Banal Catastrophes and Catastrophic Banality in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme

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ABSTRACT In the novels of Michel Houellebecq, innumerable catastrophes befall his characters, and sometimes humanity as a whole. Plateforme (2001) opens and closes with two such catastrophes, yet the catastrophe that preoccupies most its protagonist and other Houellebecq characters is one that, to their minds, has been unfolding since the moral, sexual, and economic revolution of the 1960s: the loss of Westerners’ capacity to establish and maintain human relationships outside of the logic of late capitalism. This protracted catastrophe has rendered contemporary life so isolating, passionless, and insipid that it has left us wishing for new kinds of acute catastrophe just to distract us momentarily from our baseline misery. Through a reading of Plateforme in particular, this article argues, however, that in Houellebecq’s world, banality and catastrophe are in fact two sides of the same, dismal coin: catastrophes, so very common there, always have an embarrassing touch of the banal, and banality is never anything short of catastrophic. Both, in the end, make human life unbearable, a message with which much of Houellebecq’s work at least appears to conclude.