(The following discussion is filled with spoilers.)
Trade #1: The Elementary Particles, by Michel Houellebecq
March 28, 2025
We begin what will surely become a long sequence of book trades with the man who introduced me to the concept, The Suboptimalist himself. Since he hasn’t yet gotten around to posting about the book I recommended him (actually, I now realize that wasn’t a part of the original offer, but we can still hope…) I’ll leave its identity as a mystery for now. (Edit: Suboptimalism posted a review/response to this! My pick for him was an English language collection of three novellas by Wang Xiaobo, Wang in Love and Bondage.)
Based on my perusals of Suboptimalism’s reading lists, his taste in books is certainly quite different from mine, which is what makes this exercise interesting. I’ve never read anything by David Foster Wallace or any of the other name-brand post-modernists, with the exception of Barthes’ Sot-Weed Factor. Any fiction written in the past 40 years is, for the most part, a mystery to me. And so, Suboptimalism’s choice for me is quite apt: he had had a realization one night, lying in bed with a fever, that Houellebecq must be the anti-Murakami — but since his knowledge of Murakami is mostly just based on memes and a single reading of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle many ages ago, he is unable to determine himself whether this realization was a profound truth or delusion of sickness. Since I’d written about Murakami a few weeks before this, he asked me to read any book at all by Houellebecq (I picked The Elementary Particles) and tell him what I think.
I’ll be honest though, I have no idea how to evaluate such a claim. There are certainly many parallels between the two authors, but I’m not sure how much of that is just the result of them being two male novelists writing at the end of the 20th century — I don’t read enough contemporary fiction. I’ll do my best to at least dig up a few (hopefully insightful) comparisons.
The Elementary Particles’ prologue states quite openly what it is about, who its protagonist is and his significance to the world:
This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.
…
Michel Djerzinski was not the first nor even the principal architect of the third—and in many respects the most radical—paradigm shift [after the rise of Christianity and then science], which opened up a new era in world history. But, as a result of certain extraordinary circumstances in his life, he was one of its most clear-sighted and deliberate engineers.
That is all to say, book recounts the last days of a depraved society, our society, and its transformation into something else due to insights of its protagonist, Michel Djerzinski, a professor of micro-biology with a background in particle physics who, at the beginning of the book, has just begun his sabbatical. This would make for rather dry and polemical reading, if not for the fact that Houellebecq abandons his stated protagonist almost immediately, and instead spend most of the book’s page count following Michel’s sex-obsessed half-brother Bruno on a stumbling journey through “the world the counter-culture left behind”, culminating in a holiday spent at a utopian retreat center populated by aging hippies. It’s a kind of retrospective on what became of the 1968 generation, in the eyes of someone too young to have experienced May 1968 firsthand, but who came of age in the society that immediately arose out of it.
This is one of the most obvious parallels with Murakami — his books could also be described in a similar way regarding the 1968-1969 Zenkyōtō movement. They both exude a deep sense of disappointment in the generation’s hypocrisy and failure. The difference is that Houellebecq is angry and confrontational about it, whereas if Murakami feels any anger, he prefers to maintain a sense of detachment towards it. Many of Murakami’s favorite themes appear in The Elementary Particles, but they’re dealt with in a way Murakami would never (or perhaps could never) attempt. What Murakami silently implies, Houellebecq states explicitly. The following passage from The Elementary Particles, for instance, sums up one of the central struggles of Murakami’s Rat Trilogy:
Much later, Bruno would come to realize that the petit-bourgeois world of employees and middle managers was more accepting, more tolerant, than the alternative scene—represented at that time by hippies. “If I dress up as a middle manager, they’ll accept me as one,” Bruno liked to say. “All I need is a suit, a shirt and tie—all for eight hundred francs on sale at C&A.”
I suspect that Houellebecq's fondness towards explicit sexual descriptions is what Suboptimalism was getting at when he proposed him as the anti-Murakami. However, I’m somewhat hesitant about drawing a connection here. The sexualization in Murakami’s novels is often mystifying. We have likable protagonists describing those around them with narration that’s both sensitive and understanding, and then they suddenly say things that feel unbelievably naive and sexist. In Houellebecq, the sexualization serves a much clearer point — humans have been alienated, the last remaining source of stable community, the nuclear family, has collapsed, and now Bruno, the avatar through which Houellebecq meditates upon this world, can only relate with others by sex.
One of the least-Murakami moves Houellebecq pulls is that he spend the first third of the book recalling his characters’ childhood, abused and neglected by their hippy parents. This in-media-res flashback structure turns the book into an argument: Western individualism has made us miserable. Murakami's characters don't have childhoods that we can experience — they have memories embedded into their subconscious that they're unable to fully verbalize. They don't have grand judgements against modern society, just vague misgivings. Many of Murakami's protagonists find the human form, its biology and psychology, deeply disturbing, but I can't imagine them proposing to change it.
It’s precisely this that the argument in Elementary Particles ultimately culminates in. We find out in the epilogue that the narrator is actually a member of a genetically modified post-human species developed out of Michel’s work, a species whose body, head to toe, is covered in the pleasure receptors found on human genitalia:
The coding sequences responsible for the formation of Krause’s corpuscles in the embryo had recently been identified. At the time, such corpuscles were sparsely spread on the surface of the glans penis and the clitoris. There was nothing, however, to prevent these from being multiplied in the future to cover the entirety of the epidermis, offering new and undreamed-of erotic possibilities.
So this is where all the value judgements about the pitiful state of humanity littering the books narration come from: it’s a work of anthropology performed by a culture that thinks their better than us, describing 20th century Europeans the same way a 19th century author might describe “savages.” This of course complicates the argument. Are we supposed to take it at face value? Or should we feel the urge to rebel against these other beings (who “with a certain humor” call themselves gods, by the way) holding such a low opinion of us?
The Elementary Particles’ view of science feels very quaint to me, like something from the times of Kant or Hegel, transported into a modern age and level of technology. It presents the ambitions of science as a great unity of all human knowledge, advancing our understanding of our selves by probing the depths of the natural laws that make our physical forms possible, and in the process transcending the limits placed upon us by "the human condition."
I would say my own view of science, (likely inherited from “the zeitgeist”, or at least some “sub-geist” within it), is one of neither hope nor disdain. While science is certainly accumulating more and more knowledge everyday, much of which might have important practical applications, it no longer seems clear to me that all that knowledge will ever translate into deeper understanding of ourselves. Science, for all its objectivity, feels deeply unknowable. It’s split into dozens, even hundreds, of specialized branches that are strangers to each other, let alone to the general public. So, for the non-scientist, there’s nothing much to do besides let the scientists do their work without paying much attention to them.
When science does start getting big ideas about changing humanity, I’ve been trained (or have trained myself) to feel suspicious. It’s overstepped its bounds! This is perhaps why I feel so perplexed by The Elementary Particles. Is humanity so bad that we have to transcend ourselves? I’ve experienced many of the feelings of despair and disappointment described in the book, just as I’m deeply disillusioned with the generation that came before us, but the deep cynicism with which it’s all related is hard for me to accept. Houellebecq is quite funny, which gets me nine tenths of the way there, but in the end it feels like he’s constructed a massive argument with a question mark at the end of it. All I can do is send my own, even larger question mark back to him.