Michel Houllebecq and the Pursuit of Happiness

Abstract

Michel Houellebecq has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French literature. His books of poetry, La Poursuite du bonheur (1992), Le Sens du combat (1996), Renaissance (1999), and his novels, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Les Particules elementaires (1998) and Plateforme (2001), have received such prestigious awards as the Prix de Flore, the Prix Tristan Tzara and the Prix National des Lettres. His work has been championed by arguably the most important French press phenomenon of the nineties, Les Inrockuptibles, which has published many of his journalistic and theoretical articles. In the work of Michel Houellebecq, we find a backlash against contemporary concerns with textuality, and, in broader political and cultural terms, disaffection with Ie liberalisme, with its individualistic pursuit of happiness. Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958 in La Reunion, but soon moved with his parents to metropolitan France. His mother and father split up early in his childhood, and he was sent off to a boarding-school in Meaux. According to his official web-site, 'Son pere, guide de haute montagne, et sa mere, medecin anesthesiste, se desinteressent tres vite de son existence'. 1 At six years old, he was taken into the care of his paternal grandmother, whose surname he has adopted as his pseudonym. For Houellebecq, his parents were 'les precurseurs du vaste mouvement de dissolution familiale qui allait suivre'. While his parents indulged in sexual liberation and gauchiste spontaneity, 'I' image du bien, pour moi, c' etait mes grands-parents, qui m' elevaient'z: hard-working, monogamous, generous and Communist in politics representative of a world on the brink of extinction. Houellebecq trained as an agronomist, before working as a computer technician in the Assemblee Nationale. He was briefly married, from which he has a son. He divorced and intermittently was treated for depression in psychiatric clinics. As a poet, he was first published thanks to Michel Bulteau, director of La Nouvelle Revue de Paris. Houellebecq would join Bulteau on the editorial committee of another review, Digraphe, under the directorship of Jean Ristat, lover of Louis Aragon and prominent intellectual of the Communist Party. Houellebecq was also cinema critic for Ristat' s revived version of Les