Science Fiction As Historical Novel: Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules Elementaires (Part V: Future Fictions) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Revolutions are thus the great periods of [hu]mankind because in and through them such rapid upward movements of human capacities become widespread. (1) Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel. This article offers a reading of Michel Houellebecq's science fiction novel Les Particules elementaires as both a provocation to the human sciences and as an historical novel in the classical sense given this term by Lukacs. These two readings, I hope to demonstrate, are interrelated. Reading this novel as an historical novel involves a certain amount of licence, since it is predicated on the notion that we read it from the point of view of the post-humans who are its writers. Thus what is required is something like 'content apprehended as form', to reverse the demand made by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious. (2) Through the form-content dialectic, I hope to reveal an important contradiction in Houellebecq's work between the naturalism of his Utopian solution and the historicism of the form of his novel. This is a contradiction--Jameson includes it among his postmodern 'antinomies'--which I hope to show has significance for the future of the human sciences themselves.