UFR Lettres, Arts, Communication et Technologies

Contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq’s commercial success as a novelist is undoubted, but he has consistently confounded critics because of the transgressive aspects of his work. Houellebecq’s transgression takes many forms, from the literary (such as the exploitation of the ‘non-literary’ - the best seller, the pornographic novel - in his work) to the ideological (the supposed racist and anti-Islamic positions they present).
This paper will argue, however, that the way he presents himself around his texts can be regarded as one of Houellebecq’s key transgressions; it the way in which he undermines the persona of contemporary author that has at least partially rendered him problematic from a critical perspective, causing him to be sneered at by some areas of the literary community.
This paper will establish Michel Houellebecq as a pan-disciplinary figure, and argue that, whilst best-known as a novelist, it is his extra-textual such his album of music (2001’s Présence Humaine), his filmmaking (2008’s La possibilité d'une île and 2002’s erotic short, La Rivière) that have clouded critical readings of his writing.  I will also argue that Houellebecq’s media appearances, which have created a distinct media persona of a ‘contemporary transgressor’, mediated through the distinctly non-textual spaces of the TV chat show and the newspaper/magazine interview (and, increasingly the social media space) offer crucial insights into the way we read his work. I will also suggest that parallels can be drawn in this regard between Houellebecq and another key figure of provocation, Serge Gainsbourg.
I will also make reference to the ongoing dialogue between his work and other artistic arenas, particularly the world of contemporary visual art, which reaches an apex in 2010’s La Carte et le territoire.

Critics of contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq have frequently used the adjective ‘transgressive’ in their descriptions of both the man and his work. There are, however, huge differences of both order and magnitude between the notion of transgression in the writing of the provocative novelist and that theorised systematically in the work of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, archetypical avatars of transgression. Houellebecq has even gone on record to declare his disgust at what he perceives as the synonymy between cruelty and transgression in their work and ‘transgressive’ visual art more broadly. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s fiction does display a constant preoccupation with both transgression and the transgressive: he is drawn to both the obscene and the unacceptable.
This article, which forms part of my ongoing research into the less canonical or less explored strands of Houellebecq’s work, considers the representation of both sex and transgressive contemporary visual art as represented in Houellebecq’s fiction. It demonstrates how Houellebecq’s writing maintains a critical dialogue with transgression, in particular in the work of the Vienna Actionists, Damien Hirst and, more implicitly, Jake and Dinos Chapman. It also touches on the author’s writing about art and his description of his own death, at the hands of a crazed art collector, in La Carte et le territoire (2010). As a result, it demonstrates how the image of a moralising author emerges in his work. It also considers how Houellebecq’s stance can be closely aligned with those of critics Ovidie and Paul Virilio. To conclude, it considers how the author formulates a specifically Houellebecquian notion of transgression, or an aesthetics to which art and writing should aspire, which resonates with the Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977).

This article introduces a state-space model for the dynamic modeling of curve sequences within the framework of railway switches online monitoring. In this context, each curve has the peculiarity of being subject to multiple changes in regime. The proposed model consists of a specific latent variable regression model whose coefficients are supposed to evolve dynamically in the course of time. Its parameters are recursively estimated across a sequence of curves through an online Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. The experimental study conducted on two real power consumption curve sequences from the French high speed network has shown encouraging results.