after the orgy, when all of our goals have been realized, “we live amid the interminable reproduction of ideals, fantasies, images and dreams which are now behind us, which we must continue to reproduce in a sort of inescapable indifference…we are accelerating in a void.”

PART 2

AESTHETIC BEAUTY IS AN ARGUMENT OF BELIEF

The Map And The Territory and Submission

A much more well-known work by Baudrillard is Simulacra and Simulation, made famous by the movie The Matrix and “simulation theory” which began to gain traction as the internet came to prominence. However, this understanding of “simulation” misses the complexity and sophistication of Baudrillard’s argument. The popular understanding is that the films and shows and other content we subject ourselves to through electronic media are a simulation of reality, and this is accounted for in Baudrillard’s concept of hyper-reality. But as he explains in the book, an act carried out in reality by real persons can itself be merely a simulation of a true act. Consider, for example, the difference between two deeply attracted and affectionate lovers having sex in the privacy of their own homes as part of the routine of their daily lives together, versus two complete strangers having sex in front of a camera for the production of pornography. In both instances, the couples are actually engaging in sexual intercourse, but in the case of the lovers it is the true act, while in the case of the actors it is a simulation of the act. This, I would argue, is the condition of the characters in Houellebecq’s books. We’ve already discussed two instances of simulation that help shed light on what I consider the main arguments in the next two books we will be examining, The Map And The Territory and Submission, two novels depicting and commenting on the state of a society simulating its former self.

The material isolation of the clones in The Possibility Of An Island was mentioned as a representation of the mental and emotional isolation of people living in modernity and the self-isolation of Houellebecq’s other characters. The clones communicate with each other, but only through video calls like facetime or zoom. Remember, this book was initially published in 2005, when these technologies were brand new, when only Skype was on the market. Therefore, their ubiquity had not been realized, but already in this dystopian setting it has completely replaced real human interaction - Baudrillard’s hyper-reality has subsumed reality, human interactions are now completely mediated by technology. The clones display their genitals to each other over these video calls, among other things, and here Houellebecq is making his themes of simulation overt. They exist to each other only through the simulation, and “sex” is therefore condemned purely to simulation of the act. I would argue that this condition, despite the material commitment of the sex act, is what’s happening in almost all of the sex in Houellebecq’s other books. These scenes, and the humor surrounding sex in The Possibility Of An Island, is why I consider the book as a sort of key to understanding all of Houellebecq.

The other scenario evoking this theme was found in Serotonin, when the older German man molests the ten year old girl. Because this girl was not sexually mature, was unaware of the true motivations for her actions and could not derive pleasure from them, she was merely simulating the act, carrying it out but not engaging in it. She is being used as a prop or a puppet by another person, she’s expected to behave in a certain way by the older man, and the act serves no other purpose. Despite the scenes’ harshness, Houellebecq is nevertheless trying to accomplish the same thing here as with the clones, which is to present a representation of a state of affairs that goes beyond the limitations of the scene itself. It’s a way in which society uses up its young to fulfill the promise of sexual liberation, to fulfill the desires promised to an entire generation. Earlier I said these characters, and I was including the pedophile, were caught in a “regressive loop,” and this is the same thing Baudrillard meant when he says these acts, now simulations of the true acts, were “pure circulation.” The little girl, and in effect all human beings, are interchangeable in the carrying out of these fantasies, and as we see in Houellebecq over and over, as the women age and become less desirable, they are swapped out for younger models.

The other side of the coin is the Simulacra, the image, representation, or synthetic stand-in for something else. Here, sadly, the little girl is a simulacra, and I would argue the point is that *all* sexual partners in Houellebecq are simulacra for “the real thing,” a real lover or a real partner and in some instances, most starkly with Bruno, we see the real thing swapped out for a simulacra. The clones are themselves simulacra for real people and of course we ourselves, as we participate in the simulation of real acts, become simulacra of real people. But the Simulacra is also the work of art, a representation of reality or something transcendent that either acts as a stand-in or provides a sacred connection in lieu of true transcendence and communion with the real thing. That real thing in this case is God. The condition, or plight, of the work of art, the religious icon, and God are the central concerns of The Map and The Territory and Submission.

The love life of Francois, the main character of Submission, is much as we’ve just described in that he swaps out lovers for a younger version every year. A a professor of literature, he plucks his succession of temporary lovers from his pool of students. Circumstances in France cut him off from his supply and he is left, like all of the other protagonists, totally alone after the orgy. The overarching plot of the novel will not concern us here, only because it is the most oft discussed aspect in the mainstream press. We only need mention that the Muslim Brotherhood wins the election in France and installs a Muslim prime minister, and one of the first things he does is overhaul the university system, thus obliterating Francois’ access to young, sexually liberated students. He visits a few prostitutes, only to learn that the void can no longer be filled this way, and he begins his journey into deeper and deeper isolation and eventually embarks upon a journey of redemption.

Francois is a scholar of Huysmans, a fin de siecle French author of the 19th century who eventually converted to Catholicism and retreated to a monastery at Rocamadour. In Medieval Europe, a pilgrimage was a sacred journey to a holy site to have an encounter with the divine here on earth, and Rocamadour was one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe. Once Francois finds himself alone and without any of the things that provided him pleasure and meaning thus far in his life, he decides he too will make a pilgrimage to Rocamadour, both in the footsteps of his cultural ancestors and of the man to whose work he’s devoted his life. Rocamadour houses a black madonna, a medieval sculptural motiff found throughout all Christendom and believed to posses particular sacred meaning. As Heidegger explains, in pre-technological societies these religious icons were not considered representations of the divine, they were pieces of the divine itself and, in turn, the temples or churches housing them became holy structures as the abode of the sacred on earth.

Mircea Eliade describes the world as consisting of sacred and profane, that material reality around us is profane, but we can access the sacred at sites such as temples and churches. Or at least as he puts it, “religious man,” can access it. We now live in an age of materialism, and if we lose the religious worldview, we no longer have access to the transcendence once offered at these sites. Therefore the pilgrimage today, that Francois undergoes, is merely the simulation of a medieval pilgrimage, and the black madonna at Rocamadour is merely a simulacra of the divine, not the divine itself. In an interview included in the aforementioned Interventions 2020, Houellebecq reveals that Francois’ experience at Rocamadour was his own personal experience there. He explains:

…it was a personal failure to convert myself. A personal failure in front of the Black Madonna at Rocamadour…aesthetic beauty is really an argument of belief…but for it to work, for beauty to produce belief, it has to be with very aesthetic people, more aesthetic than I am myself; even the black madonna of Rocamadour, which is a great work of art - there are lots of beautiful religious statues, but this is really a major achievement of western sculpture - didn’t work with me. Admittedly, its very old: the Romanesque era is very far away, and in a sense it’s as hard to understand the people of the eighth century as it is the ancient Egyptians. Their art is very strange, it gives a great impression of distance. So no; it fails. That’s why I portray the character in front of the statue and how it doesn’t work, it doesn’t take off (italics added).

Just as we saw Florent unable to regain love and happiness that he once had, Western Civilization cannot regain the religious feeling it once had. Houellebecq contrasts this with Islam, which has retained its religious feeling, which stayed close to its convictions and enforced its code, as we see in the novel with the veiling of the women and the enforcement of public modesty. Francois, along with many other professors, has been laid off and offered a partial pension, though a sufficient one. This is part of his loss of meaning, though he admits that Huysmans hasn’t truly meant something to him in a long time. And while his pilgrimage resulted in a failure to convert, he does manage to find his redemption in an ironic, unsubtle twist.

It turns out a Frenchman named Rediger has read Francois’ PhD thesis, and has also converted to Islam and taken a central position with the new government to evangelize Islam to the French, and has published a best-seller entitled “Ten Questions on Islam.” He offers Francois’ his job back after a lengthy discussion on Huysmans, among many other things. He also gives him his book and tries to convert him to Islam. This conversion comes replete with several wives in addition to his job. Huysmans’ Durtal trilogy, spoken of so often in Submission, follows the protagonist on his journey of conversion, revealing to the reader his motivations and revelations. Perhaps a better example for a general audience might be Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov suffers loss, madness, and isolation as a result of his adopted way of life. The novel follows his thought process as he suffers the fallout of his decisions and his coming to God, and his motivations are laid bare. In these other novels, the conversion is sincere and, while I haven’t read Huysmans, I know that in neither his book nor Dostoyevsky’s does this conversion offer any material recompense whatsoever; Raskolnikov is serving a sentence for murder in a Siberian prison camp, and Durtal is living a life of renunciation in a bare room in a monastery.

The conditions of Francois’ conversion are far different. This is the one instance in any Houellebecq’s book I’ve read where a protagonist regains the conditions of his former life. In Houellebecq’s other novels, after all is lost, after everything is stripped away and the protagonist ends up alone, his identity obliviated almost entirely due to his own choices and lack of prudence, it’s too late for redemption and all is irretrievably lost. But Francois is allowed to regain it all. It’s worth mentioning that Francois is the only protagonist whose plight is not solely a result of his own imprudence, for he loses everything due to forces beyond his control. These same forces then return all he’s lost with the condition of his conversion. In this sense we can say that the conversion, in contrast to that in Huysmans and Dostoyevsky, is insincere. Houellebecq makes this clear without saying as much, and without having read Huysmans, I would argue he evokes his novels of conversion to contrast them with Francois,’ with the intention of making one ultimate insight: the West has lost its connection with its faith. The West does not offer its people a way out of the plight its gotten them into with progress, modernity, and the sexual revolution.

The Map And The Territory also deals with art, though much more at length and for its own sake, whereas Submission uses it to discuss religion and faith. In either case both ultimately deal with the nihilistic state of the west, in which religion and art are lost. While The Map And The Territory is an outlier among these novels - the only outlier - it nevertheless works in tandem with all of his other works to expose the plight we find ourselves in, to describe the state and source of our suffering. Houellebecq characterizes himself this way, in the same interview quoted above:

In fact, I am a writer of nihilism (nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense), there’s no doubt about it; I’m a writer of a nihilistic era, and of the suffering associated with nihilism.

Nihilism and decadence set in when things are done for their own sake, when people act for the sake of the act and not the greater whole - sex for pleasure and not for children, art for aesthetic pleasure rather than transcendence. While artistic production formerly served religious ritual and communion, like in the time of the black madonna at Rocamadour, it gave way to representation and depiction of material reality. Rather than serving as a source of religious contemplation, it provided a means of cultural self-reflection, but still retained in the Romantic era a means for connection to a greater whole, be it culture or nature. In its final stages, just prior to Picasso and cubism, before abstract expressionism gave way to post-modernism, art became decadent in the truest sense of the term: skill, brushstrokes, and idiosyncratic style became primary. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, art devolves into a mere decoration, a prop, a commodity, an infinitely replaceable product instead of a priceless artifact. The proliferation of artwork no longer involves vision or skill or even an artist at all, but engineers, designers, and marketers. What happens to society, then, once it loses this source of self-reflection and cultural or religious communion? I would argue that Houellebecq’s other books answer that, while The Map And The Territory does a brilliant job satirizing the state both of the true “work of art” as well as the art world writ large in an age of nihilism and mechanical reproduction.

In The Possibility Of An Island, Houellebecq devotes a number of pages to describing the titles and subject matter of the fictional comedy sketches the main character writes, and they are some of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Here, Houellebecq goes to great lengths describing the artwork produced by Jed, the main character, and also includes summaries and even whole texts of some critical reviews of these works. As someone who spends much of his free time reading art criticism and theory, I can assure you that these passages do a better job critiquing, ridiculing, and describing the state of “modern art” today than most of the drek churned out by the literary press and academia. Once nihilism and decadence prevail, one asks not only what is a culture to do, but what does the work of art become? Houellebecq shows us here, in a much smarter way than any conservative can do mocking abstract expressionism and other absurdities. In a strange way, in fact, the art described here is even more absurd than someone hacking at a piece of butter with a microphone, etc:

Art devolves into either a commodity or an absurdity, and in The Map And The Territory, it’s both. The work that catapults Jed to prominence, and also the work that gives the book its title, is a series of photographs of Michelin maps. While Houellebecq spends some time describing the angle, lens, and focus work Jed puts into this series, yet it’s still just a collection of photographs of maps, and rather basic maps at that. If you compare Michelin to more sophisticated topographic or landscape maps, or even google earth, which was already widely available and easily accessible at the time of this publication. In fact, at least one of Jed’s pieces is a photograph of a satellite map. Satellite technology, we must keep mind despite the fact it’s never mentioned in this book, had already made printed maps obsolete. What Houellebecq is doing here should be so obvious, I can hardly bring myself to discuss it, it’s so subtly funny and brilliant, and perfectly enunciates Baudrillards’ insights perhaps better than Baudrillard does himself.

Jed has three major phases in his art. The first gets him into art school and recognized as a serious artist, and consists of “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” which was also the title he gives the series. Houellebecq describes it thusly:

Avoiding emphasis on the shininess of the metals and the menacing nature of the forms, Jed had used a neutral lighting, with few contrasts, and photographed articles of hardware against a background of mid-gray velvet. Nuts, bolts, and adjusting knobs appeared like so many jewels, gleaming discreetly.

The next phase we’ve already described, the photographs of Michelin maps, which lands him a sexy Russian socialite girlfriend (who works for Michelin) and his own gallery, and the final phase is a series of paintings of rich and famous people, including one called “Steve Jobs And Bill Gates Discussing The Future Of Information Technology,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

Houellebecq spends over a hundred pages discussing the artistic process Jed goes through creating these works, and discusses them in-depth. Jeds “sole project was to give an objective description of the world.” This, I would argue, is the plight of the artist in technological society. His work is totally superfluous, neither necessary in anyones life nor aesthetically pleasing, and Houellebecq makes this very clear over and over in the book. The hardware, for example, is readily available to anyone for purchase, these are common interchangeable items that all of us have seen a thousand times, and the way Jed photographs them does not distinguish his artistic eye from the most basic catalog or website selling these products. Perhaps most importantly, they are all made by machines. The photographs of the maps achieve no distinction from the maps themselves and are somehow worse than derivative - any inherent aesthetic value in the map is already achieved in the product itself. Lastly, the paintings of famous people already exist in many instances as photographs. Jed, therefore, uses commodity products and celebrity journalism, rather than nature, religion, landscapes, or life itself, as the subject of his artwork. The fame Jed finds through his work is satirically absurd, and deftly so. Houellebecq’s considerable talent as a writer is on full display here, in fact I consider this his smartest and most well-written novel.

Duchamp’s ready-mades were conceptual pieces portending the supersession of the commodity over the work of art. At MoMA in New York, one of his readymades is a snowshovel suspended from the ceiling, and seeing it in person was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had viewing art. I felt I immediately understood what Duchamp wanted to communicate with this piece: the commodity loomed above art like a sword of Damoclese, or a guillotine, threatening it at all times.

My understanding of the Map And The Territory is that the guillotine has fallen and cut the head off of the work of art, and this is what it has become; art becomes a commodity, the commodity replaces the work of art, and then the commodity becomes the subject of the work of art. At this point, can it even truly be called a “work of art?” Houellebecq makes all this explicit in the book.

There are several descriptions of brochures that Jed peruses when trying to decide which camera to buy, and the contents of the brochures are written out in the novel. They are quite poetic and enticing, and Houellebecq even describes one as “lyrical.” This lyricism is also accomplished in the critical reviews of Jed’s work, which speak of it with religious rapture, as if a work of art depicting a commodity can provide the same divine communion as a religious icon which, in a Marxist framework, the commodity has become or, at least, replaced. After providing some of the text of one review, the narrator remarks that the author “wanted, above all, to be a poet; but his poems are almost ever read now, and aren’t even easily available, while his essays on the work of Jed Martin remain a central reference point in art-history circles.” The plight of the poet is perhaps even more grim than the plight of the artist.

The most revealing passages, however, come in the conversations between Jed and Michel Houellebecq. Yes, “Michel Houellebecq,” the author of “Platform” and “The Elementary Particles,” is a character in the book. Jed explains his approach to painting vs photography, and in so doing illustrates the plight of the artist in a technological age when he says:

I can never manage to get interested in still lifes; since the invention of photography, I find it no longer makes sense….for example, this landscape…I know very well that there were very beautiful impressionist watercolors in the nineteenth century; however, if I had to depict this landscape today, I would simply take a photo.

Centuries of landscape painting, obliterated with one invention. Now a painter wouldn’t even bother.

However, the true intention of this book, as a piece of satire, is revealed later, by the character of Houellebecq himself, and his soliloquy on commodity products gives insight into the rest of Houellebecq’s overall project, in the very terms we’ve been discussing. He becomes emotional speaking about his favorite boots, laptop, and parka:

I loved those products, with a passion; I would’ve spent my life in their presence, buying regularly, given wear and tear, identical products. I wasn’t completely happy in all aspects of life, but at least I had that: I could, at regular intervals, buy a pair of my favorite boots…It’s brutal you know, it’s terribly brutal. While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless…

Here he elevates the status of the commodity product even above some animal species, speaking of them with love and passion, deriving joy, love, devotion, wanting to spend his life in their presence. The irony cannot be overlooking, having this come amid a series of books in which people spend their lives completely alone and without religion, in the presence of neither spouse nor God. Houellebecq connects this book and these themes to the others we’ve been discussing throughout this essay near the conclusion of his speech when he says, perhaps tritely:

we too are products…cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning of the system is identical - with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state.

CONCLUSION

A REMEDY FOR THE EXHAUSTION OF BEING

Most of Houellebecq’s novels are uncomplicated and can be read in one or two sittings, in fact the only one I struggled with was The Elementary Particles, even then only due to the fact I disliked it. However, despite their simplicity, they’re quite sophisticated in their insights and deftness, which is to say that Houellebecq’s most profound reflections on the state of the west are not spelled out or revealed by exposition from the narrator or the inner reflections of a main character, rather they’re depicted by the way the characters deal with circumstances and observe the world around them. In this sense, Houellebecq is able to convey deep meaning and critique to a general audience, something woefully lacking in our culture. Furthermore, the profundity and totality of his vision and insight become clearer and more defined if you read several of his works. In other words, one cannot truly understand Houellebecq if one has only read a single novel of his, though of course this does not diminish the import or value of any individual book.

Of the five I’ve read, as I’ve made clear, “The Elementary Particles” was my least favorite, and the least well-written. This is not much of an indictment of Houellebecq, considering how early in his career it came, and how much his writing improved over the years. Serotonin, his latest novel considered here, reads much smoother and is devoid of any of the problems I had with Elementary Particles. I have to say my favorite book of these was The Possibility Of An Island, and this discussion barely scratched the surface of how good it is, how funny, and how unique. The Map And The Territory is his most intelligent, seamlessly integrating extensive critiques of art itself and the state of the art world in the 21st century, with a rather good story that contains many elements of a detective novel that were beyond the scope of this essay. It’s also his most “post-modern” novel in that it contains the contents of other, fictional art, and the writer himself appears as a character within. Because of its synchronicities with Islamic violence in France and apparent prophetic value in the rise of Islam and its attendant reactionary backlash, Submission is his most culturally relevant and important work, and is my recommendation if you plan to read only one. It’s consideration of religion and the loss of God is much more accessible to a general audience than the discussion of art in The Map And The Territory.

Harold Bloom, who I disagree with a great deal of the time, never-the-less made one of the most profound insight into literature that I’ve ever read, and it has defined my approach to the serious consideration of art ever since. In the introduction to an interview with Bloom, paraphrasing and summarizing “How To Read And Why,” his interlocutor claims that Bloom asserts literature “is the most consummate access we can gain to the mind…of another; on their best days, the other arts don’t come close to matching that access.” To this I would add that literature is also superior to philosophy, and for the same reasons. This “access” to the “mind of another” is not to be understood as the mind of the protagonist, but rather the mind of a culture in the Hegelian sense, which is to say its spirit. In other words, it is the mind of a particular age that we most readily gain access to through literature. Houellebecq is the author today who gives us access to the spirit of the west as it exists for us now.

Embedded in The Map And The Territory is both a Marxist analysis of the condition of the work of art in commodity culture as well as a critique of the Marxist critique, and its done subtly without being heavy-handed or explicit. It is for this reason I call it his most intelligent, and it is also refreshingly devoid of graphic sex. From memory and the re-reading I did for this essay, I don’t think there is any in the book whatsoever. Submission, on the other hand, more explicitly invokes the thinkers it is building upon, with Huysmans occupying central importance to the protagonist while a lengthy discussion between him and Rediger references Nietzsche and Toynbee repeatedly and explicitly. Nietzsche of course announces the death of God, which this book deals with, while Toynbees book “A Study Of History” details how civilizations decline and fall and is of course based on and a response to Spengler’s “Decline Of The West,” whose title says it all. While Houellebecq never mentions Spengler in the book, its quite obvious the themes and insights of Spengler inform this novel, and I remembered the mention of Toynbee as a mention of Spengler until I re-read the passage. Karl Knausgaard must have felt the same way, for he discusses Spengler at some length in his review, and the Spengler Society actually awarded the first “Spengler Prize” ever to Houellebecq for this book. In his acceptance speech he mentions that he agrees with Spengler and discussed his own position on religion and demographics. While there is no overt mention of Schopenhauer in this or any of his other works (that I recall), Houellebecq wrote a book on him, and often references him as the most important philosopher to his life and work.

Still, I can’t help but declare Houellebecq, and literature in general, more important or, put another way, of retaining greater cultural value than any of these or other philosophers. Not that his insights are higher or more sophisticated, in fact we may say they aren’t even his insights at all but that they derive from these thinkers. However, Houellebecq is read not only by a wider but also by a much different audience, a great part of which would never read philosophy at all. In addition, philosophers are typically explaining things, creating concepts, and giving the reader linguistic and conceptual tools for understanding themselves, their lives, the world around them, and human nature. Literature, on the other hand, communicates these things on a much more subconscious level in that while the reader my not come away with an explicit understanding of a grand concept, they are left intuiting something deep, profound, and new about the world around them. And while Houellebecq cannot be considered a literary or intellectual genius like these philosophers, or like some of his literary predecessors such as Shakespeare, Melville, or his countryman Flaubert, for our time I would argue he is the only artist writing books that provide us the means for deep reflection into the state of affairs we find ourselves in at the beginning of this new millennium, the only one offering a remedy for our exhaustion of being.