“The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.” -Romans 8:6

In a fit of shameless self-promotion, please peruse this nugget of mine from five years ago.  It’s sometimes gratifying to independently identify something, ie: the radical changes to humanity since the advent of The Pill, that someone much smarter and more talented also identified.  Certainly, I could never write about it in such eloquence as Michel Houellebecq, but the link above is my sad attempt.  What follows is a brief synopsis and review of Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, his second novel and the one that launched him into fame and fortune.  Fair warning, this will be littered with spoilers so if you plan on reading the book and don’t want to know what happens, best you skip down to the comments and start ranting about taxes or Ukraine or cosmotarians or pineapple deep dish.

Born Michel Thomas in 1956 to hippie parents right at the dawn of the sexual revolution, his parents split not long after he was born.  At age six, his mom sent him to be raised by his paternal grandmother while she went to join a free love commune in Brazil.  His hatred for his parents was so intense that he eventually changed his name to “Houellebecq”, his grandmother’s maiden name.  At age 29, he published collections of poems in French magazines, by age 35 he published a biography of H.P. Lovecraft and at age 38 his first fiction novel Whatever.  It was with this debut that he began exploring his (extremely French) themes of bleakness, isolation, confusion and the futility of searching for happiness.  These are themes that he has continued to focus on throughout his oeuvre, but The Elementary Particles, his breakout work published four years after Whatever is really his quintessential piece.  It captures his principal philosophies on life, happiness, the human condition and how, or if, we can be redeemed.

The story’s two protagonists are half-brothers Michel and Bruno.  A couple of years apart with different fathers, their mother abandons them to join a hippie sex commune in California when they’re both very young; if that’s not on the nose enough for you, the mother shares the same surname as Houellebecq’s actual mom.  The two brothers have different autobiographical qualities to the author with Michel (not surprisingly) being closer to the truth.  He’s sent to live with his grandmother who treats him decently, though he’s isolated and damaged by his early childhood abandonment.  Bruno, on the other hand, is shuffled by his father between a series of boarding schools in which he is physically and sexually abused.  

Their defective relationships with women typify the bleakness and dysfunction with which they relate to the world in general.  In adolescence, Michel develops a “perfect love” with a girl named Annabelle, however he’s incapable of consummating that love in a physical fashion.  She patiently waits for Michel to make a move, increasingly baffled as to why he shows no sexual desire toward her.  When she finally becomes frustrated and has sex with someone else, he withdraws completely from social life and devotes himself to his work as a geneticist.  Michel views women as superior and morally perfect beings, filled with wisdom, compassion and empathy; a projection of an idealized maternal figure he lacked.

Bruno enters a loveless marriage that produces a son to whom he’s indifferent.  Now divorced, he relentlessly pursues empty sexual encounters with prostitutes and random women but is never satisfied.  He eventually meets Christiane at a free love camping retreat and they launch into a debauched affair, having sex in public, engaging in S&M and going to swingers’ clubs.  His relationship with Christiane is emblematic of his general view of women purely as sexual objects who exist only to assist him in his fruitless attempts at sating his desire.  His principal admiration for her is appreciation for “all the new cunts and tits [she gives] him access to” at the various sex clubs they frequent.

In the denouement Michel reunites with Annabelle decades later and this time their relationship contains a sexual component.  Annabelle has never married and also lives an isolated existence, though it’s implied that in her youth she also partook of the debauched and decadent Western sexual lifestyle.  As a result, she and Michel’s union is doomed from the beginning as the pure love they experienced in adolescence has been corrupted.  They do achieve some level of happiness and domestic and familial bliss, however Annabelle suddenly develops cancer and rapidly declines to death, symbolizing the internal corruption of the diseased culture that has been created around them, despite their best efforts. 

In Bruno’s case, it’s revealed in bits and pieces that Christiane has some unspecified degenerative joint and bone disorder.  In a semi-comical turn of events, during a particularly raucous Devil’s Threesome, the large man taking her from behind gets overzealous and breaks her back paralyzing her from the waist down.  Now disabled, Christiane is unable to continue with their sexual adventures but looks to Bruno for supportive and altruistic love to help her adapt to her new reality.  Bruno openly admits that he’s incapable of loving her in the absence of outrageous sex and she ends up committing suicide.

In the twist finale, it’s revealed that the narration is actually in the distant past and serves as a type of epitaph for the human race.  Michel’s life’s work has been to genetically engineer a Neo-human through cloning that doesn’t age and neither requires nor is capable of sexual reproduction; thus removing any reproductive imperative and any concomitant sex drive.  Humans are thus rapidly headed toward extinction or are already extinct.

This novel was a real trip for me and I enjoyed it immensely.  It’s full of contradictions: explicitly pornographic yet a brutally vituperative takedown of sexual liberation; viciously contemptuous of humanity yet preoccupied with finding ways to redeem it; sarcastically sneering at religion while simultaneously lamenting the loss of religious values that might drag Western culture out of its nihilistic mire.

There are two principal themes I’ve identified; first is that when Eros grows out of control, it crowds out all other types of love and further, without the context of Storge or Agape, Eros itself is not love at all.  Bruno abandons his wife and son with disgust and Michel utterly withdraws from the world and all human contact; destruction of Storge and Agape respectively.  Houellebecq even goes as far as to draw a direct line between free love and serial torture and murder.  While that is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, the idea that valuing someone purely for their instrumental value as an object of pleasure is fundamentally dehumanizing is one that I’ve intellectually toyed with for at least twenty years.  If someone only exists as a physical object to bring me to orgasm, then absent any kind of moral anchor, obtaining orgasm through their death isn’t out of bounds.

Second is the irrevocable transformation of the human condition through The Pill.  Humans are the product of billions of years of evolution, dating back at least to the first amphibians, that connects sexual intercourse and reproduction.  It is so deeply coded in our brains that there is no reasonable way to intellectualize ourselves out of it.  While traditional wisdom holds that the sexual revolution was one of culture, Houellebecq argues, successfully in my opinion, that it is fundamentally a transhuman/technocratic revolution through the invention of The Pill.  Without medically severing sex from reproduction, there is no amount of cultural argument to undo the biological consequences of promiscuity.  No Pill, no sexual revolution, no radical reorganization of male/female relations and, to Houellebecq, no Western decadence leading to civilizational decline, nihilism and misery.  

For those of you robust enough to have read your homework at the beginning of the article, I make a very similar argument, though not quite as pessimistic.  Both Houellebecq and I agree that there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube; in fact Houellebecq goes to great lengths to counter attacks from the Left that he’s a reactionary by saying that a reactionary fruitlessly dreams of returning to an idealized past.  To him (and me) there is no going back, all cultural evolutions are irreversible.  I suggest this quandary can be solved by experimenting with non-monogamy.  Perhaps the polyamorists’ smugness is justified and they have indeed reached a new stage of evolution.  Houellebecq contemptuously punctures that idea through Bruno’s storyline, suggesting that surrendering to the limitless sexual appetite that is unleashed in the modern era only consumes oneself and precludes meaningful connection outside of genital-to-genital.  It’s taking the idea of person-as-sex-object to it’s logical conclusion.  Further, he suggests that anyone who claims to have a deeper connection to any single person in such an arrangement is delusional, as Bruno finds out when he can no longer attend orgies with Christiane.  

Houellebecq’s only way out is to fundamentally alter humanity at the genetic level such that they are essentially no longer human; the reasoning goes that a transhuman revolution occurred to get us here, so only transhumanism can get us out.  Of course, this is fantasy so, in effect, there is no way out.  To Houellebecq, humanity (or perhaps more specifically Western society) is in terminal decay and decline. 

Houellebecq is a vexing figure to many; the Left despise him as a reactionary traditionalist (something he sneers at) and the Right find him nihilistic, pornographic and disgusting (probably accurate).  At core, I think he’s a flavor of Collapsitarian with a deep sentimentality for humanity but who has grown bitter after being let down by it so frequently.  This book is not for those with a weak stomach for very explicit sex with a dash of violence, but if that doesn’t scare you off, I highly recommend it. 

Very mammalian.

This song bumps, as the kids say.