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Michel Houellebecq is perhaps the single most successful and controversial of all contemporary novelists writing in French. Houellebecq has become a global publishing phenomenon: his books have been translated worldwide, three film adaptations of his work have been produced, and the author has been the subject of million-euro publishing deals and of successive media scandals in France.If Houellebecq is unique in contemporary French writing, it is thanks not only to his extraordinary success, but to the unparalleled scope of his narrative ambition. In the work which most forcefully marked his breakthrough to the mainstream – Les Particules élémentaires – Houellebecq made a significant appeal to the science-fiction genre in order to undergird his critique of contemporary society. For Houellebecq presents humanity – at least modern, western humanity – as in a terminal state of decadence and decline and ripe for replacement by its post-human successor. His novels narrate a metaphysical mutation or paradigm shift through which humanity as we know it ceases to be the over-riding value or focus of our world when it comes into conflict with a competitor in the form of a post-human or neo-human species.It is the aim of this book to appraise the global significance of Houellebecq’s novelistic visions while at the same time situating them within the context of French literature, culture and society.
This chapter engages with Jacques Rancière's theorisation of the politics of literature and the central role that nineteenth-century French literary realism plays in it. In a first section, I assess Rancière's politics of literature from a perspective that nuances Rancière's theory of realism as democratising and equalising and considers in addition the modern novel's potential complicity with what Michel Foucault calls ‘biopolitics’. This will enable me to distinguish what I call Rancière's ‘performative realism’ from approaches to realism that stay within the representationalist framework that he largely leaves aside. I then consider Rancière's discussion of nineteenth-century workers and workers’ thought, showing how it puts his performative realism into practice. In the second half of the chapter, I mobilise this theoretical framework to make sense of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq's struggle with realism and the representation of contemporary workers in his novels Whatever and The Map and the Territory. Taking my cue from Houellebecq's realism, I consider in closing what I claim to be the neglected object-oriented dimension of Rancière's politics of literature, arguing that while this dimension is essential to Rancière's discussion of literary realism, it marks a limitation of his humanising politics. At the limit of his politics but crucial to his politics of literature, then, this dimension draws out the tension between ‘politics’ and ‘the politics of literature’ that this chapter ultimately reveals.
Literature about anything, for anyone
Rancière's theorisation of the politics of literature, and of the politics of nineteenth-century French literally realism in particular, has taken many by surprise due to its stubborn refusal to assess realism within debates about its representationalism, or its aim to give an account of the world. In his work on realism, Rancière proposes that the politics of realism cannot be assessed on this count. By extension, critics of realism cannot simply claim anti-representationalism – ‘realism will never be able to give an account of the world’ – as a political position.
From a certain perspective, literature is always political. Literature in a broad sense has been a source of uprisings and protest at least since Martin Luther nailed his theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 – and probably much further back in history than that. Narratives are the most potent way to articulate both political praise and criticism within a given society. In his political satires, British author George Orwell reviled all kinds of totalitarianism and the idea of a socialist utopia. Swedish writer and journalist Stieg Larsson wrote explicitly dystopian crime stories targeting the Swedish welfare state. German novelist Heinrich Böll turned a critical eye on the development of the tabloid press and the use of state monitoring in German society. In the same tradition, Michel Houellebecq has been seen as a very provocative writer in his tone and in his use of political tools. He has articulated a nearly individual anarchist perspective combined with authoritarian and paternalistic views. In Soumission, Houellebecq uses the European idea of multiculturalism to explode our political frames from within. This article explores the perception of religion in Soumission, assesses the critique Houellebecq directs towards French society and European developments, and examines Houellebecq’s perception of democracy and politics. The following questions are addressed: does Houellebecq’s critique come from a classical ideological perspective? Does he describe any elements of an ideal society – even if only as the reverse of a presented dystopia? What kind of democracy does the text of Soumission support or oppose?
The idea of earthly immortality has a tradition in literature dating to the Gilgamesh epic. But what would it mean to attain such immortality? Answers are suggested in novels and plays that explore the theme using varieties of Borges's "rational imagination," often in connection with projections of biology or cybernetics. In this groundbreaking study, Karl S. Guthke examines key works in this vein, throwing into relief fascinating instances of human self-awareness across the last 300 years. Authors discussed in detail include J. M. Barrie, Calvino, Shaw, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Swift, Aldous Huxley, Walter Besant, Arthur C. Clarke, Wilde, Borges, William Godwin and other English Romantics, Capek, Machado de Assis, de Beauvoir, Martin Amis, Dino Buzzati, Houellebecq, Iris Barry, Saramago, Rushdie, Gabi Gleichmann, and Pascal Mercier. Guthke finds that the fictional triumph over death is only rarely viewed positively, and mostly as a "curse"-for a variety of reasons. Almost always, however, literary experiments with immortality suggest an alternative: the chance to take our limited lifetime into our own hands, shaping it meaningfully and thereby experiencing "a new way of being in the world" (Mercier). The fictional immortals reject this challenge, thus depriving themselves of what makes humans human and life worth living. And what that might be is also at least hinted at in the works Guthke analyzes. As a result, an aspect of cultural history comes into view that is revealing and stimulating at a time that is, as Der Spiegel put it in 2014, "obsessed by the invention of immortality."Karl S. Guthke is the Kuno Francke Professor of Germanic Art and Culture, Emeritus, of Harvard University.
Pascal Dusapin is a French intellectual – he cites the philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a particular inspiration – whose generation (he was born just a few months before Michel Houellebecq) are now to the fore following the death of Pierre Boulez. A student of Xenakis in Paris, he sometimes gives the titles of his works a linguistic quirkiness, as in for example, Ici, Iti, Incisa and Indeed. His comment on Outscape, his second cello concerto, that ‘it's difficult for me to explain my work because the substance of thought is confused with the flow of music’ is – given his musical pedigree and cultural milieu – unsurprising.
All forms of terror seem to aim at the destruction of the individual experience and judgement of people. Part of our world is threatened by political terror (as represented first by Dostoevsky) or ethnic and cultural terror (as convincingly described by J. M. Coetzee), but it seems possible, at least in principle, to find an answer to these threats. Is religion the primary remedy against nihilism and, therefore, also against terrorism as Dostoevsky believes? Or is the quasi or semi-autonomous self the major antagonist of terrorism? The genetic manipulation of the human race, as sketched by Michel Houellebecq in his novel Les Particules élémentaires (1998), holds a threat that is irreversible. The cloning of human beings, which supposedly offers a solution to many of our problems, seems too high a risk to take.
Can civil war ever be overcome? Can a better order come into being? This book explores how the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE laid the template for addressing perennially urgent questions. The Roman Republic's collapse and Augustus' new Empire have remained ideological battlegrounds to this day. Integrative and disintegrative readings begun in antiquity (Vergil and Lucan) have left their mark on answers given by Christians (Augustine), secular republicans (Victor Hugo), and disillusioned satirists (Michel Houellebecq) alike. France's self-understanding as a new Rome – republican during the Revolution, imperial under successive Napoleons – makes it a special case in the Roman tradition. The same story returns repeatedly. A golden age of restoration glimmers on the horizon, but comes in the guise of a decadent, oriental empire that reintroduces and exposes everything already wrong under the defunct republic. Central to the price of social order is patriarchy's need to subjugate women.
Chapter 6, “Reproduction and Dystopia,” sets out to show that Aldous Huxley’s well-known satire of a reproductive future in Brave New World – humans engineered in bottles, sorted into different classes – is only a small part of his complex moral attitude toward procreation. Novels like Point Counter Point and Island make clear that it was not only cold reproductive technologies that worried Huxley: he considered any creation of new persons to be an ethical quandary. He was prescient in his concern about the environmental degradation brought on by overpopulation – in 1928 he was already warning of humanity’s “tropism toward fossilized carrion.” Huxley’s work betrays a deep melancholy about the peopling of the earth. In this respect he is a kind of prophet for a dystopian tradition that is still with us. This chapter, in its second half, turns from Huxley to his heirs – contemporary novelists like Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq – whose glittering dystopian fantasies cannot conceal a more ordinary despair about the perpetuation of human life.
The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life has meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today's French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the pressures of globalization, uncovering previously unseen affinities amongst, and offering fresh readings of—and offering exciting new perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of today's most influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.
In 2015, French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which depicts a future France with a Muslim president, was repeatedly cited in political discourse about Islam, French identity, and terrorism. In the year of the novel’s publication, several Islamist terrorist attacks targeted France, and Houellebecq was often named in the debate on multiculturalism, immigration and the French secularist principle of laïcité. The reception of the novel is analysed in this article, focusing on ideological argumentation and political debate. Two opposite camps can be identified in this reception structure. Interestingly, the arguments of these camps are analogous to the arguments of the prosecutor and defence lawyer in the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert concerning his novel Madame Bovary. One and a half centuries after that trial, questions about the reader’s moral capacity and the author’s responsibility remain at the heart of the debate. While some liberal critics praise the ambiguities of the novel, trusting the reader’s ethical faculties, other critics condemn the novel and accuse the writer of expressing dubious values. As for the ideological homes of these critics, the liberal group represents left-wing, right-wing, and uncertain ideologies, whereas the gatekeeping group largely consists of left-leaning agents. The division into two reception groups and their respective discursive patterns and practices are analysed using the Bovary trial as a basis for comparison. It is concluded that in the anxious political climate of 2015 when terror, migration, and Islam were attracting considerable attention and when the populist right was on the rise, Houellebecq’s novel functioned as a political vehicle in government-sympathetic opinion making and as a practical tool for critics who positioned themselves as safeguarding generous migration and integration policies.
Dans ce travail nous proposons un examen des emplois de l'adverbe honnêtement en français contemporain, ainsi que de leurs propriétés les plus saillantes et des liens existant entre ces emplois et la catégorie sémantique des marqueurs d'attitude énonciative. Notre hypothèse de départ est qu'honnêtement connaît aujourd'hui un triple fonctionnement: 1. comme adverbe qui caractérise la réalisation de l'action évoquée par le verbe de l’énoncé (i.e. Il essayait de faire honnêtement son travail; Michel Houellebecq, 2010, La carte et le territoire); 2. comme adverbe qui montre l'attitude du locuteur vis-à-vis de sa propre énonciation (i.e. Honnêtement, je ne pouvais pas les laisser là. N'importe qui aurait pu les voler; Daniel Pennac, 1999, Aux fruits de la passion); 3. et comme un adverbe qui indique un degré moyen, ou un peu plus élevé que la moyenne, du contenu de l'adjectif qu'il modifie (i.e. Le passage s'est fait dans l'euphorie factice d'un réveillon organisé chez Pinaud. C’était bon et honnêtement copieux; Benoîte et Flora Groult, 1994, Journal à quatre mains). Pour atteindre notre objectif nous avons eu recours à une série de tests linguistiques (de type foncièrement syntaxique et sémantique) qui ont été appliqués à un corpus personnel de deux centaines d'occurrences tirées de la base de données FRANTEXT.
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