Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair

by Carole Sweeney

  Platform: Women on the market

  Prostitution is ubiquitous in Houellebecq’s work. In many instances, it is only a stop-gap measure for the rejected or unattractive male who cannot find a willing partner rather than a complete substitute for sexual relations, which it becomes for Jed Martin in The Map and the Territory, a novel less about sex than his previous work. In Whatever, Tisserand is at first far too proud to consider paying for sex, but soon comes to see this as his only choice, calculating that he has sufficient money from his wages to put by for a weekly visit to a prostitute. In Atomised Bruno spends a substantial portion of his income on peep shows and prostitutes, and in a grisly Oedipal scene one day recognizes the client next to him in the ‘massage’ parlour as his own father. Later, driving up to the Lieu de Changement he contemplates how, from a ‘sexual point of view’, his year had begun well as an ‘influx of girls from Eastern Europe had meant that prices had dropped. For 200 francs you could get a little personal relaxation, down from 400 francs some months earlier’ (A, 121). In Platform, the focus on prostitution is intensified. Functioning paradigmatically as the next ‘extension of the struggle’, namely, the supply of ‘Third World’ sex to Westerners who can afford to travel to purchase sexual services, a literalised sexual marketplace becomes the novel’s central preoccupation.

  The narrative begins with another isolated and disgruntled middle-aged male protagonist, another Michel – a different one to that of Atomised, this one is a composite of both Bruno and Michel – happily ready to adopt his role as a ‘lonely pot-bellied European’ on holiday to Thailand where he enjoys and greatly admires the ‘natural’ eroticism and sexual services of the Thai sex workers (P, 101). Observing the comfortable, even congenial, erotic commingling of tourists and Thai women, Michel realizes how ‘important sex tourism would be to the future of the world’ and thus, the quasi-Swiftian proposal is set in place suggesting the legitimate sale of sex by ‘Third World’ sex workers to Western men (and some women) as a rational ‘solution’ to the problem of the availability or accessibility of sex, a problem that has afflicted the characters in the previous two novels (P, 106). A perfectly rational and utilitarian solution to a simple problem of demand and supply, this is the reductio ad absurdum set in motion in the novel that takes as its starting point the increasingly unfettered market forces of neoliberal capitalism. On holiday in Thailand, Michel meets Valérie, a successful businesswoman who works for the French travel company Nouvelles Frontières. Intrigued by the sexual appeal that Thai prostitutes hold for their satisfied customers, Valérie sees a business opportunity for the niche marketing of luxury sex tourism catering for the jaded libidos of Western men. Along with her partner, she embarks upon a new business enterprise setting up discreet sex tourism in a number of Third World venues. This new venture debuts in Thailand just as Valérie is killed on Patpong beach during a terrorist attack by Islamic fundamentalists.

  Prostitution, or to use the less pejorative term, sex work, is at base a very simple relationship of exchange. Predicated on the demand and supply of sexual activity, it is not the body that is a commodity in this transaction, but rather the sexual services offered by that individual. There is no good reason then, or so Platform would have us believe, that those who possess the ability to pay for these sexual services should not be permitted to purchase them from willing suppliers who can maximize their income as a result of such a transaction. Under the terms of this implicit contract, once the services have been delivered the sex worker is free to sell those services to another buyer. Crucially, the body of the sex worker is not owned by the buyer after the expenditure of the sexual act and, therefore, as Shannon Bell points up: ‘the prostitute does not behave like any other commodity’ but is precariously positioned at ‘… the centre of an extraordinary and nefarious economic system. She is able to represent all the terms within capitalist production; she is the human labour, the object of exchange and the seller at once. She stands as worker, commodity and capitalist and blurs the categories of bourgeois economics in the same way as she tests the boundaries of bourgeois morality … ’.33 Thus, the sex worker is simultaneously both use and exchange value. A liberal outlook on sex work argues that workers are free to sell their services and equally free not to sell these same services. On the other hand, many others argue that this ‘freedom’ is nothing of the sort and in very many cases, exchanging sex for money is simply the last resort of women in an economic system that does not provide adequately paid alternatives.34 This is certainly true in the case of Thailand. We learn in Platform that when the country became part of the global ‘market economy’ it was the first real tragedy to strike the country for more than two centuries and brought the country to the ‘brink of ruin’; now the country is economically ‘deep in shit’ (P, 81, 310).

  In an essayistic aside on the relationship between beauty, money and sex, Michel muses upon the residual droits de seigneur of the twentieth-century European male inherited from his imperial ancestors who conquered the world not solely out of ‘economic self-interest’ but also in a belief of the ‘superiority of their civilisation’ (P, 298–9). This assumption of a ‘natural right’ to ‘dominate the world’ endures in the present stripped of its moral civilizing mission (the old colonial mission civilisatrice) but continues because European men with relatively modest incomes now have the financial means to travel halfway around the world to buy ‘superior’ sexual services: ‘As a wealthy European, I could obtain food and the services of women more cheaply in other countries … ’ (P, 298). The locale of the Thai sex trade is constructed so that the mechanical, commercial nature of the transaction is concealed within a more general scenario of luxury and abundance, in which food, drink and accommodation are as cheap and as pleasurable as the wide variety of sexual services on offer. The perception of Oriental females as more subservient and sexually compliant than their European counterparts lends, to what is essentially a purely commercial transaction, a veneer of romantic fantasy in which the sex worker seems to be not simply serving but caring for her ‘companion’ who they look upon with ‘an attitude of loving expectancy’ (P, 108). ‘This is all a part of the fantasy’ says one researcher on Thai sex tourism, ‘in the land where the sex tourist advertisements say “Come to Thailand where all your fantasies will be made to come true”.’35 The Thai fantasy is, then, as much concerned with a more general subordination of women, where the woman ‘serves’ the man in every possible respect, as it is with actual sexual activity. Of course, feminist critics have had much to say about the trafficking of women, not only in the sex trade but also in more structurally anthropological ways as part of primitive kinship relations in which females are the equivalent of money or land for the men trading them as commodities in the most basic sense. Gayle Rubin suggests that the ‘exchange of women’ is a consolidation of certain aspects of the social relations of sex and gender, ‘a systematic social apparatus’ that uses women as raw materials and establishes hierarchy from sexual difference.36 Linking the sexual economy with the ‘real’ one, in a broader sense, Luce Irigaray has forcefully argued that ‘Whether they be considered as origin, practice, or reflection, sexual relations clearly cannot be disassociated from the general economy in which they operate’.37 In the case of Cuba the general economy is not looking good; ‘The poor people of Cuba’, says one old man at a hotel in Baracoa, have ‘nothing left to sell but their bodies’ (P, 235). The economic law of demand and supply is applied here to sexual transactions thus making explicit what has been more or less implicit in Western sexual relationships; once this is accepted, it is simply a case of turning the sale of sex into a legitimate part of the leisure industry.

  A ‘passionate liberal’ and an exemplary figure of a post-’68 creative turned entrepreneur, Jacques Maillot went from manning the barricades to setting up the travel company Nouvelles Frontières. Regarded as ‘a symbol of the new face of modern capitalism’, the idea for the company was conceived ‘at the dawn of the leisure
society’, and thrived in the booming years of the 70s and 80s when, at its peak, in 2000, tourism became ‘the biggest economic activity in the world’ (P, 29).38 Dependent on a notion of leisure as a consumer product that entails the purchase of experiences within some strictly defined parameters, tourism is the transplantation of one’s indigenous rights and liberties as a Westerner to reside in a locale in which a certain degree of licence, often involving alcohol, drugs and sexual promiscuity, may be granted to you for the period of your stay. In the case of the package holiday it is often a relatively simple financial transaction; one reads the description of the ‘package’ in the brochure and decides if it is sufficiently tailored to one’s own particular desires. Leafing through the travel literature ahead of his Thai holiday, Michel admires the abstraction of the language in the brochures and is equally impressed by the star-ratings system that ‘indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for’ (P, 15). Mischievously listing the kinds of models of consumer satisfaction used by economists he tells us, ‘According to the Marshall model, the buyer is a rational individual seeking to maximize his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen’s model on the other hand analyses the effect of peer pressure on the buying process’ (P, 14). He cites other models of demand and supply, such as the Baudrillard and Becker model and that of Copeland before deciding that the Marshall model best suits the particular conditions of sexual tourism.

  In order to drive down costs, companies provide holidays that would have the broadest appeal to the largest number of customers, and this requires a certain level of standardization that was the mark of the earliest incarnation of the package holiday. While phenomenally successful for a while in the 1970s and 80s, sales in the travel industry, particularly package holidays, began to flag in the 1990s. The standard ‘4 Ss’ model of vacation, ‘Sea, Sun, Sand and Sex’, was far less popular in the new post-Fordist world as it relied ‘too heavily on standardization’ and the things to offer on a holiday now more clearly pertained to the ‘affective topography of individualism and personal development; authenticity, discovery, a sense of sharing … ’ (P, 168). The language of advertising in the travel industry needed to reflect the change to niche marketing; that is, the micro-tailoring of the tourist experience to a society which, as noted, increasingly understood individual freedom as the widest possible choice of goods and services. This is the mission of the modern travel industry:

  The Spirit of Aurore is the art of marrying know-how, tradition and innovation with rigour, imagination and humanism, to attain a certain form of excellence. The men and women of Aurore are repositories of a unique cultural heritage: the art of welcoming. They know the rituals that transform life in to the art of living, and the simplest of service into a privileged moment. It is a profession, it is an art: it is their gift. Creating the best in order to share it, getting in touch with the essential through hospitality, devising spaces of pleasures … (P, 263)

  While this piece of advertising copy was not originally intended to promote sex tourism it is remarkable, notices Valérie, that the notion of the ‘spirit’ described in here could just as easily describe the ‘skills’ of the Thai sex workers. Reading a journal, Tourisme Hebdo, she happens upon an article analysing the affective composition of the ‘new consumer’. The author is using the newer Holbrook and Hirschman model of affective consumption ‘which focuses on the emotion the consumer feels when faced with a new product or service’; in a pointed and incisive piece of writing, Houellebecq describes this new form of cultural capitalism and its ‘new consumers’. More ethically concerned about authenticity, they are:

  … less predictable, more eclectic, more sophisticated, more concerned with humanitarian issues. They no longer consume to ‘seem’, but to ‘be’. These new cultural consumers wanted less entertainment, more serenity. They had balanced diets, were careful about their health: they were slightly fearful of others and of the future. They demanded the right to be unfaithful out of curiosity, out of eclecticism; they favoured things that were solid, durable, authentic. (P, 202)

  Lest we think the case is being is overstated here, consider the example of ‘cultural capitalism’ that Žižek gives in the form of Starbucks’ advertising copy: ‘… when you buy Starbucks […] you’re buying into something bigger than a cup of coffee. You’re buying into a coffee ethic […] When you choose Starbucks, you are buying a cup of coffee from a company who cares’.39 The same logic is applied to setting up a travel company dedicated to providing access to paid sexual encounters; discretion and attention to luxury details bring cheerful and apparently unforced erotic experience to sex-starved and lonely Westerners. This model works as ‘… we were living in a mixed economy which was slowly evolving towards a more pronounced liberalism, slowly overcoming the prejudice against usury—and in more general terms, against money—which persists in traditionally Catholic countries’ (P, 165).

  In Platform, we read that the criteria for selling sex are ‘unduly simple’; no longer linked to reproduction or to the transmission of property and wealth down genetic blood-lines, female beauty and youth is ‘now something marketable, narcissistic’ and enters into the ‘category of tradable commodities’, thus ‘the best solution was probably to involve money, that universal mediator which already made it possible to assure an exact equivalence between intelligence, talent and technical competence; which had already made it possible to assure a perfect standardization of opinions, tastes and lifestyles … ’ (P, 297–8). It is then but a small step to transcribe this commercial business model, replete with its affective lexicon drawn from traditional holiday pastimes of sightseeing, sunbathing and yoga classes, onto a sexual bill of fare. ‘The ruthless competition and demand for excellence that drive the labour market and economic relations’, says Morrey, ‘have gradually encroached upon the private sphere in such a way that personal relationships and sexual practices are now subject to the same pressure’.40 Houellebecq is referring here, satirically we assume, to the theory of comparative advantage applied to sexual services. 41

  As noted earlier, the sexual domain in Platform reverts to an unashamedly phallocentric, or more precisely what Bourdieu calls a ‘phallonarcissistic vision of the world’ where the space of the Thai brothels and bars is determined, very literally, by the ‘big dicks’ of patriarchal culture in which the feminine exists solely to mutely service in every possible way the presence of the masculine.42 The Thai sex workers are not represented as merely prostitutes but as erotic practitioners in the lost art of sensuality, ‘natural’ women who still know how to ‘make’ love. Untainted by the consumer logic of Western culture that has turned sex into shopping, these ‘natural’ women are venerated with what Kristeva describes as a ‘pagan enthusiasm’ central to ‘the phallic idealization of Woman’, where they become not only sexual objects but havens of existential solace, they are invoked as an ‘idealized fantasy-fulfilment’ for the incurable emotional lack caused by separation from the mother’.43 The narrator’s sexual transactions with Ôon and Sin form part of a kind of romanticized sexual pastoral, one which exists in a state of suspended separation from any moral or ethical considerations. Concealing the weight of colonial history, their labouring exoticized bodies render them as uncomplicated sites of pleasure. Smiling and acquiescent, the Thai women’s bodies possess neither subtext nor context and exist only to offer life-affirming sex to disenchanted Western men with an expertise and tenderness that combines a maternal tenderness with the advanced sexual techniques of the whore. This then, is the ultimate ‘girlfriend experience’. The allure of the Thai sex worker is that they seem to offer what all Houellebecq’s male protagonists seek – intimacy and feeling, and above all an affective experience of the other that has been destroyed, as we have seen, by Western feminism. The ‘natural’ erotic experience with the Thai sex workers is untouched by demands for equality or agency or any sense of reciprocity and, as such, can reconnect men with some sense of sublimity or encha
ntment, something that Michel will find in his relationship with Valérie. But again this is a short-lived happiness as she is killed in a terrorist attack, leaving Michel to live out his days in his room on Naklua Road where, although he still visits the prostitutes, his penance for living is to be deprived forever of any real sexual pleasure. Thus, the order of the Houellebecquian universe has been restored; the protagonist is left alone, about to die, still railing against the West: ‘I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it’ (P, 361).

  In the closed circuit of Houellebecq’s reasoning in his novels, it is inevitable that the logical extension of the struggle, what Crowley describes as the ‘reductive, materialistic anthropology he sees as responsible for the hegemony of the free market, both economically and sexually’, must extend to selling sex, as anything less than this would not adequately demonstrate his hypothesis that suggests a correlation between the economic and the sexual.44 But the problem of sex, how to get it in a ‘deregulated’ libidinal economy, how to make it last, and what to do when it is no longer freely available is, however, not finally the real preoccupation of Houellebecq’s work; rather it is an alibi, a decoy for an examination of the disappearance of love, compassion and the possibility of intimate communion. Love, in Houellebecq’s work, is ‘immense and admirable’ and ‘in the absence of love nothing can be sanctified’, says Daniel 1. When the creative energies necessary for the apprehension of otherness and for love are destroyed by the reifying forces of commerce, then the affective human body is in danger of obliteration. It is to this obliteration of affect to which I now turn.