The Poet
I've had my galley of Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation for at least four months now; I've been able to stare at the tentative publication date of 10-8-24, thinking about when I'm going to get around to writing this review.
There's something in Houellebecq, the presence, the authority, the idea of Houellebecq as the author, that seemed to say, "Don't take this too seriously. Don't be too professional. Don't be a meek, little under-laborer of literature. Just sit with this. Write when you're ready." You don't need to do the traditional catalog of past novels and brief, arbitrary exegesis of the plot. Maybe just think about annihilation—the concept, the novel, the experience.
I read the first few chapters when I received the galley, and then I let it sit for weeks. I didn't read it on the train from Denver to Salt Lake City, which was 18 hours. I didn't touch it for a week in San Francisco. And I didn't touch it in LA. But, on the plane from LAX to Newark, I read 400 pages in one go. I had to read the book like I was watching a movie; I had to absorb it; it couldn’t be done piecemeal.
The first few chapters of Annihilation are a head fake. At first, we believe we are reading a political thriller set in 2027, centered on the ambitious Bruno Juge (judge in English), France’s finance minister during a critical election year (Juge imagines that he might become Prime Minister one day). Juge, a seasoned technocrat, is a contemporary Jacques Necker–Louis the XVI’s tragically competent finance minister. Juge embodies the rational, pragmatic, elitist face of French politics, and we sense the book will be about whether he, Juge, the hero-bureaucrat, will be able to manage France’s looming polycrisis. Annihilation feels like a story about terrorism, economic upheaval, cults… about Juge grappling with forces that threaten to annihilate both himself, his ministry, and France… but…
Annihilation turns out to be about Paul Raison (reason in English), Juge’s able advisor, a banal civil servant. Raison is just another “graduate of the grands ecoles”: a machine part in the larger operation of the French technocratic government. Juge–and the election, and the terrorism, and the sinister spread of cults through French society–largely disappears into the background of the novel, which, almost in real time, re-centers itself on Raison.
It’s almost like Houellebecq got bored doing another Houellebecq novel about the breakdown of the West, or another Houellebecq novel about the imminence of dystopia; it’s almost like he started writing a book about cyberattacks, elections, cults, and Satanism and halfway through just said, “No, I want to write about a man and his wife.” Thus, the side, the spy movie, plots fade away. Paul’s father disappears; Paul’s brother commits suicide; then Paul, himself, starts dying of oral cancer (though, at first, he’s in denial about it).
Paul is a Job who doesn’t fully realize he is a Job. Paul’s illness brings him (who, before his diagnosis, fucks a young prostitute only to discover that she’s family relation) back together with his wife Prudence. Prudence and Paul start to fuck again–all the time, constantly. They become lovers again, experience a second youth. Death is catalytic.
A little aside here: I think, while Houellebecq is still associated with scandal and reactionary cultural impulses, and will still get dinged by minor American critics and writers for being naughty or bad, at this point it’s more accurate to say that he’s simply honest: about human nature, politics, culture. He deserves credit for registering, more honestly, the seismic pulses and quakes that have gradually broken down the post-1990, post-Pax Americana, globalized West, and that have made a mockery about the aspirations of progressive liberalism.
His books are about cloning, terrorism, immortality cults, the clash of Islamism and the West, and the ineradicability of the Dionysian and the erotic. Houellebecq is to our century, I think, what Baudelaire was to the 19th—the first poet to get the news about what the world was becoming, what technology was creating and perpetuating: a poet exquisitely sensitive to the incremental shifts in ontology that others can numbly dissuade themselves from acknowledging.
What I think critics and hot-takers miss about Houellebecq is that he’s not a science fiction writer or a political writer; politics and science fiction are really means of expression, but they’re not really what’s being expressed. Houellebecq is a poet writing about ontological shock. He’s not writing novels to scandalize or to titillate, or to abuse or defame–but to get closer to the truth.
Houellebecq’s major theme is the splitting of the modern person into a primal, sexual half and a technologized, pseudo-rational half. Extreme sex and violence haven’t gone away: they’ve been screened off, penned in, and hidden from the daily technologized flow of bureaucratic civilization. Houellebecq’s novels tear away the screens.
In the Houellebecq-verse, which is a poetic rendering of our own, Bureaucratic Apollo has not really figured out what to do with Dionysus. Technocratic Apollo has more technology and power, but the more Apollo tries to vanquish Dionysus–tries to make sex and violence and the desire for an ecstatic immortality go away–the stronger he makes him. And so, widespread eruptions of violence become ever the more shocking, grotesque, and insane.
Annihilation is a distillation; it distills itself in real time to focus on Paul's sex drive and his death drive. Paul Raison (reason) needs to fuck, and love again, before he dies; annihilation only has meaning if he stops being a civil servant and starts being (emphasis on Being) a human animal.
The last quarter of Annihilation is some of the most important fiction published this century. The reader is not really, if they’re still reading by this point, allowed to evade, allowed to lie to themselves, allowed to imagine that there’s any other fate than annihilation. The reader isn’t allowed to conceive of the human species as something other than an animal—a very intelligent animal designed to pass on its seed and die.
Houellebecq belongs to a tradition that includes de Sade, Baudelaire, D. H. Lawrence, Mailer, and Pasolini—writers who otherwise bear little resemblance to each other except for the fact that they are exquisitely sensitive to the body’s fate, its purpose, and its capacity to be perverted, tortured, and made mockery of. And to love and lust. They are what we might call secular Dionysians, who can no longer believe in the God of the past, but can’t really believe in progress, technology, reason, or morality either. They can only believe in what they feel. They are sometimes called Romantics.
Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.
