The Elementary Particles is an unpleasant look at two brothers and how they relate to women.
Editor’s Note: Every week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes an “Off the Shelf” column sharing casual observations on the books he’s reading and the passing scene.
“Most of the people Bruno had encountered in his life had been motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure — if one includes in the definition those narcissistic pleasures so central to the esteem or admiration of others. And thus different strategies are adopted, and these are called human lives.” — The Elementary Particles
My life this week felt like it was being run on a treadmill controlled by an enemy. And I still feel like I’m about to fall face first into the treads.
I was having what you would call a very productive week. I was pumping out the morning baseball newsletter. Turning in columns and blog posts. It seemed like my 15-month-old son was waking up one fewer time per night than usual. On Tuesday, I hastily canceled my online language lesson and drove to New Jersey to attend a wake. On Wednesday I published a column on the Jersey City Katyn Memorial controversy and then attended an event at First Things co-hosted by the Polish consulate in New York. I was handling little things in my house. Until a crashing headache on Thursday afternoon revealed how tired I was. After a long night of sleep, I suddenly realized that the headache was likely due to the fact that I just forgot to feed my coffee habit for two days straight.
All the while I was trying to sneak in a reading of The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq. The novel first came out as something like “Atomised” in the original French. Houellebecq’s more recent novel, Submission, is about a France that finds its national culture revivified as it consents to Islamification. You probably heard of it.
The Elementary Particles follows the lives of two half-brothers, Bruno Clément and Michel Djerzinski, as they live their lives in France during the second half of the 20th century. Bruno is basically a sex addict and political columnist, going from one lifeless assignation to another. Michel is withdrawn from human relationships almost entirely and pushes himself further and further into his career as a biologist. Both of them are depicted as products of their hippie mother, who shipped them off to their respective grandmothers so she could go to a California commune.
Houellebecq can be entertainingly nasty when describing the evolution of New Left communes into New Age retreat houses for the almost-rich and aimless. When Bruno “meets” a woman at one of these retreats, she describes the kind of character that floats in:
Talk to them for five minutes and you’ll see they don’t believe any of this bullsh** about chakras and crystal healing and light vibrations. They force themselves to believe it, and sometimes they do for an hour or two. They feel the presence of the Angel or the flower blossoming within but then the workshop’s over and they’re still ugly, aging and alone. So they have crying fits — they do a lot of crying here, have you noticed? Especially after the Zen workshops. They don’t have much choice, really — most of them have money problems too. A lot of them have been in therapy and they’re completely broke. Mantras and tarot may be stupid, but they’re a lot cheaper than therapy.
Bruno also entertains some of what I assume are Houellebecq’s own nasty assessments about the world as it actually is. A mild example:
He was starting to get p***ed off about the world’s stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a sh**hole full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One. It was the ne plus ultra of violence, corruption and misery. If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil.
I give the translator credit for the thrilling cadence of the above. But I’ll be honest in saying I found the whole reading experience unpleasant. It was supposed to be unpleasant. I’ve heard somewhere else that Houellebecq’s translators do him the service of replicating his deliberately flattened prose style. And the effect of this choice in describing Bruno’s sex life achieves what I take to be the intended effect: It utterly disgusts you. Other writers and authors try to give something of the thrill of our renegade minds at work. Houellebecq looks at the modern world with the soul of an unflinching Hugenout, who carries close to his heart Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity. Much of it can’t be quoted in a family publication like National Review, but this gives you a flavor:
The last remaining myth of Western civilization was that sex was something to do; something expedient, a diversion. He put on a pair of swimming trunks and slipped some condoms into his bag — snorting with laughter as he did so. He had been carrying condoms around for years and had never used one of them — after all, whores always had their own.
The beach at Meschers was crawling with jerk-offs in shorts and bimbos in thongs; this was reassuring.
The sexless brother Michel also disgusts readers, in a certain way. Bruno thinks of women as pure objects. But Michel sentimentalizes them: “He could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, loving and compassionate; they were less prone to violence, selfishness, cruelty or self-centeredness. Moreover, they were more rational, intelligent and hardworking.”
At one point, not too long after sharing his view that Huxley’s Brave New World depicted a human utopia, disguised as a dystopia, Bruno concludes that there is no point in having children:
Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value — he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.
These awful wounds in the family life of Michel and Bruno go a long way toward explaining their almost pathological behavior with women. But they also bring about the startling conclusion, where we discover that Michel’s work in cloning has almost eliminated the human race, and in fact the entire narration has been conducted by a creature descended from his work, a new intelligent species, “made by man ‘in his own image.’”
The conclusion horrifies, because this sordid account of family breakdown, and the vituperative denunciation of the generation of ’68, are revealed to be “a last tribute to humanity.” It explains the tone of condescension that pervades the book. And I have to say, that gut punch at the end worked on me. Our narrator cooly explains that “we live very different lives.” And that, having overcome egotism, cruelty, and personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty takes on a less urgent aspect. That last observation is great for a chuckle — it partly explains the ugliness and artlessness of the book. But you may also be gagging.
For reasons related to my own book-writing project, I was also dipping back into Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Patrick Deneen’s more recent Why Liberalism Failed.
There were resonant passages that seemed to chime with The Elementary Particles. When Fukuyama comes to contemplate the last man, and what might endanger democracy, he concludes that the peril will not be an exaggerated quest for equality:
Nature, on the other hand, will conspire to preserve a substantial degree of megalothymia even in our egalitarian, democratic world. For Nietzsche was absolutely correct in his belief that some degree of megalothymia is a necessary precondition for life itself. A civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life. It would be incompetently governed, for few people of quality would choose a life of public service. It would not have much in the way of economic dynamism; its crafts and industries would be pedestrian and unchanging, and its technology second-rate. And perhaps most critically, it would be unable to defend itself from civilizations that were infused with a greater spirit of megalothymia, whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion.
I’m not so sure. At least right now, I’m tired and our civilization seems tired. Are you impressed with the people in public service? Are you impressed with our technology? I’m less and less so. But that’s owed to the fact that I, unlike Michel Djerzinski, really do have children made in my own unruly image. So maybe it’s just another downer mood. Next week, I’m hoping to read another novel in translation, The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin. I’m not sure if I’ll get to it, however. I’m really entering the home stretch of the draft of my own book, and the assignments are piling up.
That’s what she told me. Now you try getting a restful night of sleep.
Also, a Polish woman approached me at that event at First Things, and I can’t get her out of my head. She knew me, from my work here. And she appreciated an earlier edition of this column, where I talked about the way Germans behaved differently on the Western and Eastern fronts. She told me about her grandmother, who suffered immensely under both Nazi and Soviet occupations. She demonstrated, by imitating on me what her grandmother did to her. When her parents left the room, this suffering woman snatched her by the arm and warned her: “The Germans can destroy your body, but the Russians will destroy your soul.”
When she said it, I thought it was something I had heard before, probably because it is now ringing in my ears. That’s what she told me. Now you try getting a restful night of sleep.