Having devoted considerable attention to the workplace in Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), Houellebecq continued to develop a complex reflection on the place of work in our lives in his later novels Plateforme (2001) and La Carte et le territoire (2010). At the same time, however, he also pursued his interrogation of leisure and its relation to work in a capitalist economy, with particular reference to tourism. He did this most controversially in Plateforme, with its notorious discussion of sex tourism, and later more soberly in La Carte et le territoire, which also includes a self-reflexive meditation on the nature and function of art. This chapter will explore these two texts in depth.

Plateforme

Plateforme, Houellebecq's third novel and, in many ways, his most controversial, can also be seen as a synthesis of his two preceding novels. Like Extension du domaine de la lutte it gives extensive, often satirical, coverage to the professional activities of white-collar office workers. Like Extension and Les Particules élémentaires (1998) it presents contemporary western society as a place where sexuality is a fraught, painful and disappointing experience for all but an elect few. And, like Les Particules, it conceives of a radical, utopian solution to this sexual impasse. Pierre Varrod, in an early appraisal of the novel, went further: he suggests that if Extension showed us the lives of those excluded from sexual relations and Les Particules documented a sexualised society from which all possibility of love had disappeared, the redemptive narrative of Plateforme unites sex and love in the narrator Michel's tender but very torrid relationship with Valérie. As such, Varrod concludes, Plateforme can be considered the novel of Houellebecq's maturity. In this chapter, I have chosen not to address this relationship at any length, partly because, as Varrod and other commentators have recognised, the character of Valérie comes across more as a fantasy figure than as a flesh-and-blood woman. She is beautiful, intelligent and successful, invariably gentle and understanding, but also, in the words of David Lehardy Sweet, ‘a sexual dynamo whose primary goal in life seems to be to get Michel off’.