Never underestimate the power of suggestion.
Consider France’s latest literary sensation, Les particules
élémentaires. We were prepared to believe, as all the
advance publicity led us to believe, that the novel
was an attack on what The New York Times called
(in a piece published last March) “the failed dreams of the 1968 student
protest movement.” Don’t believe a word of it. Advance proofs of
The Elementary Particles (as Michel Houellebecq’s novel is
called in English) arrived on our desk recently. Far from being
an “attack on everything the 60’s generation holds dear” (as a
profile of Houellebecq in the Times’s magazine of
September 10 put it), the book wallows in the sex- and
drug-sodden pathology of the 1960s. It is no
more
an attack on
those excesses than was the Woodstock festival or
William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.
But Mr. Houellebecq is obviously a man who specializes in
misleading impressions. In the long profile in the Times,
for example, it is suggested that he recently
moved from Paris to Dublin the better to enjoy isolation and the
oblivion he purchases daily with alcohol and sex. And what better
way to assure one’s isolation than to grant an interview to a
reporter from The New York Times? Never mind that Mr.
Houellebecq propositioned the reporter, Emily Eakin, or that
during dinner he “fell into a drunken stupor, his nodding head
eventually landing on his plate next to a smear of mayonnaise.”
Obviously we have here a literary genius who has gone far to
commune alone with his muse.
It is difficult to say which is more repulsive: the withering profile in
the Times or the book itself. Well, no: let us emend that. The
Elementary Particles, at two-hundred-and-sixty-some pages, is
clearly the more repulsive document. Doubtless it will be a
bestseller here, as it is already in France. The book
tells the story of Michel and Bruno, half-brothers
abandoned by hippie parents. Bruno is an erotomaniacal psychiatric
patient; much of the book is taken up with describing his grotesque
sexual conquests, failures, and fantasies. Michel is a depressed
biologist who, after perfecting a formula for cloning a kind of
rational parody of human beings, commits suicide. In an epilogue
set some decades in the future, we learn that the whole story has
been told by one of these pan-sexual, post-human creatures.
There are obvious parallels to be drawn between The
Elementary Particles and Huxley’s Brave New World. But
whatever novelistic failings Huxley’s book suffered from, it was
clearly a work of social and moral criticism. Mr. Houellebecq’s
book, by contrast, exploits the pathologies he describes. The
endless parade of brutal sex, madness, and self-destruction is
meant to titillate not horrify—or, rather, it is meant to
horrify, but only as part of its basic desire to titillate.
There was a time when The Elementary Particles would have been
dismissed as the worst sort of pornography. That, alas, is
a term that has been emptied of content as surely as it has been
legally neutralized. This much, however, is clear: The
Elementary Particles graphically represents a certain type of
moral degradation—one that does not challenge but rather epitomizes the
nihilism we have inherited from the 1960s.
