Michel Houellebecq: power and perversity

What rage ferments in your degenerate mind

To make you rail at reason and mankind?

(Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr Against Mankind”)

Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Welbeck”), born in 1956 on the French island colony of Réunion in the Indian Ocean*, is the wildly popular star and caustic celebrity of contemporary French literature.  His novel Submission (2015) has sold an astonishing 950,000 copies; Sérotonine (2019) sold 450,000.  He portrays the alienation and anger that many readers feel but can’t express.  Rancorous, misanthropic and propelled by savage indignation, he goes out of his way to shock readers and create an unpleasant persona.  His best novel, Platform (2001), is a forum for his outrageous yet perversely appealing ideas.  Anglo-American critics in the Guardian and the New York Times have offered moralistic and politically correct condemnations, but it is surely wrong to equate the fictional “Michel” with the author of this impressive novel.

Unlike narcissistic and superficial contemporary novelists, Houellebecq (whom I shall call MH) boldly and seriously questions the human condition.  He has a similarly bleak vision to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.  Platform combines ecstatic descriptions of sex with savage satire on modern life.  MH doesn’t like the world he lives in and doesn’t believe in the humane values of western civilisation.  He thinks “man is clearly not intended to be happy” and that “ultimately everyone returns to his original nothingness.”  Platform is a brilliant, powerful, sometimes toxic mixture of Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night with the sexual athletes in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.  MH transforms the essence of these books into his own disturbed and distressing vision.

Albert Camus’ The Stranger begins “Mother died today,” and his hero Meursault has no emotional reaction to her death.  Platform begins “Father died last year” and Michel is also untroubled by his parent’s passing.  A heavy smoker, alcoholic and physical wreck, he’s a striking contrast to his athletic and fanatically fit father.  He soon learns that his father (reversing Meursault’s murder of an Arab) has been murdered by an Arab whose younger sister he had seduced.

MH adds interest and depth to Platform by a series of literary allusions and ironic echoes from the Bible to other modern writers.

–“Her feet are of fine gold, her legs like the columns of the temple of Jerusalem”: Song of Solomon 5:15, “His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold.”

–“A moveable feast”: Ernest Hemingway’s memoir.

 –“I stay in bed for most of the day”: Ivan Goncharov’s hero in Oblomov.

–“The brownish, wrinkled skin of the balls, the brutally anatomical look of the glans”: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar comically describes the male sex organ as a turkey gizzard.

–“It is not enough that he is unhappy; everyone else must be unhappy too”:

Gore Vidal, “It is not enough to succeed, others must fail.”

–“You don’t come to Pattaya to start life over, but to end it in tolerable conditions”: Scott Fitzgerald, “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.”

–“We lose ourselves in the infinite silence of the desert”:  Blaise Pascal, “the eternal silence of infinite spaces.”

–“You have built your house upon sand”: Matthew 7:26, “Like a foolish man who has built his house on sand.”

–“I had lived and I would die alone”: Joseph Conrad, “We live, as we dream — alone.”

–Better if his parents had never married: Sophocles, “Not to be born at all is best.”

 –“All those guys who find it easier just to jerk off on the Internet or watch porn films”: Philip Larkin, who wrote in a letter that it was better to jerk off at home than spend money on women.  Larkin also created a miserable self-portrait and expressed reactionary political views.

Michel—bitter, ironic and disenchanted—has “as much freedom as a vacuum cleaner.”  He’s washed up, boring and has no close friends; finds young children malicious and repugnant; and feels superior to his father, bureaucrats, tourists, foreigners and mincing German pederasts.  He satirises Jane Fonda’s feminist ideology, “halfwit” bestsellers by Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham, newspapers and magazines, television programmes and video games, sociology experts and health cures, groups that visit uninteresting places, torture-to-hear entertainers at resorts, and sex tourism.  In Sado-Masochistic sessions willing victims have needles pushed through their genitals and fingernails pulled out with pliers.  Michel finances art exhibitions at the Ministry of Culture that include releasing frogs onto playing cards and leaving rotting meat in young girls’ panties.  He never “felt any ‘solidarity’ with other human beings” and is disgusted by humanitarians.  He loathes patriotism, and believes the British prisoners on the River Kwai in Thailand who suffered the “innate viciousness of the Japanese”, were “a bunch of morons who died for the sake of democracy.”

A series of violent episodes occur in the impoverished suburban housing projects and local shopping centers near successful offices that have moved from central Paris.  A woman is attacked, raped and beaten by West Indians on a train while other passengers fearfully retreat from the outrage.  A gang smashes an elderly woman’s head with a baseball bat.  Unemployed North African men in “rival gangs faced each other with Stanley knives, baseball bats and containers of sulfuric acid. . . . Professors are stabbed, schoolteachers are raped, fire engines attacked with Molotov cocktails, handicapped people thrown through train windows by barbarian hordes.”

Platform reverses the traditional Christian order: not death and Resurrection, but Resurrection followed by death.  The novel is structured by a rise-and-fall trajectory as Michel moves from lonely misery, to sex and love, to disaster and anomie.  His frequent masturbation—sex with the person he loves most—reveals his isolation and loneliness, and he prefers to pay for sex that excludes emotion.  Michel moves in painful stages from whores, poor sex with French women and sex tourism in Thailand, to ecstatic sex and redemptive love with Valérie.  After her violent death he’s forced back to his emotional dead end, with the possibility of suicide as the only escape.  Valérie’s high-powered boss Jean-Yves, miserably married, increasingly unhappy and hopelessly adrift, declines as Michel prospers.

Few serious novels are set in Thailand.  The exception, mentioned in Platform, is Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996).  MH writes, “the early chapters of the book perfectly illustrate the curse of the tourist, caught up in a frenetic search for places that are not ‘touristy,’ which his very presence undermines.”  The popular current television series The White Lotus has also aroused interest in Thailand.  In 2001, when the novel takes place, Pattaya is “completely dedicated to lust and debauchery”, and Thailand is the perfect setting for Michel and Valérie’s successful development of no-holes-barred sex tourism.  Michel considers sex, a rare gift and one of the few pleasures in his miserable life, better in cheap and uninhibited Third-World countries.  The desire for the nebulous oblivion of sensual ecstasy is one of his few remaining human qualities: “with the exception of the sexual act, there are few moments in life in which the body exults in the simple pleasure of being alive.”

Valérie (age 27) is bisexual and polymorphously perverse, superior to Thai women in providing pleasure, eager to please Michel (age 40) and ecstatically pleasing.

MH’s 21+ descriptions in Platform are the sexual equivalents of Bach’s 30 Goldberg Variations.   Michel has great sex with a Thai girl, Oôn, and then with Sin, who assures him she’s had medical checkups, though one-third of all prostitutes in Thailand are HIV-positive.  He and Valérie have sex in and out of bedrooms: standing in quiet streets, in her thin-walled parents’ house, under a tablecloth in a restaurant, in a train compartment, in a steam bath and in the Cuban sea. They venture into uncharted regions of voyeurism, trios and quartets with two girls in a brothel, with a Spanish woman in Thailand, with a Cuban maid who first watches and then enthusiastically joins them, and in mutual anal sex and front-and-back penetration with a Black couple.

MH probably read and been influenced by James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (1967).  In Platform Michel has sex with Valérie, a beautiful, sophisticated and exciting woman who wants to please him.  Salter’s hero Philip Dean has sex with plain provincial French girl who works as a typist.  He doesn’t love her and they have no future.  Salter and MH are lyrical and realistic, and both describe with ingenious virtuosity the theme and variations of numerous carnal duets.  Dean’s love-making is sometimes lyrical:

His hands float on to her.  The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love.  He feels himself enter.  Her last breath—it is almost a sigh—leaves her.  Her white throat appears.

The lovers float, breathe and sigh as the focus shifts from his hands to her throat.  During his first time with Valérie, Michel feels as if he’s been shot into heaven:

I felt as though I was disappearing into space, and only my penis was alive, a wave of extraordinarily intense pleasure coursing through it.

Both Salter and MH capture the superlative multi-orgasmic experience as their lovers engage in Lawrencean anal intercourse.  Salter observes:

Suddenly he feels her flesh give way and then, deliciously, the muscle close about him.  He tries not to press against anything, to go in straight.  She is breathing quickly, and as he withdraws on the first stroke he can feel her jerking with pleasure.  It’s the short movements she likes.  She thrusts herself against him.  Moans escape her.  Dean comes—it’s like a hemorrhage—and afterwards she clasps him tightly.

The sensation of penetrating soft flesh and tense muscle leads to gasps from pleasurable thrusts.

MH writes of anal sex, with double penetration like a sword thrust, followed by a swift slide and heavy breathing as the lovers move from an intense to a soft warm feeling after orgasm.

She opened and I pushed into her up to the hilt.  It was like sliding down an inclined plane—she came surprisingly quickly.  Then she became still, panting, happy.  It was not that it was particularly more intense, but when everything went well, there was a point when the two sensations fused, and it became something gentle and irresistible, like being warm all over.

Salter’s young hero leaves France to complete his education at Yale.  In a significant phrase, MH writes of an American character, “Bob must leave [Thailand] to finish his senior year at Yale.”  Salter’s hero dies in a fatal car accident; Valérie dies in a bomb explosion.

Michel and Valérie’s journeys to Thailand and Cuba provoke a savage and satiric view of the tourist business: “Taking a plane today amounts to being treated like shit.”

The travel brochures advertise warm welcoming friendly people who are actually quite hostile and see tourists “purely as wallets on legs.”  MH observes, “the great thing about Discovery Tours: you can subject tourists to horrible conditions.”  In an ecological-paradise resort the guests’ excrement flows straight from a hole in the floor into the river where the local people bathe and do laundry.  Instead of breeding tolerance, travel reinforces or creates racial prejudice.  Women on holiday crave sexual adventures and are drawn to the more “laid-back and virile” dark races.  MH wittily observes, “white people want to be tanned and to dance like Negroes; blacks want to lighten their skin and straighten their hair. . . . All humanity instinctively tends toward miscegenation.”

(My experience of hearing excruciating “entertainment” while lecturing on cruise ships, seeing infected whores attracting American soldiers in rural Korea, having Nubian women offered to me in Cairo, evading Thai prostitutes who tried to grab me in a narrow alley, seeing a white female tourist and Black Jamaican having public sex on the beach confirms MH’s realistic descriptions.)

MH offers superb descriptions of the exotic settings: “It was the hour when the jungle readies itself for night.”  As he “looks down on the river, the moon was up and shimmered on the water.”  He and Valérie seize the opportunity to set up Sex-Tour Clubs in these locales and immediately achieve 95% occupancy.  After contrasting the touristic success in freewheeling Thailand with the commercial failure in Communist Cuba, Michel plans to give up his job and remain permanently in Thailand with Valérie as resort manager.  She says, “We’re happy here; we have everything we need in life.”  But their idyll is soon shattered and events propel them to an apocalypse.

MH mentions the terrorist attack in Luxor, Egypt, that killed 58 tourists in 1997.  In Platform, Islamic movements supported by Libya have been active on the northern Malay-Thai border.  Malaysian terrorists suddenly attack the religiously offensive sex tourist sites in Thailand with guns and bombs.  Like Michel’s father, Valérie—and 117 other people—is killed by a Moslem.  Like the medieval Crusaders against the Moslems, MH sees Islam as the main enemy of the West.  Islam had wrecked his life, he hates it and “could not find words enough to revile it”.  With deliberately defiant, reactionary and xenophobic opinions (for which MH has been fiercely attacked) Michel vents his spleen, declares that “Moslems aren’t worth much” and calls them “the losers of the Sahara.”  He condemns Islam as the “dumbest” and “most dangerous religion,” and despises the Taliban stewing in their own filth.

At the end of the novel, with Valérie dead and their plans destroyed, Michel is embittered and back to the emotional dead end where he started.  Despite the disaster, he returns to Thailand.  Though his thoughts are negative, Michel believes that “we build up memories so we’ll feel less alone at the moment of death.”  But his connections with other people unleash his hostile feelings, he becomes unbearable, and confesses, “I wasn’t interested in human relationships anymore. . . . There was nothing left for me to do in this life.”  Their fragile and ephemeral happiness could not last.  Platform is a kind of suicide note.

*Many other important French writers were also born outside France and provided a unique literary perspective: José-Maria de Heredia in Cuba; Lautréamont, Jules Laforgue and Jules Supervielle in Uruguay; Francis Carco in New Caledonia; Saint-John Perse in Guadeloupe; Albert Camus in Algeria.

Jeffrey Meyers’ 43 Ways of Looking at Hemingway will appear in November 2025 with Louisiana State University Press.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out in the spring of 2026.

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