Mimetic Themes in the Literature of Michel Houellebecq

This paper treats Girardian themes in the fiction of the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, considered one of the leading voices in contemporary European fiction. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously declared "Hell is other people," for Houellebecq hell seems to be the individual left to his (almost always his for Houellebecq) own devices.

Although a productive novelist for over four decades, Houellebecq, born in 1956, has never seemed more contemporary than now. His most recent novel, Annihilation, takes place in the near distant 2027, and deals with radical social upheaval brought on by cyber terrorists whose targets (both international shipping routes and sperm banks) leave their political affiliations uneasy to discern. This paper focuses on themes in Annihilation (2022) but also brings them into conversation with the most salient Girardian themes from earlier novels, specifically The Elementary Particles (1998),The Map and the Territory (2010), Submission (2015), and Serotonin (2019). 

Long a curiosity to Girardians, Houellebecq's Annihilation, takes up the claims of Girard directly, especially regarding mimetic or triangular desire, and rejects them wholesale: "Amusing on paper, the theory is in fact false." (p. 335). Yet curiously, the main character, Paul Raison, comes to realize that the model for his real-life partner is a fictional character in the movie, The Matrix; in other words, he gives a textbook example of external mediation. This paper takes up the tension that lies at the center of so many of Houellebecq's central characters, a series of similar but unique men who experience profound loneliness and harbor violent impulses that recall Dostoevsky's "underground man" and Nietzsche's proto-incel.

A central feature of Houellebecq's fiction is the near conversion. Central characters in almost all of his novels come to the brink of Christianity. These experiences happen through pilgrimage to Marian sites (Submission), encounters with holy people (Elementary Particles), and the reading of Pascal (Annihilation). Yet his characters, who often come to realize the limits of secularism and liberalism (understood anthropologically), rarely take the plunge. The novels portray "romantic deceit" and "novelistic truth" but the conversion does not transpire. Still, the paper will argue that Houellebecq's fiction counts as "novelistic" in the Girardian sense despite lacking the late, bedside conversion scene so central to Girard's argument in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. This is so despite the last 100 pages of Annihiliation being essentially an extended deathbed scene. 

Of particular interest in this paper is Houellebecq's reading of the French literary tradition. Like Girard, who traces the changing social hierarchies as portrayed in the history of French literature and their effects on the mediation of desire, Houellebecq highlights the inability for literature to mediate desire given the proliferation of popular culture and the widespread availability of pornography. Nowhere does this rise to the surface more forcefully when the protagonist in Elementary Particles compares the social statuses between Bill Gates, Snoop Dogg, and a the Duchess of Guermantes, as portrayed in Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in the context of the same character rereading the French classics.

This paper ultimately reads Houellebecq as Girard reads Nietzsche: a kind of genius with his pulse on the real currents in contemporary society, at the very brink of what Girard calls "Christian revelation" but ultimately unable to accept its truth and thus thrust back to nihilism. Just as Girard found much to learn--not just about modernity but about Christianity--from Nietzsche, so this paper concludes that those interested in mimetic theory have much to learn from Houellebecq. His fiction confirms what Girard says about the great novelists, that they have more to teach about the human beings than all of the human sciences. In conversation with the leading interpretations of Houellebecq, it reads Houellebecq as deeply flawed but also prophetic, and as a novelist whose fiction may prove more true to the reality unfolding before us than many of us would like to imagine.