Michel Houellebecq's political economy: family, market and liberal democracy from a different angle

Michel Houellebecq's eighth novel Cancelled (Booka, 2024; translated by Vladimir D. Janković) is a complex novel. At the very beginning it should be noted that in the original title the impersonal verb form of the infinitive, Annihilate, which emphasizes the process, names the action, so that the verbal noun - cancellation or disappearing - would be a more adequate solution than the infinitive and the passive verb adjective of the neuter gender, and that of the perfect tense, Cancelled, but in the following we will use the form of the official translation.

...

The novel offers a wide variety of themes that Houellebecq has been writing about for thirty years - French politics, climate change, racial discrimination, colonialism, family, love, sex, religion, aging, illness and death. However, the way he presents the problem now is quite different from the previous novels. Instead of criticizing the consequences of individualism, multiculturalism, political correctness, liberalism and market capitalism by vividly showing us their perverted consequences, Houellebecq in the novel Cancelled he portrays these same themes in a different way, the way he imagined French society should look. Utopian images were never foreign to Houellebecq. In the foreground, family, tradition, love and faith stand out as values ​​with which modern Western society can be regenerated, and the lost individual can find the meaning of life again. The main characters try (and succeed) to maintain lasting family ties. Love becomes a source of emotional stability and not frustration, and in cooperation with sex (which in this novel, unlike the previous ones, is moderate), forms the basis of a family that protects the individual from frustration, failure, abandonment and despair.

From the very beginning (the first novel was published in 1994), Houellebecq's main characters (always men) were emotionally and vitally executed and "uprooted" from tradition and society. Educated, employed, situated, they were looking for short, mostly sexual satisfaction. From such a position arose a rather gloomy description of modern society - marriage and family either do not exist or are rejected as concepts, women are seen as objects, most often in the function of meeting the sexual needs of men, and society exists as a set of individuals. For this social condition, Houellebecq sought the causes in the political sphere, i.e. in Western liberal democracy, which, having opened the door to multiculturalism and political correctness (vokism), led to the collapse of the nation, tradition, family, society and political system.

The original problem is highlighted in the novel Elementary particles (1998), which describes the transformation of the sexual attitudes of the French middle class through the generations, from the XNUMXs to the XNUMXs. The main character is the "omega man" Bruno, the one who is on the last one place on the social ladder (especially in the sexual sense) and cannot find love and peace. Every search for emotional warmth and happiness ends in rejection and humiliation. To avoid such failures, he relies on paid sex because it allows him to hold the strings in his own hands. Although he has a wife and a son, he continues to have extramarital affairs, which only reinforces the failures and creates an even deeper feeling of bitterness that will transform into racism. The massive supply and demand of sexual pleasure has separated sexual desire from emotional needs or fulfillment.

Variants of the "omega man" are repeated in the novels Tool (2001) Possibility of an island (2006) Submission (2015) and Serotonin (2019). In these last two, Houellebecq perhaps went the furthest in his criticism of contemporary politics, democracy and left-wing ideas, which cumulatively led to the strong frustration and sexual impotence of the "omega" man. Serotonin highlights the connection between Western politics and the erosion of the libido of the Western European man. This erosion of individual sexuality, which is reflected in the declining sexual drive of the protagonist Floran-Claude Labrus due to the antidepressants he takes, in a hypersexualized world, serves as a metaphor for the wider loss of the meaning of life and biological vitality of the individual in Western societies.

The impotence of the modern Western individual and the connection with Western democracies is the main theme in Submission. The election of a French Muslim president leads to the adoption of Islamic principles, including arranged marriages and polygamy. These changes are portrayed as an effort to restore traditional family values ​​and social security. Paradoxically, in order to strengthen family and social ties, recover the concept of community, find the meaning of life and renew the biological vitality lost during the era of liberal capitalism, France saw the solution, at least in this fictional world, in the assumption of power by a Muslim ethnic minority that offers satisfaction the longings of a Western European man. The message is roughly this: France had this vitality in its original (own) form. After the bourgeois revolution, it accepted Western democracy and the market economy only to lose it all, and then find it all again in subjugation to another ethnic and religious community.

Plot of the novel Cancelled it is also set in the 2027 presidential election campaign. This time, the French have the reins firmly in their hands, and the ethnic minorities are nowhere near taking power. The attitude towards ethnic minorities is shown more rationally, minorities are not and cannot be the source of the problems of French society. The character of Marise, a nurse from Benin, and her view of the French family are significant. But in order to understand the significance of the novel Cancelled, perhaps it is best compared to a novel Possibility of an island (from 2006). Both novels take place in the context of a post-Fordist society and explore love, sex, aging (attitudes towards the elderly) and the fear of death and abandonment. U The possibilities of the island aging is depicted as a gradual physical decay, which creates a fear of death that individuals run away from by paying money for sexual activity that gives them the illusion that they are still relevant members of society. Society loses interest in the elderly practically the moment they become sexually inactive and physically unattractive. (This especially applies to women who enter such a state earlier.) On the contrary, in the novel Cancelled Houellebecq invests enormous authorial effort and enormous narrative potential not only to show that the attitude towards the elderly can be different, but also that unconditional care for the elderly is one of the main ways to revitalize society and save it from egocentrism. If we encountered such a plot in The possibilities of the island, the children would place a sick parent in a hospital or nursing home and visit him as a courtesy once a year. (Similar "care" has already been shown in Maps and territories.)

Houellebecq was no less critical of the market economy, especially the entertainment industry and the technological progress made possible by post-Ford capitalism. The main character is constantly on the run for fear of being rejected and forgotten because the speed at which people are treated as consumables and discarded in the entertainment industry is faster than in other industries. U The possibilities of the island that fear is avoided for a while with money and buying sex. Ultimately, the solution lies in the invention of sentient clones. When a person can no longer feel, fears disappear. Clones, brought about by technological progress, in The possibilities of the island they serve as a symbol of potential dehumanization. Quite the contrary, Cancelled suggests a return to family and religion. Only in the family can you find unconditional love. Both between spouses, and between parents and children, brothers and sisters. New Houellebecq suggests that facing the inevitability of aging can alleviate the fear of death and provide a sense of purpose if the process takes place within the family. The ending of the novel is atypically Uelbeckian - the main character learns that he is suffering from cancer and that he does not have much time left. His wife still stays with him. In the earlier novels, Annabelle dies alone, Christiana remains immobile and alone, a desperate Daniel surrenders his DNA to The possibilities of the island, all elementary particles themselves.

From a feminist perspective, Houellebecq remains ideologically consistent. Characters of women in the novel Cancelled they are better portrayed, they have diverse characters, but their function in Uelbeck's world is still to be the function of a man. They used to be there for sex, but now for care. It would be interesting to see the continuation of this supposed emancipatory line - for a man to stay with a sick woman, to talk about a real shift in Houellebecq's worldview.

This book, perhaps more than others, raises the question of Houellebecq's political and ideological position, which should now be clearer. Houellebecq is often attacked by left-wing and progressive thinkers as a racist, nihilist and misogynist. When looking at the entire work of Houellebecq, it is known that the French writer is a traditionalist. His poetics is too modern, his literary models are from the nineteenth century. Since the first published novel, criticism has labeled Houellebecq as a restorer of the naturalistic novel and positivism, his actions and ambitions are Balzac's. Mimetism, scientism, the intention to create a fresco of French society, reference to Auguste Comte, Zola, Claude Bernard, are recognized from the first novels. And his characters like to read nineteenth-century literature: a policeman in Maps and territories reads Nerval, François u Submission is an expert on Uismans, but the late one, the author of the so-called of Catholic novels, and Daniel 1 explicitly claims to be a Balzac: "I had a vision a bitter observer of social facts, one medium light Balzakovac".

Houellebecq's criticism does not differ much from the way in which contemporary society was written about by, for example, Anthony Giddens in his works Consequences of modernity (1990) and Transformations of Intimacy (1992), Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, married couple of German sociologists in Ganz normale Chaos der Liebe (1995), Brian Barry u Culture and Equality (2001) or Paul Collier in The Future of Capitalism (2018). These sociological, political and economic (!) discussions of a left and egalitarian orientation also criticized individualism, market economy and multiculturalism, just like Welbeck. The famous French novelist, however, attracted more attention and criticism. First of all, because the novel is a popular and well-read genre, and Houellebecq has proven himself as a master of "analytical studies" in the image of society. As an artist, he is not obliged to provide scientific evidence for his claims and weigh every word, but skillfully incorporates scientism and ideology into the fictional world of his novels. The picture of modern Western society that he painted for 30 years was not a pleasant mirror for many. Those who did not want to read it because of this now have the opportunity to see what Houellebecq's vision of society looks like from a positive angle. Maybe with a novel Cancelled The French finally see themselves more beautiful in the mirror.