It's a Houellebecqian World

PLUS some back-to-school news

Today I’ve got a few topical news items in the NOTES section, including my most recent Real Talk podcast appearance with host, Ryan Jespersen. For the back-to-school season, we talked about Alberta’s social studies curriculum with Dr. Carla Peck from the University of Alberta. Also today, The Edmonton Journal published an editorial I wrote about phones and social media use among youth.

Now on with the regularly scheduled post, which is about Michel Houellebecq, sex, incels and our current dystopia.

*

On holiday at the age of sixteen, I privately invented a solution to what I believed to be a widespread social problem.

At the time, I was a virgin. I assumed that the first time I had sex, I would be bad at it. It was possible I would also be bad the second, the third and the fourth time, and so on. But with practice, I would become good. Yet how was I supposed to get practice when my lack of experience equipped me so poorly to even approach a girl in the first place? The situation struck me as a catch-22, not just for me but for all male virgins. 

French novelist, Michel Houellebecq.

The solution? The world should provide a team of experienced women to serve as sexual mentors to young men. Prepare men for a future in which they would adequately satisfy a real-world partner.

I recall this solution vividly. I came up with it while lazing around on an inflatable mattress in a tent in France, and the prospect of an experienced sexual mentor coaching me was a turn-on. The term incel (involuntary celibate) had not yet come into use. The year was 1991. Over the following three decades, conditions became increasingly conducive to turning insecure young men into the worst possible versions of themselves. If we want to know why, it’s best to turn to Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Whatever, published in 1994. I have seen scant appreciation for the book in its thirtieth-anniversary year so I will pick up the slack.

Whatever’s original title, L’extension du domaine de la lutte (“the extension of the domain of struggle,”) does a far better job of conveying its premise. The novel is narrated anonymously by a computer programmer in a caustic and philosophical style. During his otherwise unremarkable and quite boring life, the narrator is one day assigned by the Ministry of Agriculture to help implement a new software in the city of Rouen. He takes the journey from Paris to Rouen with a colleague called Raphaël Tisserand, a man so ugly, we’re told, that “his appearance repels women.”

Unfortunately for him, ugly Tisserand still wants sex. At every turn he is rejected. After a particularly painful rejection in a nightclub, the narrator—whose amoral character is well known to the reader by this point—takes Tisserand aside and tells him he will never succeed sexually. The only way he can “possess” a woman is to take her life. “Launch yourself on a career of murder this very evening,” the narrator urges Tisserand. “Believe me, my friend, it’s the only way still open to you. When you feel these women trembling at the end of your knife, and begging for their young lives, then will you truly be the master; then you will possess them body and soul.”

Even incels seem to agree that Houellebecq has nailed incel culture. On the incels Wiki, Whatever is described as “perhaps the most frank depiction of inceldom ever in literature.”

Houellebecq’s debut novel provides the definitive theory as to why incels exist and, indeed, why it is that current conditions will likely increase their number. The narrator provides his theory in his philosophical style during the book’s final third. It’s a quote that has become widely cited, including by the New York Times, who once hailed Houellebecq as the prophet of our sexual dystopia.

“...in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolutely pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never… It’s what’s known as the ‘law of the market.’ … Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

Going from pre-capitalism to capitalism, all humans are plunged into competition with each other. While mainstream discourse emphasizes the economic aspects of this struggle, Houellebecq was among the few to observe that the struggle has extended to the sexual domain.

In Whatever, it is apparent that achieving economic stability is ultimately unrewarding if it cannot lead to sex. The narrator tells us he earns two and a half times France’s minimum wage. “All in all I may consider myself satisfied with my social status,” he tells us. Tisserand is equally as secure materially. Yet neither man is truly a participant in society; rather, both are hapless bystanders. “The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable,” says the narrator.

This is a world in which God is absent. The narrator is lectured in the early going by a friendly priest. The priest tells him “Our civilization… suffers from vital exhaustion… We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it’s abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.”

It doesn’t seem entirely improbable that the narrator, even as nihilistic as he is, would seek refuge in God, and yet by the novel’s conclusion, such a possibility seems to have been foreclosed by the actions of the same priest. The priest has an affair with a young nurse (a nurse who, with the consent of her managers, euthanizes an old woman who was taking up a much-needed hospital bed).  The priest is subsequently abandoned by the nurse. For her, the dalliance was just an exciting distraction. So much for religious guidance in the Houellebecqian world!

If sexual adventures are among the most prized of all experiences in late-stage capitalism, yet distributed unevenly, just like all other goods, those on the losing side cannot help but feel they have failed at a primordial quest. In a secular society, they are robbed even of their inherent worth in the eyes of an all-seeing, all-knowing, forgiving and loving deity.

Have incels—especially men—made themselves unlovable? Sam Kriss has lamented that: “America keeps birthing these half-finished men, wasting their lives on video games, still watching cartoons, so turned in on themselves that there’s simply nothing there for another person to desire.” This isn’t to attribute blame solely to incels themselves. They did not spring from the earth with hate in their hearts. America—and indeed, Canada, and other countries—are “birthing” these kinds of young men.

Let’s consider the endless choices on offer for men in the Houellebecqian dystopia we inhabit: sports, pornography, Big Macs, monster trucks, 4chan, opioids, lap dances, all-you-can-eat buffets, The Whopper, Joel Olsteen, Joe Rogan, guns, sex dolls, Happy Hour, gaming, gambling, googling for nude celebrities, Jordan Peterson, Kanye, Andrew Tate… and all the way up to the godfather, the Donald. An endless diet bloviation and bile that will never satiate, never console, never endure. Sometimes it seems to me a minor miracle that any young man behaves with any decency whatsoever.

Yet, as has been noted by author Mary Gaitskill, involuntary celibacy (the plight of the incel) is by no means exclusively a male concern, even if the stereotypical incel is a young man. (The term incel was actually coined by a woman and then stretched far beyond its original meaning). Gaitskill writes, “If I was, say, 25 years old and had never experienced sex and tenderness (or sex and anything), and believed I never would have those experiences, because I was judged so utterly repulsive mostly based on my most superficial qualities, if I believed that there was no place for me in society—I too would be in a very ugly mood.”

Inceldom is like a host of other modern ills—ubiquitous mental health disorders, the housing crisis, climate crisis, and so on—birthed by capitalism and probably not solvable under its ongoing dominion. That Houellebecq saw this so clearly offers scant consolation. It’s Houellebecq’s world, and we’re just plodding through it pointlessly, in search of salvation, when the meaningful answers can only be found beyond this world.

NOTES

Last week I embarked on reading Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism and the World by Malcolm Harris. He writes, “Capital hit California like a meteor, alien tendrils surging from the crash site.” It strikes me as a book that Houellebecq would read with full agreement because Houellebecq has long acknowledged that to understand any worldwide phenomenon, you need to look to California first. That’s where the future is being born each day. Every part of the western world ultimately finds it own way of mimicking what’s going on in the Golden State. (Edmonton, for example, has a police helicopter in the sky on a regular basis, because we want to be a serious city, like Los Angeles.) I will have more to say about Palo Alto at some point.

This morning, I was on Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen. It’s starting to feel like an annual tradition. I was there again for back-to-school season, this time talking about Alberta’s social studies curriculum, along with Dr. Carla Peck. You can watch the discussion in full on Real Talk’s YouTube channel, where some of Ryan’s tens of thousands of viewers tune in.

I was also pleased to have an editorial I’d been puzzling away at for a while picked up and published by The Edmonton Journal.

Happy back-to-school season, all!

Books

Whatever, Michel Houellebecq, Serpent’s Tail. (Original French edition,  L’extension du domaine de la lutte was published in 1994).

Essays, articles, wikis, posts, etc.

“Whatever” (wiki synopsis)

https://incels.wiki/w/Whatever_(novel) 

"A French novelist imagined our sexual dystopia. Now it's arrived.” New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/books/review/michael-houellebecqs-sexual-distopia.html 

“The woman who founded the 'incel' movement.” BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45284455 

“Incels,” Mary Gaitskill

Incels

 

“When Reason Fails,” Sam Kriss

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/when-reason-fails/

Photo

Michel Houellebecq

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/michel-houellebecq-the-end/