"In cemeteries all across the world, the recently deceased continued to rot in their graves, slowly becoming skeletons."†
It is your 30th birthday. Drenched in sweat, you wake up and realise that something, at some point, must have gone horribly awry. You thought you'd be different. You thought you'd learn from other people's (poor, misguided souls as they may be) mistakes, their intimate disasters, their defective, crippled lives. But you didn't. Then, one day, you stumble across a book your friend proclaims:
Fight Club for the clever ones.
"Wasn't Fight Club itself supposed to be for the clever ones?" you smirk, snug in the pastel safety of your tastefully furnished bachelor pad (courtesy of your parents), a bit of pseudointellectual rhetorics (courtesy of your education), a lot of pseudoartistic ambition (courtesy of your bloated ego) and a lot less imagination (courtesy of trying to imitate anything that's remotely successful) that, with a bit of postmodern irony thrown in for good measure, all help you become a well-oiled (if a little grumpy... er, sorry, existentialist) cog in a well-oiled machine. Lower-middle-class, omega-male human shell, version 2.006.
The Lost Kingdom. Strange Moments. Emotional Infinity. Tatoo these.
You grow your hair (independence) and grow your beard (worldly wisdom) and wear glasses (intelligence) and pump your pecs (physical prowess) and steer clear of (gasp!) a day job and get yourself a squash racket and a snowboard and a secondhand aluminium Powerbook and a proper girlfriend, pretty but not too pretty, clever but not too clever, sexually cognizant, definitely wife material. You intend to age together. You take some drugs but not too much, not to fuck up your already shaky attention span.
"All of us are failures; we all die."††
You write some poetry and think, neither particularly well. You struggle to envision yourself as a success. Just then, your copy of The Elementary Particles arrives. You read it and smirk. Then you just read it. By the time you will have finished (or, should I say, it will have finished with you), the cliché-ridden ego-trip you've been subscribing to under the guise of your liberal arts career path implodes only to viciously reassemble its shards into something pretty much the same as before, but oh so very different.
Michel Houellebecq is to blame for everything.
Bruno and Michel are half-brothers. Bruno wants to fuck, just to fuck. Michel, on the other hand, is more spiritual. It takes both of them 264 primal pages to die†††. On the plus side, they are in good company -- the rest of humanity is taken along for the ride. Think Sartre and de Sade writing The Stand minus the flu bit. What if the end of the world has already happened, you think, only CNN failed to notice? Occam's Razor wasn't invented just for kicks, you know. You think of your unborn kids as existential assailants from the future. Fine. You recalculate your family's net worth twice a week. Obviously. But do you really believe the few pitiful moments of sexual release (scarce and forgettable affairs at the best of times) are the only reason for hanging around a bit longer? In case your answer is a resounding Yes!, well, this has just come in, courtesy of our Parisian correspondent:
So do 6 billion people.
Huh? But how will all that affect you personally, you wonder? Brace yourself buddy, bad news is coming. For all intents and purposes, you're dead meat. "What, just now?!" I hear you cry in an indignant voice. You've only just started to fancy your little precious life, lustfully eyeing the transient pleasures to be derived at a convenient date, some surplus cash, some quality action at the nudist colony at Cap d'Agde, the works! You were only about to exercise your "personal freedom". All your life you have been taught to fight for your "personal freedom" fucking tooth and nail, and now this?! How's that for unfair? You thrash, google "to unread", book a shrink, crave prettier bodies, begin to click on penile implant links, a dying animal realising the hunter was just a figment of its imagination; but so was the food.
What's an ugly, balding, divorced 40-year old with no money, a history of depression and a penchant for fucking to do?
Hm... How about writing a bestselling novel? The proceeds from IMPAC itself would have afforded him a decent hair transplant. But then, this kind of money renders the very reason for getting a hair transplant superfluous. (He still got it, though). Your envy is sharp like a blade of a fractal knife: he had been through all this and survived, broken but undefeated, whereas you had drowned, so that he could bask in metaphysical glory. Writhe and squirm, like he predicted, writhe and squirm. Wallow in it, you don't have that much left anyway. You have a reluctant revelation. You understand.
Détournement, anyone?
You will live exactly like that, becoming yet another Houellebecqian sockpuppet — an actor (or actress, should you be pathologically unlucky) in a play entitled The Third Metaphysical Mutation of Mankind®, vaccinating yourself against life by embracing apathy, gleefully bathing in its dull pain until it just about dissipates in the bottomless pit of misery you share with the rest of us, losers. Yes, you belong here, too. You're no better, you just thought you were. Come on, give in, finally. You know you want to.
Make Gaspar Noé proud.
You sigh with relief. You didn't quit but life fired you anyway. You kind of expected it, especially after that last disastrous performance review. You are angry, but not very. The pay was nothing to write home about and you had to work twenty-four seven. You feel resentment, but just a little. You did jackshit in life, but so did everybody else. Meanwhile, rogueishly buddhist in its omnipresent rage, The Elementary Particles relentlessly assembles itself page after heart-wrenching page, to be multiplied ad infinitum in the Knopf factory of the printed word, ISBN-tatooed and price-slapped just in time to be released onto unsuspecting hordes of hopeful zombies, somewhat confused and clueless with no-one left to infect.
Zen Fury '99.
That is, if a political novel about gratuitious sexuality, revolution, suicide, feminism, snuff and a minor inconvenience in the form of the end of the world can have anything even remotely zen to it. You didn't believe books could mess with your head anymore, did you?
This w/u is dedicated to noderkind.
† Michel Houellebecq celebrates the new millennium.
†† John Fowles (1926-2005), The Aristos (revised edition), Picador, 1993, p.49.
††† Michel disappears around page 253. Bruno is dead to the world from page 244. The rest of you fuckers are six feet under by page 264.
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