Michel Houellebecq : return of the sincerity of the novelistic testimony and the 'new romanticism'

This article examines the trend towards the new sincerity and authenticity of novelistic testimony and the controversial recourse to romanticism in the novels of contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq (* 1956). In the selected novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994, translated as Whatever by Paul Hammond in 1998), La carte et le territoire (2010, translated as The Map and the Territory by Gavin Bowd in 2011), Sérotonine (2019, translated as Serotonin by Shaun Whiteside in 2019) and Anéantir (2022, English translation titled Annihilation to be released 19/09/2024), it explores how Houellebecqian prose maintains a critical dialogue with subversion and how the image of an empathizing author emerges in his work. It also examines how Houellebecq's position can be compared with those of the philosophers Václav Bělohradský and Zygmunt Bauman. Finally, it examines how the author's narrative aesthetics adequately reflects the contemporary human condition through the irony of the irony, the subversion of the subversion. The author thus transcribes a specifically Houellebecquian notion of the new romanticism as a means of rediscovering the sense of life of the contemporary man and his bearings in the world.