In this article I argue that Michel Houellebecq’s novelistic descriptions of isolated and depressed protagonists in Sérotonine (2019) and in his earlier novels should not simply be read as ...symptomatic of the crisis of love in late capitalism. By focusing on situations where love might or might not manifest itself, Houellebecq also explores the potentiality of love. Despite the vast reception of Houellebecq’s poems and novels, his critics have not sufficiently understood how the love theme is central throughout his work. This article explains its significance by focusing on Sérotonine and drawing lines to the earlier novels. In Sérotonine, as in Soumission (2016), the potentiality of love is closely related to an ambivalent pondering on the threshold of religion. Both novels have protagonists characterised by avoidance, negativity and indecisiveness. Love is both a potential and a testing ground for survival, on a personal as well as on a cultural level.
Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission imagines a future in which a Muslim party wins the 2022 election and begins to turn France into an Islamic country. This story initially led critics to accuse ...Houellebecq of reproducing a far-right narrative about Muslim immigration. More recently, however, other critics have argued that the novel does not denigrate Islam but depicts the new regime as a viable refuge from Western liberalism, leading to the accusation that Houellebecq glorifies patriarchal society. This article addresses both charges by arguing that Submission is not primarily concerned with Islam at all; rather, it is a satire of Western liberal democracy, which uses Islam as a satirical device to illustrate the shortcomings of Western conceptions of freedom and democracy. It is therefore no coincidence that Submission revolves around a farcical democratic election, and that the French people embraces their new illiberal system. Importantly, although the novel's protagonist compares political Islam favorably with Western liberal democracy, there are numerous signs in the novel that Houellebecq does not champion the return of the patriarchy. Finally, drawing on political science, the article argues that Houellebecq's satire correctly pinpoints some major problems with liberal democracy as it is presently exercised throughout the West.
This comparative analysis examines two instances of dystopian/utopian narratives and media – the film and script Submission: Part I (2004) by the Dutch-Somalian but naturalized American author Ayaan ...Hirsi Ali and the novel Submission (2015) by the French author Michel Houellebecq. These two works challenge the project of Europe as a bastion of liberal ideals and its various markers, including laïcité, universalism and human rights, through narratives informed by cultural pessimism and religious and racial dystopia. Fantasies of race, ethnicity and empire pervade the fictional Islamistan in Submission I as well as Houellebecq’s narrative exploring the conversion of French society to Islam. Whereas Submission: Part I has been hailed for addressing Muslim abuse and Houellebecq’s novel has been cited often as a trigger of Islamophobia, I argue that both works merit new interpretations when read in relation to historical fears of ethnic and religious Muslim Others in postcolonial presents: Submission: Part I as contributing to the Islamic problem it supposedly addressed, with Houellebecq offering a nuanced and sympathetic understanding of the Muslim ‘Other’ that acknowledges the significance of Arab/Muslim France to the French Republic.
The challenge of what we understand by hypermodern is that the concept does not fit in any French literary movement or school of thought. Is it that the hypermodern novel transmutes with each ...contemporary author? This article discusses how Houellebecq is one novelist who has adopted ideology as a shorthand for questioning the state of contemporary French society. Yet critical reality is far more complex-as Houellebecq is no realist writer-and it is conditioned by vested interest in what literature can say today in a world dominated by the image-truth paradigm. While Houellebecq gives the appearance of a reactionary figure, his œuvre is multi-faceted, notably with the issue of form as opposed to mere political message. It is therefore important to study the valence of culture and truth while at the same time nothing seems to be really happening in his far-fetched plots. Is it also the reason why Houellebecq dismisses the duality between aesthetics and mimesis? In a very Baudelairian fashion, Houellebecq's sense of beauty strives in mediocre lives. The article analysis offers counter-arguments as well as a discussion on Houellebecq's plea to reinvent the novel itself.
Submission (2015), a novel in which a Muslim political party is elected to govern France, has been widely interpreted as part of a ubiquitous discourse of “declinism” in contemporary French ...intellectual culture. The novel has been accused of complicity with a reactionary politics favoring a return to strong patriarchal authority and national pride, while the narrative of the triumph of political Islam is frequently interpreted as a thinly veiled act of Islamophobia. This ideological interpretation is, however, complicated by the bad faith of the novel’s unreliable narrator, and by the ironic treatment of his narrative voice. By taking the elusiveness of this narration more fully into account, it becomes possible to read Submission as a tentative — if never unambiguous — narrative of religious conversion. To this extent, the treatment of Islam in Submission can be seen as consistent with the persistent but ambivalent role of religion in Houellebecq’s wider work.
This article emerges from exhausted readings of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq's notorious portrayals of sex and sexuality to observe the relationship between the monstrous, the ...sexual, and extinction. Rather than dwell on what I call the "Houellebecq, pornographer" trope (that there are either too many, or too graphic, or too obscene depictions of sex in his novels), this article will observe Houellebecq's troubling of what sex might in fact be. This requires asking exactly what is meant, in terms of demonstration, by "sex" - especially in the literary setting of a novel, which, compared with the explicit potential different media have given to twenty-first century iterations of sexuality, is relatively tame. In doing so, I will ask exactly what is explicit about sexuality, especially considering its technical changes throughout modernity. I suggest that Houellebecq's attention to the depiction or de-monstration of sex, in all of its "monstrous" guises, comments on late-capitalist decadence and its extinctive trajectories - offering an ironic template from which to reconsider them.
Michel Houellebecq has gained a reputation for combining left-wing critiques of neo-liberal capitalism with reactionary laments at the decline of nation, religion, honest labour, and the patriarchal ...family. Critics thus typically declare the novelist either to be unclassifiable in political terms or to be a 'rouge-brun'. Surveying Houellebecq's novels, from Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994) to Sérotonine (2019), I argue that there is nothing unclassifiable, 'rouge', or left-wing about the author's political world-view. On the contrary, his work needs to be understood as belonging to a tradition of French counter-revolutionary thought, personified by Auguste Comte and Charles Maurras.
Dans cet article, nous avons pour objectif de réfléchir à la notion de créativité, longtemps écartée de la théorie de la traduction. Cette notion, difficile de cerner, renvoie également au rôle du ...traducteur (auteur, mais pas l'Auteur) et de son oeuvre (oeuvre, mais pas l'OEuvre). Comment caractériser la créativité ? Comment l'identifier dans une traduction littéraire ? En partant de quelques propositions d'affinement de la terminologie et du cadre conceptuel de la notion de création en traduction littéraire, nous essayerons de l'illustrer par le biais d'exemples tirés de la traduction en portugais de l'oeuvre La carte et le territoire de Michel Houellebecq, de la plume de Pedro Tamen.
This article explores the notorious contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq in a way that differs from the major critical approaches to his work. While there is a tendency to investigate, ...describe, and (perhaps) celebrate his individual style, this essay questions the extent to which he is a product of the Google era, and how this manifests in the formal dimension of his work. In doing so, this essay suggests a new way of reading this provocative writer, one that has implications for the contemporary reading, writing, and teaching of literature in the Academy.
The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical figure to shed some light on the way in which Houellebecq's supratextual image influences the way in which his texts are read. We start from the ...premise that there is a certain overlap between author's public image and his different narrators and characters. Thus, we will propose the figure of the reality show paradox to try to explain the uncertain reading frame that implies the authorship of Houellebecq. Our thesis is that the author's literary position, as a generator of reception horizons in the reader, consists in imposing the structural suspicion that what Houellebecq's works contain are nothing but the fictionalization of a true self.
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