No Hope In a Neoliberal World: On Michel Houellebecq’s Serotonin
Much-needed pessimism from France’s top literary export
Michel Houellebecq has nothing left to prove: his string of literary successes starting with novels like Whatever (1994) and peaking with best-selling ones such as Platform (2001) and The Map and the Territory (2010) have positioned him as France’s biggest contemporary literary export and one of the biggest references for contemporary Western postmodernist literature. He has also written essays, opinion editorials, and even a movie. However, that has not stopped him from continuing to write and, most importantly, from causing mixed reactions with his newer works that do not fear dealing with sensitive current events. In 2015, his dystopian novel Submission imagined what a Muslim-led Europe would look like; many qualified him then as indulging the fantasies of the far-right and repeating the same pessimistic script he is known for. In 2019, Serotonin was understood by many as needlessly bleak and pornographic perhaps so much that Houellebecq is producing parodies of himself unintentionally. Others praised him for his talent to predict the yellow vest movements in Paris through his representations of angry Normandy farmers who are tired of begging the state to protect them from competing with cheaper foreign products. So, what is it then: is Houellebecq’s latest fetishizing sadness or denouncing the state? The text is not as simple as either interpretation suggests.
It is true that Serotonin is extremely bleak. The first-person account of a bureaucrat named Florent-Claude who has worked in the field of agriculture but who has grown tired of his career and love life is never going to resemble a Prévert poem; Houellebecq never hesitates to show us how low the main character can sink. He abandons his promiscuous Japanese girlfriend and his luxury apartment and wanders around in hotels in the French capital, not knowing what to do with himself. In the process, he recounts his past failed relationships with other women. Notably, Florent once fell deeply in love with a veterinarian intern named Camille but blames himself for letting her go after cheating on her twice without knowing why. Camille provided him with years of happiness, and her departure left a hole in him that neither new relationships nor his booming career could fill. Near the end of the novel, he starts stalking Camille, who years later has her own practice and a 4 year-old son. He considers murdering her son so she would eventually reach out to him and they could be together, but fails to achieve the task and resigns himself to existing in a state of deep depression for the rest of his life. The fictional antidepressant Captorix allows him to wake up, eat, and take showers but, as his eccentric doctor tells him, will never be a solution for the emotional pain he is experiencing. This blunt doctor suggests hiring sex workers to alleviate the pain as a final effort to keep him alive. It is not a mystery why many reviewers found it displeasing to confront such an open, hopeless representation of mental illness.
The social commentary, on the other hand, is easier to swallow. Florent’s college friend Ayméric is an aristocrat who believes in sustainable farming but is forced to rent out rooms to tourists in get by. Left by his wife who got into a relationship with a younger pianist, Ayméric has no reason to keep living but his cows. Soon, he and his fellow dissatisfied farmers from Normandy stage a protest where as many as 10 of them are killed; Ayméric commits suicide by standing in the way of the authorities and shooting himself. The protest makes national and international headlines, but the situation of French farmers under the open trade encouraged by the European Union is probably not getting any better. In spite of the several snarky remarks Houellebecq’s protagonist makes about communists, it is clear that the author firmly believes living under neoliberalism is causing distress on several people whose occupations and fields are being dismantled by its imposition. Although Houllebecq is unsatisfactorily not proposing any specific solution to the decay of the Western man, he is at least using his pen to talk about how society as it exists now destroys people’s reasons to live. Released shortly after the start of the yellow vest protest, Serotonin was for obvious reason seen as part of the pleas from the French working and middle-classes to rethink the current political establishment.
Overall, Serotonin is not necessarily communicating a new message nor innovating literature but rather commenting on the current state of France and the world without embellishing it even a little. Things are bad. Even a well-off white man living in Paris struggles to make sense of life in a neoliberal world: antidepressants help people get up but will never replace lost relationships (and might even cause impotency and obesity, among other side effects), the political elites don’t think or care much about the consequences of their actions, and, most importantly, people witness evil and do not feel compelled to solve it. Hearing all of this can be very uncomfortable , yes, but maybe we need to keep hearing it if we want things to ever change. Maybe we simply need to read a book where a man thinks through the murder of a child and his own suicide to realize some reforms and conversations require urgency.
