"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..."
With this devastating line, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion - particularly in the bedroom - which characterizes the early 21st century.
Ours is an age in which people continue to fuck and to feign an interest in romance, but their fascination for eroticism is completely artificial and they are, in fact, bored beyond stiffness by the endless orgy in which they find themselves; thus the growing need for pornography, sex toys, and Viagra.
We simply don't feel or even truly understand what fictional lovers such as Cathy and Heathcliff are said to have felt; their passion has become embarrassing and slightly repulsive. We don't want intense emotional commitment; rather, we prefer to fake our own feelings and simply replay old scenarios whilst lacking in any conviction. For us, sex is all about a nostalgic staging of desire and its dispersal.
Ultimately, all we'll be left with are the signs and simulations of sex circulating via the media creating a world characterized by what Baudrillard refers to as virtual indifference. This will doubtless have many consequences, including the fact that novels, such as Emily Brontë's
classic, will become impossible to read, or even talk about in and on our own terms; as evidenced, for example, in Peep Show series 7, episode 3.
