04/03/2022 12:28 Anton Jäger, Animatron

Anton Jäger, Animatron

On Michel Houellebecq.

In May 2020, the radio station France Inter commissioned a series of

prominent writers to reflect on the consequences of the pandemic. One of the
first invitees was Michel Houellebecq, reporting on the home front while holed
up in his Paris apartment. The tenor of most other interventions was one of
hopeful transition, that COVID would mark a civilizational watershed, leaving
behind a world indelibly changed. Houellebecq disagreed violently: ‘After
lockdown we will not wake up in a new world; it will be the same one, just a bit
worse.’ COVID was ‘a banal virus, unglamorously related to some obscure flu
illnesses, with poorly understood survival conditions, unclear characteristics –
sometimes benign, sometimes deadly, not even sexually transmissible: in short,
a virus without qualities’. This banality appeared crueller still given the response
– the ways in which the victims had been hidden, abstracted, dehumanized in
past months. In his intervention, Houellebecq wondered until what age elderly
patients could ‘be resuscitated and cared for? Seventy, seventy-five, eighty
years? It depends, apparently, on which region of the world one lives in; but
never has the fact that not everyone’s life has the same value been expressed
with such quiet impudence; from a certain age onwards, you are practically
already dead.’

Indignation at the contemporary treatment of death, along with empathy for the
private suffering of the dying, emerges as the animating force of Houellebecq’s
latest novel, Anéantir, which arrived in Francophone bookstores in January.
The set-up is as follows: the year is 2026, and Paul Raison is an advisor to his
friend Bruno Juge, the Minister of Economy and Finance. Trapped in a tired
marriage with Prudence, another senior civil servant at the same ministry, he
dreams of one-night stands with Juge’s wife, Evangeline. Presidential elections
are underway, and Juge is planning to run on a modernizing platform after
delivering a reasonably performing economy for the previous five years. Videos
of the minister’s beheading surface online, made with such ingenuity that the
department’s specialists find themselves at pains to figure out who composed
the clips. A series of mysterious cyberattacks then occur, shutting down traffic
in several international ports. At this point though, the novel changes gear, as
Paul leaves Paris to visit his father, on life support after suffering a stroke. The
homecoming involves his sister Cécile, a loyal Le Pen voter and born again
Catholic, now married to an unemployed notary. We also get glimpses of Paul’s
mother Suzanne, a conservationist, and his brother, Aurélien, an archivist at the
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Ministry of Culture married to a displeasing woman named Indy. The novel

ends with Paul’s own descent into purgatory after a cancer diagnosis.

‘A political thriller veering into metaphysical meditation’ was the polite

summary given by one French critic; another spoke of ‘a book written in the
minor key’. Many were less polite. Promoted as both a personal reflection on
faith and a world undergoing rapid deglobalization, the novel’s 730 pages
suggest a Wagnerite symphony, but Anéantir (‘Annihilation’, though the
meaning is closer to the German ‘Vernichten’, literally ‘nothingify’) is closer to a
string of sonatas, orchestrated with little sign of editorial interference. While the
cyber warfare and broken supply chains of the opening pages conjure the same
lure of the contemporary as the Islamist takeover of Soumission (2015) or the
périphérique revolt of Sérotonine (2019), these incidents rapidly fade from view
as the book suddenly transitions into a hospital memoir, growing more and
more claustral, dragging itself from one sonata to the other without ever settling
on a unifying theme. We hear Paul’s thoughts on presidents, televisions, vegans,
the far right, fantasy films, yet none of this amounts to any clear declaration of
intent or desire. The novel simply continues, aimlessly, like a device stuck on
shuffle mode, switching from one track to another. 

To the habitual houellebecqien, the constitutive elements of Anéantir may feel

familiar – reminiscent of the competitive sociability of Extension du domain de
la lute (1994), the neurotic professionals of Particules élémentaires (1998), the
vaudeville treatment of the art world in La carte et le territoire (2010), the
meditations on religious feeling in Soumission (2015), the social upheavals of
Sérotonine (2019). But there is an unmistakeable diminution. The novel reads
as if it was written compulsively and in haste, the range of themes is remarkably
less grand in scope, and the tone is uncharacteristically mellow. Its goals are
clear enough: Houellebecq hopes to rescue death from its contemporary
dehumanization as exemplified in the state response to the pandemic. This is
paired with openly congratulatory portraits of the healthcare workers and
general practitioners who helped France weather its plague years (in his
acknowledgements, Houellebecq devotes a word of thanks to specialists at a
French hospital, who helped him with technical details on medical care). Yet
this is not what the novel initially promises, nor what we’ve come to expect from
Houellebecq.

A degree of strategic aimlessness has long been part of his repertoire, and
indeed once provided us with Houellebecq at his most exhilarating, whether in
the opening party scenes in Extension du domain de la lutte or the closing visits
to the psychiatrist in Sérotonine. Such moments approximate the repetitively
psalmodic style of Thomas Bernhard, an influence that was made manifest in
2019 when Houellebecq was pictured trying on Bernhard’s jacket during a visit
to the late Austrian author’s country estate. The admixture of personal and
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political also has precedent: Soumission simultaneously dwells on the religious

and existential concerns of its protagonist, Sérotonine their depression and
ailing sex life. Yet in Anéantir, the balance has shifted, with its long flight of
interiority taking Houellebecq’s writing closer and closer to Bernhardian
monologue. Bernhard, however, was consistent in his refusal to engage in
conventional storytelling. ‘Whenever signs of a story begin to form somewhere,
or even when I just see in the distance, behind a prose-hill, the indication of a
story emerging, I shoot it down.’ The resulting oeuvre was one in a dizzying
state of mid-air suspension, castigated by Baudrillard as little more than
onanism for the Viennese bourgeoisie, but consistently captivating in its own
right. In Anéantir, however, we have stretches of writing which could only be
described as ‘animatronic’, intimating a sense of style where there is, in fact,
none:

It was still rather vague but you could feel the beginning of spring, there was
a sweetness in the air and the vegetation felt it, the leaves were shedding their
winter protection with a quiet shamelessness, they were showing off their
tender areas and they were taking a risk, these young leaves, a sudden frost
could at any moment destroy them.

Or:

He began to wonder whether he would have been better off coming by car; it
was a pleasant surprise to discover that there was a car park in the courtyard
of the hospital. Its brightly coloured facade reminded him a little of the one at
Saint-Luc Hospital in Lyon. After the PET-Scan, the prospect of a spinal tap
and a gastrostomy, this façade. Decidedly, he thought with a mixture of
ambiguous feelings, he was increasingly following in his father’s footsteps.

In a passing assessment from 2004, Perry Anderson noted how ‘the steady
drone of flat, slack sentences’ in Houellebecq’s work ‘reproduces the
demoralised world they depict’. Here even the affect is missing, flatness without
its imitative correlative. What might explain such passages? One factor may be
that Houellebecq, far from a natural born member of the establishment, has
gradually developed a proximity – a cosiness, even – with parts of the French
power elite. France, beholden to its republican heritage, is unique in the close
relation between its literary stars and political class, consecrated through
institutions such as the Académie. The Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015 marked a
point of escalation: Houellebecq featured on the cover during the week of the
shootings and Soumission was released the same day, with the murders
prompting a rallying round of the French establishment in the name of free
speech. New Philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut subsequently celebrated
the book as an authentic portrayal of France’s impending ‘Lebanonization’. The
effect has been an inevitable weakening of his oppositional stance.
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This proximity is encapsulated by the fact that the minister and presidential
candidate in the novel is based on Bruno Le Maire, current Minister of Economy
and Finance and personal friend of Houellebecq. They first met when the
latter’s dog was held up by Irish customs and help from the diplomatic service
was required. The two have been exchanging emails ever since about ‘German
Romanticism, economic affairs, and Rilke’s poems.’ Anéantir bears unfortunate
traces of this friendship. In a recent debate with Éric Zemmour, Le Maire
claimed that France was now ‘nearing a growth and employment rate equal to
that of the trente glorieuses’. Houellebecq picks up this theme in the book,
claiming that the ingoing president was able to restore France’s competitive
edge by recharging the nation’s ‘knowledge economy’. The very same
‘knowledge economy’ was once the bane of the French working class in his
novels, and these passages could perhaps be read as ridiculing Macron’s attempt
to modernize a hopelessly declining country. Yet in the run-up to the last
election Houellebecq confessed that, given his recent change of station, he ‘now
obviously supports Macron’. Such are the dangers of a writer immune to self-
theorization.

In Anéantir this inability for introspection is compounded by an even more

destabilizing development. The central subject of Houellebecq’s original novels
– the nihilist neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s – has become less reliable as
a target. As a raw capitalist reflex, neoliberal policies will retain their attraction.
But they are hardly election winners anymore, as the current contest in France
makes plain. Macron and Le Maire might be Europe’s ‘last neoliberals’, yet they
are operating in a landscape far removed from that which the first neoliberals
had to navigate. Along with a return to religion, Houellebecq had long predicted
that neoliberals might one day adopt the protectionist platforms of their
opponents. Yet what to do when the ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ of the 1990s
become the ‘zombie Catholics’ of today? The great portraitist of the neoliberal
subject has lost his model; in the resulting confusion, the natural pivot is to
existentialist cliché: death, faith, Jacob wrestling with the angel, love eternal
and so on.

‘Every writer knows the temptation of irresponsibility’, as Sartre used to say.

And there has always been a place for smaller feelings in Houellebecq’s work,
much as Schopenhauer’s practical philosophy – a source of lasting inspiration to
the novelist – ended in unconditional devotion to his poodle. But it is grating to
see a writer once antinomic to the ruling order now appear essentially subdued
by it. The unrelentingly bleak vision of French life in Houellebecq’s finest
novels, which tied together the personal and social dimensions of despair,
seemed to implicitly ratify almost any anti-establishment movement (though
never openly supportive of the Gilets Jaunes, it appeared that they had a shared
object of critique). The characters in Anéantir however do not appear as the

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resigned victims of neoliberal restructuring. Rather, we see men and women

outside of history, facing a godless universe as Christians without a church. The
novel may reference nearly every contemporary political orientation – from
right-identitarians to anarcho-primitivists to deep ecologists – but all appear
merely as unwitting agents in a ‘gigantic collapse’, a naturalised disaster
personified by Paul’s father’s comatose state. In this way, Anéantir is more
Blaise Pascal than Michel Clouscard, the protagonist (Paul Raison) merely a
cipher for modern man’s incapacity to face up to the transcendental.

If this is indeed Houellebecq’s last novel, as he proclaims in the

acknowledgements, it is an underwhelming finale. Incensed as he may be by the
indignities of the dying, he has remarkably little to say about the causes or
material circumstances of their suffering. The pandemic is ultimately just an
avenue for his growing spiritual preoccupations, increasingly detached from
brutalities of the social. Houellebecq was once able to write compassionately
without succumbing to religious delirium. In a 1993 essay on the city of Calais,
for instance, composed after the French vote on the Maastricht Treaty, he gave
readers a portrait of a déclassé France filled with spleen and anger at its
tormentors, but also deeply admiring of its victims:

Calais is an impressive city…even if it was razed to the ground during the

Second World War. Saturday afternoon one does not see a soul on the street.
One passes by abandoned store windows, immense deserted parking spots
(without doubt this is the city with the most parking space in the whole of
France). Saturday evening is a bit jollier, but it is a particular kind of
jolliness: everyone is inebriated. In bars one finds a casino, with a set of
machines at which the Calaisians come to waste their benefit payments. The
preferred walking spot Sunday afternoon is the entry tunnel to the Manche.
Behind the bars, families pushing baby carriages watch the Eurostar pass by.
They handwave to the foreman, who hoots in response before being
swallowed up by the sea.

Christopher Prendergast, ‘Negotiating World Literature’, NLR 8.

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