The Western Abyss

Reviewed by Benjamin Kerstein

The Possibility of an Island
by Michael Houellebecq
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 352 pages.

This visceral equation—sexuality as a system of social hierarchy—is more than a satirical revision of the war between the sexes. It is, rather, the key to Houellebecq’s own absolutism of despair. It is a dagger thrust into the heart of the ’68 generation, striking at their greatest source of pride: The liberation of the individual from social constraints on sexuality. Far from an erotic paradise, Houellebecq’s sexual revolution has created not only a world of the walking wounded, but a world in which the most intimate of human relationships has become an arena of Hobbesian brutality. It has created a life which is no longer worth living.

This manifesto for the liberation of the sexually frustrated is not merely an attack on a single generation, however. It is also an inversion of modernity’s insistence that the progressive freedom of man leads to greater happiness. In Houellebecq’s view, we have progressed, but we have also been reduced, decivilized, and hurled back into the unforgiving struggle for biological pleasure. Freedom, in this construct, is the reduction of man to the sum total of his genetic attributes. “We have created a system,” Houellebecq is quoted in an LA Weekly profile, “in which it has simply become impossible to live....”

The Elementary Particles, his next work, is not so much a theory but a worldview, and ultimately a world unto itself. Published in France in 1999, it is unquestionably Houellebecq’s masterpiece. It tells the tale of Bruno and Michel, half-brothers abandoned in their childhood by parents who, like Houellebecq’s, preferred sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll to the banality of child-rearing. Michel, a renowned biologist who is emotionally incapable of love, and Bruno, a perpetual failure obsessed with sex, are forced to live out their lives among the detritus of a civilization destroyed by the parents they barely knew. But unlike Houellebecq’s previous novel, this is not merely a tale of individuals. Here Houellebecq asserts the universality of their condition:

This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe…. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled… often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness, and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared; the relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and often cruel.

Bruno’s and Michel’s search for something of value in an inhuman age is fruitless; they capture only fleeting moments of comfort and happiness before even these are shorn away by the raw force of a society that despises life. Michel disappears into his work, submitting only briefly to the love of Annabelle, his childhood sweetheart, whose own capacity for love could not save her.

“I haven’t really had a happy life,” said Annabelle, “I think I was too obsessed by love…. It took me years to come to terms with the cliché that men don’t make love because they’re in love, they do it because they’re turned on. Everyone around me knew that and lived like that—I grew up in a pretty liberal environment—but I never enjoyed the game for its own sake. In the end, even the sex started to disgust me…. It was too hurtful to know they thought of me as just another piece of meat.

Annabelle clings to Michel, a man who cannot love, as her only hope for redemption. In the end, however, her sacrifice saves no one; history is arrayed against her. “In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear they had no chance,” Houellebecq declares. Annabelle dies of cancer, but not before being “gutted,” as Houellebecq puts it, of her uterus and Fallopian tubes—society’s final vengeance, as it were, on a woman who has used her organs as something other than a weapon in the arena of struggle.

Bruno, too, cleaves for a moment to a true love, Christiane, who dutifully indulges his sexual obsessions and comforts him as the mother he never had. Yet after suffering a debilitating injury that destroys her capacity for lovemaking, she kills herself. What else, Houellebecq seems to ask, is possible in a society where sexual expertise is the denominator of one’s worthiness to exist?

In the end, with his brother in a mental institution and himself sequestered on the west coast of Ireland, Michel takes his revenge on humanity. It is here, in the final pages of The Elementary Particles, that the book reaches its pinnacle. In near-Lovecraftian fashion, it is revealed to us that the pages we have been reading are not the work of an omniscient, amorphous narrator, but rather the testimony of another species, a race of cloned beings made possible by Michel’s research into human genetics. What we have been reading is, in fact, an epitaph for the entire human race, ending with these tremor-inducing words:

The ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes, which nevertheless carried within it such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic, quarrelsome, and infinitely selfish, it was sometimes capable of extraordinary explosions of violence, but never quite abandoned a belief in love.… As the last members of this race are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, an homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind.

Lost in the cacophony that followed the publication of The Elementary Particles—as with all of Houellebecq’s subsequent books—was Houellebecq the writer. This is a great tragedy, since The Elementary Particles is, above all, beautiful: At turns angry, erotic, detached, sentimental, and satirical, the book’s overriding emotion is an almost unbearable sadness, and the writing is immensely delicate. To be sure, the concentration on the scandalous rather than the literary—on Houellebecq the celebrity rather than Houellebecq the writer—is, to some degree, Houellebecq’s own fault. Deliberately provocative, gleefully contemptuous of his own country, and given to Serge Gainsbourg-style antics (such as sexually propositioning a New York Times reporter and falling asleep during a live television interview), Houellebecq may be the closest thing the literary world has to a rock star: The level of his fame seems to be commensurate with the degree to which he acts like an unconscionable bastard. People love to hate him, and yet love him because he is hated.

Houellebecq’s notoriety no doubt contributed to the outrage surrounding the publication of his next work, Platform. Like Whatever, Platform is the first-person account of a despairing white-collar civil servant, and, like The Elementary Particles, it tackles the world and portends its destruction. The protagonist, another perpetually depressed Michel, uses the small legacy he received from his murdered father to go on a tour of Thailand and have sex with the local prostitutes. Eventually he falls in love with Valérie, a fellow traveler specializing in package tourism. This meeting of the minds results in a synthesis of globalization and Houellebecq’s own rebellion against sexuality as social hierarchy: A series of package tours dedicated to the sexual gratification of wealthy Westerners by poor Eastern prostitutes. As Michel explains to Valérie:

“Something is definitely happening that’s making Westerners stop sleeping with each other. Maybe it’s something to do with narcissism, or individualism, the cult of success, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that from about the age of twenty-five or thirty, people find it very difficult to meet new sexual partners…. So they end up spending the next thirty years, almost the entirety of their adult lives, suffering permanent withdrawal….

“Therefore,” I went on, “you have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction. They spend their lives looking without finding it, and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation, and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality.… It’s an ideal trading opportunity.”