Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (review)

In December 2004, two academics from the University of Amsterdam approached the future participants at the ‘World of Houellebecq’ conference of October 2005, inviting them to contribute to an edited volume. The product of this dubious publishing venture shows both the richness and limits of the critical cottage industry that has fed on the meteoric career of France’s best-known contemporary author. Many of the essays add little to the book of that conference, Le Monde de Houellebecq: Sandrine Rabosseau repeats her rapprochement of Houellebecq and Zola; Floriane Place-Verghnes discerns again the determining influence of Schopenhauer; while David Evans goes into forensic prosodic detail to show, unconvincingly, a tension in Houellebecq’s poetry between reassuring regularity and irregularity that betrays suicidal anguish. However, such irksome salami-slicing aside, there are original and valuable contributions: Julia Proll’s contrasting of Baudelaire’s Paris and the postmodern monotony of the Houellebecquian city; Jean-Louis Cornille’s demonstration of the haunting presence of Camus’s L’Etranger in Extension du domaine de la lutte; as well as less canonical but extremely pertinent comparisons, for example, Frédéric Sayer’s identification of a nihilist aesthetics of evil in Houellebecq and his favourite living American author, Bret Easton Ellis. This volume also contains stimulating applications of theory: Bruno Viard’s use of the thought of Marcel Mauss to show in the work of Houellebecq a crisis of the gift in western society; Sara Kippur’s use of Lacan to analyse the impossibility of voyeurism in the world of Houellebecq; Vincent Bruyère’s use of Michel de Certeau to describe relations of textual production in Plateforme. Christian van Treeck offers an entertaining and instructive vignette on the image of Germans in Houellebecq’s work, which may partly explain the author’s popularity in that country, but also indicates a certain disillusionment. The range of contributions to this volume shows the insidious reach of Houellebecq’s work across the campuses of the western world. However, the frequency of comparisons to Baudelaire, Balzac, Proust, Zola and Camus could also be seen as a sign of fundamental insecurity: the author of Les Particules élémentaires must be seen as part of the canon in order to avoid the critic’s marginalization within the academic field, especially in France. And the repetitive nature of much of the criticism suggests a ‘degree zero’ flatness and monotony commensurate to the world of the object of study.