A French novelist anatomises the lonely death of post-Christian Europe

Steven Tucker

October 18, 2024 1 Reaction

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As a collection of some of Houellebecq’s many non-fiction essays and interviews, Interventions 2020, just released in paperback to coincide with the appearance of his new novel, demonstrates, Houellebecq is something of an admirer of the 19th century French Positivist thinker Auguste Comte, the founder of the discipline of sociology. Comte correctly perceived that, with the disappearance of Christianity, the West would be robbed of its main motivational social power and would ultimately collapse into ennui and disappear as a functioning force in world affairs, man being an inherently religious animal.

As remedy, Comte tried to found an artificial “religion of rationality” to replace Catholicism, with famous dead scientists and philosophers taking the place of the saints of old, but predictably it failed utterly.

Instead, sees Houellebecq, we are left with a new, technocratic sociological secularist priest-class with no meaningful religion left to serve beyond that of an empty secular technocracy itself, as exemplified by the two main protagonists of Annihilation, France’s highly capable Finance Minister Bruno Juge, and his advisor and underling, Paul Raison.

Neither are bad men, exactly, and Houellebecq’s portrait of them is in many ways broadly sympathetic. Juge, in particular, really does dedicate his entire existence to the national wellbeing, sacrificing his marriage, social life, and all else, to the exceedingly limited goal of slightly improving the French economy in certain relatively trivial respects, thereby slowing down the decline of the nation into utter irrelevance and ultimate entropy by the odd few years or so: after all, delay is life, as Lord Salisbury used to argue.

This, it seems, is the most meaning the average “human” (if such they really are) amongst the West’s governing class can now find in their sad, affectless little lives. Just witness the profound emotional effect that Juge’s achievement of pushing Citroen into being the leading European exporter of cars to “the highly strategic Indian market” ahead even of “Audi itself, the unrivalled Audi” upon one fellow member of his post-human kind: “the economic journalist Francois Lenglet, not given to emotional outbursts, had wept as he announced the news on David Pujadas’ much-watched programme on the LCI channel.”

Who is this Bruno Juge, who can make grown men cry over the latest highly encouraging car-export data, as they would once have wept with joy over the birth of their first child? It’s quite difficult to say; as someone who appears merely to possess an external, public-facing persona, rather than a genuine internal life of his own, like so many technocratic politicians these days, the best way to interpret him is via public opinion-poll surveys: “For 88% of French people, Bruno was “competent”; 89% saw him as ‘hard working’ and 82% as upright’, which was an exceptional score, never attained by any politician since the appearance of surveys … But only 18% found him ‘warm’, and 16% ‘empathetic’, and only 11% thought him ‘close to the people’” – possibly because he isn’t truly a full person at all, emotionally speaking.

In contrast to the more elaborate interior monologues, whether first-person or narrator-reported, of the classic Victorian novel, we now get this: flat, wholly impersonal, data and statistics. In a complete reversal of the traditional novelistic technique, the externally perceived version of the character becomes much more real than the internally revealed one. In Interventions 2020, Houellebecq explains his reasoning behind such writing:            

“The explanation of human behaviour by a short list of numerical parameters (essentially, concentrations of hormones and neurotransmitters) is gaining ground every day. In these matters, the novelist is part of the general public. The construction of a character in a novel should therefore, if he is honest, appear to him as a somewhat formal and futile exercise; all in all, a technical specifications sheet would be sufficient.”

With the character of Bruno Juge, we finally get one. 

Where there’s no Will, there’s no way

In the contemporary, Godless, disenchanted world of today’s post-democratic West, “Human life consists of a sequence of administrative and technical difficulties, interspersed with medical problems,” nothing more, nothing less; or all three combined, if you’ve ever tried booking an NHS doctor’s appointment lately, it might be said. In such an environment, humans become nothing more than “little balls of shit, egoistic shit, unconnected and unrelated to one another … For some years, it’s true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reject one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears [still existing], but you can’t sort everything out at the same time.”

When these “little balls of shit” do roll on top of one another to reproduce, they often only do so for selfish reasons. Two white characters in the novel have a mixed-race son, the result of artificial insemination. But why did the mother choose to be injected with a black man’s sperm by the medical company? Because she appeared to view the resultant child not as an actual human being – a now archaic species who barely still even exist in Houellebecq-Land – but as a literal walking advertisement for her own political and moral virtue: “She had used her child as a kind of advertising billboard, a way of displaying the image that she wanted to give of herself – warm, open, a citizen of the world – while [in fact she was] rather selfish, greedy, and above all conformist to the highest degree.”

She even gives him a pretentious cod-medieval name, “Godefroy”, as if to say “blacks are more French than the French are”, and also wishes to use him as a standing rebuke to her husband, to actively point out even to random unknown strangers in the street that he is not really the true father of her child, just a biologically redundant receptacle for her senseless marital cruelty. Again, external surfaces, and advertising of one’s desired character, take the place of one’s actual internal character, as with Bruno Juge: no doubt 99 percent of French readers questioned by opinion pollsters found her to be “a heartless harridan”.   

This child also may be seen to stand in for the demographic “Great Replacement” of white Westerners with imported non-whites from Africa and the Muslim world, an idea with great public purchase in France. Houellebecq is a big fan of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and his notion of the “Immanent Will“, a sort of inherent “life-force” innate within the natural world, which tends to prevent, say, tortoises, seagulls or tardigrades from losing all faith in their natural place in the great round of existence and committing suicide, unlike depressed human beings so often do. The West, it seems, has lost its collective possession of this same “Immanent Will”, and is therefore slowly but steadily committing post-Christian suicide, whether it consciously knows it or not:

“Could a politician really influence the course of things? It seemed questionable … There was also something else [besides politics, economics and technocracy], a dark and secret force which might be psychological, sociological, or simply biological in nature, it was impossible to know what it was, but it was terribly important because everything else depended on it, both demographics and religious faith, and finally people’s desire to stay alive, and the future of their civilisations.”

The last generation to possess this Immanent Will en masse had been the Baby-Boomers, sired in and around WWII, when the population of Europe had enjoyed a genuine moral crusade against a genuine evil to engage in; now, their successor generations possessed only fake moral crusades like BLM, #MeToo, and increasingly weird LGBTQ stuff to march alongside. It’s no wonder the “little balls of shit” were beginning to flush themselves down the civilisational and demographic toilet.

A living death

So, that’s the general atmosphere of the book – one of profound, yet mordantly amusing, despair and hopelessness – but what’s the actual plot? When it begins, it seems as if the novel is going to tell a somewhat thriller-like story in the rough manner of late J.G. Ballard in titles like Cocaine Nights , Super-Cannes or Kingdom Come. A series of bizarre terrorist events are playing out across the globe, which seemingly aim at undercutting mankind’s remaining stores of Immanent Will even further; container ships are torpedoed to disrupt international trade, artificial insemination facilities are firebombed, migrant ships sunk with all onboard, and overall attempts made to discourage mankind from reproducing itself even more.

Seemingly, the persons responsible are Satanists of some kind, albeit “Satanism” here really being some kind of aesthetic front for eco-fascists of the Savitri Devi-type who view modern mankind as a plague which really ought to be wiped from the planet: what Hitler did to the Jews, they would like to do to the rest of us too, maybe. Or maybe not. It’s never really made quite clear who or what is behind all the chaos, and ultimately this particular plot strand all just peters out quietly, a bit like France is currently doing of its own accord anyway, no eco-terrorism necessary.

“If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them,” it is said of one character, who really seems to speak here for Houellebecq himself. In one of his Interventions 2020 pieces, the author specifically recommends blowing up container ships after evacuating their crews, as “the reduction of world trade is a desirable objective” in order to help ameliorate the globalist madness currently ruining us all.

Amidst all the general civilisational-level Annihilation, though, lies much parallel oblivion on a personal level. Paul Raison, the administrative assistant to Bruno Juge, is the book’s overall main character, and what initially seems a mere subplot about his father having a stroke and being a candidate for euthanasia (voluntary or otherwise) in an under-funded medical rehabilitation centre from which he must be rescued by his family, gradually begins to take centre-stage over all the Ballardian drama about ships getting bombed and so forth.

Houellebecq seems generally to be against euthanasia, as one essay in Interventions 2020 about the real-life medical killing of a paraplegic Frenchman named Vincent Lambert demonstrates, and when Raison realises that his father, although essentially a vegetable, still has the capacity to watch the sunset and leaves blowing in the breeze, to read books if someone else turns the pages for him, “then he was lacking absolutely nothing in life” – indeed, he is actually more alive than Raison and Juge themselves are.

And then, suddenly, Raison does find life – by dying. He develops mouth cancer and, lacking the Immanent Will of his Baby-Boomer father, effectively commits suicide by refusing treatment due to its painful and disfiguring side-effects, something which, together with her sympathy for him over his father’s illness, finally effects a kind of reconciliation, both emotional and sexual, with his estranged wife.

Prior to this, however, Raison sets up an encounter with a prostitute. Unfortunately, the escort in question turns out to be Raison’s niece, but his initial pleasant surprise at not being rejected simply for being a middle-aged straight white man, as opposed to a more fashionably acceptable eighteen-year-old black gay Muslim, does at least offer him a brief respite from the cult of youth and anti-tradition into which the post-Christian West has systematically descended over recent decades.

The End … of absolutely everything

I greatly enjoyed both this novel, and its accompanying collection of essays, viewing each as excellent comic horror stories about the seemingly inevitable results of the loss of religion upon mankind: horror stories not written, of course, from the perspective of an actual believer.

Houellebecq has sometimes been accused of being an undeclared crypto-Catholic, but, he says in Interventions 2020, he is Catholic “only in the sense that I express the horror of the world without God” without himself actually in any way believing in Him personally. It is just that, likewise, Houellebecq equally does not believe in the Comtean pseudo-religious political doctrines that have appeared to most unsatisfactorily replace the Deity, like “progress”, “tolerance”, “equality”, “freedom” and “human rights”, so-called: in abandoning supernatural Heaven, we have succeeded only in inhabiting a materialist Hell instead, he implies.

As much of his writing has been criticised as pornographic, violent, insulting, non-PC, racist, etc, etc, some have viewed Houellebecq as being a supposedly “immoral” writer. But as he explains in Interventions 2020, “writing involves taking upon oneself the negative, all the negative in the world, and depicting it, so that the reader can be relieved by having seen the negative part expressed.” Unfortunately, however, “The author, who takes it upon himself to express it, runs the risk of being identified with this negative part of the world.” But Houellebecq is not the sum total of the characters depicted in his books, any more than Agatha Christie is a mass murderer or Vladimir Nabokov is a paedophile; in fact, he is ultimately rather a moral writer, comparing himself to “Christ taking upon himself all the sins of humanity”.

I wouldn’t quite compare Houellebecq to Christ myself, but there can be no doubt the Frenchman does enjoy a similar facility for producing memorable parables, and so it is here with Annihilation. In the end, Paul Raison successfully manages to achieve the closest thing there is to a happy ending in a Michel Houellebecq novel – he dies. But he dies peacefully, loved, and without too much pain, which is probably more than the post-Christian West itself ultimately will. 

Is Houellebecq’s despair about the future justified? Tell us what you think in the comments below. 

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.

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