The first novel I read by Michel Houellebecq was Elementary Particles, probably in 1999. I read it in German translation, toward the end of a year in Berlin. At that point, my German was pretty good, and I had graduated from reading The Neverending Story to some light novels. The guy in whose apartment I was renting a room, a law student, let me borrow Houellebecq’s book, but warned me that it was pretty shocking. I read it.
My German was still not quite good enough to permit an unmediated relationship to the text, and I’m sure I missed a lot. I’ve never reread that book, but since then I’ve read nearly all his novels, recently finishing his latest, Annihilation. Though I read them translated into my native language, English, that mediated relationship has stayed with me somehow. It might be why I’ve always considered Houellebecq more as a literary author and less as a shock artist, despite much evidence, personal and professional, to the contrary.
What I see across his work is a serious, perhaps desperate effort to express directly the experience of total absorption, in which you lose yourself in an activity or situation beyond any concern for mannerism or performance. This is why his books are filled with themes of violence and sex, but also with a kind of semi-perverse yearning for love, art and religion. It is also why his writings are about how to write a book that does not compromise the author’s own absorption in what he writes.
Annihilation, like his earlier novel The Map and the Territory, shows Houellebecq experimenting more openly with the tension between immersion and performance, which reminded me of something I first encountered in a different context, specifically in Michael Fried’s writing on absorption and theatricality. That frame, once I started applying it to Houellebecq, opened out my earlier, language-based mediation to a broader question of artistic mediation itself: the constant struggle between an artist’s genuine absorption in his subject and the theatrical performance for an audience he knows is watching.
●
Michael Fried taught a seminar in Chicago when I was a Ph.D. student in the Committee on Social Thought. I didn’t take it. At the time, I hadn’t read his work. I only came to it during a sabbatical, about six years ago, when I gave myself permission to follow random threads in my reading, wherever they led. I started thinking about sociological aesthetics, which led me down about a year of open-ended reading in art criticism, during which I became pretty obsessed with Fried.
I didn’t expect to be as taken as I was. Fried’s books are sometimes obsessively focused on quite esoteric propositions about a specific painting or photograph, but perhaps because of that are often spellbinding. I never thought I’d sit through 45 minutes of silent footage of Zidane running across a soccer field and come away enthralled, or find myself standing in front of a wall for hours thinking about the direction a figure is facing in a seventeenth-century painting or a 21st-century photograph. Fried can get carried away: once you see the absorption-theatricality distinction, it becomes tempting to see it everywhere. But even if it is not everywhere, it is in a lot of places. And once I started rereading Houellebecq, it was there too.
Fried’s basic insight is as follows: If you look at the tradition of high European art painting (he then expands to photography and novels), you will notice that many paintings seek to show figures as if they were not aware of being looked at by an audience. This could come through absorption in work, such as artisanal craftsmanship, or immersion in sociality with others. But in any case, the figures are oriented away from the audience, and pulled into the distinct world of the painting. This “pulling in” is crucial, since it sets up the painting as somehow standing outside and beyond our own wishes, with its own inner solidity. Because it pulls them away from us and into it, the figures and their world become objects that we look at and learn from, not mere projections of our desires.
And yet, they are inescapably there to be looked at by us. This fact means that in one way or another the painting must acknowledge that its scenes were created to be part of a scene, and therefore the figures are never fully independent of some kind of performance for their imagined audience. The independence they gain through being pulled into the inner world of the painting is taken back through being drawn back to their dependence for their existence on the desires of their audience. In Fried’s interpretation, this dependence shows up in subtle indications, such as a playing card turned outward toward the viewer, or one figure who breaks the spell of the absorbing scene to look out of the painting’s scene into the eye of the beholder.
What makes this relationship between theatricality and absorption especially potent is that it is not only descriptive but dynamic. It is an engine that drives artistic creativity, and much of Fried’s criticism is devoted to examining escalating attempts to deal with it. The most important dynamic involves various efforts to defeat the threat of theatricality and mannerism. This can happen in many ways, and no doubt many more will be discovered. One variant involves representations of figures caught up in war and violence: What could be more absorbing than that? There is no time to look away in the midst of battle. This is Fried’s interpretation of Jacques-Louis David, for example. Another variant is depictions of simple peasants, lost in everyday activities such as picking crops, oblivious to anything else but the task at hand. This is Fried’s interpretation of Millet’s The Gleaners.
But that very escalating depiction of violence or simplicity is unstable, in Fried’s reading. They inevitably become cliché and overdone, oscillating between shock for shock’s sake as the demands for the intensity of violence become greater on the one hand, and the brutalization and oversimplification of uneducated lower classes or nonintellectuals becomes too overt to ignore. In this and similar cases, the artist’s independence is the one threatened by theatricality. The peasants or soldiers may be absorbed in their work in the fields or bloody battles, but only an attention-seeking artist would put them in large-format canvases in front of crowds of the bourgeois public as a surefire way to gain their applause.
The dialectic begins anew, and artists begin finding ways to defeat the impression that they are painting in order to be seen painting but are themselves absorbed in the world of the painting as it unfolds, as if on its own, beyond their will. Fried takes this thought very far and in many directions, but his book on Courbet develops it directly. Courbet, in his view, hits on a very potent technique, which involves dispersing his own artistic consciousness throughout the painting, creating an impression that he is everywhere in it, and therefore somehow has merged with each and every aspect of it. In that way, the audience sees the painting and the painter immersed in it all at once.
This too ultimately proves unstable, in ways I will not get into now, eventually leading to the undoing from within of this line of painting in Manet. The last point I do want to emphasize is that while Fried often highlights painterly concerns around how to represent absorbed figures and defeat the impression of mannerism, this concern has roots in a conviction that the desire for some kind of absorption is present in the culture. Here too he has a point. Think of Charlie Kaufman films, such as Adaptation. These are animated by the sense that “we” have lost the ability to have intense, unmediated direct experience, that we are always somehow, even in the most seemingly intimate moments, acting with a view to how it will look to somebody else: how it will play on your feed, in the article you might write, in the story you might tell at a party.
Taken far enough, this thought leads to a kind of lament with language itself and a corresponding desire for prelinguistic immersion in instincts. But we don’t have to go so far to get the point. Just think of moments when you have felt like the line between you and the world disappeared: running down a hill so fast you can’t think but just must react; working on an essay and looking up two hours later as if it were no time at all; laughing with family and friends as each says exactly the right next thing that everybody understands without having to make any inferences; escaping or inflicting violence; and, yes, orgasm. The larger point behind Fried’s project is twofold: that painters try to depict absorption because this is how to absorb audiences who crave that very absorption, but that this very act creates the self-reinforcing oscillation between victories for theatricality and momentary reclamations of absorption.
●
I did not begin Annihilation expecting Fried to keep popping into my head. What I thought would happen is what Houellebecq clearly wanted me to think would happen: that this would be another of his now-familiar stories of European civilization collapsing, whether through external conquest by violent jihadism, inner exhaustion from individualism and fertility collapse, or self-immolation of a historically Christian society to a seductive form of neo-traditionalist conversion.
And that is what the first part of the novel leads you to believe it is about. It sets up something of a thriller plot. There is some shady outfit posting odd internet videos. One displays the French minister of finance being beheaded, and does so with a production quality that the very best studios could not match. Later acts move from virtual to real, destroying a supply of human sperm and sinking a Chinese shipping boat. The first few have no casualties, but later attacks kill hundreds. A detective plot ensues, which eventually leads to suspicions of some kind of semi-satanic cult that seems to have infiltrated the world’s intelligence agencies, who are helpless before it.
I am a sucker for thrillers, and I allowed myself to be pleasantly absorbed in this one, carried on toward the inevitable destruction of European and maybe global society by some cult that had decided humanity did not deserve an ongoing existence. Annihilation is where this was heading, and I was happy to let Houellebecq take me on a ride to it for a few hours on the beach. Why not? Or, as Houellebecq might say, whatever.
But that sort of pretentiousness would be a fate worse than death for a writer with pretensions to being an artist, which Houellebecq is. At that point, he’d be a caricature of himself, playing to character and audience expectations. A defeat at the hands of theatricality. Shocking sex parties, random gruesome violence and other anti-PC representations: we’ve seen it before. This would not in the end be surprising—if Fried is right, something similar happened to David!—but it would be sad. An artist still operating at something approaching peak powers needs to at least try to avoid it.
●
And Houellebecq did try. I’m not sure he succeeded, but we must give him credit for not going down so easily. It turns out the thriller was a total sleight of hand. The actual centerpiece of the novel is indeed about annihilation, but comes in the form of the totally normal, nonviolent death of Paul Raison, a civil servant assistant to the aforementioned minister of finance.
Around fifty years old and a smoker, Paul is diagnosed with mouth cancer. If he had gone to the doctor sooner, he might have had a better chance. But as it is, his best chance at a 25 percent survival rate is to have his jaw and tongue cut out. He chooses chemotherapy, radiation and an experimental immunotherapy treatment instead. He could not bear the more violent option, and especially the loss of his tongue. A few months later, he dies in his wife’s arms. They had drifted apart, but in his last years their romance rekindled.
A sad story, and one we’ve all heard, or at least seen variations of, many times. Yet in Houellebecq’s hands it was thrilling, at least for me. Contrary to this reviewer, I did not mind the thriller bait and switch. Actually, once the story shrank, I couldn’t put it down. The critical question for a reader like me, then, is how Houellebecq achieved this thriller/anti-thriller effect.
It would likely take a much longer essay to get to the bottom of that question, but I want to point to a few passages or themes that stand out to me. One pervasive aspect is that as the focus switches to the story of Paul’s death, the global events fade away. He had been pretty close to the center of the action. Working in the office of the finance minister—who had a good chance of becoming president—gave him a front-row seat on the world stage. His father had been an intelligence agent, and Paul discovered among his papers clues that could be key to identifying the terror organization.
And yet as Paul’s cancer progresses, all that becomes as nothing. We never find out if that terror organization is defeated or if they bring modern civilization to its knees. Not only that, but we don’t care. The next appointment with the specialist seems much more important. The second opinion looms larger. The decision to forgo the disfiguring surgery has more world-historical significance. Paul, his wife, the doctors, the nurses: all take every aspect with total seriousness, so much so that it is as if the rest of the world has disappeared, since it has.
While Paul and his wife Prudence had rediscovered their love prior to his diagnosis (already a departure from the bleak picture of marriage one might associate with Houellebecq), their love deepens as his health deteriorates. As death approaches, his doctor discusses with Paul when and how to take morphine and go to hospice. The doctor lets him in on a little professional wisdom: rich and poor die the same. Morphine gives some serenity and sense of cosmic harmony, but not true personal happiness. Only one thing gives that: love.
What follows are tender and touching scenes of Paul and Prudence in love. She devotes herself to him completely; he feels his existence matters. Houellebecq does not shy away from sex here, but there is a kind of intensity to a description of Prudence giving oral sex to a weak and dying Paul that a swinger orgy would certainly lack at this point in Houellebecq’s authorship. That they manage to have deep and mutually orgasmic intercourse is an even greater testament to a depiction of their love as a vitalizing force. A close and multi-paragraph description of the loving sex life of a middle-aged sick man and his wife, lost in each other’s arms and thoughts and bodies, indeed is not something one reads every day.
●
Beyond thinking about sex, love and death, Paul’s annihilation also carries him away into reveries about even more important matters, namely reading and writing. He loses himself in Sherlock Holmes stories and reflects on Arthur Conan Doyle’s mastery of the detective-fiction genre. In his mind, the great value of fiction writing, especially that type of fiction writing, is creating a genuine sense of otherness. Holmes’s genius lies in his ability to see exactly what is there in the world, while everyone else tend to look without noticing, being more bound by conventions and expectations of others. But the detective’s senses are fully sensitive to the world, and it is through him that the author creates the impression that there is indeed a world outside us, which we can enter, because we must bend to its own inner logic. Real life can’t actually do that; at best each of us has a few moments that could be part of a scene in a novel. But it is in the novel that we meet reality, not in reality. Here is the absorptive ideal: a self-contained world that, by demanding we bend to its logic, pulls us away from our own.
Paul soon enough burns through Doyle’s full body of work. Oddly enough, I found this to be one of the saddest moments in the novel: a representation of art as a kind of redemptive force, but one that simply cannot last. Seeking more otherness, Paul turns to Agatha Christie, who he finds to be very good, but not quite as perfect, and that moment is when his hold on life begins to finally fail.
Houellebecq’s praise for Sherlock Holmes stories clearly has some self-referential component. Could he write a novel like that? Agatha Christie couldn’t do it in her day, and there is no way now for an author like Houellebecq to write a straight detective thriller. It would invariably come off as affected.
So too could his depiction of loving marriages and art as redemptive come off as sappy. Maybe it is for some readers; I can’t say. But Houellebecq seems to try to fend this off through his own variation of what Fried saw in Courbet. Throughout the novel, the third-person narrative consciousness jumps around in weird ways. Paul’s consciousness holds the narrator position more than any other, probably. But often, in the middle of the conversation, it will leap over to somebody else, sometimes to minor characters, other times to a character we’ve known for many pages, but only or mostly through Paul’s descriptions of them. Then, all of a sudden, we have narration from within their point of view.
It would be a mistake, I think, to try to triangulate all these perspectives to get to the “true” one, or to take this as some kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise. Rather, we could see it as a display of Houellebecq’s authorial power to create and absorb himself in the world of his creation. After all, in the real world, consciousness does not leap around like this. It only does that when an author moves through these various minds, and that is only possible because of the singular mind of the author that has immersed itself in so many minds and built a world out of them. This technique could be seen as Houellebecq’s version of what Fried saw in Courbet: a method for demonstrating his own absorption. By pervading every corner of the narrative, moving freely between minds, he performs his own immersion in the world he has created. The effect suggests an author so lost in his creation that his gaze is turned inward, toward it, rather than outward toward his audience.
That, in the end, is a different kind of annihilation. Not the collapse of civilization but the erasure of theatricality: the disappearance of the author into the world he has made, and with it, the possibility that we might follow.
This essay was first published in slightly different form on Dan Silver’s Substack newsletter.
The first novel I read by Michel Houellebecq was Elementary Particles, probably in 1999. I read it in German translation, toward the end of a year in Berlin. At that point, my German was pretty good, and I had graduated from reading The Neverending Story to some light novels. The guy in whose apartment I was renting a room, a law student, let me borrow Houellebecq’s book, but warned me that it was pretty shocking. I read it.
My German was still not quite good enough to permit an unmediated relationship to the text, and I’m sure I missed a lot. I’ve never reread that book, but since then I’ve read nearly all his novels, recently finishing his latest, Annihilation. Though I read them translated into my native language, English, that mediated relationship has stayed with me somehow. It might be why I’ve always considered Houellebecq more as a literary author and less as a shock artist, despite much evidence, personal and professional, to the contrary.
What I see across his work is a serious, perhaps desperate effort to express directly the experience of total absorption, in which you lose yourself in an activity or situation beyond any concern for mannerism or performance. This is why his books are filled with themes of violence and sex, but also with a kind of semi-perverse yearning for love, art and religion. It is also why his writings are about how to write a book that does not compromise the author’s own absorption in what he writes.
Annihilation, like his earlier novel The Map and the Territory, shows Houellebecq experimenting more openly with the tension between immersion and performance, which reminded me of something I first encountered in a different context, specifically in Michael Fried’s writing on absorption and theatricality. That frame, once I started applying it to Houellebecq, opened out my earlier, language-based mediation to a broader question of artistic mediation itself: the constant struggle between an artist’s genuine absorption in his subject and the theatrical performance for an audience he knows is watching.
●
Michael Fried taught a seminar in Chicago when I was a Ph.D. student in the Committee on Social Thought. I didn’t take it. At the time, I hadn’t read his work. I only came to it during a sabbatical, about six years ago, when I gave myself permission to follow random threads in my reading, wherever they led. I started thinking about sociological aesthetics, which led me down about a year of open-ended reading in art criticism, during which I became pretty obsessed with Fried.
I didn’t expect to be as taken as I was. Fried’s books are sometimes obsessively focused on quite esoteric propositions about a specific painting or photograph, but perhaps because of that are often spellbinding. I never thought I’d sit through 45 minutes of silent footage of Zidane running across a soccer field and come away enthralled, or find myself standing in front of a wall for hours thinking about the direction a figure is facing in a seventeenth-century painting or a 21st-century photograph. Fried can get carried away: once you see the absorption-theatricality distinction, it becomes tempting to see it everywhere. But even if it is not everywhere, it is in a lot of places. And once I started rereading Houellebecq, it was there too.
Fried’s basic insight is as follows: If you look at the tradition of high European art painting (he then expands to photography and novels), you will notice that many paintings seek to show figures as if they were not aware of being looked at by an audience. This could come through absorption in work, such as artisanal craftsmanship, or immersion in sociality with others. But in any case, the figures are oriented away from the audience, and pulled into the distinct world of the painting. This “pulling in” is crucial, since it sets up the painting as somehow standing outside and beyond our own wishes, with its own inner solidity. Because it pulls them away from us and into it, the figures and their world become objects that we look at and learn from, not mere projections of our desires.
And yet, they are inescapably there to be looked at by us. This fact means that in one way or another the painting must acknowledge that its scenes were created to be part of a scene, and therefore the figures are never fully independent of some kind of performance for their imagined audience. The independence they gain through being pulled into the inner world of the painting is taken back through being drawn back to their dependence for their existence on the desires of their audience. In Fried’s interpretation, this dependence shows up in subtle indications, such as a playing card turned outward toward the viewer, or one figure who breaks the spell of the absorbing scene to look out of the painting’s scene into the eye of the beholder.
What makes this relationship between theatricality and absorption especially potent is that it is not only descriptive but dynamic. It is an engine that drives artistic creativity, and much of Fried’s criticism is devoted to examining escalating attempts to deal with it. The most important dynamic involves various efforts to defeat the threat of theatricality and mannerism. This can happen in many ways, and no doubt many more will be discovered. One variant involves representations of figures caught up in war and violence: What could be more absorbing than that? There is no time to look away in the midst of battle. This is Fried’s interpretation of Jacques-Louis David, for example. Another variant is depictions of simple peasants, lost in everyday activities such as picking crops, oblivious to anything else but the task at hand. This is Fried’s interpretation of Millet’s The Gleaners.
But that very escalating depiction of violence or simplicity is unstable, in Fried’s reading. They inevitably become cliché and overdone, oscillating between shock for shock’s sake as the demands for the intensity of violence become greater on the one hand, and the brutalization and oversimplification of uneducated lower classes or nonintellectuals becomes too overt to ignore. In this and similar cases, the artist’s independence is the one threatened by theatricality. The peasants or soldiers may be absorbed in their work in the fields or bloody battles, but only an attention-seeking artist would put them in large-format canvases in front of crowds of the bourgeois public as a surefire way to gain their applause.
The dialectic begins anew, and artists begin finding ways to defeat the impression that they are painting in order to be seen painting but are themselves absorbed in the world of the painting as it unfolds, as if on its own, beyond their will. Fried takes this thought very far and in many directions, but his book on Courbet develops it directly. Courbet, in his view, hits on a very potent technique, which involves dispersing his own artistic consciousness throughout the painting, creating an impression that he is everywhere in it, and therefore somehow has merged with each and every aspect of it. In that way, the audience sees the painting and the painter immersed in it all at once.
This too ultimately proves unstable, in ways I will not get into now, eventually leading to the undoing from within of this line of painting in Manet. The last point I do want to emphasize is that while Fried often highlights painterly concerns around how to represent absorbed figures and defeat the impression of mannerism, this concern has roots in a conviction that the desire for some kind of absorption is present in the culture. Here too he has a point. Think of Charlie Kaufman films, such as Adaptation. These are animated by the sense that “we” have lost the ability to have intense, unmediated direct experience, that we are always somehow, even in the most seemingly intimate moments, acting with a view to how it will look to somebody else: how it will play on your feed, in the article you might write, in the story you might tell at a party.
Taken far enough, this thought leads to a kind of lament with language itself and a corresponding desire for prelinguistic immersion in instincts. But we don’t have to go so far to get the point. Just think of moments when you have felt like the line between you and the world disappeared: running down a hill so fast you can’t think but just must react; working on an essay and looking up two hours later as if it were no time at all; laughing with family and friends as each says exactly the right next thing that everybody understands without having to make any inferences; escaping or inflicting violence; and, yes, orgasm. The larger point behind Fried’s project is twofold: that painters try to depict absorption because this is how to absorb audiences who crave that very absorption, but that this very act creates the self-reinforcing oscillation between victories for theatricality and momentary reclamations of absorption.
●
I did not begin Annihilation expecting Fried to keep popping into my head. What I thought would happen is what Houellebecq clearly wanted me to think would happen: that this would be another of his now-familiar stories of European civilization collapsing, whether through external conquest by violent jihadism, inner exhaustion from individualism and fertility collapse, or self-immolation of a historically Christian society to a seductive form of neo-traditionalist conversion.
And that is what the first part of the novel leads you to believe it is about. It sets up something of a thriller plot. There is some shady outfit posting odd internet videos. One displays the French minister of finance being beheaded, and does so with a production quality that the very best studios could not match. Later acts move from virtual to real, destroying a supply of human sperm and sinking a Chinese shipping boat. The first few have no casualties, but later attacks kill hundreds. A detective plot ensues, which eventually leads to suspicions of some kind of semi-satanic cult that seems to have infiltrated the world’s intelligence agencies, who are helpless before it.
I am a sucker for thrillers, and I allowed myself to be pleasantly absorbed in this one, carried on toward the inevitable destruction of European and maybe global society by some cult that had decided humanity did not deserve an ongoing existence. Annihilation is where this was heading, and I was happy to let Houellebecq take me on a ride to it for a few hours on the beach. Why not? Or, as Houellebecq might say, whatever.
But that sort of pretentiousness would be a fate worse than death for a writer with pretensions to being an artist, which Houellebecq is. At that point, he’d be a caricature of himself, playing to character and audience expectations. A defeat at the hands of theatricality. Shocking sex parties, random gruesome violence and other anti-PC representations: we’ve seen it before. This would not in the end be surprising—if Fried is right, something similar happened to David!—but it would be sad. An artist still operating at something approaching peak powers needs to at least try to avoid it.
●
And Houellebecq did try. I’m not sure he succeeded, but we must give him credit for not going down so easily. It turns out the thriller was a total sleight of hand. The actual centerpiece of the novel is indeed about annihilation, but comes in the form of the totally normal, nonviolent death of Paul Raison, a civil servant assistant to the aforementioned minister of finance.
Around fifty years old and a smoker, Paul is diagnosed with mouth cancer. If he had gone to the doctor sooner, he might have had a better chance. But as it is, his best chance at a 25 percent survival rate is to have his jaw and tongue cut out. He chooses chemotherapy, radiation and an experimental immunotherapy treatment instead. He could not bear the more violent option, and especially the loss of his tongue. A few months later, he dies in his wife’s arms. They had drifted apart, but in his last years their romance rekindled.
A sad story, and one we’ve all heard, or at least seen variations of, many times. Yet in Houellebecq’s hands it was thrilling, at least for me. Contrary to this reviewer, I did not mind the thriller bait and switch. Actually, once the story shrank, I couldn’t put it down. The critical question for a reader like me, then, is how Houellebecq achieved this thriller/anti-thriller effect.
It would likely take a much longer essay to get to the bottom of that question, but I want to point to a few passages or themes that stand out to me. One pervasive aspect is that as the focus switches to the story of Paul’s death, the global events fade away. He had been pretty close to the center of the action. Working in the office of the finance minister—who had a good chance of becoming president—gave him a front-row seat on the world stage. His father had been an intelligence agent, and Paul discovered among his papers clues that could be key to identifying the terror organization.
And yet as Paul’s cancer progresses, all that becomes as nothing. We never find out if that terror organization is defeated or if they bring modern civilization to its knees. Not only that, but we don’t care. The next appointment with the specialist seems much more important. The second opinion looms larger. The decision to forgo the disfiguring surgery has more world-historical significance. Paul, his wife, the doctors, the nurses: all take every aspect with total seriousness, so much so that it is as if the rest of the world has disappeared, since it has.
While Paul and his wife Prudence had rediscovered their love prior to his diagnosis (already a departure from the bleak picture of marriage one might associate with Houellebecq), their love deepens as his health deteriorates. As death approaches, his doctor discusses with Paul when and how to take morphine and go to hospice. The doctor lets him in on a little professional wisdom: rich and poor die the same. Morphine gives some serenity and sense of cosmic harmony, but not true personal happiness. Only one thing gives that: love.
What follows are tender and touching scenes of Paul and Prudence in love. She devotes herself to him completely; he feels his existence matters. Houellebecq does not shy away from sex here, but there is a kind of intensity to a description of Prudence giving oral sex to a weak and dying Paul that a swinger orgy would certainly lack at this point in Houellebecq’s authorship. That they manage to have deep and mutually orgasmic intercourse is an even greater testament to a depiction of their love as a vitalizing force. A close and multi-paragraph description of the loving sex life of a middle-aged sick man and his wife, lost in each other’s arms and thoughts and bodies, indeed is not something one reads every day.
●
Beyond thinking about sex, love and death, Paul’s annihilation also carries him away into reveries about even more important matters, namely reading and writing. He loses himself in Sherlock Holmes stories and reflects on Arthur Conan Doyle’s mastery of the detective-fiction genre. In his mind, the great value of fiction writing, especially that type of fiction writing, is creating a genuine sense of otherness. Holmes’s genius lies in his ability to see exactly what is there in the world, while everyone else tend to look without noticing, being more bound by conventions and expectations of others. But the detective’s senses are fully sensitive to the world, and it is through him that the author creates the impression that there is indeed a world outside us, which we can enter, because we must bend to its own inner logic. Real life can’t actually do that; at best each of us has a few moments that could be part of a scene in a novel. But it is in the novel that we meet reality, not in reality. Here is the absorptive ideal: a self-contained world that, by demanding we bend to its logic, pulls us away from our own.
Paul soon enough burns through Doyle’s full body of work. Oddly enough, I found this to be one of the saddest moments in the novel: a representation of art as a kind of redemptive force, but one that simply cannot last. Seeking more otherness, Paul turns to Agatha Christie, who he finds to be very good, but not quite as perfect, and that moment is when his hold on life begins to finally fail.
Houellebecq’s praise for Sherlock Holmes stories clearly has some self-referential component. Could he write a novel like that? Agatha Christie couldn’t do it in her day, and there is no way now for an author like Houellebecq to write a straight detective thriller. It would invariably come off as affected.
So too could his depiction of loving marriages and art as redemptive come off as sappy. Maybe it is for some readers; I can’t say. But Houellebecq seems to try to fend this off through his own variation of what Fried saw in Courbet. Throughout the novel, the third-person narrative consciousness jumps around in weird ways. Paul’s consciousness holds the narrator position more than any other, probably. But often, in the middle of the conversation, it will leap over to somebody else, sometimes to minor characters, other times to a character we’ve known for many pages, but only or mostly through Paul’s descriptions of them. Then, all of a sudden, we have narration from within their point of view.
It would be a mistake, I think, to try to triangulate all these perspectives to get to the “true” one, or to take this as some kind of stream-of-consciousness exercise. Rather, we could see it as a display of Houellebecq’s authorial power to create and absorb himself in the world of his creation. After all, in the real world, consciousness does not leap around like this. It only does that when an author moves through these various minds, and that is only possible because of the singular mind of the author that has immersed itself in so many minds and built a world out of them. This technique could be seen as Houellebecq’s version of what Fried saw in Courbet: a method for demonstrating his own absorption. By pervading every corner of the narrative, moving freely between minds, he performs his own immersion in the world he has created. The effect suggests an author so lost in his creation that his gaze is turned inward, toward it, rather than outward toward his audience.
That, in the end, is a different kind of annihilation. Not the collapse of civilization but the erasure of theatricality: the disappearance of the author into the world he has made, and with it, the possibility that we might follow.
This essay was first published in slightly different form on Dan Silver’s Substack newsletter.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.