In The Elementary Particles Michel Houellebecq has tried to write a novel
of Big Ideas, and set off a firestorm of controversy in the process.
Already both wildly acclaimed and condemned in Europe, its North American
debut has been met with accusations of misogyny, racism, and other kinds of
political incorrectness.
But most of this criticism misses the novel's point. The Elementary
Particles is an atom bomb of nihilism, and if it is offensive then it
should offend us all.
The story deals with a pair of half-brothers: Bruno and Michel. Their
mother, Janine, is a Bohemian floozy who parties her way through the 60s
and 70s. Not surprisingly, both brothers are abandoned by their selfish and
egotistical parents. Bruno has the worst of it, being shuffled off to a
boarding school where he is physically and sexually abused. In mid-life he
is overwhelmed by loneliness and ends up in an asylum. Michel, incapable of
feeling any emotional attachment, becomes a famous scientist who redesigns
the human race through his groundbreaking work in genetics.
Of all the novel's Big Ideas, the most controversial are the least
interesting. "All the great writers were reactionaries" an editor tells
Bruno, meaning that all great writers look back to a past when society had
its act together, before some historical crisis occurred that ruined
everything. For Houellenbecq there have been three such turning points in
human history: the advent of Christianity, the rise of science and
materialism (exactly when this happened isn't clear), and the "metaphysical
mutation" of the cultural revolution.
Houellebecq's political argument is that the counterculture of the 1960s
and 70s - drugs, free love, Aldous Huxley - was more than just an orgy of
selfish individualism. It was a movement "calling for the sweeping away of
Western civilization in its entirety." That may seems a little over the
top, but Big Ideas often come in the form of absolute pronouncements.
Houellebecq's writing is full of such breezily assured generalizations. You
can understand why he offends so many people from offhand editorial
passages like this:
"The terrible predicament of a beautiful girl is that only an experienced
womanizer, someone cynical and without scruple, feels up to the challenge.
More often than not, she will lose her virginity to some filthy lowlife in
what proves to be the first step in an irrevocable decline."
But we shouldn't pity the beautiful girl. We are all involved in a process
of irrevocable decline. The best evidence the novel presents for the
"suicide of the west" is the breakdown of the family unit, our last true
human community. Janine is only the most monstrous of the many selfish and
irresponsible parents we meet. Even the nice characters admit to hating
their children, and are usually just looking for a place to park them while
they make for the nearest orgy.
There is, of course, nothing new about any of this. It is the kind of novel
we might imagine David Frum writing, if he could write a novel. The really
interesting part of The Elementary Particles is what it shares with a lot
of the best science-fiction writing of the last decade - a concern for the
future evolution of the human race.
As it turns out, The Elementary Particles is a kind of SF novel, supposedly
being written sometime near the end of the 21st century. In its future
Michel's experiments, which have something to do with cloning, create a
master race that is "asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown
individuality, separation and evolution."
Is this a horrifying vision of the future? Far from it. According to
Michel, Brave New World wasn't a dystopic vision of the future but a
description of the ideal state. All of the hedonism of the counterculture
was only the result of our profound self-loathing, a disgust with our
degraded human nature. But now, finally, science has found a cure.
Which is important, because the real enemy in The Elementary Particles is
nature. Houellebecq despises nature in no uncertain terms. Michel is
possessed by the conviction that "nature, as a whole, was a repulsive
cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust - and
man's mission on earth was probably to do just that." Bruno is even more
emphatic:
"Nature? I wouldn't piss on it if it was on fire . . . I'd shit on its
face. Fucking nature . . . nature my ass!"
Such an attitude both vilifies and finally endorses Nietzsche: Humankind is
something to be surpassed.
Hating nature as much as he does, Houellebecq likes to dwell on how the
human body is degraded through disease, old age, physical desire, and
death. If only we could transcend this miserable natural state,
Schopenhauer's world as will, and adopt the cool metaphysical purity of
Kant and the Buddha. Now that would be a future worth dying for!
The pessimism and self-disgust inherent in such a world-view have been
bubbling to the surface in a lot of recent SF writing. We are such vile,
unhappy creatures, extinction may be counted as a blessing. With the
mapping of the human genome and advances in reproductive sciences we are
nearing a point where "conscious evolution" will have become a practical
fact. People in the future will be stronger, swifter, smarter, healthier,
and better-looking. According to Houellenbecq they will be happier too.
It is an interesting twist on the idea of progress: If the future is going
to be so much better, how can we stand living in the present? The
Elementary Particles forces us to consider what the value of being human is.
Notes:
http://www.goodreports.net/elehou.htm
