Annihilation

Comments on Michelle Houellebecq's latest

Referenced Below:
Michelle Houellebecq, Annihilation, Submission, Atomised, Platform
Albert Camus, The Stranger
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Please vit

I’ve been reading Michelle Houellebecq novels for about seven or eight years now. Houellebecq is a French writer, a trenchant critic of Modernity and one who ultimately refuses the hope of a transcendent answer to the tragedy and absurdity of human existence. In that sense, he a bit like twentieth century existentialists such as Camus. But I actually much prefer Houellebecq because I think he always refuses to try and give “answers” since he doesn’t really believe there are any. Camus and similar writers always feel to me like a non-religious sermon is being preached about the value of human autonomy or something like that. Houellebecq is at least trying to be consistent in his atheistic rejection of Christianity.

I wrote in my previous book about Houellebecq’s central characters, who I took to be archetypal examples of man’s futile search for transcendent meaning in the midst of a God-abandoned universe:

Another archetypal example would be the various first-person, thirty to fourty-ish male protagonists of the novels of Michel Houellebecq. What is particularly interesting about Houellebecq is the way that sexual relationships are depicted in these stories. The protagonists are always looking to these to provide some kind of meaning to their otherwise humdrum existence. In Houellebecq’s novel Submission,^[1] for example, the central character François enters into a deep existential crisis because a sense of joy that he found in a particular encounter with two prostitutes fails to produce a sequel. For François the fact of this failure has deeper significance than the simple lack of pleasure: it seems somehow to rob his whole existence of hope and meaning. Houellebecq’s delineations of these encounters are of note because they always involve unusually detailed descriptions of the various relevant body parts, their movements, shapes, and so on. There is a sense here of the pornographic but not for the purpose of eroticism; rather Houellebecq wants to make it clear that these exchanges are mechanical; they are, as it were, a fundamental refusal of the transcendent.^[2]

A fruitless search for ultimate fulfilment is a touchstone in Houellebecq’s stories: the characters often find sexual satisfaction through relationship, but these are short-lived as the partners of the protagonists move away to Israel because of fear of Islamic anti-Semitism (Submission), become injured and disabled in the midst of orgiastic activities (Atomised),^[3]or are killed by Islamic terrorists (Platform).^[4]The point in all of this is that these relationships might provide a sense of depth for a time, but they will inevitably come to an end, leaving the bereft with feelings of pointlessness and absurdity. The pathological devotion with which the characters indulge themselves is an index of their fleeting existence. Houellebecq is ultimately a metaphysical pessimist, endorsing, in contemporary form, the words of St Paul, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor. 15:12). Once again then, the desire for prosperity and comfort acts more like an addiction whose satisfying pay-off diminishes with each hit and therefore demands ever-increasing dosage.

But I would say that with Annihilation, we see a much less brutal and more human side to Houellebecq. The novel is in fact deeply moving as it deals with themes of redemption, love, and the sad inevitability of death.

There was a passage that stood out to me that seems somehow to combine Houellebecq’s characteristic absurdist humour with the themes of this novel: the evanescence of life, the certainty of change, and the strangeness of our responses to all of these things. The passage in question concerns the main character Paul's realisation that he will have to find a new dentist to help investigate an abnormality in his mouth. He speaks of how thoughts of his old dentist’s retirement filled him with “a terrible wave of disproportionate sadness” and how he had felt he would burst into tears at the thought of the two of them dying without ever seeing each other again.

What he couldn't bear, he had realized uneasily, was impermanence; it was the idea that something, anything, could come to an end; what he couldn’t bear was simply one of life’s fundamental conditions.

Michelle Houellebecq, Annihilation, p. 372

I don’t want to spoil the plot for you, but the book ends on a highly ambiguous note that seems to imply that Paul and his wife view religion and spiritual beliefs as powerful panacea that help human beings cope with the reality of death and eternal separation from one another (even though Paul’s wife Prudence is a seemingly highly committed Wiccan).

It is truly moving and human in this sense and I commend it highly as a work of literature. But I always wonder with Houellebecq - and with this book I wonder even more - if, one day, perhaps near the end of his life, he will reach out and embrace the transcendent that always seems to be refused by his characters though it is always somehow there like a ghost haunting them.

The passage I quoted above summarises this problem so well: “What he couldn’t bear” - that is, impermanence - “was simply one of life’s fundamental conditions”.

It’s such a penetrating observation and one sees it often in small children: the sadness, devastation sometimes, that things don’t last forever - that this game has to end, that this toy has to break, that this day has to be over, at some point.

In all of these things, we have to ask ourselves why we so desperately long for things to last. Why is it part of our nature for this to be so? I’m afraid that I’m with C.S. Lewis on this one. To paraphrase him, the reason that we long for something that this world cannot supply is because we were made for another one.

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I’m writing short this week because Christmas stuff is heavily upon me. But let me thank all of you for reading. I’ve made this a free post, so, if you are a free subscriber or reader please do consider signing up for the full blog for the small monthly fee using the subscribe button below. I generate my own income through my writing and podcasting so I genuinely rely on this money to live.

Thanks again to all who have supported me this year. I’ll be writing a bit less over the next couple of weeks but I will be back with many new and hopefully very interesting entries in the New Year.

A blessed Christmastide to all when it comes. May you know Christ’s joy and his peace.

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^[1] Michel Houellebecq, Submission, trans. by Lorin Stein (London: William Heinemann, 2015).

^[2] Having said this, I would not want to read Houellebecq simply as closed to transcendence; it would be legitimate to see these experiences as epiphanic of their meaninglessness and therefore indicative of the possibility of spiritual fulfilment, the residual melancholy expressing a desire for God and the transcendent but with a deep underlying ambivalence.

^[3] Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, trans. by Frank Wynne (London: William Heinemann, 1999).

^[4] Michel Houellebecq, Platform, trans. by Frank Wynne (London: Vintage, 2003).