Houellebeq, Michel, Annihilation, trans. Shaun Whiteside; Picador, London: 2024. (French edition: Aneantir, Flammarion, 2022)
I have a requirement for at least one review to be put into this magazine, one article devoted to reviewing a book or some books from recent times. The rest of the articles are ready for print, but there is no review of any kind. With some effort, I have compelled myself to write on Michael Wellbeck, or Michel Houellebecq as he styles himself.
My review of Joyce and his Ulysses emphasised the story told in that book; I also said that the story was hidden deep underneath the paraphernalia of the writing; above all, I said, the story is what gives the book meaning for me now, and that it is interesting for the emotions it arouses in me, for the epiphany it brings about by showing the power of grief and sympathy between people.
Wellbeck, spelling his name in English, who is writing one hundred years later, puts his stories at the superficial front face of the page, and his intention when writing a novel, he has himself said, is to bring about a specific emotional response in the reader. This is so, even if Houellebecq could have written differently, in an experimental way. He explains in this dialogue with Bernard Henri Levy, Public Enemies (2008), that he started out by writing poetry. He considers Baudelaire to be the most important of the poets of France. He could have expressed himself in an intricate experimental and new style, and he could have avoided mere stories of ordinary life. But he has not played with abstruse styles, and linguistic subtlety; his novels are stylistically classical, and so is his poetry. The verse in Unreconciled (2017) is often in the alexandrine form, rhymed, and it is typically a demonstration or expression of something not difficult to understand.
I would say that Houellebecq is cultivated, but that he has determined to express himself in a classic unambiguous way. This is appropriate for the kind of age in which he believes that we live. It is the age in which two mutually supporting things are taking place. First, he believes the nation of France, the civilisation of the West, has already entered its end stage; and second, that it is a time when it is hard or impossible, for love and other such fundamental human emotions and relations to last and to have value.
My focus in this short essay is on Annihilation (2022), the book released a few years ago in Europe, and only last year in English translation. Like some of Houellebecq's other novels, this one is told from the future; it is set in a future time. There is a strange economy, in which what happens in an only slightly altered and future world, can show us more clearly what is going on today. Writing from the vantage of the future is also useful as a means of invoking the science fiction mood, which is so important to him. Houellebecq has always been interested in science fiction; his first published work was devoted to the science fiction and horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft. I cannot leave until later, mention of what Lovecraft’s science fiction does which other authors with other styles of writing have generally failed to do: it shows that human life is not the only kind of life. Lovecraft's prose gives expression to a high form of anti-Christian imagination; the horror it inspires in us is that we are led to believe that God has no interest in human beings. Only in a universe where Christ is absent and is not God, could there also be the types of demonic creature which Lovecraft has described. In Annihilation, the central character is an elite level metrosexual type, an assistant to a senior government minister, who is tasked with understanding a gigantic virtual satanic pentagram which has been drawn across Western Europe by an unknown activist group. As the man's family and love life improve, he loses interest in the enigmatic activist group, and prepares for death at the hands of a cancer which has taken root in his mouth.
In his first years as an accomplished writer, Houellebecq also wrote on Arthur Schopenhauer, and published a short book on that philosopher’s spare and incisive prose, and Schopenhauer's exposition of the condition of men as the products merely of desire or will. In both Lovecraft and Schopenhauer, the foreground and insistent theme is, to present to us the rational belief, that life has no meaning whatsoever, and that there is no transcendental personality which can escape the vast infinite movement of an indifferent universe. The character of existence is, that it is purely material, so that the mammalian values which give us comfort and meaning are delicately cultivated upon an infinite inhuman void; they have to be cultivated, because the world in itself does not give rise to them in us.
I have no interest in observing a career path, a development of Houellebecq’s writing. Over the last twenty years his work has not changed with the times. The recent novel, Annihilation, has no more to offer than his previous books, speaking in general. I suppose it would be possible to say, that in this recent novel, there is not so much sexuality and pornography. But that is not significant. If one were to write specifically about the human relationship and its impossibility in this era, and about the collapse of the nation state, the Church, and the like, then what was true twenty or thirty years ago is no less true today. He has always had the long-term historical consciousness, and the metaphysical interest, as the central focus of his work.
We get to know about Houellebecq’s writing for one of two reasons, perhaps. Either because of the sometimes excessive descriptions of sexual activity, which have made him notorious; or, because of his views on Islam and his 2015 book, Submission. Houellebecq exiled himself to Ireland, and returned to France only recently, after making a public remark about France and Islam, to the effect that that religion is the most stupid of all the world religions. I think that he was in some danger from Muslims having said that in public; but equally or perhaps more so, he was given a death sentence by the French establishment. His novel about the problem of Islam in France described how its followers could take control of the French state, by both force and guile; and he showed the type of man who would simply allow this to happen. The central character in the book is an unmarried French academic who has attempted to believe in God and become part of the Catholic Church, but has found it impossible to do so from lack of any loyalty to his country, or any other significant feelings about anything at all.
The absence of marriage, love, and children is a kind of existential disease which, Houellebecq implies, is the fault of most of France’s establishment; and that it cannot be cured. He has said in interviews (see Interventions 2020) that, given this generalised collapse of his native country, he would be happy to see the Catholic Church be put into a position where it could once more take charge of the nation’s culture. He adds some conditions to this takeover, and some recommendations about how the Church could modify itself, so as to be fit to resume its old place. The doctrines of the Immaculate Conception, the infallibility of the Pope, for instance, must be discarded. And, he would also advise that the Church stop taking an interest in the private lives of the believers, in sexual matters. In connection with these doctrines and habits of the Catholic Church, he has said in an interview that the Orthodox Church could work closely with the Catholic, and that it could show the Catholic Church the way. The Orthodox Church allows priests to marry, for instance.
The notorious novel, Atomised, is the story of two brothers, one of whom finds the method of giving human cells, and therefore human beings, a means of avoiding age and death. Houellebecq has imagined a writer in some not so distant future time, who writes the story of those two brothers, retrospectively. The book tells not only the story of the two brothers and their 1960s irresponsible hippy French establishment mother, but also the pains of being mortal, the disastrous way in which natural men used to live. The failure of love, the decay of the family and marriage as a source of meaning and happiness, is the theme. The same can be said of the recent novel, Annihilation. I myself have a preference for the novel which described a man purportedly typical of the educated atheist French of our time, namely Serotonin (2019). There is no need to describe the details of the plot. The book ends with the purported narrator in despair and in a condition of death-in-life, imagining how God would see the French people today, asking them: What else did I have to do to prove to you, that you need to love one another? What more could I have done, than come down there and die for you out of love, to show you what life is meant to be about? Houellebecq has also spoken warmly about the return to the Church made by his friend Emmanuel Carrere as described in his book The Kingdom (2014). But that is enough; I have fulfilled my own requirement for a review for this edition.
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