Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
The French author Michel Houellebecq is the epitome of an enfant terrible. No one is as controversial as he is; almost no one sells as many books. His literary method is best captured in one of his early essays, To Stay Alive, where he writes:
Every society has its points of least resistance, its sore spots. Put your finger on the wound and press good and hard. Dig deeper into the subjects no one wants to talk about. Behind the scenes, the underside of the decor. Insist upon malady, agony, ugliness. Talk about death and oblivion. About jealousy, indifference, frustration, the absence of love. Be abject, you will be true.
This poetics of provocation is present in practically all of Houellebecq’s work. His second novel, Atomised (published in 1998) is no exception, as evidenced by the fact that it led his own mother to threaten to “knock his teeth out”. Expanding on the themes of his debut novel, Atomised is an ambitious novel of ideas, addressing the dark side of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the modern economy of desire, and the conditions of love in an egotistic society. It is also, as revealed in the book's conclusion, a transhumanist utopia describing a future in which a “metaphysical mutation” takes place, a paradigm shift comparable to materialism's triumph over religion. In this review, I will attempt to explicate these ideas, and show how they are manifested in Houellebecq's characters.
The novel revolves around two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel. Bruno is a choleric literature teacher at a high school, who is preoccupied with sex, and especially with his inability to get sex to an extent that satiates his voracious desires. He tries to increase his chances in the sexual market by working out, getting hair implants, and taking part in New Age-activities that he despises just for the chance of a lay. In contrast, Michel, a brilliant physicist working in biology, is emotionally detached and alien to sexuality. However, his discoveries turn out to have decisive consequences for the future of sexual reproduction, and it is through his work that the new metaphysical mutation comes to take place.
The half-brothers’ mother, Jane Ceccaldi (who shares her last name with Houellebecq’s actual mother) is a sort of proto-hippie, who finds that her hedonistic lifestyle isn’t compatible with caring for children, and abandons both of the children when they are young. In an uncomfortable scene, it is described how Michel as a baby is neglected so severely that he’s left crawling around in his own faeces, while his mother is off with one of her lovers. It is this far from flattering portrait of a mother that led to Houellebecq’s mother, who did in fact abandon Houellebecq as a child, to take to the press to vent her anger with him (a move which hardly hurt his sales figures).
Bruno and Michel are raised separately; Bruno by his maternal grandparents, while Michel, like Houellebecq himself, is brought up by his affectionate grandmother (Houellebecq assumed his surname in honour of his grandmother). They rarely meet each other. When Bruno’s grandparents die, he is sent off to boarding school, where he gets his first taste of being at the bottom of the pecking order, and the other boys subject him to torture-like bullying. But it's not these physical abuses that become a lasting trauma for Bruno, but rather when he, at the same age, is rejected by a girl, Caroline Yasser. The feeling of worthlessness that this rejection inspires Bruno never quite seems to leave him, and when he later looks back on his failings with women and his sense of sexual inferiority, he is convinced that Caroline Yassar is to blame for everything.
This theme of sexual inferiority recurs throughout the book. Bruno describes how much easier it is for him to be accepted as a grey civil servant (“all you need to do is put on a suit”), than among his mother's young, attractive hippie friends. Although he would like to take part in their sexually liberated lifestyle, he lacks both the right physical and mental prerequisites - he is neither hot nor cool enough. Bruno expresses that “this is an incurable defect: no matter what I say, what I do, or what I wear, I will never overcome this handicap - yes, it’s as cruel as a natural disability.”
Given such themes, it isn’t surprising that many have drawn similarities between Houellebecq's characters and the psychology of the incel movement, which has gained such attention in the decades following the publication of Atomised. And indeed, the same sense of predetermined, incurable inferiority that Bruno expresses could easily have been written online by some black-pilled incel. Part of Houellbecq’s literary method is to describe in detail the far-from-pretty phenomenology of the sexual loser, and he does so without passing any judgement. The controversial nature of this subject matter, combined with his refusal to moralise has led to accusation that Houellebecq himself is an incel, or that he justifies their actions.
But what Houellebecq is doing is not to engage in apologetics for incels, but rather to apply a sociological gaze in depicting the consequences (both phenomenological and societal) of a society that has increased the extent to which sexuality plays a role in determining the status of individuals. To Houellebecq, Bruno is not a protagonist to be identified with and rooted for, but rather a kind of mean sociological subject who exemplifies the implicit values that exist in our society. As Michel says about Bruno: “His motives, values and desires did not distinguish him from his contemporaries in any way”.
The increasing importance of sexual attractiveness as a basis for determining status is a central theme in Atomised. To Houellebecq, this valorisation of sex starts with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, made possible by the accessibility of birth control. When sexual pleasure is increasingly separated from reproduction, sexuality becomes an arena for “narcissistic competition” for the new, broad middle-class, which is largely equal in economic respects. The human need to stand out, and to create hierarchies of differentiation, leads to the emergence of a sexual hierarchy alongside the one based on economic status. And with its gradual erosion of cultural values such as monogamy and chastity, the sexual revolution gives rise to a deregulated, free sexual market, operating on similar principles as the economic market. In his first novel, Whatever, Houllebecq writes:
Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperisation ... In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Thus, the incel phenomenon (the “absolutely pauperised” with respect to sex) is portrayed as the logical conclusion of sexual success becoming an arena for competition which determines the relative status of individuals. In the world described by Houellebecq, people’s worth is determined by their economic and sexual capital, and it is in the light of this that Bruno’s dark feelings when confronted with his lack of sexual capital should be understood; his unworthiness isn’t merely sexual, but also more fundamental, since inadequate sexual capital not only means fewer opportunities to have sex, but also to be perceived as having lesser value as a human being.
To Houellebecq, nothing matters as much as sexual and economic status, and he sees these criteria as relatively independent of one another. He writes: “We clearly live in a simplified world. The Duchesse de Guermantes has a lot less dosh than Snoop Doggy Dog; Snoop has less than Bill Gates, but he gets the girls wet. There are two possible criteria, that's it.”
One intriguing aspect of Houellebecq’s ideas is that they relegate the role of sexual attractiveness as helping procure sexual pleasure to a secondary status. The pleasure aspect doesn’t vanish completely, but, as Michel puts it: “sex, even stripped of its link with reproduction, still exists – not as a pleasure principle, but as a form of narcissistic differentiation.” That is, the importance of sexual attractiveness in determining status shifts the primary purpose of being attractive to functioning as a status symbol, rather than to gain sexual opportunities.
A consequence of this is that sexual attractiveness takes precedence over sex itself; we don’t want to be sexy in order to sleep with people, but rather the opposite: having sex becomes a confirmation of our fuckability, and thus of our value as human beings. This also leads to other non-romantic motives to have sex, such as doing it to acquire sexual competence (becoming good in bed, experienced etc), which people want to (at least appear) to possess precisely because it gives sexual status. This inevitably means that symbols and attitudes that once signalled sexual competence and thus sexual status (it can be a certain way of talking about sex, or a certain blasé attitude), are detached from signifying anything about a concrete reality, when such attitudes are mimicked by people who lack the actual competence, but who desire the status that such attitudes have become markers for. Like Kat, in the TV series Euphoria, who strives to sound blasé and indifferent when discussing sexual acts far beyond her actual experience.
It is this world of sexual status anxiety that Houellebecq portrays, and it is in the light of this sociological analysis that his characters should be understood. A common criticism of Houellebecq is that his characters' fixation on sex and women's appearance is problematic because it promotes a skewed view of women, and veers into misogyny. But rather than interpreting the values highlighted by Houellebecq's characters as literally intended by the author, I see his characters as mirroring societal values that are rarely expressed out loud, but nevertheless present in our lives. Bruno is sex-obsessed because our society is sex-obsessed, and he primarily sees women's value in sexual terms because that is how a patriarchal society values women.
The only character in Atomised that is mostly untainted by sexual dissatisfaction is Michel – if Bruno symbolises libido, Michel undoubtedly represents reason. In his youth, the beautiful Annabelle was in love with him, but he didn’t have the capacity to truly reciprocate her feelings, and instead fell into a solitary research career studying the physical processes underlying DNA replication. Through most of the book, we follow him during a year-long sabbatical from his work, which he spends in almost complete isolation, seemingly without need for human contact or emotions. For long stretches, he lies catatonic in his bed, meditating on his radiator or the advertisements he receives in his mailbox. However, a scientific insight begins to form in his mind, that sexual reproduction is necessarily linked to the harmful genetic mutations that cause ageing (a kind of genetic theory of ageing seems to be assumed here). Thus, he connects sexuality and death, and comes to the realisation that if we are to conquer death with the help of science, we must also abolish sexual reproduction.
While Michel ponder such matters, Bruno travels to the New Age-resort “Lieu de Changement” (or “Place of Change”) in the hopes of finding someone open-minded enough to sleep with him, despite not giving much for the other participants nor for the activities offered (Gestalt massage, “rebirth” in hot water etc). After an initial week of failures and sexual humiliation, Bruno finally finds what he’s been looking for: after seeing her having sex with another man in a pool, Bruno meets a woman named Christiane who in many ways is the woman he’s dreamed of: she is sexually accommodating, and shares many of Bruno's thoughts on the tragedy of sexual liberalism (Houellebecq is not always an elegant writer, and one of his weaknesses is that all his characters have a tendency to make similar-sounding speeches that advocate the same point of view).
Bruno and Christiane quickly become very close, and share their life stories with each other. Houellebecq beautifully describes the feeling of boundlessness that can exist in the initial stage of falling in love: “One of the most surprising things about physical love is the sense of intimacy it creates the instant there's any trace of mutual affection. Suddenly - even if you met the night before - you can confide things to your lover that you would never tell another living soul.”
Just like Bruno, Christiane has endured great disappointments in the arena of love, and if Bruno exemplifies the sexual suffering of modern men, Christiane is the female equivalent. She describes being attractive in her youth, and being valued precisely because of that attractiveness. But as she’s aged, she has seen the very foundation for the value that others ascribed to her wither away, and she is painfully aware that the bodily decline that ageing entails undermines her entire human worth. Since childhood, she has been fed with big ideas of love, but understands that her chances of being loved shrink as her body deteriorates. As she puts it:
Men who grow old alone have it easier than older women. They drink cheap booze and fall asleep, their breath stinks, then they wake up and start all over again; they tend to die young. Women take tranquillisers, go to yoga classes, see a shrink; they live a lot longer and suffer a lot more. They try to trade on their looks, even when they know their bodies are sad and ugly. They get hurt but they do it anyway, because they can't give up the need to be loved. That's one delusion they'll keep to the bitter end. Once she's past a certain age, a woman might get to rub up against some cocks, but she has no chance of being loved. That's men for you.
For Houellebecq, this demonstrates another dark aspect of the sexual revolution. Since it is mainly young bodies that are considered attractive, and this attractiveness has come to be assigned such importance through the elevation of sexuality, a fetishization of youth takes hold, which manifests itself in shame about one’s own ageing, and in an obsession with “staying young”. This anxiety is then exploited by the beauty industry, which markets products and surgical procedures that promise to grant such youth (in the novel, Bruno's father becomes rich by establishing a silicone breast clinic). For the original hippie generation, who by the time Atomised takes place have grown old, this represents a tragic irony: “As their flesh began to age, the cult of the body, which they had done so much to promote, simply filled them with an intensifying disgust for their own bodies-a disgust they could see mirrored in the gaze of others.”
After their stay at the Lieu de Changement, Bruno and Christiane continue to vacation together, and travel to the nudist beaches at Cap d'Agde. There, they engage in hedonism and partner-swapping, and Bruno experiences something resembling happiness as he finally gets the sexual satisfaction he has dreamed of his whole life.
There may seem to be a paradox in Bruno's happiness, in that sexuality, whose valorisation is repeatedly portrayed as the root of much of his misery, also becomes what enables his happiness, a cure for his alienation and depression. But this is only seemingly a paradox: what Houellebecq ( who is a testament to the truth of there “hiding a disappointed romantic behind every cynic”), criticises is the development of sexuality no longer primarily being about pleasure and intimacy, but rather about status. He views sexual pleasure itself as something good, and as closely linked to the possibility of love. But when market logic infiltrates the sexual realm, it poses a threat to this romantic view of sex as a catalyst for love. For Houellebecq, there is a fundamental contradiction between sexual liberalism and our capacity for love. The perhaps most central theme of Atomised is how people's alienation and loneliness increase as sexuality becomes less about pleasure and more about status, since this undermines the very foundation of genuine love.
Shortly before Bruno and Christiane travel to Cap d’Agde, Bruno pays Michel a visit. They talk about Aldous Huxley, in a conversation which mirrors several of the ideas that form the basis of Atomised’s ending. Bruno argues that Brave New World is not, as it is commonly considered, a dystopia, but rather that it is “our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against ageing, the leisure society. This is precisely the world that we have tried - and so far failed - to create.” He believes that Western civilisation increasingly resembles the society described by Huxley, and speculates that the increasing separation of reproduction from sexuality will lead to “procreation taking place in tightly guarded laboratories where perfect genetic conditions are ensured. Once that happens, any sense of family, of father-son bonds, will disappear.”
While Bruno experiences love at the nudist beaches, an opportunity to be loved presents itself for Michel as well. Revisiting the village where he grew up to oversee his grandmother’s grave being moved to make place for a bus stop, he meets Annabelle at the local pub, and they resume their relationship. But the emotional detachment that defines Michel never really subsides. Not even sex gives him any real pleasure, and it becomes clear to both Annabelle and Michel that their love is living on borrowed time. Eventually, Michel tells her that he’s ready to start working again, and that he plans to travel to Ireland to take up a new research project. He does not invite her to join him there. In conjunction with this, Annabelle receives a cancer diagnosis. Not wanting to burden others, she takes an overdose of pills and slips into a coma before passing away a few days later.
Bruno's love also meets a tragic end. During an orgy, Christiane sustains permanent injuries to her back, and is told she will be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Bruno offers her to come live with him, but when she questions if that really is his wish, he hesitates for a few seconds too long. When he finally decides to contact her again, it is already too late: she has committed suicide by plunging her wheelchair down a staircase. Here, the consequences of Houellbecq’s worldview are taken to their extreme: when one’s worth is determined by one’s sexual status, being permanently deprived of the possibility of sexuality like Christiane renders life meaningless. Bruno reflects that “he had no more been capable of love than his parents before him” and checks himself into a psychiatric clinic. It is implied that he stays there for the rest of his life.
Here, the narrative changes to become a kind of retrospective of Michel’s career as a scientist, and of the metaphysical mutation that his discoveries bring about. We are told that, after Annabelles death, he travels to Ireland, where he works for a decade to formalise the intuitive insights he’d come to during his leave of absence. He publishes a string of papers, which culminate in the article “Prolegomena to the perfect replication”, whose upshot is that “any genetic code, however complex, can be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated from disturbances or mutations. This means that every cell contains within it the possibility of being infinitely copied. Every animal species, however highly evolved, can be transformed into a similar species reproducible by cloning, and immortal.”
Thus, Michel has made overcoming ageing and death possible, through the elimination of sexual reproduction – the new species he describes would be “sexless”, having “outgrown individuality, separation and evolution”. Shortly after publishing his article, Michel disappears, and it is thought that he has drowned himself. In the years following his disappearance, a society-wide debate begins on whether the theoretical new species he invented should be actualised. One of Michel's successors, Hubczejak, campaigns for humanity to be abolished and completely replaced by the new clone species. He points out that the “end of sexuality as a means of reproduction in no way heralded the end of sexual pleasure”, as the new species through genetic manipulation can be equipped with pleasure-giving nerve endings that “cover the entirety of the epidermis, offering new and undreamed-of erotic possibilities”. Thus, Hubczejak advocates a kind of eugenics, where humanity would be “the first species in the universe to develop the conditions for its own replacement” in order to make way for a new species whose opportunities for pleasure are greater than ours.
Despite opposition, especially from religious groups, Hubczejak's campaign succeeds, and 20 years after Michel’s disappearance, the first individual of the new species is born in a laboratory. We learn that the retrospective of Michel's career and the subsequent development is written by this new species, at a time in the future when only a few humans remain in the world. In one of the last paragraphs of Atomised, this new species describe their existence:
Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we live on. Men consider us to be happy; it is certainly true that we have succeeded in overcoming the monstrous egotism, cruelty and anger which they could not; we live very different lives. Science and art are still a part of our society, but without the stimulus of personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty has taken on a less urgent aspect. To humans of the old species, our world seems a paradise. It has even been known for us to refer to ourselves - with a certain humour — by the name which they dreamed of, 'gods'.
Atomised thus ultimately leads to a kind of transhumanist ideal society, which exhibits all the features that Bruno and Michel saw in Brave New World – here we find both the complete separation of sexual pleasure and reproduction and the disappearance of significant family ties. Although this entails the total annihilation of humanity, it is hard not to see this end as a utopian vision of a future society. One can compare this vision not only with Huxley's, but also with Russian cosmism, which similarly believed in abolishing death with the help of science, or with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical ideas about the final stage of humanity( the seventh root race), where “any sexual difference among humans will cease to exist, and both conception and birth will become entirely spiritual.”
It is tempting to attribute personal motives to Houellebecq in constructing this utopia. He has described the “fundamental psychic flaw” that being abandoned by his parents has left him with. Through completely replacing parenthood with cloning technology, this source of suffering is vanquished completely.
One can also understand the ending of Atomised through the concept of Equality of Opportunity. Equality of Opportunity is the idea that when people compete against each other to gain some limited resource (an attractive job, a scholarship), no one should be unfairly disadvantaged. However, what exactly “unfairly” means is disputed. For advocates of meritocracy, it simply means that the person who can best perform the job/has the best scholarship application, etc., should win. But there are more radical schools, such as “luck egalitarianism”, which argue that all variations in outcomes that are due to bad luck should be eliminated (that is, even if candidate X can perform the job better than candidate Y, it goes against equality of opportunity to give the job to X, if Y’s inability to perform it is due to circumstances of bad luck, such as being born with a mental or physical disability).
In Atomised, Houellbecq consistently includes the sexual sphere, and not just economic outcomes, within the scope of equality of opportunity. People’s differing opportunities of success in the sexual hierarchy is a central theme of the novel, and Bruno repeatedly talks about “regulating” this sexual inequality. He also idealises the “sexual social democracy” that he sees in Cap d’Agde, where even people who are deemed unattractive are given opportunities to participate in the public debauchery.
Whether sexual outcomes can be included in equality of opportunity in this way is a difficult and subtle question. In her article “Does Anyone Have The Right To Sex?”, philosophy professor Amia Srinavasan writes that, if we were to learn that that someone's child was systematically denied to share a sandwich that everyone else got to eat, we would be upset, and view it as a discrimination that we would want to put an end to. But, she writes, “sex is not a sandwich”. Sexual outcomes, such as sleeping with some particular attractive person, are different in kind from outcomes pertaining to access to food. The difference lies in sandwiches not having any preferences of their own, while many sexual outcomes fundamentally depend on the preferences of the individuals involved. A too broad notion of equality of opportunity, which includes the latter type of outcome in its scope, threatens to encroach on these people’s personal freedom. It simply doesn’t make sense to say that all people should have equal opportunities to, say, sleep with King Charles. Nor is it acceptable to force equal opportunities for the unattractive in the pursuit of having sex with the most beautiful people – the limitation in personal autonomy that this would entail for the beautiful is worse than the regrettable fact of lacking opportunities for the unattractive (who naturally also wish to have attractive partners).
If one persists in letting equality of opportunity encompass sexual outcomes, the meritocrat may possibly argue that the drastic discrepancy in outcomes between the most pretty and the most ugly people is justified, in that beautiful people have more relevant merit (simply in virtue of being attractive), and therefore deserve better outcomes. In contrast, it is clear that the luck-egalitarian cannot accept that anyone should be disadvantaged in the sexual market simply because they had the misfortune of being born ugly or with some handicap. And it is such cases of bad luck leading to sexual misfortune which Houellebecq repeatedly returns to, suggesting a certain affinity to the luck egalitarian position.
Luck egalitarianism as an ideal for equality of opportunity is often criticised for being unachievable in practice. People are inevitably born with different abilities to do different things, and it is hard to see how, for instance, a person who is partially blind in practice could have the same opportunities to become a pilot as someone with 20/20 vision. But here, we see how Houellebecq’s utopia circumvents both such objections and the problem of applying equality of opportunity to sexual outcomes. By eliminating all genetic differences, no one is fated to grow up ugly, and discussions about whether the unattractive should have the same sexual opportunities as the attractive are rendered obsolete. Similarly, everyone’s opportunity to become a pilot is, at least on a genetic basis, literally equal in such a society. Thus, one may see the ending of Atomised as representing the luck-egalitarian ideal taken as far as one can imagine it to be possible. On this interpretation, Houellbecq’s utopia is a vision of what real equality of opportunity would look like, where differing luck in circumstances minimally affects access to desirable positions or sexual pleasure, without such sexual equality infringing on the freedom of the individual.
However, it is clear that not even this vision fully realises the ideal set forth by luck egalitarianism – bad luck will inevitably, even in this utopia, affect the opportunities people have. For instance, we can imagine some individuals growing up in an area contaminated with lead, and suffering mental damage that affects their future opportunities as a result. Furthermore, as philosopher Clare Chambers has argued, there are deep reasons to doubt that complete equality of opportunity is even possible, since “every outcome can constitute a new opportunity”. In a thought experiment, she asks us to envision a “moment of equal opportunity”, a moment when perfect equality of opportunity in fact exists. Under these completely equal conditions, two individuals compete for the same position, which only one of them can get. We further suppose they both apply themselves equally much in attempting to get the position. Despite their completely equal conditions, one of them must lose, and given their equality of opportunity, and their equal effort, whoever loses can only have done so through bad luck.
This in itself contradicts the notion of perfect equality of opportunity as conceived of by the luck egalitarian, and what’s worse is that this outcome will constitute new opportunities for the winner. For instance, they may get the opportunity to advance further in the organisation, or opportunities related to their now higher compensation. The one who didn’t get the job due to misfortune will also miss out on these subsequent opportunities. So even though both candidates had equal opportunities (by the stipulation of the thought experiment), as soon as an outcome like this occurs, the moment of equal opportunity is over, and new inequalities of opportunity creep in, effectively rendering long-term equality of opportunity impossible.
Despite this, not many are concerned with such theoretical perfect equality of opportunity, but rather with maximising it in practice, and I would argue that this is precisely what Houellebecq achieves in his utopia. Nevertheless, I believe that many will feel there is something rather dystopian about this supposed utopia, just as the vast majority find little appealing in Brave New World. Not only does it entail the end of humanity as a species, it is also highly ambiguous whether the cessation of death is something desirable (author Karl-Ove Knausgaard, whose current suite of novels “The Morning Star” similarly depicts a post-death society describes this as his “biggest nightmare”). Furthermore, the society that Houellebecq describes is fundamentally opposed to other human values: for instance, many of us have strong aesthetic preferences for human diversity over a homogeneous species of clones, and view the eugenic ideas realised in such a society with moral scepticism. The maximisation of equality of opportunity-related values that Houellbecq’s utopia embodies thus comes at the expense of our other values, and I suspect that how one ranks the relative importance of these values determines how appealing one ultimately finds the society depicted at the end of Atomised.
In addition to its interesting sociological analysis and utopian vision, Atomised is also a work of fiction, and it is not just its ideas that makes it enjoyable to read. One thing which isn’t always appreciated is just how funny Houellebecq can be, despite all his bleakness and cynicism. This is especially evident in the parts where a love-deprived Bruno attempts to write literature (a “substitution activity” compared to how some doves start pecking frantically at random when they don’t get any food). Nevertheless, it seems clear that its ideas are one of the main reasons the book has garnered such success – the pessimistic worldview that Houellebecq espouses sharply contrasts with the “end of history”-optimism that was prevalent at the time the book was published, and in hindsight, many of Houellebecq’s ideas appear prescient. At its best, Atomised typifies a literature which dares to be free-thinking, and even though Houellbecq presses hard on our soft spots, it is difficult to put him down.