Michel Houellebecq Research Articles

Two Solitudes

Abstract Contemporary French novelists Michel Houellebecq and Yannick Haenel may seem to have little in common, but in fact both are given to making pronouncements about the state of Western civilization, and each has been described as prophetic in this regard. Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019) and Haenel’s Tiens ferme ta couronne (2017) are both stories whose protagonists isolate in their apartments, and—from that remove—proceed to, ostensibly, see the world for what it really is. Looming in both novels is a twenty-four-hour-news-cycle culture that serves as the ultimate prophet of doom. Haenel’s hero finds in solitude the critical distance from that culture needed to formulate an alternative vision of the world and exorcise the horror just enough to find hope. In Houellebecq’s novel, that distance is impossible, as his hero, a self-proclaimed “telemancer,” remains obsessed with cable news and as, on a deeper level, Houellebecq’s style merges seamlessly with the news cycle’s fearmongering logic.

Unicestwiany. Czy Michel Houellebecq napisał patografię?

This article discusses the relationship between two types of pathography, the fictional (Michel Houellebecq’s Anéantir) and the authentic (Philippe Lançon’s Le Lambeau). The aim is to establish the status of the fictional pathography in the field of illness narrative.

Social Acceleration and the Dehumanization of the Subject in the Works of Michel Houellebecq

Notions of movement and mutability are fundamental to Michel Houellebecq’s œuvre. His theoretical text “Approches du Désarroi” (1998), includes an extensive critique of how contemporary urban infrastructure fosters personal, social and communicative acceleration to the detriment of the human subject. Contemporary urban architecture, with its myriad transportation and communication hubs, acts in his words as “un immense dispositive d’accélération et de rationalisation des déplacements humains” (1998). Yet, as his œuvre demonstrates, such urban structures only serve to dehumanize and alienate as their productivist principles refashion individuals into modular and more efficient beings. Houellebecq analyzes famous Parisian landmarks in terms of how they embody this phenomenon, including la Gare Montparnasse, and la Défense, “un pur dispositif productiviste”. His ideas make an important contribution to the scholarship of social acceleration, which has become increasingly popular over the last two decades. This article therefore seeks to understand better an area of Houellebecquian studies that has hitherto received little scholarly attention, expounding not only the full significance of his view of social acceleration and rationalization but also their role in influencing the author’s literary and other creative works.

Global lokalisering

Global localization. Google Earth and the experience of place attachment in GeoGuessr, Houellebecq and Darrieussecq The purpose of this article is to analyze literary texts and other cultural practices that relate to or use content from Google Earth and, more generally, to outline what I call a contemporary glocal experience of place. The article discusses the browser game GeoGuessr and the interactive music video “The Wilderness Downtown” by Arcade Fire, along with the novel La Mer à l’envers by Marie Darrieussecq, and different works, including photographs and poems, by Michel Houellebecq. In all these instances, the transmissions, slippages, and tensions between a situated and embodied experience of place and global technological systems play a prominent role. The article shows how GeoGuessr and “The Wilderness Downtown” explore this tension from opposite points of departure: while the game fosters a sense of place within locales that are essentially unknown to the player, the music video integrates images from places that are related to the viewer’s personal memories into an otherwise impersonal animated video. In turn, Darrieussecq’s novel combines and narrativizes these opposing perspectives. Here, Calais represents a globalized space that can only be understood through glocalizing technologies, such as geoposititioning and interactive mapping. But Clève, the hometown of the protagonist, becomes unmoored through the same interaction with these technologies. Finally, the article highlights the “Houellebecq perspective” in novels, poems, and photographs. In these recurring scenes, the world is seen from above (through satellite imagery, on maps, or through airplanes windows). They revolve around the tension between the aerial view and the “horizon structure”, which permits the subject to place itself in the world and in relation to others.

Writing the History of Neoliberalism in the Contemporary French Novel: François Roux and Michel Houellebecq

Structured around pivotal elections in France and the United States, recent novels by François Roux and Michel Houellebecq weave together fictional characters with their historical referents, tracing a history of neoliberal economics and its effects on political processes and personal lives. By directly staging the history of Neoliberalism, both Roux and Houellebecq are able to invoke an experience of sudden awareness in their characters—the dedicated businessman Tanguy can, for example, come to view automation as a “genocide of workers” at a climactic moment. By coupling narrative with historical fact, both authors accomplish the difficult task of producing shock at developments so widespread that they have come to be considered inevitable and immune to the influence of democratic politics.

Traces of Transhumanism in Michel Houellebecq’s Novel Elementary Particles

Transhumanism sees the next step of the evolution of humanity in technology, together with the developments in the twentieth century and the influence of positivism. As a modern repetition of the golem myth, it desires to use technology as o tool for a stronger, smarter, non-sick, even immortal humanity. Transhumanists developed in an environment where the influence of humanism was reduced due to materialism and they aim to create a super human through technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and cloning, and tries to bring humans to a higher position. In literature, which is a close follower mirror of social developments, transhumanist works are frequently encountered as they create a suitable environment for the development and discussion of transhumanist ideas. Therefor Transhumanism has become an important subject in world literature and has attracted the attention of French authors, especially with the twenty-first century. Michel Houellebecq, one of the leading figures of contemporary French literature, is famous for deeply processing existential themes and bringing striking subjects such as religion, nudity and the human condition into his novels by refence. His novel Elementary Particles, published in 1998, problematizes the potential return of transhumanist ideas, human desires and technological advances, while depicting a modern society where life has lost its meaning with the advancement of scientific developments. This article aims to reveal the author’s ideas for the future of humanity in a world driven by the increasing use of technology while critically investigating the traces of transhumanism in Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles. After providing an overview of the foundations of the theory by creating a framework for understanding the concept of transhumanism, the study tries to reveal the author’s transhumanist ideas and the potential consequences of transcending human boundaries by making use of important themes and passages in the novel.

Possible Worlds, Possible Selves in the Works of Michel Houellebecq

ABSTRACT There exists a sharp divide amongst literary scholars about whether or not Michel Houellebecq’s works reflect aspects of the living author’s opinions and biography. In a new analysis of Houellebecq’s creative practice, this article seeks to avoid the pitfalls to which either side of the debate is prone by considering his works as expressions of ‘the possible’ and, in particular, as explorations of the ‘possibilities’ within his own life. Houellebecq has himself explained the creative process through which his protagonists come into being in terms of the counterfactual and the possible—‘j’ai pris un évènement réel de ma vie et je me suis demandé qu’est-ce qui se serait passé dans ma vie si j’avais pris la décision opposée’—having previously affirmed that they represent ‘Ce qu’on pourrait être et qu’on n’est pas’. This article therefore proposes that his fictional universe can be read as an exploration of Possible Worlds, that is to say, non-actualized worlds that may have eventuated if circumstances in reality had taken a different turn. By extension, his protagonists, including his self-portrayals (in his novels, films and other mediatic projects) are frequently potentialities of the author, his story worlds depicting what he ‘might have become’.

‘Doing a Houellebecq’ in the Age of Screens: Trolling, Selfies and Textual Bricolage

ABSTRACT Contrasting with readings of his work that strive to shackle the author to the traditional French nineteenth-century literary canon, this article argues that Michel Houellebecq can be understood as a novelist of the Facebook generation. To put it another way, this article considers what happens when a novelist who began his literary career stressing the insufficiency of literature (in Extension du domaine de la lutte, 1994) keeps on writing. Not only does he persist, but he does so against the background of an ever-accelerating evolution in the technologies, channels and modes of reading towards a post-literate age. This article thus considers the cultural logics of the digital moment—including re/appropriation, information overload, online trolling and the curation of online identities—and how they illuminate the themes, texture and politics of Houellebecq’s work. This argument is illustrated through examples drawn from Houellebecq’s Sérotonine (2019) and also briefly considers how the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm might prove a helpful frame through which to view the work of the French novelist. Sérotonine, I argue, is far from the novelist’s most accomplished novel, but demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the forms and structures of contemporary online experience.

Niclouellebecq

ABSTRACT This essay explores the work relationship between Guillaume Nicloux and Michel Houellebecq. It argues that the collaboration between the whimsical director and the novice actor does not simply serve Houellebecq’s interests by allowing him to further curate his persona. More significantly, it reveals Houellebecq’s ability to act and allows Nicloux to explore a new approach to his filmmaking that eventually yields a paradigmatic shift in his praxis.

Banal Catastrophes and Catastrophic Banality in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme

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.

Migration and immigration in Europe and its edges

ABSTRACT Literature of the twentieth and twenty-first century is often concerned with migration, immigration, and exile. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, narrate the lives of immigrants and refugees and the negotiations between migrants and host nations. They trace the transformations on the idea of Europe and how it is challenged in the face of socio-historical crises. Kapka Kassabova’s Border belongs to a long tradition of Eastern European writing that engages in a dialogue with the idea of Europe. Viewed from its edges and through narratives of migration, Europe emerges as a geographical, linguistic, and cultural space whose oneness is an impossibility considering the stories of dislocation housed in its cities.

Particules Flottantes : Mutable Identity and Postmodern "Schizophrenia" in the Works of Michel Houellebecq

Abstract: Michel Houellebecq's representations of selfhood, both in his theoretical works and literary oeuvre, depict the self as unstable, decentered or fluid, evoking postmodern theory about the dissociative nature of the self. In his essay "Approaches to Distress" (1997), he posits the notion of the "mutable self," and, for the unmoored protagonists of his novels, self-identity becomes increasingly fractured and fluid as they are engulfed by what the author terms "the market society." Herein, the individual is enjoined to adapt and change (in consonance with market forces, consumer tastes, social trends) while fixed values and identities are swept away by the mutability of capitalism. In his representations of selfhood, Houellebecq evokes the theories of Baudrillard and Jameson concerning postmodern schizophrenia, the latter eschewing clinical definitions of the term to offer a diagnosis of the subject's fractured psychical apparatus and loss of subjectivity in postmodernity.

Houellebecq's Platform : The Detective Novel and Its Infinite Boundary

Abstract: Michel Houellebecq's Platform is a novel that intentionally provokes and disturbs through creative engagement with the detective novel. The novel highlights the versatility of detective fiction and how through subversion and the intentional breaking of the genre's rules and boundaries the author can construct a form of resistance. Thus, an investigation into the intention and effect of Houellebecq's use of the detective novel will help us see how this particular genre shapes his narration and themes. Traditionally, detective fiction is known for its coherence and narrative closure; however, it is apparent that Houellebecq's Platform undermines these conventions and instead focuses on ambiguity and disorientation and, in the end, offers no resolution. Through the employment and subversion of the detective tropes, the novel highlights controversial perspectives and beliefs and forces the reader to confront their own assumptions about genre, narration, and resistance.

Reason and Faith: Desacralization and Resacralization in Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq, L’Anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, and Le Voyant d’Étampes by Abel Quentin

Reason and Faith: Desacralization and Resacralization in Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq, L’Anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier, and Le Voyant d’Étampes by Abel Quentin

Rural Revolt: The Scale Problem in Houellebecq and Norris

Abstract: This article discusses the implications of farmers' insurrections suppressed by state power in Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). In both cases, the disparity in scale between the farmers' organization and the larger forces set against them (the European Union and the French police, for Houellebecq; the railroad trust and U.S. marshals, for Norris) not only dictates the narrative outcome but also animates a set of questions around globalization, masculinity, the sociological meaning of place, and the relationship between the natural and mechanized worlds. Both novels' conclusions can be read as a surrender to scale, although the two authors' perspectives treat that surrender with ostensibly opposed reactions.

Happiness as an Impossible Horizon: On Andrei Platonov and Michel Houellebecq

This article offers an analysis of the short story Dzhanby Andrei Platonov written in the early 20th century, and the novel The Possibility of an Islandby Michel Houellebecq penned in the early 21st century. Genre-wise, both works navigate between utopia and dystopia. The text explores the potential for happiness in conditions of a primordial, pre-modern society (in Dzhan) and in the context of hypermodernity (The Possibility of an Island). The article questions: What happens to the perfect utopian machine and the pursuit of happiness today? Or,how does the absence of desire and imagination, the lack of a lasting yearning for future horizons, as an essential existential aspect of humanity, undermine even the in human itself?

Infedeltà nel trasferimento delle collocazioni nella traduzione dei romanzi di Michel Houellebecq dal francese all’italiano

Building on my PhD project, this paper explores fidelity challenges in the transfer of verb-nominal collocations (VNC) in the Italian translations of seven of Michel Houellebecq’s novels. I examine various kinds of infidelity, such as omissions, errors, incongruence in constituent transmission, incoherence in recurrent VNC transmission, and infidelity at the level of phraseological coverage. The accurate transfer of collocations is crucial for preserving the style and the vibrancy of the source text. Errors, omissions, and unjustified transformations in the target language speak to the complexity of the translation process. My analysis explains the multifaceted nature of collocations and contributes to a nuanced understanding of their role in literary translation.

Représentations sociales et engagements littéraires : Étude comparée de La Carte et le Territoire de Michel Houellebecq et Le Septième Jour de Yu Hua

This article analyses the social representations and literary engagement of Michel Houellebecq and Yu Hua through their respective novels: The Map and the Territory and The Seventh Day. Interactions between the authors and their societies would also constitute another aspect of our work. Nowadays, France and China are marked by a "society of the spectacle" and a "liquid present": a society of the spectacle that stifles the nature of human beings and erases their individuality and creativity, as well as a liquid present that represents the perpetual instability of modernity favoring eternal competition and thus producing restless and fragmented individuals.

Nothing new under the sun: the Five Scrolls read Houellebecq

The novels of Michel Houellebecq and the Five Scrolls in the Jewish Scriptures are mutually illuminating in their portrayal of human life in the context of a secular or post-secular world with its wistfulness about meaning and about God.

Problémom nie sú muži, ale ľudia

The concepts of gender, gender role, gender identity, gender stereotypes, and the relationships between them are explained in the introduction of the study. The main topic is focused on essays about the relationship between masculinity and femininity, its genesis, and consequences in the contemporary life authored by the professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge Mary Beard, the French writer Michel Houellebecq, and Jessa Crispin, the editor-in-chief of Bookslut. The essays resolve male-female power relations differently. Mary Beard offers the concept of over-gender, i.e. universality freed from the conditioning of gender identity.Michel Houellebecq dreams about human cloning and creating a new nature based on a single law, which is the moral law. Jessa Crispin prefers the world of equality based on humanity, built on the ruins of patriarchy, and shared by all people without distinction.