Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  But the genetic manipulation in Houellebecq’s novels is also another way the books have of expressing their self-contempt. Literature is sometimes called the ‘spooky art’. I think usually what this is meant to describe is the writer’s feeling that she is not in control of what she writes about; how a story ‘chooses them’, as they say, rather than the other way round – inspiration is always something of an enigma. But a spooky element is part of reading too. The poststructuralist idea that text doesn’t require an author to be meaningful (that the author ‘dies’ once they’ve laid their words on paper) is true insomuch as it means that the meaning of a piece of writing isn’t fixed, but lives variously through its readers. Since the personal associations and pleasure-centres that colour stories from reader to reader are so often subconscious or half-realised, the effect of a powerful piece of fiction is rarely felt rationally, but as something more immediate, sensational – ‘spooky’. There’s an old Platonic idea that truth is already known in the soul, only we constantly need to be reminded of it. When literature hits the nerves powerfully it’s not unlike this: a shock of recognition. The thought (cf. Hemmingway) that it does no good to talk about some parts of writing transmits the fact that, after a certain point, to talk about writing in general is to leave out the singular effect it has on the reader; the sense in which a story is theirs alone. Whenever the objection is made that theorising about literature somehow misses the point, that it intellectualises needlessly and spoils pleasure in the process, it’s right at least that there is a core, incommunicably personal aspect to the reader’s experience that gains little or nothing from analysis. It’s also a truism that the imagination is not the servant of the intellect, and may frequently be at odds with it, so this is another natural limit to explaining art’s charm. Literature as we know it involves a twin-failure of explanation – the writer who can’t really explain where writing comes from, the reader who can’t really explain what it does.

  The threat Heidegger identified in modern science is that it might eliminate the universe’s ‘dark spots’, the gaps in our understanding that give us the space to invent meaning. For example, the scientific explanation of thunder destroys the ignorance that allowed men to project meaning onto the weather (that the thunder was God’s anger, e.g.). The radical possibility opened by neuroscience is of demystifying and de-meaning art itself, of throwing light onto the dark spots of inspiration and aesthetic enjoyment. Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation A (2009) presents one intriguing possibility of genetic engineering: a drug is manufactured that recreates the peace of deep reading. It is, in effect, one of the benefits of literature in pill form. Science-fiction interested in brain science is always, consciously or not, thinking about itself, exploring the possibility of writing’s obsolescence – of a time when inner feeling and moral education are matters for technical expertise rather than personal judgment. Oryx and Crake is a parable in precisely this vein. The narrator, Jimmy, Crake’s best friend and the Last Man-figure left with the Crakers after the apocalypse, engages in fruitless debates with Crake over the value of art. He is doubly-limited, understanding neither the scientist’s genetic breakthroughs, nor the motivations of Oryx, Crake’s inscrutable lover, with whom Jimmy has an affair. The novel can be read as an old-fashioned morality tale about the cost of playing God, where, upon discovering Jimmy’s tryst with Oryx, Crake is driven mad and destroyed by all-too-human jealousy. But it is unclear, in the end, where the real explanation for Crake’s actions lies. Partly, the ambiguity seeps in because his ‘fall’ is the spur for the terrible act of destruction (unleashing the plague) rather than a consequence of his folly. Atwood leaves it elegantly undecided how much Crake knew and how far ahead he planned; whether Jimmy was his antagonist or puppet, or both. The everyman narrator is left with two brute facts – his obsessive love for Oryx, and the catastrophe that followed. But why they happened, how each connects to the other, is unknown. There is no story. The denouncement comes with the climactic discovery, by ‘Snowman’ (Jimmy’s post-apocalyptic guise), of a letter in the ruins of Crake’s laboratory, written by Jimmy in the aftermath of the plague:

  He picks [the letter] up with curiosity. What is it that the Jimmy he’d once been had seen fit to communicate, or at least to record – to set down in black and white, with smudges – for the edification of a world that no longer existed?

  ‘To whom it may concern … Crake himself had developed a vaccine concurrently with the virus, but he had destroyed it prior to his death. … As for Crake’s motives, I can only speculate. Perhaps…’

  Here the handwriting stops. Whatever Jimmy’s speculations might have been on the subject of Crake’s motives, they had not been recorded. Snowman crumples the sheets up, drops them onto the floor. It’s the fate of these words to be eaten by beetles.

  As in Houellebecq, the territory between the simplicity of biological urge and the immaculate principles of science is dark, and not necessarily meaningful. There is a metaphysical question about the truth of human experience beneath the double-effect materialism has on self-perception. Again, although in one way materialism makes (or appears to make) life flatter and more easily explicable – by revealing general principles for behaviour in terms of biology, psychology, etc.; by dispelling religious superstition – in another it is deeply confusing, because there is a sense in which ignorance and delusion are fundamental parts of human identity, and yet materialism seems to allow no space for this. At one moment in The Possibility of an Island Daniel25 mentions the theory that consciousness is a ‘software fiction’, a hopelessly misleading picture of the world, unable even to comprehend its own workings. Neuroscience demonstrates nothing so much as the distance between the unimaginably complex flesh and blood mechanisms of the brain and our naïve, conscious self-image. Only an inferential awareness of the vast data-banks and reservoirs of knowledge about human workings is enough to compel a besieged kind of thought that you must not know yourself very well. Stanislaw Lem’s beautiful description of incomprehension at the phenomena on an immense, alien planet in Solaris (1961) is highly appropriate: ‘We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands of millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint’, a ‘symphony… but we lack the ears to hear it.’ Not an alien planet, our material reality is the thing we know but cannot grasp, and it is human science that tells us what we cannot imagine, insofar as we are unable to accept the message. Rather than simply dispel our illusions, at some root level materialism seems to only inform us that we have illusions, but leaves them in place. Subjectivity is left stranded; a bewildered, stupid thing, untuned to itself or the world. Both depressive realism and fiction imagining the possibilities of brain science confront a type of event-horizon for literature, in aiming for a truth no longer grounded in meaning – the dumb, physical process behind the activity of story-telling.

  ***

  The epilogue of The Possibility of an Island tracks Daniel25 walking from his dwelling in San Jose, Spain, through the ruins of Madrid, and then toward Lanzarote over the dried sea. Unlike earlier chapters from the dystopia, the narrative attains some shape and a peaceful rhythm as the neo-human travels across the desolate landscape, away from the protection of his compound and the mechanisms that guarantee his resurrection. He is accompanied by his dog Fox, a clone of Daniel1’s corgi (and all-purpose literary symbol of innocent joie de vivre). The journey bears a resemblance to the last chapter of Whatever, after the anonymous narrator has left the psychiatric hospital – his bile eased into a tranquilised sadness: ‘it’s been a while since meaning of my actions has seemed clear to me;’ he says, ‘they don’t seem clear very often, let’s say. The rest of the time I’m more or less in the position of the observer.’ On impulse, the narrator of Whatever books a trip to the countryside, renting a bike and cycling through deserted forests, breaking into sobs from time to time for no clear reason. Unique
among Houellebecq’s protagonists, he has been diagnosed with depression, and so his realism is officially sick. ‘The formula seems a happy one to me. It’s not that I feel tremendously low; it’s rather that the world around me appears high.’ The story concludes with self-imprisonment, a barren end to desire:

  For years I have been walking alongside a phantom who looks like me, and who lives in a theoretical paradise strictly related to the world. I’ve long believed it was up to me to become one with this phantom. That’s done with.

  I cycle still further into the forest. … The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total…

  In The Possibility of an Island, Daniel25 and Fox’s final adventure aptly summarises Houellebecq’s sensibility, albeit not enticingly. Grandiose metaphysical reflections mix with armchair sociology (‘Nothing now remains of those literary and artistic productions of which mankind had been so proud… we could no longer see in it anything more than the arbitrary ravings of limited and confused minds’), garish sentimentality bangs up against grave pronunciations about the brutality of existence. There is even a half-hearted swipe at his original target, the post-Sixties sexual marketplace. A small number of humans have survived the end of the world, although they have regressed into a state of savagery (‘slightly more intelligent monkeys, and, for this reason, more dangerous’). Daniel25 happens across a large tribe and wastes no time with his judgments. He notes copulation with females is reserved for the dominant males, with all other men pitilessly rejected. ‘In short, it was a mode of organisation that quite closely recalled that of human societies, in particular those of the last periods… a social system of control of access to the vulva of the females, in order to maintain the genetic makeup of the species.’ (Later adding, a trifle self-consciously: ‘they were only the caricature-like residues of the worst tendencies of ordinary mankind’.) The savages fight among themselves, ritually slaughter their elderly, and kill Fox while Daniel25 is distracted.9 In his review of Platform, Julian Barnes drew a hopeful analogy between Houellebecq and Camus, ‘who began by creating in Meursault one of the most disaffected characters in postwar fiction, ended by writing “The First Man,” in which ordinary lives are depicted with the richest observation and sympathy. The trajectory of Houellebecq’s world view will be worth following.’ In the event, rather than turn his sympathy outwards, Houellebecq intensified his bitterness and solipsism to a hideous degree. It gives Possibility its most oppressively effective passages, but by the time we arrive at the exhausted symbolism of the epilogue it’s hard to think how it could be taken further. In that respect, the comparatively long wait between Possibility and La Carte et le Territoire isn’t surprising. Houellebecq’s imagined world ends up as flat and sterile as the neo-humans who live there, a zone where everything is settled, and so nothing lives – life has been crushed out of it. ‘The animal world was known, human societies were known; no mystery was hidden in it, and nothing could be expected from it, except the repetition of carnage.’

  Although not apocalyptic, La Carte et le Territoire is also fixated with a subject of depleted energy, and resigned to social rot. It spans ninety years and ends deep in the twenty-first century. Tracing the life of Jed Martin, a famous photographer and painter, the novel provides an image of a France in decay. Here too, the world of the future has atrophied instead of evolved, petrifying in the grip of capitalism. Money pervades everything. Jed becomes fabulously wealthy painting portraits of leading businessmen, his stratospheric prices dictated by the mechanism of supply and demand rather than any inherent quality of the work. Jed’s father – an architect who dreamed of being an artist – is incrementally killed by capital. As a young man, his projects won’t sell, and financial necessity soon forces him to abandon his visions for a job in an architectural firm. ‘Life immediately became less amusing’, he recalls to his son. Dying of colon cancer, the old man finally travels to Dignitas to purchase an assisted suicide; even his death is marked with a price. The names of social reformers appear throughout La Carte et le Territoire: Jed’s father was a member of an art collective who idolised William Morris; the character ‘Michel Houellebecq’ collects books by Karl Marx and Charles Fourier. But this seems only to underline the utter failure of utopian hopes. Social protectionism in France steadily disappears; its entitlement culture ends, and the market is unfettered. Ultimately the country itself becomes a product, a simulacrum of its historical self, peddling the ‘fantasy image’ of France to armies of tourists from Asia and the Americas.

  In The Possibility of an Island, the religious-mystic idea is the only alternative Houellebecq seems able to present against this animal pain and striving. If nothing is good, the good must be nothing. Curiously, it’s Daniel1, rather than any of his neo-human successors, who gives the clearest articulation to this, during a dreamlike experience inside a Elohimite artwork: ‘I was… seized by an intense desire to disappear, to melt into a luminous, active nothingness, vibrating with perpetual possibilities; the luminosity became blinding, the space around me seemed to explode and diffract into shards of light, but it was not a space in the usual sense of the term, it included many dimensions, and any other form of perception had disappeared – this space contained, in the conventional sense of the word, nothing.’ Appropriately, the finest moments in Possibility’s epilogue are the most unearthly. Daniel25 gives up the idea of finding the First Church on Lanzarote, but continues numbly onwards through the nuclear desert to the sea. ‘Under my feet the ashes became white, and the sky took on ultramarine tones… It was three days later, in the early hours, that I saw the clouds. Their silky surface appeared to be just a modulation on the horizon, a trembling of light, and I first thought of a mirage, but on closer approach I made out more clearly cumulus clouds of beautiful matt white, separated by supernaturally still, thin curls of vapour.’ The novel loses itself in clouds, ending with Daniel25 cocooned a living death; nullified but still existing – a mere gesture of disembodied blankness, impure anti-matter.

  6

  There is Actually

  No Such Thing as Atheism

  Claiming that Houellebecq is an especially resonant author is not to say that he’s utterly and unquestionably convincing. In some obvious ways, he misrepresents life. The novels make close to no mention of friendship, or community, or the pleasures of achievement, and the toxic attitude towards parenting has been mentioned already. Houellebecq spins his cynicism out into an all-consuming theory, and has no patience for anything that fails to fit this theory – ‘like a sick man who wants the entire world to suffer’, as Voltaire said of Pascal. It’s not hard to disagree with life as Houellebecq depicts it; at least it’s not hard to say that he’s excluding an awful lot. But then there’s a difference between reasoned truths and truth- effects: the almost percussive feeling of invigoration or quickening or clear-sight that comes with certain powerful aesthetic experiences. What people mean when they say they were ‘struck’ by art. To my mind, the force and counterintuitive vitality of Houellebecq’s writing is rather comforting evidence of literature’s continuing ability to resonate in hostile circumstances – which is just to say that, at its best, his work manages to feel true in a way that’s rare. As I’ve tried to demonstrate, the merit of this (bleak, miserable, contempt-filled) feeling of truth becomes very quickly complicated and murky once you start thinking about it, and it drives us towards large and stupefying questions about why we want truth in art, or how we know it when we find it, or if it even exists. But for me the initial, percussive sensation is undeniable. It feels as though it’s owed an explanation.

  Whenever pessimism is elevated into a philosophical system, as though to prove that misery is the truth of human existence, it meets a kind of natural incredulity. Why should we believe that we are unhappy all the time? Or be horrified at our own existence? Disappointment and sad
ness are parts of life – one might respond – but so is happiness (that’s only common sense), and the pessimist omits or denies pleasures whose reality is self-evident to any normal person. Whilst admitting this, and admitting that it’s perverse to glorify misery for its own sake, at the core of depressive realism is something much harder to deflect, and all of the inconsistencies, shrillness and tendencies toward self-romance involved in pessimistic art don’t rid us of the trouble. Houellebecq dramatises one great, largely unspoken yet almost tactile anxiety running through Western culture – the anxiety that can be grasped by simply thinking long enough about any normal advertisement and the visions of the better, happier, more self-possessed you it tries to conjure. Health and pleasure and comfort cannot last. You will die. This is not one defeat amidst life’s pleasures; it is the overwhelming end, a negation at once absolute and utterly private. The comparison between Houellebecq and Pascal is fitting. ‘Let us imagine a number of people in chains,’ Pascal wrote in the Penśees, ‘all of them sentenced to death, some of them slaughtered every day before the eyes of the others, the remaining ones seeing their own fate in that of their neighbours, looking at each other in pain and despair, waiting their turn. This is the image of the human condition.’ Death is the terrifying, singular fact consciousness tries to suppress, although it can never do this completely. But for Pascal waking someone up to the truth of their mortality was a profound mission – if you compel a person to face the misery of death, you force them to look for a remedy, i.e. to embark on the (difficult) path of virtuous Christian life. The truth is hard but it is also liberating, because it enables us to see the unhappiness and self-deception that drives most of our activity, and the extent to which we fill our minds simply to avoid thinking about our death-marked condition. Diversion, says Pascal, ‘is the only comfort we have in our misery, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries; for… it brings us imperceptibly to our death’. Much like a later Christian philosopher, Simone Weil, Pascal enjoys the dubious quality of giving a stark and uncomfortably astute portrait of existential woe, for which the only cure is faith – but a faith that’s inimical to the modern, materialist world. Needless to say, there is no supernatural remedy in Houellebecq’s novels (nor, if The Possibility of an Island is taken as the last word, even a scientific one), and so the consequence appears to be that knowing the truth is no use, and if we cannot ignore it entirely we should at least pursue the diversions that allow us to forget about it as much as possible (sex, in Houellebecq’s opinion). Houellebecq is hardly the first person to articulate this thought, but he might have given it its boldest modern setting. The miserable truth remains, without salvation, which brings us back to what was almost the first question asked in this book. What good is a truth like that?