Murielle Lucie Clément follows Farncesco Alberoni in elucidating Houellebecq’s pornographic scenes. According to Alberoni in his work L’Erotisme,3 pornography belongs to the male imagination; it is the fantasy of satisfying male desires, needs, aspirations, and fears. The male fantasy in pornography represents women as sexually ravenous, driven by an uncontrollable urge, who want nothing more than to throw themselves upon the male sex organ. Clément demonstrates how this definition corresponds perfectly with the following sexual fantasy scene that occurs in the mind of Platform’s protagonist: ← 141 | 142 →
I drew the curtains and lay down. Curiously, I fell asleep immediately and dreamed of an Arab girl dancing in a subway car. She didn’t look anything like Aïcha, or at least I don’t think so. She was standing against the pole in the middle of the car like the girls in go-go bars. Her breasts were covered by a minuscule strip of cotton, which she was slowly lifting. With a smile, she freed her breasts completely; they were swollen, round, copper-colored, magnificent. She licked her fingers and stroked her nipples. Then she put her hands on my trousers, eased down my fly, took out my penis, and began to jerk me off. People crowded past us, got off at their stations. She got on all fours on the floor and lifted up her miniskirt. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Her vulva was welcoming, surrounded by black hair, like a gift. I started to penetrate her. The car was half-full, but no one paid any attention to us. (Platform, p. 61)
[«Je tirai les rideaux et m’allongeai. Curieusement je m’endormis tout de suite, et je rêvai d’une Beurette qui dansait dans le métro. Elle n’avait pas les traits d’Aïcha, du moins je ne crois pas. Elle se tenait au pilier central, comme les filles dans les go-go bars. Ses seins étaient recouverts d’un bandeau de coton minuscule, qu’elle relevait progressivement. Avec un sourire, elle les libéra tout à fait; ils étaient gonflés, ronds et bruns, magnifiques. Elle lécha ensuite ses doigts et se caressa les mamelons. Puis elle posa une main sur mon pantalon, fit coulisser la braguette et sortit mon sexe, qu’elle commença à branler. Les gens passaient autour de nous, descendaient à leurs stations. Elle se mit à quatre pattes sur le sol, releva sa minijupe; elle ne portait rien en dessous. Sa vulve était accueillante, entourée de poils très noirs, comme un cadeau; je commençai à la pénétrer. La rame était à demi pleine, mais personne ne faisait attention à nous.» (Plateforme, p. 86)]
This description highlights the standard nature of pornography, including the elements to be found in every pornographic piece, whether written or visual. The scene encapsulates male desire as it appears in a fantasy fully realized:4 the female body is offered effortlessly to the narrator, without any encounter in the social sense (there is no mutual introduction of the participants), with only one goal – immediate physical pleasure, without love or foreplay, based on contact only between the basic erogenous zones, swift and immediate in sudden sexual relations. The woman is young, foreign, and exotic, impatient in her desire for the male sexual organ.
However, it is not only the protagonist’s fantasies that meet pornographic standards; this is also true of his experiences with characters in the fictional reality. In the scene which occurs in a swingers’ club, quoted below, Christiane’s focus (and that of the other women) is on the ← 142 | 143 → man involved – Bruno, the protagonist of The Elementary Particles. The entire scene is organized around the man, symbolically creating the pornographic scene: the women approach him and perform sexual acts for him to see. In this respect, there is no distinction between Christiane, the protagonist’s lover and partner, and the anonymous participant, or between these two women and any other woman in a pornographic representation. Houellebecq describes this scene as follows:
Christiane opened his trousers and began to jerk him off, glancing around her as she did so. A man came up to them and slipped his hand under her skirt. She unhooked it and let it slip to the floor; she was wearing nothing underneath. The man knelt and began to stroke her as she continued to masturbate Bruno. Beside him on the bed, the dark-haired woman began to moan louder, and he cupped her breasts. […] Christiane leaned over and began to tease the ridge of his penis and the frenum with the tip of her tongue. Another couple came over and sat beside them; the woman […] was wearing a black fake-leather miniskirt. She watched as Christiane licked his cock; Christiane smiled at her and pulled up her T-shirt to show off her breasts. The other woman hiked up her skirt, revealing her cunt […]. Christiane took her hand and guided it to Bruno’s penis. The woman began to jerk him off while Christiane continued to lick the glans. In a matter of seconds, he shuddered with a spasm of pleasure and came all over her face. (Particles, p. 199)
[«Christiane déboutonna son pantalon et commença à le branler tout en regardant autour d’elle. Un homme s’approcha, passa une main sous sa jupe. Elle dégrafa l’attache, la jupe glissa sur la moquette; elle ne portait rien en dessous. L’homme s’agenouilla et commença à la caresser pendant qu’elle branlait Bruno. Près de lui, sur le lit, la brune gémissait de plus en plus fort; il prit ses seins entre ses mains. […] Christiane approcha sa bouche, commença à titiller le sillon et le frein de son gland avec la pointe de la langue. Un autre couple vint s’asseoir à leurs côtés; la femme […] portait une minijupe en skaï noir. Elle regarda Christiane qui le léchait; Christiane lui sourit, releva son tee-shirt pour lui montrer ses seins. L’autre retroussa sa jupe, découvrant une chatte fournie […]. Christiane prit sa main et la guida jusqu’au sexe de Bruno. La femme commença à le branler, cependant que Christiane approchait à nouveau sa langue. En quelques secondes, pris par un soubresaut de plaisir incontrôlable, il éjacula sur son visage.» (Particules, pp. 240–241)]
This scene employs additional clichés of pornographic representation, in particular the soiling of the woman with the man’s semen at the culmination of the sexual act, as well as the descriptions of the women’s clothing, or lack thereof, which draw on the repertoire of pornographic motifs. Every element of this scene is functional: the sexual activity is an organized and efficient system based on predetermined formulas and a modularity of regular movements, all images that represent the focus of male ← 143 | 144 → desire. Among the participants there are no relationships based on sharing or curiosity, but rather just the opposite: maximum predetermination. The sex portrayed here could almost be described as a consumer product.5
As Franc Schuerewegen shows,6 Houellebecq reveals his models to the reader. In Platform, the narrator is an avid reader of American bestsellers, that is, non-canonical literature:7 Grisham, Baldacci, and others are explicitly mentioned by name. The following passage provides one example:
Halfheartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages, skipped back fifty. By chance, I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit. Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the process of unmasking it, it wasn’t too clear. Whatever the deal was, he was getting to know a stunning mixed-race girl, Eilene, who wasn’t exactly backward in coming forward. ‘She unsnapped something and removed her skirt, leaving nothing but a string around her waist and a string running between her legs.’ I unzipped my trousers. This was followed by a weird passage that was difficult to grasp psychologically: ‘Something said run. Throw the beer bottle in the ocean. Throw the skirt in the sand. And run like hell. Run to the condo. Lock the door. Lock the windows. Run. Run. Run.’ Thankfully, Eilene didn’t see things quite that way. ‘In slow motion, she reached behind her neck. She unhooked her bikini top, and it fell off, very slowly. Her breasts, much larger now, lay on his forearm. She handed it to him. ‘Hold this for me.’ It was soft and white and weighed less than a millionth of an ounce.’ I was jerking off in earnest now, trying to visualize mixed-race girls wearing tiny swimsuits in the dark. I ejaculated between the two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn’t matter, it wasn’t the kind of book you read twice. (Platform, pp. 64–65)
; [«Je repris avec résignation La Firme, sautai deux cents pages, revint en arrière de cinquante; par hasard, je tombai sur une scène de cul. L’intrigue avait passablement ← 144 | 145 → évolué: Tom Cruise se trouvait maintenant dans les îles Caïmans, en train de mettre au point je ne sais quel dispositif d’évasion fiscale – ou de le dénoncer, ce n’était pas clair. Quoi qu’il en soit, il faisait la connaissance d’une splendide métisse, et la fille n’avait pas froid aux yeux. ‘Mitch entendit un bruit sec et vit la jupe glisser jusqu’aux chevilles d’Eilene, découvrant un string retenu par deux cordelettes.’ Je défis la fermeture éclair de ma braguette. Ensuite intervenait un passage bizarre, psychologiquement peu compréhensible: ‘Va-t-en, lui soufflait une voix intérieure. Jette la bouteille de bière dans l’océan et la jupe sur le sable. Prends tes jambes à ton cou et cours jusqu’à l’appartement. Va-t-en !’ Heureusement, Eilene ne l’entendait pas de cette oreille: ‘Avec des gestes très lents, elle passa la main derrière son dos pour dégrafer le haut de son bikini qui glissa, découvrant ses seins, qui paraissaient encore plus pleins dans leur nudité. ― Voulez-vous me tenir ça? demanda-t-elle en lui tendant l’étoffe douce et blanche, aussi légère qu’une plume.’ Je me branlai avec sérieux, essayant de visualiser des métisses vêtues de maillots de bain minuscules, la nuit. J’éjaculai avec un soupir de satisfaction entre deux pages. Ça allait coller; bon, ce n’était pas un livre à lire deux fois.» (Plateforme, pp. 90–91)]
Schuerewegen goes on to explain that Houellebecq presents the erotic or pornographic book as an object, a consumer product, like a television or a dishwasher – and it is no coincidence that there is a television set humming in the background of the situation described, a Sony in fact, which clearly belongs to that very same milieu of consumer culture. The author explicitly informs us that pornography is not canonic – “it wasn’t the kind of book you read twice” as he puts it; this is literature in which any literariness has undergone a systematic banalization, even devaluation. A book by John Grisham is indicative of a genre, the labeling of a particular kind of literature. The sex scene in an ‘American bestseller’ could just as easily appear in Houellebecq’s writing, because both offer a formulaic representation of crude, explicit sex, a scene whose main purpose is to satisfy the sexual appetite of the reader (most likely male). This follows Susan Sontag’s definition of pornography, in her influential article “The Pornographic Imagination”,8 as an explicit representation of sexual acts or sexual organs, intended to create sexual titillation. And indeed, Michel, the protagonist of Houellebecq’s novel, uses Grisham’s book to stimulate sexual arousal as he leafs back and forth through it in order to find a suitably titillating sexual scene.
The question at the center of this discussion regards the purpose which this pornographic phenomenon serves. What is the purpose of the ← 145 | 146 → sexual interludes interspersed throughout Houellebecq’s oeuvre, amidst writing that is fundamentally realistic, describing present day life in the West and which is punctuated with passages of sociological philosophy focusing on social units and patterns of social behavior? What is the role of pornography in Houellebecq’s writing and what does it mean?
One possible answer to this appears obvious: one of the trademarks of postmodernist art is to gaze directly at sexual images, scenes which in the past were catalogued as abominations and concealed. This is part of the blurring of boundaries between the canonic and non-canonic in the present day, the introduction of mass culture’s thought and imagination into high art, both in cooperation with and in an attack upon it: subversive complicity, as in the oxymoron formulated by the art critic Craig Owens.9 Sexuality is a marketing product, while at the very same time, the marketing itself presents the problem. In postmodernism, images of desire appear, among other things, as ritual consumption, serialized yearning, and instrumentalization.
Another answer comes to mind in the wake of Olivier Bessard-Banquy’s work on French pornographic literature.10 In his view, Houellebecq can be counted among the “theorists of the new love order”.11 Indeed, he continues, “sex in his [Houellebecq’s] work is less an end than a means: sensual life is uninteresting except to the extent that it reveals just how much, with intimate accuracy, the individual of today can adapt to an inegalitarian society”.12 For Bessard-Banquy, pornography is “bad writing”; it translates in its own bestiality the drama of absent love. A similar reading is offered by John Updike, who explains that Houellebecq ← 146 | 147 → provides an excellent description of the meaning of consumer society by emphasizing the only source of temporary happiness – sex. Houellebecq’s protagonist, maintains Updike, presents himself wearing one of two masks, or both simultaneously: a desolate, lone wolf, consumed by boredom and apathy, or a galvanized male porn star.13 However, this interpretive direction, according to which a multiplicity of sexual descriptions represents the crisis in contemporary western society, does not explain Houellebecq’s serial and exclusive employment of the pornographic model.
Another answer may be inferred from a psychological-archetypal interpretive direction. Sabine Van Wesemael14 argues, in the wake of Freud, that fantasy is a realization of desire which seeks to correct a reality in which there is no satisfaction. When sexual satisfaction does not encounter any difficulty, especially amidst societies in a state of crisis, sex and love become valueless. Thus, Van Wesemael defines Houellebecq’s exaggerated preoccupation with sex as the embodiment of sick sexuality; exaggerated sexual activity depicts the traumatized nature of human sexuality in a market society within which everything has become a commodity – men, women and, of course, love.15 However, this explanation does not resolve the riddle of why Houellebecq specifically chose the pornographic model. ← 147 | 148 →
The Cultural Logic of Posthumanism
In order to explain successfully the question of pornographic representation in Houellebecq’s writing, this phenomenon must be directly and inextricably connected to the thought of the post-human, that same individual who is the product of the contemporary, postmodern, global, and technological world.16 This is the time and space in which the eradication of the self on the individual level occurs, enabling the rise of an individual characterized by a vacuum. Post-humanism is a concept that marks the extinction of the self and its space in favor of the standardization of everything human.17 The pornographic representation, as will be demonstrated below, plays a role in generating meaning in Houellebecq’s texts, highlighting the environment of human reality in which Houellebecq’s writing is created, the fictional environment that he creates in his novels.
All of Houellebecq’s novels are set in a society controlled by the church of consumption, leisure, and pleasure; they describe a reality in which human existence has become a commodity and social forces tend towards emptiness and overall despair. This situation imposes misery on all its subjects, eradicates the existence of human relations, leading to the extinction of the ideals of creativity, individuality, and self-expression, and dooming human existence to constant bitterness. Houellebecq himself expresses this poignantly in his first novel, Whatever:
It’s a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours, sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation, it functions just as mercilessly. The effect of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s known as ‘the law of the market.’ In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others ← 148 | 149 → stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal
sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude. Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. (Whatever, p. 99)
[«Décidément, me disais-je, dans nos sociétés, le sexe représente bel et bien un second système de différenciation, tout à fait indépendant de l’argent; et il se comporte comme un système de différenciation au moins aussi impitoyable. Les effets de ces deux systèmes sont d’ailleurs strictement équivalents. Tout comme le libéralisme économique sans frein, et pour des raisons analogues, le libéralisme sexuel produit des phénomènes de paupérisation absolue. Certains font l’amour tous les jours; d’autres cinq ou six fois dans leur vie, ou jamais. Certains font l’amour avec des dizaines de femmes; d’autres avec aucune. C’est ce qu’on appelle la « loi du marché». Dans un système économique où le licenciement est prohibé, chacun réussit plus ou moins à trouver sa place. Dans un système sexuel où l’adultère est prohibé, chacun réussit plus ou moins à trouver son compagnon de lit. En système économique parfaitement libéral, certains accumulent des fortunes considérables; d’autres croupissent dans le chômage et la misère. En système sexuel parfaitement libéral, certains ont une vie érotique variée et excitante; d’autres sont réduits à la masturbation et la solitude. Le libéralisme économique, c’est l’extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société. De même, le libéralisme sexuel, c’est l’extension du domaine de la lutte, son extension à tous les âges de la vie et à toutes les classes de la société.» (Extension, pp. 100–101)]
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