Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq 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 and his next novel, Atomised in 1998, which brought him international fame as well as controversy. 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, before moving back to France. In 2010, he published The Map and the Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In 2015, his novel, Submission, sparked controversy for its depiction of Islam and was later accused of plagiarism. Annihilation was published in 2022. He was described in 2015 as "France's biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer" and called himself "probably islamophobic". In a 2017 Deutsche Welle article, he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature".
Early life and education
Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas on the French island of Réunion in 1956. His mother Lucie Ceccaldi was a French physician of Corsican descent, born in Algeria, his father René Thomas was a ski instructor and mountain guide. Houellebecq's official date of birth is 26 February 1956, although he has sometimes stated that he may have actually been born in 1958.He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his paternal grandmother. In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website, he states that his parents "lost interest in existence pretty quickly", and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her recent boyfriend. His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name. Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux north-east of Paris, as a boarder. He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for grandes écoles. He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called Karamazov and wrote poetry. He graduated in 1980.
Career
Houellebecq worked as a computer administrator in Paris, including at the French National Assembly to support himself as a writer. His first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue. Six years later, in 1991, he published a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the programmatic subtitle Against the World, Against Life. A short poetical essay named Rester vivant : méthode appeared the same year, dealing with the art of writing as a way of life – or rather, a way of not-dying and being able to write in spite of apathy and disgust for life. It was followed by his first collection of poetry, La poursuite du bonheur.In 1994 his debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was published and he started to gain fame. Eventually he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation".
Throughout the 1990s, Houellebecq published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996, 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 edited by Philippe Sollers). Most of those texts were later collected in Interventions.
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, comparing both neighbours' careers and the way their writings were met by critics and audiences.
An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel 'Plateforme 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, before moving back to France.
Works
His debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte was published by Maurice Nadeau, a first-person narrative, alternating between realistic accounts of the 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 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.In 1998 his second novel, Les Particules Élémentaires translated by Frank Wynne and published in the English-speaking world as Atomised in the UK, or The Elementary Particles in the US was a breakthrough, bringing him national and soon international fame and controversy for its intricate mix of brutally honest social commentary and pornographic depictions It narrates the fate of two half brothers who grew up in the troubled 1960s: Michel Djerzinski, who became a prominent biologist, highly successful as a scientist but utterly withdrawn and depressed, and Bruno Clément, a French teacher, deeply disturbed and obsessed by sex; Djerzinski eventually triggers what is labelled as the "third metaphysical mutation" by retro-engineering the human species into immortal neo-humans. The book won the 1998 Prix Novembre, missing the more prestigious Prix Goncourt for which it was the favourite. The novel became an instant "nihilistic classic" and was mostly praised for the boldness of its ideas and thought-provoking qualities, although it was also heavily criticized for its relentless bleakness and vivid depictions of racism, paedophilia, and torture, as well as for being an apology for eugenics. The novel won Houellebecq the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002.
In 2000, Houellebecq published the short fiction Lanzarote published in France with a volume of his photographs, in which he explores a number of the themes he would develop in later novels, including sex tourism and fringe religions.
His subsequent novel, Plateforme, 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 criticism of Islam—the story ends with the depiction of a terrorist attack on a sex tourism venue, later compared to the Bali bombings which happened the following year—together with an interview its author gave to the magazine Lire in which he described Islam as "the dumbest religion," which remark led to accusations of incitement to ethnic or racial hatred against Houellebecq by several organisations, including France's Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League as well as the mosques of Paris and Lyon. Charges were brought to trial, but a panel of three judges, delivering their verdict to a packed Paris courtroom, acquitted the author of having provoked 'racial' hatred, ascribing Houellebecq's opinions to the legitimate right of criticizing religions. The huge controversy in the media subsided following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
His next novel, La Possibilité d'une île, 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 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 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, 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 and Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance. Présence humaine, 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 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, 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.
His novel La Carte et le Territoire was released in September 2010 and finally won its author the prestigious Prix Goncourt. This is the tale of an accidental art star and is full of insights into the contemporary art scene. Slate magazine accused him of plagiarising some passages of this book from French Wikipedia. Houellebecq denied the accusation of plagiarism, stating that "taking passages word for word was not stealing so long as the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes," evoking the influence of Georges Perec, Lautreamont or Jorge Luis Borges, and advocated the use of all sorts of raw materials in literature, including advertising, recipes or mathematics problems.
On 7 January 2015, the date of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the novel Submission was published. The book describes a future situation in France, set in 2022, when a Muslim party, following a victory against 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. 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.
In January 2019, Houellebecq was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. His novel Sérotonine was published in the same month. This time, one of the novel's main themes, a violent revolt from desperate farmers, appeared to echo the Yellow Vests movement.