Houellebecq at the End
On September 25, the state of Alabama executed Alan Eugene Miller using nitrogen hypnoxia. A mask was placed over the prisoner’s face and flooded with nitrogen, depriving him of oxygen, rendering him unconscious, and slowly suffocating him. During Alabama’s previous execution by nitrogen, the prisoner Kenneth Smith was seen to thrash violently while strapped to the table. When Miller asked about this during a deposition, the state’s lawyer told him that a medical expert had said that if Smith had cooperated and taken deep breaths during his execution, he would have lost consciousness much sooner. “You’re basically telling Kenny Smith to cooperate with y’all killing him” Miller replied. “I’m not quite understanding. You’re telling me to practice killing myself.” Maya Foa of the human-rights group Reprieve called the use of gas for execution akin to human experimentation: “Whether by lethal injection or nitrogen suffocation, the myth of the ‘humane execution’ is a lie fewer and fewer people believe.”
Two days earlier, police in Switzerland arrested multiple people after a woman ended her life using a suicide pod created by the company Sarco. The Sarco pod can be 3D-printed, assembled at home, and operated without medical supervision. Once a person inside has activated it, the BBC reported, the pod is flooded with nitrogen, reducing oxygen levels rapidly and leading to unconsciousness and death in ten minutes. To avoid discomfort, it is recommended that a person take deep breaths as nitrogen floods the pod. According to its creator Philip Nitschke, the machine allows for a “quick, peaceful and dignified death.”
The juxtaposition of the two events was unintentional but illustrative. While the myth of humane inflicted death may be declining, the myth of quick, peaceful, and dignified chosen death is very much on the rise. In both September cases, the method of killing was effectively the same and proclaimed reliable and humane by its proponents. Perhaps more than anything else, ethical debates about death reveal the logic of our deeply held beliefs—in this case, our valorization of autonomy and expressive individualism. Increasingly we see execution as the inexcusable erasure of an individual, and suicide as his rightful apotheosis.
The Sarco pod used in September had on its base a quotation from Carl Sagan: “We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” No secular author has cut through such drivel more publicly than Michel Houellebecq. In 2021, as the French National Assembly debated a law “giving and guaranteeing the right to a free and chosen end of life,” France’s most famous novelist wrote a sharp critique of the proposal. He discussed the likely reactions of religious groups to the bill. “Catholics will do their best to resist,” he wrote, “but, sad to say, we have more or less got used to the idea that the Catholics always lose.” This is consistent with Houellebecq’s view throughout his novels: Catholicism has compelling ideas, but is ultimately unable to combat the acids of modernity. Priests, rabbis, and imams will give way and offer encouraging last words to euthanasia candidates, he predicted. Buddhist Lamas would view euthanasia as even worse, given that death throes offer a final chance to be free of the cycle of rebirth: “Any early interruption of death-agonies is thus a frankly criminal act; unfortunately, Buddhists rarely intervene in public debate.”
In his conclusion, Houellebecq famously argued that euthanasia was “a question of life and death,” not just for individuals but for societies:
And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country—a society, a civilization—gets to the point of legalizing euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else—another country, another society, another civilization—might have a chance to arise.
It is impossible to read Houellebecq’s latest novel Annihilation (Anéantir) without this essay in the background. The novel focuses on two plotlines involving Paul Raison, a high-level civil servant in a loveless marriage. At the same moment, Paul’s friend and boss Bruno begins to prepare for a presidential campaign, and his father suffers a massive stroke, rendering him first unconscious and then unresponsive. This tragedy makes Paul and his siblings return to their childhood home and gradually rekindles the passion he and his wife once shared. In the meantime, a terrorist network seeking to disrupt global trade and technological progress begins a campaign of bombings—which Paul’s father may know something about given his continued work in the secret service even after retirement.
These two threads, political and professional, allow Houellebecq to examine modern life in the face of death and debility. Houellebecq has made a name for himself as a cataloguer of loneliness, sex, and despair, all of which feature prominently in the novel. Paul and his wife, Prudence, have the kind of upper-middle-class life they set out to attain, and it has left them with “a kind of standardized despair.” When his mother died, Paul’s father began a relationship with a woman named Madeleine. After the stroke, Paul is moved to discover that his father and Madeleine had set up a joint bank account, something he and Prudence had never done. This fact of accounting prompts him to see that “his father had plainly had access to levels of human experience that remained unknown to him.”
The loneliness in his marriage has been the norm of Paul’s life, a wall that only sexual desire could sometimes break down in his youth. As for most Houellebecq protagonists, that desire is primary, strong, and described in crude, frank terms. Sex takes place entirely within an immanent frame, occasionally reinforcing a bond between two people but never resulting in new life or the attainment of anything transcendent. Indeed, over the course of the novel, Prudence as a character, and their marriage, both fail to deepen. As Paul approaches death, Prudence’s main form of consolation is new kinds of arousal.
The stroke prompts Paul to reflect on his father’s life in contrast to his own. With his silence and unflinching gaze, his father has become oracular and priestly, and Paul is astonished to find himself confessing to his father that he regretted not having children. He comes to recognize that the problem of children is both personal and professional, a matter of his own happiness and the survival of the social order he has worked to uphold:
Family and marriage: those were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organized in the first half of the twenty-first century. Other solutions had been imagined, in vain, by people who had had the merit of sensing that the old solutions were worn out, even if they could not come up with new ones, and whose role in history had therefore been entirely negative. The liberal doxa persisted in ignoring the problem, in the naive belief that the lure of material gain could be substituted for any other human motivation, and could on its own supply the mental energy necessary for the maintenance of a complex social organization. This was quite plainly false, and it seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if one could not at present predict the date or the manner in which this might occur—but the date could be close, and the manner violent. So he found himself in that strange situation in which he was working steadily, and even with a certain devotion towards the maintenance of a social system which he knew was condemned beyond repair, and probably not in the very long term.
Perhaps the root of Houellebecq’s despair lies in recognizing the inability of immanence to satisfy us and sustain our society, but lacking the faith and will to escape it. As his father improves, Paul considers whether he and his partner still have a sex life: “If his father could get an erection, if he could read and contemplate the movement of leaves stirred by the wind, Paul said to himself, then he was lacking absolutely nothing in life.” Houellebecq’s characters think that this should be enough for happiness, but find out that somehow it is not.
The book takes a turn when Paul discovers that his chronic jaw pain is not just impacted teeth but cancer. The plot, while entertaining enough thus far, becomes most effective as a backdrop to illustrate the disruptive quality of death—how it suddenly disconnects us from the drama of our lives when it approaches. The presidential election and his father fade, and Paul is left with Prudence in their apartment as his cancer progresses and treatment fails.
Annihilation offers multiple case studies on death and debility. Paul’s father turns out not to be “vegetative,” but attains a dignified life in his own home. His brother Aurélien ends a toxic marriage and falls for a nurse in his father’s facility, only to commit suicide when it seems that his ex-wife has destroyed the possibility of their new life. It is clear that Aurélien’s death is unnecessary and renders a verdict of absurdity on an already diminished life. Given his work as a restorer of tapestries and guardian of culture, I found it hard not to see him as a symbol of Europe as a whole.
As for Paul, when he discovers that the most aggressive treatment would entail removing his jaw and tongue, he immediately decides not to pursue it. We are left to determine whether this is prudence or cowardice, though his Catholic sister Céline clearly deems it the latter. “Your life belongs to the people who love you,” she urges him, “you belong to Prudence first and foremost, but also a bit to me, and maybe to other people that I didn’t know, you belong to other people, even if you don’t know it.”
But Paul does not want his tongue cut out, and radiation is ineffective. He begins to reflect on death by turning to Pascal, then trades philosophy for the escapism of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. He rejects the Wicca to which Prudence has turned and considers the possibility of reincarnation and nirvana. But in the end, death for him is not a form of release or ascent, but, as the title suggests, annihilation. Paul knows that his consciousness will disappear, that he will fade from others’ memory over time: “he had always seen death as absolute destruction, like a terrifying plunge into nothingness.”
Throughout his career, Houellebecq has had a talent for publishing on topics right as they explode in public life. It is fitting that this book appears in English now, when across the Channel, Parliament has taken the first steps to legalize assisted suicide. Our debates about assisted suicide and euthanasia tend to sugarcoat death’s horror. The Sarco pod could have easily come from a Houellebecq novel. The sadness of Michel Houellebecq lies in the accuracy of his diagnosis and the failure of his prescription: He sees that death is the last enemy, but not that it might be destroyed.
Image by Brandon and licensed via Adobe Stock.