Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation wrestles with the carnal void

French novelist, poet, and critic Michel Houellebecq is a pessimist and a controversialist. He is also a realist, and in his latest novel, Annihilation, he writes, “However much one might despise, or even hate, one’s generation and one’s era, one belongs to it whether one wants to or not.” Published in French in 2022 and recently translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, Annihilation looks a few years into the future, where Houellebecq again prophesies a bleak destiny for his native France and the wider West, as he has done most recently in his novels Submission (2015) and Serotonin (2019).

In many places, Annihilation is not so much pessimistic as resigned. It is a book about death, and at first blush the novel appears to be yet another declaration of the way things are. And things are bad. On closer examination, however, Houellebecq cracks a window to a new wind of desirable expectation which, presumably, he leaves to others to throw open wider. His usual gloom runs throughout the book, but there are also glimmers of light. He says in the acknowledgements page, “By chance I have reached a positive conclusion; it’s time for me to stop.”

Let us hope he keeps going.

Annihilation is a family drama which depicts the mundane hellscape of modern medical “care,” the end of which may be euthanasia in some countries, and a gross death by neglect most everywhere else. Moreover, Houellebecq shows us how the final demise of our bodies may be the last of many deaths we are all likely to experience during our time on earth. The loss of someone we love may remove us temporarily or permanently from an abundant experience of the world. Divorce, unemployment, and alienating work may do likewise.

But euthanasia or any kind of suicide is an abomination, because there are also resurrections before the Resurrection. Lesser hopes stand athwart our inevitable earthly demise as pledges of a greater hope of life beyond the boundaries of the present age. Sometimes the most awful shocks serve not to annihilate us, but rather to re-awaken us to the gift of our existence.

The book’s protagonist, Paul Raison, is a high-level technocrat with no serious convictions about anything, including love. When we meet him, he is not fully alive. Paul and his wife, Prudence, have drifted apart over many years, sharing a luxurious Paris apartment with no children, no sex, and separate shelves in the refrigerator. They work different schedules and pass like ships in the night. Paul’s boss is the Finance Minister, Bruno Juge, who is in a similar boat, literally living at his workplace and ignoring every extraneous element to existence beyond number-crunching and political gamesmanship. Bruno harbors a theory about society, believing “the baby-boom generation, the one that had triumphed over Nazism, could in many respects be compared to the Romantic generation, the one that triumphed over the Revolution.”

But who are the Boomers’ inheritors if not a series of lost generations that have let everything defeat them?

Bruno’s knowledge and influence place him one door down from the presidency of the Republic, but he displays the weak features of a body politic which stands at a severe disadvantage against an unidentified, spiritually charged terrorist conglomerate. The novel begins with the report of a deep-fake video of Bruno being beheaded, with the culprits and their motives remaining elusive. Later attacks yield real casualties, leading us to wonder whom or what we should fear most. Hackers, Islamists, anarchists, “fundamentalist Catholics,” or a catch-all category of malice that we may identify as Satanists?

In any case, the reality of the threat is beyond the scope of today’s decision-makers, whose souls are so small that they have little capacity for understanding any danger that is not expressed in chyrons and spreadsheets.

The question of deep fakes and the manipulation of media is timely. How, we wonder, can we find meaning in recent films or music, let alone the news, when we can no longer trust what we see and hear to be the products of human agency? Can most people tell the difference between a real poem and an AI-generated one? Or what good is capacious philosophy in a house with no metaphysical floor to stand on? Novels, too, can be plagiarized or computer-generated, and yet Houellebecq sticks up for his own medium, suggesting its unique and abiding power to work wonders within the individual soul amid the noise of today’s chaos magick. He depicts Paul consoling himself with literary fiction during physical suffering, concluding, “he needed the narration of lives other than his own…. What else but a book could have produced such an effect?”

In this vein, we may find solidarity with Paul and his family members, all of whom are wading through different depths of agony to which most Western people today can relate. Paul’s father is a retired intelligence officer and a widower, struck down with total paralysis by a stroke. Paul’s sister Cécile and brother-in-law Hervé are devout Catholics and “far right” provincials whose daughters have disappeared into the capital. His much younger brother Aurélien is a pathetic cuckold who holds his fragile nerves together by too-little-too-late civilizational conservation work as a tapestry restorer. Prudence dabbles in Wicca and is facing the decline of her own ageing parents.

The renaissance of Paul’s and Prudence’s marriage is a miracle, and the roaring return to their conjugal bed should be significant to readers of Houellebecq’s other novels, where sex often appears as a last-ditch attempt to feel something in a rapidly dying world. Many readers may simply be encouraged by the thought that it is never too late for a spark to return to a marriage that has grown cold. The tragedy, however, is that the couple’s passion, like Aurélien’s restoration work, has run out of time to be procreative and thereby transform to the world.

Houellebecq sums it up matter-of-factly, as if looking back on our age from the post-human future he posits in his 2005 science-fiction novel The Possibility of an Island. He writes, “Family and marriage: those were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organized in the first half of the twenty-first century.”

Having saved his father temporarily from bodily death, Paul must deal with the loss of another loved one before facing his own mortality. Bereft of a personal faith that could make meaning either of the newfound joy he has in his relationship with Prudence or the illness that threatens to take it all away, he both admires and is perplexed by his Catholic sister, who is not without her own deep sadness. Cécile, Paul reckons, finds a way through everything, because God is always in control somehow. “Christians,” we are told, “have trouble with the absurd.”

In this way, Houellebecq may be playing a bit with the comparison sometimes made of him to Albert Camus, whose work proposes a mysterious reason to live despite a universe with no meaning. As Paul nears the end of his life, he has as dark a view of reality as anyone in a Camus story, but he is also grasping for a stronger sense of purpose beyond it all. At one point, he intends to go investigate Catholicism at his local parish church, and he suspects the place may have a role to play in his life before the end.

Here, connoisseurs of Houellebecq may remember a scene from the 2011 film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, starring the author as himself, where an acquaintance is surprised to see him coming out of a Catholic church in the middle of a weekday. Houellebecq replies that he likes to go to the funerals. We are left to wonder.

Paul’s fate calls to mind another giant of French letters with certain similarities to Houellebecq–André Gide, whose many novels explore faith, society, personal identity, and sexuality. Whereas in Gide’s 1902 novel The Immoralist, a man falls ill, is nursed back from the brink of death by his wife, becomes enamored with his healthy body, and abandons himself to homosexual libertinism, in Annihilation, Paul’s descent into almost complete physical incapacity takes him even deeper into an intimate experience of marriage, including sex. Cécile reminds her brother, “you might imagine that your life belongs to you but that’s wrong; your life belongs to the people who love you.” The narrator echoes Cécile’s words, affirming they have hit their target in Paul’s soul, telling us that Paul and Prudence, “would walk the valley of the shadow of death together.”

No doubt, many readers will close the novel imagining the forces of annihilation to be simply too great, and the call of nothingness too strong; but the spiritually mature may think otherwise. “We weren’t really made for living,” a mixed-up New Age Prudence says at the end; but surely, she does not know what she means. Nor are the “wonderful lies” Paul mentions any explanation for what has undergirded human civilization for centuries.

For my part, I closed Annihilation feeling completely wrecked–sad, but awake. In my mind, there returned a line from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope by yet another Frenchman, Charles Péguy: “It’s for this that France, that Christianity must go on; So that the eternal word doesn’t fall into dead silence, into a carnal void.”

It’s a stretch; but to me, Houellebecq’s troubling new words help keep the sacred, age-old conversation going.

In the midst of death, we may be in life.