Michel Houellebecq

Michel Thomas (Saint-Pierre, Reunion Island, February 26, 1956), known as Michel Houellebecq, is a French poet, novelist and essayist. His novels Enlargement of the battlefield , Elementary particles and Platform became landmarks of the new French narrative for their description of affective misery and sexuality of Western man at the end of the XX and beginning of the XXI. Those novels gave him literary consideration, but also gave rise to the so-called "Houellebecq phenomenon", which sparked many passionate debates in the international press.

Biography

Michel Houellebecq (pronounced [miˈʃɛl wɛlˈbɛk]) was born in Saint-Pierre, on the island of Réunion, the son of René Thomas, a mountain guide, and Lucie Ceccaldi, a medical doctor and anesthetist who graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Algiers, both communist militants. His name was chosen by his parents after their visit to Mont-Saint-Michel. Apparently his mother would have falsified his birth certificate to age him for two years, because she believed that he had talent: he would not be born in this way on February 26, 1956, as indicated on his birth certificate, but on February 26, 1958.

According to his own statements, his parents lose interest in him very early; the couple separates, and a stepsister is born soon after. At first, it is his maternal grandparents, in Algeria, who take care of him, then, after his parents' divorce, his father recovers him by force of a coup and entrusts him to his paternal grandmother, Henriette Thomas, née Houellebecq, also fervent communist, whose maiden name the writer adopted as a pseudonym in recognition of her.

After having been a high school student in Meaux, he attended preparatory classes for the grandes écoles at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris (where he was reportedly beaten by his classmates, a fact reflected in Elementary Particles) already in 1975, he joined the National Agronomic Institute of Paris-Grignon (INA PG) where he would go up the steps progressively. In Agro, he founded the short-lived magazine of literary criticism Karamazov , for which he wrote some poems and began shooting a film called Crystal of Suffering . He graduated from school in 1978, an agronomist with a (fortuitous) specialization in 'Development of the natural environment and ecology'. A period of unemployment allowed him to resort to literary creation: he had a decisive meeting with Michel Bulteau, director of La Nouvelle Revue in Paris, who proposed that he collaborate on the collection of Infrequentables with the Rocher editions.. He then entered the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière, in the photography section (shooting section), but left in 1981, before graduating. His son Étienne was born the same year. He then experiences a period of unemployment, after a divorce, which causes him a serious nervous breakdown.

Two years later he began a career in computer science at Unilog, later working as a contract manager in the IT department of the Ministry of Agriculture, (rue de Picpus), in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, where he stayed for three years (this period is romantically evoked in Battlefield Expansion). He applied for a job in the National Assembly and in 1990 passed the competition for administrative assistant in the IT department. This job then gives him the peace he needs. In 1991 he published H. P. Lovecraft's biography, Against the World, Against Life . In 1996, having acquired the necessary seniority and wanting to devote himself to writing, he requested his dismissal. In 1992, Michel Houellebecq received the Tristan-Tzara Prize for his collection of poems La Poursuite du bonheur, published in 1991. He met Juliette and André Darle, who then invited this thirty-six-year-old young poet years, employee of the National Assembly, almost unknown, to the Festival of Murale Poetry that takes place in the castle of the Estuaries in Aubigny-sur-Nère. Juliette Darle remembers the following; "I perceived a singular personality in him and immediately assimilated Michel to the great authors of the 20th century [...]. Michel Houellebecq had embarked on a tirade against liberalism. The deputy mayor of Aubigny, Yves Fromion, had been surprised and wanted to meet this curious poet. [...] There was no space left, he had to sleep in a caravan. We had big parties. Michel was reading poems by Aragon crying and having a few shots of whiskey. The next day we took him to Sancerre".

With the publication in 1994 of Amplification of the battlefield, which came to be compared to Camus's The Stranger, it went from total anonymity to conversion, thanks exclusively to word of mouth advertising, author of one of the best-selling books of the year. The work was translated into numerous languages and made it known to the general public.

Some critics, caught off guard, believed that their success would be a flash in the pan. But that prediction suddenly dissipated with the publication of his second novel, Elementary Particles, considered the best French book of 1998 by Lire magazine and awarded the Prix Novembre . Her description of love relationships in Elementary Particles was highly controversial; In this context, she is accused of misogyny and objectification of the female body by radical feminists.

That same year, he also won the National Literature Award for young talents.

His third novel, Plataforma, made him a definitive media star, not only because it was translated into more than twenty-five languages, but also because he was the subject of a bitter controversy about his alleged Islamophobia and his amoral vision of the sexual exploitation of the Third World. In his work, the influence of authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Aldous Huxley, H.P. Lovecraft and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Due to media pressure, he left France and lived in Ireland for a few years and then in the south of Spain, in Cabo de Gata (Almería province), to return to France again years later. In 2000, he went into exile in Ireland with his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier. In 2002, he moved to Andalusia, to the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park.

In 2008, after seventeen years without seeing her mother and after she said in press interviews that she was probably dead, Lucie Ceccaldi published a book, L'innocente, very virulent regarding his son, in which he declares in particular: "To my son, let him fuck whoever he wants or do it with whoever he wants, I have nothing to apologize for."

At the end of 2012, in the midst of controversy due to his tax exile, he announced his return to France. Installed in his new apartment in Paris, he comments in an interview on the reasons for his return, including the lassitude of foreign languages. He denies any deliberate political gesture regarding his departure from Ireland's southwest coast, but admits nonetheless that this can be construed as such "as it shows that the level of taxation is not strong enough to discourage him." 3. 4;. In the announcement of the publication of his collection of poems Configuration of the last shore in April 2013, he expresses his desire to continue writing: & # 34; Life does not interest me enough to be able to do it without writing & # 34;.

Houellebecq in 2016

In 2014, he is the main protagonist of the movie Near Death Experience. In 2016, To Stay Alive: A Method was published, an adaptation of his essay & # 34; Stay Alive & # 34;, directed by the Dutch director Erik Lieshout. On September 21, 2018, he married Qianyum Lysis Li, a young woman of Chinese descent. In January 2019 he publishes Serotonina and is made a knight of the legion of honor.

Literary style

Houellebecq's stylistic absence has been highlighted by commentators and critics. His writing, as he himself has referred, has a very conscious "absence of style", although there are those who affirm that he is actually capable of using resources when and how it suits him. Different critics, mainly French, have called his way of writing write as "white style" or "flat style" ("forme plate").

Disputes

Michel Houellebecq in 2008.

His works and opinions have caused controversy and some outlets have accused him of being misogynistic, decadent, xenophobic and racist. This controversy helped increase his popularity. Some passages in Plataforma, where the issue of Islamist terrorism appears, were described as Islamophobic. Following an interview in the literary magazine Lire, published in September 2001, in which he stated that "the most idiotic religion in the world is Islam" and that "when you read the Koran your heart falls to your feet" was denounced by various Muslim and human rights groups for "racial slander" and "incitement to religious hatred" but he was cleared of all charges. The controversy over his alleged Islamophobia was revived in 2015 with the publication of Submission, a novel in which he discusses the profound changes suffered by French society since 2022, when the Islamist Mohammed Ben Abbes assumes the presidency.

In November 2022, the writer gave an interview to Michel Onfray's Front Populaire magazine in which he stated:

"The great replacement is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no elite conspiracy to wipe out the white race but there is a transfer of population from Africa where birth rates are too high"

About Muslims he said:

"When entire territories are under Islamic control, I think there will be acts of resistance. There will be attacks and shootings in mosques, in cafes frequented by Muslims, in short, a Bataclan in reverse (...) The desire of the French native population, as they say, is not that Muslims assimilate, but that they stop robbing it and attack her. Or if not, another solution, let them go"

In the same interview the author blamed the United States for promoting politically correct thinking in France and concluded:

"Our only chance of survival would be for white supremacism to catch on in America."

For these statements, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris threatened to sue him for incitement to hatred, however, he changed his mind when the writer apologized. For his part, Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the Union of Mosques of France - which had also announced its intention to file a complaint - said in a statement that it would continue its legal action against Houellebecq.

In addition to his far-right political views, Houellebecq has been the subject of controversy after being accused of plagiarism on two occasions. The first in 2010 when a magazine accused him of including some passages from the French Wikipedia in his work The map and the territory and he acknowledged having used them, defending himself by saying that "borrowing some word texts per word is not stealing as long as the reasons for this recycling are artistic", evoking that same use by authors such as Borges or Georges Perec. Lawyers and free software activists used the obligations imposed by the free license of Wikipedia (free use, but its derived products must have the same free license) to later post Houellebecq's novel on the internet. The second in 2022 when the Franco-Senegalese writer El Hadji Diagola sued him, stating that Submission was a plagiarism of his work La chute des barbelés. The demand was rejected in the first instance but El Hadji Diagola appealed the sentence and the process has not yet been resolved.

Work

Novel

Several of Houellebecq's novels

• Expansion of the battlefield (Extension du domaine de la lutte1994), trad. Encarna Castejón, published by Anagrama in 2001.
• Elementary particles (Les Particules élémentaires1998), trad. Encarna Castejón, published by Anagrama in 1999. Novembre Award and finalist of the Goncourt Prize.
• Lanzarote (Lanzarote, 2000), trad. by Javier Calzada, published by Anagrama in 2003.
• Platform (Plateforme, 2001), trad. de Encarna Castejón, published by Anagrama in 2002.
• The possibility of an island (La Possibilité d'une île, 2005), trad. de Encarna Castejón, published by Alfaguara in 2005. Interallié Prize.
• Map and territory (La Carte et le Territoire2010), trad. Jaime Zulaika, published by Anagrama in 2011. Goncourt Award.
• Submit (Soumission, 2015), trad. by Joan Riambau, published by Anagrama in 2015.
• Serotonin (Sérotonine, 2019), trad. by Jaime Zulaika, published by Anagrama in 2019.
• Annihilation (Anéantir, 2022),[1] trad. by Jaime Zulaika, published by Anagrama in 2022.

Other genres

• H.P. Lovecraft. Against the world, against life (H.P. Lovecraft. Contre le monde, contre la vie, 1991), biography, Siruela, 2006; reedición Anagrama, 2021.
• Keep alive (Rester vivant, 1991), method, Contemporary Cultural Association for the Dissemination of Art, 2006.
• La Poursuite du bonheur (La Poursuite du bonheur1992), poems.
• La Peau (La Peau, 1995), poems, art book with Sarah Wiame.
• La Ville (La Ville1996), poems, artistic book with Sarah Wiame.
• Le Sens du combat (Le Sens du combat, 1996), poems, Flore Prize.
• The world as a supermarket (Interventions1998), articles; trad. de Encarna Castejón, Anagrama, 2005.
• Rebirth (Renaissance, 1999), poems, Acuarela, 2000.
• Survival (Rester vivant, Le sens du combat, La poursuite du bonheur, 1996/97), poems, Acuarela " A. Machado Libros en 2007.
• Poetry (Poetry, 2000), brings together the four poems before the publication of this; tr.: Altair Díez and Abel H. Pozuelo, bilingual edition, Anagrama, 2012.
• Public Enemies (Ennemis publics, 2008), exchange of emails with Bernard-Henri Lévy;.trad. by Jaime Zulaika Goicoechea, Anagrama, 2010.
• Interventions 2 (Interventions 2, 2009), articles.