Michel Houellebecq

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 (To Stay Alive) 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 (The pursuit of happiness).

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 (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.

An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel Plateformeled 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.

Personal life

In 1980, age 24, Houellebecq married for the first time and had a son; he divorced, and became depressed.

In 1998 he married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier. They divorced in 2010.

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

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 La Possibilité d'une île, directed by Houellebecq himself and based on his novel, premiered in France on 10 September 2008. It was a critical and commercial failure, sometimes even considered one of the worst films ever made in France, alongside Bernard Henri Levy's 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 of 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, 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 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.

He faced trial on charges of racial hatred after calling Islam "the dumbest religion" ("la religion la plus con") in the same 2002 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." The court acquitted him. He was sued by a civil-rights group for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression. 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." In what he has said will be his last novel, Anéantir, Houellebecq has seemingly softened his view on Christianity, though by no means seems to be a convert.

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. 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."

In a 2019 interview, Houellebecq described his views on Catholicism and Europe's need for the Catholic faith.

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

[W]hen 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.

In 2020, conservative American journalist, Christopher Caldwell, defended 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.

In an interview with Front Populaire magazine in November 2022, he stated: "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 poor countries, where the birth rate is high ... What we can already see is that people are arming themselves. There will be acts of resistance, reverse Bataclans, 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 "woke" culture into France. He went on to add: "Our only chance of survival would be for white supremacy to become trendy in the United States."

Although Houellebecq's work is often credited with building on conservative ideas, his critical depiction of the hippie movement, New Age ideology and the May 1968 generation, especially in Atomised, echoes the thesis of Marxist sociologist Michel Clouscard.

Literary critical reception

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

His works, particularly Atomised, have received high praise from the French literary intelligentsia, with generally positive international critical response, though there have been poor reviews in The New York Times by Michiko Kakutani and Anthony Quinn, in the London Review of Books by Perry Anderson, as well as mixed reviews from The Wall Street Journal. However, without ignoring the book's grotesqueries, Lorin Stein from 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.

In 2010, Houellebecq 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.

According to the Austrian feature-writer Anne-Catherine Simon in 2016, Houellebecq's oeuvre shows "great continuity: as a long story of western decadence".

In a 2020 interview with Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, Houellebecq characterised himself as "the author of a nihilistic era and the suffering that goes along with nihilism".

In 2018, Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has criticised Houellebecq's stance on Lovecraft. 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."

Houellebecq's novels have been classified as satire since 2015.

Legal dispute

In 2022, Houellebecq participated in an experimental erotic film titled KIRAC 27, produced by the Dutch art collective Keeping It Real Art Critics (KIRAC). The project involved Houellebecq engaging in explicit scenes with multiple women, with the stipulation that his genitals would not appear in the same shot as his face. However, upon viewing the film's trailer, Houellebecq sought to halt its release, alleging an invasion of privacy and labeling the project defamatory.

In response to Houellebecq's legal efforts to prevent the film's distribution, the Amsterdam District Court did not directly rule in favor of KIRAC. Instead, the court attempted to mediate a compromise by ordering KIRAC to provide Houellebecq with a complete copy of the film for review before its release. This decision aimed to address Houellebecq's concerns while allowing the film to proceed under certain conditions. Despite this, Houellebecq continued to contest the film's release, leading to further legal proceedings.

The controversy surrounding the film led to a significant rift within KIRAC. In 2022, founding member Tarik Sadouma left the collective to focus on The Unsafe House in Amsterdam, an avant-garde project exploring provocative and “unsafe” ideas. His departure and the ensuing fallout were partly attributed to creative differences and ethical concerns related to the film KIRAC 27.

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.