Atomised (or its more literary title Elementary Particles--a translation of the French Les Particules Élémentaires) dissects the current crisis festering in contemporary Western culture. The title was chosen to emphasize the ever continuing expansion of individualism with its ever increasing alienation of human beings from each other and even from their true feelings, leading to psychological stress, depression, pessimism as to the future, with bodily deterioration and death waiting at the end.
Most cultures have in the past and many even in the present still stress the group with its discipline and ingroup character and its extended family to the exclusion of the individual. A human being in such a society totally adrift from his fellow humans and not bound by their shared cultural norms and belief-sets is unthinkable. In such cultures the very idea is an oxymoron. Such people in ancient Greece were known as idiots. Cultural norms and customs bind the single person in a complex web of ways of doing things and a common shared worldview. But since the Renaissance and with ever increasing intensity in the West the solitary individual stands alone facing the world like a sheet blowing in the wind, pushed this way and that by countervailing forces. The late German philosopher, Ernst Cassirer, considered culture to be self-liberating. Atomised takes a view 180-degrees from this optimistic appraisal. Rather it is self-suffocating and alienating.
Culture should function as a womb to shelter humans from the harshness of physical reality. As Western culture entered into its modern phase beginning with the rise of modern science and its increasing insights into physical reality, it has become ever more clear that physical reality is directed by strict laws that physics has revealed. There is no morality at the level of physical reality. A tsumani can inundate towns and cities and kill thousands as it did in 2004 in southeast Asia. A hurricane can swamp a town killing hundreds as it did in New Orleans in 2005. These things have no intention. They are neither good nor evil. They happen due to the exercise of physical laws. Couple that with the disappearance of god (the Death of God) in many parts of the industrialized West, and the solitary human is left in the predicament of following her or his own moral code. In short Western culture has become unhinged. It has lost its mooring. The loss of religion as a bulwark against extreme individualism was also made almost 70 years ago by Max Horkheimer in his Eclipse of Reason. The steady erosion of Western culture from its origins and its history.
Modern science is mute on religion. One might say that modern technology, the offspring of modern science, has filled in for the role religion used to play in terms of providing a vision for the future. Heaven on Earth by the triumph of modern technology. Western culture has turned increasingly to hedonism, both sexual and sensual through the consumption of more and more consumer goods and services (the bling-bling culture), to assuage its dwindling capacity to find meaning in life. Rampant consumerism also drives the wheels of capitalism, the chief economic force of the Western world and now much of the rest of the world also.
Disturbing ideas along these lines keep popping up at unexpected junctures in Atomised. Houellebecq also throws in information regarding how certain lifeforms carry on in their unique lifeworlds, reminding the reader of the enormous variety of lifeforms that exist on Earth. Homo sapiens is just one of an almost uncountable multitude.
The book centers around two half-brothers, Bruno (born 1956) and Michel (born 1958). Both share the same mother, Janine who changes her name to Jane to appear more “cool” during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which she heartily embraces. Jane left one man (Bruno’s father) to marry another (Michel’s father), who disappears in Tibet. She leaves Bruno as an infant with her parents in Algeria and she leaves Michel with his paternal grandmother, leaving her free to pursue Hippy hedonism and New Age mysticism. Left without a mother at very young ages leaves both men suffering from the lack of maternal love. Bruno finds solace in sex (most of it in his head) and Michel finds it in science: quantum theory and its application to molecular biology. Bruno eventually finds love but it is short-lived. Later in live (when he was 40) Michel has a chance for love with a woman, Annabelle, whom he saw on a regular basis as a teen. A woman who always loved him and wants to bear his child. Although he consents, Annabelle has developed advanced uterine cancer and dies without ever having had his child. Human life is transitory. Within the scope of the universe, a mere flash before it burns out and is extinguished forever.
After the suicide of his lover Bruno lives out the rest of his days in a psychiatric clinic. Michel relocates to Ireland to conduct research at the Galway Centre for Genetic Research. County Galway is literally at the geographic end of the Western world. Ireland’s atmosphere is strange, haunting, and unique where “the sky, the sea, the light converge.” [p. 365]. Like being on a different planet.
Eventually Michel’s molecular biology research bears fruit. He has found a way to implement genetically the grand vision of Julian and Aldous Huxley during the 1930s, both of whom believed that biology would make the next great thrust forward in human evolution in the 20th century, even before the discovery of the DNA molecule (Watson and Crick, 1953). He has found a way that human beings can be cloned indefinitely and thus achieve immortality.* His life work being done he disappears, presumably a suicide by drowning in the ocean.
In summary Atomised scrunitizes not only the lives of its two chief protagonists, Michel and Bruno, but steps back to examine the entire cultural milieu in which they are embedded and portrays a devastating picture of modern Western culture. It is not a cheery read and is not for the gentle reader. Unlike academic philosophy with its jargon-filled pedantic argumentations, it is cultural philosophy in novel format for the seasoned reader.
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* Possibly Houellebecq had read about the research of Dr. Daniel Martinez who in the early 1990s studied the longevity of Hydra vulgaris, a multicellular invertebrate. Under conditions where the Hydra are fed regularly and live in an environment where the temperature is not allowed to get too high, they can reproduce by budding off clones of themselves. Martinez published a paper of his work in 1998.
Whether such a phenomenon would work with human beings is moot. Even if it did, cloning only ensures that the exact genome is preserved, not the person. If you had a clone, it would have your genome. Although your genome controls many things regarding your body, it does not determine your conscious “I,” that which makes “you” who you are not physically but “you” that arises from your lifelong memories, experiences and interactions within the culture and lifeworld that you inhabit. Your clone would have different experiences and interactions. In short, your clone would not be “you.” Your genome would be immortal but “you” as a person would not be. Unless I read Atomised incorrectly, Houellebecq does not make this crucial distinction.
NOTE: It should be duly noted that the US version of Les Particules Élémentaires is titled The Elementary Particles (2001). There is a separate entry for The Elementary Particles in Amazon Books and many more reviews than under Atomised. It would have been helpful to correlate the two as it is the same book only with a different cover. The cover of Atomised displays a semi-nude woman who I am supposing to be Janine/Jane, the mother of Bruno and Michel. I also like the title Atomised better as I have been using the phrase “our atomized society” with the same meaning it has in Atomised long before I read Atomised.
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