THE WEST STARTS AT GALWAY:

Life On Venus: Europe’s Last Man (Adam Kirsch, Spring 2009, World Affairs Journal)

The Elementary Particles (1998) is the book that comes closest to confirming Nietzsche’s vision of the Last Man. Indeed, the novel opens with a portentous preface, written as though in the distant future, informing us that the character we are about to meet—Michel Djerzinski, “a first-rate biologist and a serious candidate for the Nobel Prize,” who is also an emotionally autistic, sexually stunted wreck of a human being—literally brought about the end of the human race in the late twentieth century. For his discoveries in genetics allowed humanity to replace itself with a new species that is not dependent on sexual reproduction, and is therefore free from suffering and death. Houellebecq gives us a glimpse of that future felicity in a poem: “We live today under a new world order . . . / What men considered a dream, perfect but remote, / We take for granted as the simplest of things.”

The novel, then, is Houellebecq’s portrait of a society—contemporary European society, French division—so incurably miserable that it deserves, and needs, to be made extinct. Yet the ironic message of The Elementary Particles is that it is precisely the plenty and safety of French society that make it intolerable to inhabit. All the qualities that European social democracy prides itself on—its sexual liberation, political tolerance, and economic equality, free health care and the long paid vacations—become instruments of torture to Michel and his half brother, Bruno, the novel’s unlovable heroes.

They are victims of the zeitgeist—of “Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century,” which Houellebecq describes in the novel’s very first lines as “an age that was miserable and troubled,” when “the relationships between . . . contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.” The most destructive agent of this indifference is Bruno and Michel’s mother, Janine, who Houellebecq describes as an early adapter of the hedonistic, materialistic lifestyle that would become routine after the 1960s and the sexual revolution. (This is the character that prompted Houellebecq’s mother—who shares Janine’s last name—to publicly disown him.) Concerned only with her own pleasure, Janine has no interest in mothering her children, literally abandoning the infant Michel in a pile of his own excrement. No wonder he grows up to be incapable of love or sexual connection; or that Bruno, similarly maltreated, becomes a loathsome pervert, obsessed with pornography and public masturbation, prevented only by his own cowardice from becoming a child molester.

Bruno and Michel are the prime exhibits in Houellebecq’s programmatic indictment of modern European sexual mores. Starting in the 1960s, he writes, “a ‘youth culture’ based principally on sex and violence” began to drive out the ancient Judeo-Christian culture that valued monogamy, mutual devotion, and self-restraint. The innovative element in Houellebecq’s argument is to link this new hedonism with the triumph of the European welfare state. Freed from all concern about politics and economics, men and women had nothing to occupy themselves with but the pursuit of sensual gratification. But this pursuit quickly developed into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which the young and attractive are the objects of worship while the ugly and shy, like Bruno, are utterly despised. “Of all worldly goods,” Bruno rages, “youth is clearly the most precious, and today we don’t believe in anything but worldly goods.”

“It is interesting to note,” Houellebecq writes in one of many passages of armchair sociology, “that the ‘sexual revolution’ was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely world ‘household’ suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.” No wonder that “in the last years of Western civilization,” the “general mood [was] depression bordering on masochism.”

Houellebecq’s powerful nostalgia for the “household,” for genuine love and romance instead of sexual adventure, naturally leads him to an extremely sentimental view of women. Michel and Bruno each encounter a saintly, self-sacrificing woman who longs to heal their psychological trauma. But both of them are unable to return the love they are offered, so profoundly have they been ruined by their mother and the age she represents. By the novel’s end, Bruno has gone into an insane asylum and Michel has withdrawn to a hermit-like existence in Galway, Ireland, where he works out the scientific discoveries that will lead to the abolition of mankind. It is not a coincidence that Galway is the westernmost city in Europe, the point where the West culminates and disappears. Nor is Houellebecq’s reader surprised to learn that, in the future, humans greet their own extinction with “meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief.” The leisure-world that is contemporary Europe, Houellebecq argues, is a trial that human beings cannot bear.