Houellebeqc's High Point
Last August,a provocative French author named Michel Houellebeqc (pronounced “Wellbeck”) released a novel called Platfeforme on the curious subjects of sex tourism and Islamic terrorism amid a welter of Gallic handwringing and controversy. Yes, last August. Now Plateforme has appeared in English translation (as Platform), though only in the UK for the time being. I am dying to get my hands on the English edition, both to correct the inevitable gaps in my own comprehension and to support my knee-jerk reaction from reading the first reviews that book has been hideously mistranslated and completely misunderstood.
Plateforme (I prefer the French title) tells the story of Michel, a 40-ish civil servant, bored by his job and his life, who uses the small inheritance left by his father to take a two-week package tour to Thailand. There, he discovers the phenomenon of sex tourism and, incidentally, meets Valerie, a young French woman from the package tour company with whom he begins a serious affair. The second part of the book develops Michel’s relationship with Valerie and their exploration of sexual frontiers. It also includes a lengthy section focused on the tourism industry and the efforts of Valerie and her boss to develop a new product to help their firm compete. A raunchy trip to Cuba inspires Michel and Valerie to propose setting up a chain of sex-tourism resorts in Third World countries – a plan which is dutifully implemented, marketed and sold to public. Unfortunately, the first resort in Thailand offends the sensibilities of local Islamic extremists, who stage a terrorist attack with tragic consequences. The final brief section of the book concentrates on the effect those consequences have on Michel and his view of the world.
Perhaps it doesn’t come through in this account, but many parts of Plateforme are hysterically funny. The nearest English-language equivalent to Houellebecq’s prose style is Hunter S. Thompson, or perhaps the South African humorist Tom Sharpe. All share the gift of being able to express the grotesque in plainspoken, deadpan terms, simultaneously outrageous and understated. The result is a devastating satire full of caustic characterizations, scandalous candor, and ruthless deconstruction of contemporary commercialism, bolstered by Huellebecq’s authoritative command of detail and economic prose style.
Apparently Houellebecq is a problematic figure in his native France. He is too smart and talented to ignore, but his political concerns are expressed in terms too frank for polite French literary society. He is accused by some of being a racist because some of his characters express themselves in coarse language authentic to the racism of their background and culture. Many critics titter at his explicit sexuality, as if matter-of-fact descriptions of fellatio and ménages-a-trois were somehow groundbreaking or worthy of comment at this late date. Perhaps his work is racy by contemporary French standards, but that seems rather hard to believe. I think what offends is that this improbable, uncomfortable creature Huellebecq – known to be something of a drunk and a bore in person – is virtually the only serious French author writing about real issues in a real, confrontational and accessible style.
Which brings us to the English translation of Plateforme and the critical reaction to it in the British press. My first suspicion about the translation is triggered by the title. Yes, the French word “Plateforme” translates literally to the English “Platform.” However, in the relevant passage in the book, Houellebecq’s protagonist is referring to a unique period in his life where things are right. This period is both preceded and, tragically, followed by a steep drop off. The term “plateau” or “high point” seems much more appropriate than “platform,” which, in addition to its imprecision in this specific case, carries too many complicated political and technological connotations.
In his Sunday, August 31 review in the Independent, Boyd Tomkin begins by comparing Houellebecq to D. H. Lawrence, thinking it ironic that such a professed Anglophobe could so closely resemble the prurient puritan who penned Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Other than scoring points for his English readers, it’s hard to imagine how or why anyone would even think of such a comparison, unless translator Frank Wynne bled Houellebecq’s prose dry then laid it out for three days to bleach in the sun until it resembled Lawrence’s. Houellebecq is a decadent, but his antecedents are Frenchmen like J. K. Huysmans, filtered through the howling emotional emptiness of Camus. Indeed, L’etranger looms so large in the background starting with the very first line (“Aujour d’hui, maman est mort,” opens Camus. “Mon pere est mort il y a un an…” echoes Houellebecq) that one could say Plateforme is a prolonged dialogue with the philosophical, political and racial issues raised in that work, and by Camus’s brand of existentialism in general.
Other reviews like Jason Cowley’s piece in the August 11th Guardian attempt to place Houellebecq in the context of post-modernism, with analysis like this:
Reading Platform, one realises again and again what a flimsy construct the self is, and how provisional is the manner in which we lead our lives. Western individualism teaches us that we are free to remake ourselves in whichever way we chose, that we are masters of our own destiny. The modernist project taught us that individual consciousness is supreme, that it is not what we do, but what we think that makes us interesting. Houellebecq persuasively reminds us that such notions are simply not true.
The only excuse for such a misreading of the text is some kind of literary guilt-by-association, whereby any significant French writer must be somehow aligned with the other Gallic purveyors of this nonsense. Houellebecq isn’t post-modern. If anything, his sensibility is pre-modern, almost medieval in its fatalism. We’re doomed because, beneath our pretenses, we’re petty worthless creatures, driven by base needs and appetites. Modern society is just an improved system for fulfilling and exploiting those desires. It is, for that reason, ridiculous, and the only appropriate responses are detached acceptance of absurdity or ill-concealed mockery. And, as Cowley correctly observes in Houellebecq’s outlook, the only possibility of redemption is love. Which makes him – what? A post-modern romantic?
Both of these examples are newspaper reviews and so necessarily do not present a complete or sophisticated critical view of the work. Now that Plateforme is available in English, however, I look forward to some enlightening discussion of this great novel by a most significant contemporary author.
5:10:22 PM 
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