Science fiction as historical novel: Michel Houellebecq's les particules elementaires.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Jack, David
• Published date: 22 September 2005
• Author: Jack, David

Revolutions are thus the great periods of [hu]mankind because in and through them such rapid upward movements of human capacities become widespread. (1) Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel. This article offers a reading of Michel Houellebecq's science fiction novel Les Particules elementaires as both a provocation to the human sciences and as an historical novel in the classical sense given this term by Lukacs. These two readings, I hope to demonstrate, are interrelated. Reading this novel as an historical novel involves a certain amount of licence, since it is predicated on the notion that we read it from the point of view of the post-humans who are its writers. Thus what is required is something like 'content apprehended as form', to reverse the demand made by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. (2) Through the form-content dialectic, I hope to reveal an important contradiction in Houellebecq's work between the naturalism of his Utopian solution and the historicism of the form of his novel. This is a contradiction--Jameson includes it among his postmodern 'antinomies'--which I hope to show has significance for the future of the human sciences themselves.

In his essay 'No Sex Please, We're Post-Human', Slavoj Zizek describes the utopia of Les Particules elementaires in the following way:

In 2040, humanity collectively decides to replace itself with genetically modified asexual humanoids in order to avoid the deadlock of sexuality--these humanoids experience no passions proper, no intense self-assertion that can lead to destructive rage. (3) These post-humans of the future, it turns out, are the novel's narrators: the novel itself is an archaeology of their present, pieced together from fragments of the notebooks of Michel Djerzinski, the scientist responsible for the self-replicating gene which gives rise to their new world order. All this appears, however, only at the very end of the novel, in the form of an epilogue. Up until this point, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a work of contemporary fiction, about the lives of two half-brothers, the aforementioned Djerzinski, a molecular biologist who is emotionally numb, and Bruno, a high-school teacher who writes abrasive poetry (much admired in the novel by Sollers, who nonetheless refuses to publish it) and winds up in an asylum after exposing himself to one of his students. The text, however, is structurally ambiguous: the sudden generic twist at the end of the novel sweeps aside with all the force of a natural disaster not only certain narrative conventions (if there can be said to be any such thing left in postmodern cultural production), but our own contemporary situation as well, thrust into the past in some Benjaminian 'storm of progress' in which the reader is left, like the angel of history, to survey the wreckage of Western civilization, only this time from 'paradise' itself.

The generic nature of this 'paradise', of course, hinges upon the question of whether to approach the utopian solution of Houellebecq's novel ironically or non-ironically. Zizek seems to have opted for the latter, citing the 'meaninglessness of the permissive sexuality' (4) which confronts the novel's characters, leading them into the somewhat debased world of swingers' clubs and 'excruciatingly' detailed orgies which serve only to emphasize the pathos of these individuals' quest for meaning in a fully reified universe, and there is a certain sense of relief at the end of the novel when all this is relegated to the near past. It is this kind of ambivalence towards the fate of our own present, the fascination and relief which accompany even the most abject images of its destruction, which carry with them all the power of utopian daydreams of the impending collapse, or at least the momentary disruption, of a fundamentally intolerable everyday life--which Houellebecq's novel presents in very unambiguous terms--in late capitalism. The mixture of horror and fascination which attended the images of September11 is perhaps a case in point. (Whether or not we see the utopian valour of this fascination or 'gratification' as enough in itself to constitute a pre-revolutionary foment is a question which cannot be pursued here, even if it has affinities with the utopian gratifications of certain mass cultural productions such as the disaster film.) Suffice to note here that Houellebecq's novel was a best seller, and while this may be put down to its content--lit-porn, as it is often defined--there is perhaps a case to be argued for the satisfaction of its utopian prediction, a more formal consideration regarding the particular way the work both deals with and then consigns to history its own contemporary milieu.

However, I would want to argue against this reading, preferring instead to grasp Les Particules elementaires as something like a warning, in the manner, if you like, of the dystopian prognosis put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a 'call to arms' for the re-politicization or radicalization of the human sciences against the positivist 'myth of things as they actually are'. (5) Such an assertion would involve rewriting the novel's premise in the conditional mood ('If this ..., then this'), in much the same way as Freud advised we treat the positive assertions of dreams and delusions. Such psychical phenomena have no means at their disposal for representing the conditional mood and it is one of the conditions of representation of the dreamwork that it dispenses entirely with certain linguistic constructions by replacing them with others:

Sometimes, in a dream in which the same situation and setting have persisted for some time, an interruption will occur which is described in these words: 'But then it was as though at the same time it was another place, and there such and such a thing happened'. After a while the main thread of the dream may be resumed, and what interrupted turns out to be a subordinate clause in the dream-material--an interpolated thought. A conditional in the dream-thoughts has been represented in the dream by simultaneity: 'if' has become 'when'. (6) The question of utopia or dystopia in Houellebecq's novel revolves very much around whether we grasp the narrative as a celebration or critique of the Enlightenment's sense of progress (the third, more dialectical possibility is, of course, that it is both, in the sense of Marx's remark about capitalism being both the problem and the solution). One gets the sense of a certain 'reality paralysis', as Fredric Jameson has called it, at work: in the absence of any radical political or social remedy--that is, in the absence of the negative--this absence itself...