The Prophet of Male Despair
I wrote about Michel Houellebecq's most recent novel (and sex scandal) for the Cleveland Review of Books
In his debut novel Whatever, Michel Houellebecq wrote that “the novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness.” And yet, the 1994 bildungsroman—which featured an unnamed, vividly sullen, and suicidal narrator—inspired an entire youth subculture in France now known as “depressionism.” With that despondent style as a mold, Houellebecq, now 68, has since written numerous, always male, protagonists who occupy uninspiring jobs and navigate life through detached reflections on philosophy, politics, and religion, their sense of responsibility eroded by defeatist attitudes. In Annihilation—his eighth and most recent work of fiction published in English by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2024—Paul, an aide to the finance minister of France, lives in a fog of loneliness, noting that for as long as he could remember, “nothingness” had always been a part of his relationships, platonic or otherwise.
Sex, however, is the one pursuit that Houellebecq has always found capable of stirring these men’s passions, briefly lifting their malaise and reconnecting them with humanity. In The Elementary Particles (1998), Bruno, a school teacher, believes the universe to be “cold and sluggish” with only “one source of warmth—between a woman's thighs.” Houellebecq’s sex writing is graphic, leveraging precise anatomical language (the word "glans," referring to the head of the penis, appears in nearly all of his novels), and his protagonists often refer to women in a degrading and sexually objectifying manner. In Submission (2015), Francois, a Huysmans professor, laments his female colleague's age: “once upon a time a man had felt desire for this squat, stumpy, almost froglike little thing.” In Platform (2001), the aptly named Michel, a civil servant, initially fixates on the principal female character for her ejaculate-worthy mouth.
While the degree of relational maladjustment varies among his male protagonists, Houellebecq's work seems to suggest that their attitudes and behavior towards women are not entirely their fault. Rather, these men are simply victims of their sexual impulses. In The Possibility of an Island (2005), Daniel, an aging comedian, describes his body as “ravaged by desire” and the hunt for sexual pleasure as the “sole objective of human existence.” In The Map and the Territory (2010), Jed, an artist, describes an erection so powerful and “sore” that he nearly passes out. These men are not fully autonomous but, instead, constantly at the mercy of a force that overpowers reason and self-restraint.
The scholar Benjamin Boysen has, in the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, likened the power that sexuality exerts on these protagonists’ lives with “priapism,” the medical diagnosis for an unwanted erection. In his explication, the enslaving agent is not pure carnality but, instead, the West’s post-industrial, neoliberal society. Houellebecq’s point is that characters experience “desire against their will” because consumer culture, mass communication, and capitalist enterprise have conditioned them to believe that pursuing pleasure is paramount. Michel, Bruno’s half-brother in The Elementary Particles, opines that “for society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more until desire fills their lives and finally devours them.” In this world, ruthless free market forces dominate every sector of life, including sexual selection, and Houellebecq’s men are often found inadequate because they lack the erotic capital of the young and beautiful.
Consequently, Houellebecq protagonists are often sexually inactive or, at least, unsatisfied. Whatever’s protagonist has no sexual partners, living in sexual frustration passed off as apathy. Seratonin’s (2019) Florent-Claude, who works for an agricultural regulatory agency, takes an anti-depressant that crushes his libido. Michel (The Elementary Particles) experiences anhedonia during coitus. Paul (Annihilation) tries to rekindle his sexual vigor by visiting a sex worker, who turns out to be his niece. But whether or not the protagonists succeed in gratifying their sexual needs is beside the point; they understand—implicitly or explicitly—that they are doomed to failure because they can’t get off the treadmill of pleasure-seeking. Thus, they believe that their despair, passivity, and sexual attitudes are justified—nothing more than a learned helplessness response to immutable laws.