Houellebecq and Science

Michel Houellebecq has a very poor opinion of 20th-century culture. The polemic French writer reckons that Science and Technology are the real intelectual and economic forces of our time. Also the biggest human successes of the last hundred years. In comparison, Houellebecq claims, humanistic culture has been an involution, a disaster.

20th-century intelectuality has been almost totally rubbish, he argues in his 2006 article coming out of the 20th century. Left wing thinkers are phony. Literature is useless. But there is, concedes the controversial author, one literary genre which can be saved from the general wreckage: science-fiction. Oddly, a form of fiction usually dispised, looked down upon by critics. Houellebecq praises, in particular, Clifford D. Simak´s City (1952).

Science fiction, as a literary genre, is a humanistic thing, but one closely linked to Science and Technology. We could say it is the literary creature of what French intelectuals call Techno-Science. SF written from the 1950 onwards, reasons Houellebecq, may not have the elegance of old fantastic fiction from the turn of the 19th century into the 20th (Wells, Stevenson). But SF is however, the form of fiction of today which has to tell the things most worthy of consideration on the human condition. And its place on planet Earth and the Universe that holds it.

The turning point for it all was Hiroshima. The human tragedy of the bomb defined also a dramatic shift in man´s view of science, unanimously positive so far. That opened the door for Science to become the stuff of literature and drama. A big human affair at last, so to speak.

Science is an usual presence in Houellebecq´s works, like Atomized or Posibility of an island. Its impact in reality, nature and even culture is there. And, in the case of Atomized, the possibility of it changing the (according to Houellebecq) sorry human condition, no less, and its anavoidable suffering. Something no reconversion of the political or social frame will ever achieve. In Michel Houellebecq, Science is, ironically, the ultimate humanistic force.