Michel Houellebecq

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Michel Houellebecq
Houellebecq in 2016
Houellebecq in 2016
BornMichel Thomas
(1956-02-26) 26 February 1956 (age 68)
Saint-Pierre, Réunion, France
OccupationNovelist, filmmaker and poet
NationalityFrench
Notable worksAtomised
The Map and the Territory
Submission
Notable awards

Michel Houellebecq (French: [miˈʃɛl wɛlˈbɛk]; born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956 or 1958)[1][2] is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer.

His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.

An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel Platform led to Houellebecq being taken to court for inciting racial hatred (he was eventually cleared of all charges). He subsequently moved to Ireland for several years,[3] before moving back to France, where he currently resides.[4] He was described in 2015 as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer."[5] In a 2017 DW article, he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature".[6]

In 2010, he published The Map and the Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In 2015, his next novel, Submission, sparked another controversy for its depiction of Islam. He was also recently accused of plagiarism concerning Submission.[7][8] Anéantir was published in 2022.

Personal life

Houellebecq was born in 1956 on the French island of

Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called Karamazov (named after Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel) and wrote poetry. He graduated in 1980, married and had a son; then he divorced, and became depressed.[11][12]

He married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier, in 1998. They divorced in 2010.[11]

His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior, and a student of his works.[13][14]

Works and rise to fame

Michel Houellebecq, Warsaw, June 2008

Houellebecq's first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine

French National Assembly, before he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation", starting to gain fame in 1994 with his debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, published by Maurice Nadeau (translated in English by Paul Hammond and published as Whatever). It reads as a first-person narrative, alternating between realistic accounts of the (unnamed) protagonist's bleak and solitary life as a computer programmer, and his idiosyncratic musings about society, some of which are presented in the form of "animal fictions"; he teams up with an even more desperate colleague (he is a virgin at the age of 28) who later gets killed in a car accident, which triggers the narrator's mental breakdown and eventual admission in a psychiatric hospital
; even there, he theorizes about his condition being the direct result of the contemporary social configuration, rather than a personal failure or mental illness.

Throughout the 1990s, Houellebecq published several books of poetry, including Le sens du combat in 1996 (translated as The Art of Struggle, which, in a 2005 video interview for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he cited as his most accomplished book to date, the one he would usually choose if compelled to read whatever he wanted among his published works), and articles in magazines (such as Les Inrockuptibles) or more confidential literary publications (such as L'Infini[15] edited by Philippe Sollers). Most of those texts were later collected in Interventions (1998, expanded in 2009 and 2020). At that time, he lived at the same address as fellow writer Marc-Édouard Nabe, at 103, rue de la Convention in Paris. Nabe wrote about this proximity in Le Vingt-Septième Livre (2006), comparing both neighbours' careers and the way their writings were met by critics and audiences.[16][17]

His second novel,

paedophilia, torture, as well as for being an apology for eugenics (Michiko Kakutani described it in The New York Times as "a deeply repugnant read"[19]). The novel won Houellebecq (along with his translator, Frank Wynne) the International Dublin Literary Award
in 2002.

In 2000, Houellebecq published the short fiction

fringe religions. His subsequent novel, Plateforme (Platform, 2001), was another critical and commercial success. A first-person romance narrated by a 40-year-old male arts administrator named Michel, who shares many real-life characteristics with the author, including his apathy and low self-esteem, it includes a depiction of life as hopeless, as well as numerous sex scenes, some of which display an approving attitude towards prostitution and sex tourism
.

The novel's explicit

terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
.

His next novel, La Possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island, 2005), cycles between three characters' narratives: Daniel 1, a contemporary stand-up comedian and movie maker renowned for his extreme causticity, alternating with Daniel 24 and then Daniel 25, neo-human clones of Daniel 1 in a far future; Daniel 1 witnesses dramatic events by which a sect named the Elohimites (based on Raëlism) changes the course of history, and his autobiography constitutes a canonical account that his clones are compelled to study, both in order to acquaint themselves with their model / ancestor's troubled character (since the Elohimites' chief scientist's purported project of mind uploading turned out to be a failure) and to distance themselves from the flaws of humans. Houellebecq later adapted and directed a movie based on this novel, which was a critical and commercial failure.

In 2008, Flammarion published Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World (Ennemis publics), a conversation via e-mail between Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in which both reflected on their controversial reception by the mainstream media, and elaborated on their tastes and influences in literature, among other topics.

Houellebecq has also released three music albums on which he recites or sings selected excerpts from his poetry. Two of them were recorded with composer Jean-Jacques Birgé: Le sens du combat (1996, Radio France) and Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance (2007, Grrr Records, which Houellebecq considers the best of his recording endeavours, as handwritten in the libretto). Présence humaine (released in 2000 on Bertrand Burgalat's Tricatel label, and featuring musical arrangements by Burgalat himself), has a rock band backing him, and has been compared to the works of Serge Gainsbourg in the 1970s; it was re-released in 2016 with two additional tracks arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier (who famously worked on Histoire de Melody Nelson) and a booklet featuring notes by Mishka Assayas and texts by Fernando Arrabal.

A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of

free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. The original French title of Whatever, Extension du domaine de la lutte (literally "broadening of the field of struggle"), alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has absolute winners and absolute losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not value monogamy but rather exhorts people to seek the happiness that always eludes them through the path of sexual consumerism, in pursuit of narcissistic satisfaction. Similarly, Platform
carries to its logical conclusion the touristic phenomenon, where Westerners of both sexes go on organized trips to developing countries in search of exotic locations and climates. In the novel, a similar popular demand arises for sex tourism, organized and sold in a corporate and professional fashion. Sex tourists are willing to sacrifice financially to experience the instinctual expression of sexuality, which has been better preserved in poor countries whose people are focused on the struggle for survival.

Although Houellebecq's work is often credited with building on

sociologist Michel Clouscard
.

His novel

Lautreamont or Jorge Luis Borges, and advocated the use of all sorts of raw materials in literature, including advertising, recipes or mathematics problems.[22]

On 7 January 2015, the date of the

National Front, is ruling the country according to Islamic law, which again generated heated controversy and accusations of Islamophobia. On the same date, a cartoon of Houellebecq appeared on the cover page of Charlie Hebdo with the caption "The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq," eerily ironic in retrospect.[23] For the second time, his fictional work appeared to echo real events involving Islamic terrorism, although Submission does not feature acts of terrorism and eventually presents conversion to Islam as an attractive choice for the protagonist, a typically "houellebecquian" middle-aged man with a fixation for young women. A friend of his, Bernard Maris, was killed in that shooting. In an interview with Antoine de Caunes after the shooting, Houellebecq stated he was unwell and had cancelled the promotional tour for Submission.[24]

In January 2019, Houellebecq was made a Chevalier of the

Yellow Vests movement
.

Adaptations

Extension du domaine de la lutte has been adapted into a film with the same title by Philippe Harel, and later adapted as a play in Danish by Jens Albinus for the Royal Danish Theatre.

The English translation of his novel Platform was adapted as a play by the theatre company Carnal Acts for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in December 2004. A Spanish adaptation of the novel by Calixto Bieito, performed by Companyia Teatre Romea, premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival. Houellebecq and Bieito appeared together that same year in a TV program named Au cœur de la nuit / Durch die Nacht (Through the night) for the French-German channel Arte.

Along with Loo Hui Phang, Houellebecq wrote the screenplay for the film Monde extérieur (2002) by David Rault and David Warren.

Atomised has been made into a German film, Elementarteilchen, directed by Oskar Roehler, starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Franka Potente. The film premiered in 2006 at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. It was poorly received and generally considered a watered-down take on the novel's bleakness and thought-provoking ideas.

The film

Le Jour et la Nuit
, although some authors found him intriguing and recognized redeeming qualities.

American rock singer and "godfather of punk" Iggy Pop released in 2009 the unusually quiet album Préliminaires, which he described as influenced by his reading of Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island (one track 'A Machine for Loving' even consists in the singer merely reading a passage from the book over a musical accompaniment.). The author considered it a great honour, as he was himself deeply affected as a teenager by Iggy Pop's music with The Stooges,[26] even going so far as to say that he was, for once, "completely happy".

In 2016 he participated, together with Iggy Pop and several others, in Erik Lieshout's documentary To Stay Alive: A Method, based on his 1991 essay.

Views on politics and religion

In 2014, Houellebecq drew up a "project for a new constitution" based on direct democracy which would render the president of the republic elected for life, but instantly revocable by a simple popular referendum, and would permit the people to elect judges.[27] During his 21 June 2016 appearance on Le Petit Journal, Houellebecq said that he voted for the Socialist Party ticket headed by Anne Hidalgo and Jérôme Coumet in the 2014 Paris municipal election. In 2017, Houellebecq explained that he "doesn't believe in an ideological vote, but a vote based on class" and that "there is a class which votes for Le Pen, a class which votes for Mélenchon, a class which votes for Macron, and a class which votes for Fillon. I am part of the France which votes for Macron, because I am too rich to vote for Le Pen or Mélenchon."[28]

In 2002, during an interview about his book Platform published in the literary magazine Lire, Houellebecq remarked:

Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been from the moment it appeared. Fortunately, it is doomed. On one hand, because God does not exist, and even if someone is an idiot, he will eventually realize that. In the long run, the truth will triumph. On the other hand, Islam is undermined from the inside by capitalism. We can only hope that it will triumph rapidly. Materialism is a lesser evil. Its values are contemptible, but nevertheless less destructive, less cruel than those of Islam.[29]

He faced trial on charges of racial hatred after calling Islam "the dumbest religion" ("la religion la plus con") in the same interview. He told a court in Paris that his words had been twisted, saying: "I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims [but] I have as much contempt as ever for Islam."[30] The court acquitted him.[31] He was sued by a civil-rights group for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression.[26] Houellebecq extended his critique to monotheistic religions in general: "The fundamental monotheistic texts preach neither peace nor love nor tolerance. From the start, they were texts of hatred."[32] In what he has said will be his last novel, Aneantir, Houellebecq has seemingly softened his view on Christianity, though by no means seems to be a convert.[33]

He has been critical of attempts to legalise euthanasia in France and Europe, writing in April 2021 in Le Figaro that:

when a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise.[34][35]

In an interview with Front Populaire magazine on 16 November 2022, he claimed: The "Great Replacement" is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no conspiracy orchestrated by the elite but there is a "transfer" of people from Africa, where the birth rate is high ... What we can already see is that people are arming themselves. There will be acts of resistance, reverse Bataclan, attacks aimed at mosques as well as cafés popular with Muslims ...The objective of the local French population is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them or another possibility, that they go away.

He also blamed the US for importing

White Supremacy to become trendy in the United States."[36]

Reception

Literary critics have labelled Houellebecq's novels "vulgar", "pamphlet literature" and "pornography"; he has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia.

Salon, later editor of The Paris Review
, made a spirited defense:

Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn't, his compassion can blow you away.[40]

Ten years later, Houllebecq responded to critical reviews:

First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn't bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I've become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they've already got their idea about me. To some degree of course, that's true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer can't expect to be read. The critics have made up their minds.[26]

According to the Austrian feature-writer Anne-Catherine Simon, Houellebecq's oeuvre shows "great continuity: as a long story of western decadence".[41]

In an interview with Agathe Novak-Lechevalier Houellebecq characterised himself as "the author of a nihilistic era and the suffering that goes along with nihilism".[42]

Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has criticised Houellebecq's stance on Lovecraft.[43] An essay by Todd Spaulding makes the case for why Houellebecq portrayed Lovecraft as an "obsolete reactionary" whose work was based largely on "racial hatred."[44][further explanation needed]

However, Christopher Caldwell defends Houellebecq for his overall depictions of technological loneliness and cultural alienation:

Certain basic things that important novelists do, Houellebecq does not. Great novels usually concern the relationships, institutions, and ideals out of which the "bourgeois" social order is knit together—marriages, schools, jobs, piety, patriotism. But in our time, relationships fail to take root. Institutions fall apart. The visible social order seems not to be the real one. Many novelists limit their vision to those narrow precincts where the world still makes sense (or can be made to make sense) in the way it did to Balzac or Flaubert ... Houellebecq is up to something different. He places his characters in front of specific, vivid, contemporary challenges, often humiliating and often mediated by technology: Internet pornography, genetic research, terrorism, prescription drug addiction. This technological mediation can make his characters seem isolated, and yet it is an isolation with which any contemporary can at least empathize. The Outsider is Everyman. Houellebecq's reputation as a visionary rests on his depiction of what we have instead of the old bourgeois social order.[45]

Selected publications

Main article: Michel Houellebecq bibliography

Filmography

Audio albums

  • Le Sens du combat (1996) Paris: Les Poétiques de France Culture.
  • Présence humaine (2000) Paris: Tricatel.
  • Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance (2007) Paris: Grrr.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 9780810879454.
    Riding, Alan (10 September 2005). "The French Still Obsess Over Their Gloomy Novelist of Despair". The New York Times. Archived
    from the original on 7 November 2017. Retrieved 19 February 2017.
  2. ^ In his own 2005 autobiographical account, "Mourir", published on his – now defunct – personal website following the publication of the aforementioned biography, the author explained that he was "more likely" born in 1958, and that his mother, by her own admission, managed to have the date changed on his birth certificate to allow him to enter school at age four, as she was convinced that he was intellectually gifted. "I was born in 1956 or in 1958, I don't know. More likely in 1958. My mother always told me that she had faked the birth certificate so that I could go to school at age four instead of six – I guess that there was no pre-school at the time. She had convinced herself that I was intellectually precocious [un surdoué] — because at age three, so was I told, I had learned to read by myself, using cubes, and one evening coming home she had found me, utterly surprised, casually reading the newspaper. That she may have had the power to do so, there is no doubt: the birth certificates were handwritten and roughly made, and she really was among the dignitaries in La Réunion, she had influent acquaintances [...]."
  3. ^ The Sex Export the Independent on Sunday, 21 August 2005
  4. ^ "Michel Houellebecq assure que son nouveau livre n'est pas une "provocation" En savoir plus sur". Le Monde. 4 January 2015. Archived from the original on 4 January 2015. Retrieved 4 January 2015.
  5. ^ Angelique Chrisafis. Michel Houellebecq: "Am I Islamophobic? Probably, yes" Archived 20 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian, September 2015; accessed 6 November 2017
  6. ^ "A selection of France's best contemporary writers | DW | 11.10.2017". Deutsche Welle. 11 October 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
  7. ^ "El Hadji Diagola, écrivain franco-sénégalais, poursuit Houellebecq et ses éditeurs pour plagiat".
  8. ^ "El Hadji Diagola contre Michel Houellebecq au tribunal judiciaire de Paris – Jeune Afrique". 19 January 2022.
  9. ^ "La possibilité d'une Elle". Seb the Player. 3 December 2014. Archived from the original on 15 July 2015. Retrieved 12 February 2015.
  10. ^ Chrisafis, Angelique (7 May 2008). "Guardian.co.uk". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 7 May 2008.
  11. ^ a b "French writer Houellebecq finds 'happiness' in third marriage: friend". France 24. 23 September 2018. Retrieved 27 April 2020.
  12. ^ "Michel Houellebecq | Biography, Books and Facts". www.famousauthors.org. Retrieved 27 April 2020.
  13. ^ "Complément d'enquête Michel Houellebecq : Moi, moche et méchant ?". 5 September 2019.
  14. ^ "Spa-ing partners".
  15. ^ De Gaudemar, Antoine (2 October 1997). "Retour en enfance. L'infini, La question pédophile, N°59, automne 1997, Gallimard, 143pp., 86F". Liberation. Archived from the original on 23 June 2016. Retrieved 17 April 2017.
  16. ISBN 978-2-406-05910-3
    , retrieved 27 February 2020
  17. ^ Dupuis, Jerome (29 January 2009). "Mon voisin Houellebecq". L'Express. Archived from the original on 29 January 2018. Retrieved 17 April 2018.
  18. TheGuardian.com. Archived
    from the original on 4 February 2018. Retrieved 4 February 2018.
  19. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (10 November 2000). "Unsparing Case Studies of Humanity's Vileness". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 29 January 2018. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  20. ^ "France's Cassandra: why Michel Houellebecq predicts an Islamist". Evening Standard. 8 January 2015. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
  21. ^ Davies, Lizzy (8 September 2010). "Houellebecq fights off claims of plagiarism in new novel". The Guardian, Main section, p. 16. Published online (7 September 2010) as "Michel Houellebecq novel ruffles literary world again" Archived 7 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 15 September 2010.
  22. ^ Lichfield, John (8 September 2010). "I stole from Wikipedia but it's not plagiarism, says Houellebecq". The Independent. UK. Archived from the original on 11 September 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2010.
  23. ^ "The telegraph". 7 January 2015. Archived from the original on 4 February 2018. Retrieved 4 April 2018.
  24. ^ "The telegraph". 13 January 2015. Archived from the original on 4 February 2018. Retrieved 4 April 2018.
  25. ^ "Légion d'honneur: Houellebecq et les champions du monde de foot distingués". Le Monde. Paris. 1 January 2019. Archived from the original on 1 January 2019. Retrieved 1 January 2019.
  26. ^ a b c d Susannah Hunnewell (2010) 'Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206 Archived 19 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine' Fall 2010 The Paris Review.
  27. ^ "Michel Houellebecq présente un projet politique dans "Lui"". Libération. 29 April 2014. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  28. ^ Guyonnet, Paul (5 May 2017). "Michel Houellebecq : "J'appartiens à la classe qui vote Macron"". Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  29. ^ Aïssaoui, Mohammed (30 December 2014). "Houellebecq et Plateforme : "La religion la plus con, c'est quand même l'islam"". Le Figaro. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  30. ^ "French author denies racial hatred". BBC News. 17 September 2002. Archived from the original on 23 December 2006. Retrieved 8 January 2015.
  31. ^ The Australian (10 August 2010) 'Has Mad, Bad Michel Houellebecq Come in From The Cold?' Arts Section [1] Archived 2 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine]
  32. ^ "Poursuivi pour injure, Michel Houellebecq est relaxé". Le Monde. 22 October 2002. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  33. ^ "Houellebecq, joy and Jesus". The Critic. 19 June 2023.
  34. ^ "Michel Houellebecq: "Une civilisation qui légalise l'euthanasie perd tout droit au respect"". LEFIGARO (in French). 5 April 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2021.
  35. ^ "Michel Houellebecq arremete contra la legalización de la eutanasia". RFI. 6 April 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2021.
  36. ^ "Michel Houellebecq and the far-right radicalization of a best-selling author". Le Monde.fr. 22 December 2022.
  37. ^ "Michel Houellebecq Profile at the European Graduate School. Biography, bibliography, photos and video lecture". Saas-Fee, Switzerland: European Graduate School. Archived from the original on 24 February 2011. Retrieved 30 January 2011.
  38. ^ Perry Anderson, Dégringolade Archived 10 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, London Review of Books, September 2004.
  39. ^ "The Elementary Particles (Atomised) by Michel Houellebecq". The Complete Review. Archived from the original on 25 November 2010. Retrieved 31 January 2011.
  40. ^ Stein, Lorin (23 October 2000). "What to Read in October". Salon, Published online (23 October 2000) as "What to Read in October" Archived 3 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 8 November 2011.
  41. ^ Anne-Catherine Simon (7 January 2016). "Houellebecqs Welt: Von der Dekadenz zur "Unterwerfung"". Die Presse. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  42. ^ In: Michel Houellebecq: Ein bisschen schlechter. Dumont Buchverlag Cologne 2020.
  43. JSTOR 26868554
    .
  44. JSTOR 26868505
    .
  45. ^ Christopher Caldwell (March 2020), "A Bellow from France",[2] March 2010 Commentary.

External links

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