Platform Read online

  Acclaim for Michel Houellebecq's

  Platform

  "Full, acidic, self-flagellating . . . [Platform has] earned Mr. Houellebecq the status of conversation piece, agent provocateur, and savage messiah." —The New York Times

  "Remarkable . . . hilarious. . . . [Houellebecq] writes from the soul of a despairing, acutely lucid bureaucrat on Viagra."

  — Los Angeles Times Book Review

  "Scaldingly honest... | Platform] takes no prisoners as to prevailing terms of politically correct or any-ofher-waycorrect discourse. . . . It frequently uses jarring juxtaposition to dislocate us from complacencies, received wisdoms or even moderate comfort. . . . The analysis is broad and extremely knowledgeable . . . [with] quirky and sometimes horrific observations on everything from ecology to airport gift shops to incest."

  — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  "The most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier. . . . The trajectory of Houellebecq's world view will be worth following." —The New Yorker

  "An outstandingly powerful and relevant novel about sex, death, and Islam."— Hanif Kureishi

  "Astute, graceful, sexually preoccupied, occasionally alarming. . .. Eviscerat[es] the cultural moment."— The Baltimore Sun

  "Brilliant.. . . Reads like a shot.... The excitement of Platform is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation."— Salon

  "[A] dirty novel of ideas.... Houellebecq's sex scenes are hot and bountiful."— Entertainment Weekly

  "An extraordinary blend of pornography, satire, and diatribe. . . . Houellebecq is an undeniably gifted writer—I found myself reading on, even when the impulse to throw the book across the room grew strong."—Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News

  "Odd, subversive entertainment."— The Boston Globe

  "What's at stake is the desacralizing of sex, its final leap into the realm of pure commodity, the role of implacable consumption in cultural imperialism. . . . It's not the kind of book you only read once."—The Village Voice

  "Cynical and anomic . . . literary and complex."

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  "Shockingly vile and shockingly banal, written with an ear toward pissing off just about everyone. . . . Houellebecq's novel is tough to put down no matter how much you'd like to. . . . Like good porn it's increasingly difficult to draw your eyes away as it oozes toward climax."—The Austin Chronicle

  "A work of considerable imagination and wit. Even when the reader is most repelled, he may want to view the writer with grudging admiration. . . . [Michel Renault's rants] are very funny, and . . . very true."— The Star-Ledger

  "Platform cuts precisely to the core of every imaginable big-picture problem facing the world. . . . Houellebecq knows how to get a rise out of his readers. . . .His prejudices are serious, and current."— American Book Review

  "Houellebecq writes with an honesty and an anomic conviction that raises his novels, beyond any single troubling moment, toward genius."—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  "The most important book of the year—and perhaps of the century thus far. . . . Dazzling and prescient. . . . Houellebecq [is] one of the finest novelists of ideas alive."— Evening Standard (London)

  "Brilliant. . . . A thrilling read, close to Swift's A Modest Proposal in its impact."—The Daily Telegraph (London)

  "Houellebecq writes with humor as sharp as a razor's edge. There is bravery and even bravado in [his] prose. He alone among contemporary writers is prepared to do what the likes of Orwell and Huxley did and put up a mirror to our past and project its reflection on the future."— Financial Times

  MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

  Platform

  Michel Houellebeccq's The Elementary Particles, an international bestseller, won the prestigious Prix Novembre in France as well as the lucrative International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Houellebecq lives in Ireland.

  ALSO BY MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

  The Elementary Particles

  Whatever

  The publisher wishes to thank Amber Qureshi for her comprehensive assistance in translating and editing this text.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2004

  Translation copyright ©2002 by Frank Wynne

  All rights reserved tinder International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published

  in France as Platforme: Au milieu du mondeby Flammarion, Paris, in 2001. Copyright © 2001 by

  Flammarion. This translation was first published in slightly different form in Great Britain

  under the title Platform by William Heincmann, an imprint of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2002, and subsequently in hardcover in the United

  States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.,

  New York, in 2003.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon

  are trademarks of Random House, Inc. The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Houellebecq, Michel.

  [Platforme. English] Platform: a novel/by Michel Houellebecq ; translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

  p. cm.

  1. Wynne,Frank. II.Title.

  PQ2668.077 P5313 2003

  843'.9l4-dc21

  2002040634

  Vintage ISBN: 1-4000-3026-9

  Boot design by Virginia Tan

  www.vintagebooks.com Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Plus sa vie est infâme, plus I'homme y tient; elle est alors une

  protestation, une vengeance de tous les instants.

  —HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  (The more contemptible his life, the more a man clings to it; it thus

  becomes a protest, a retribution for every moment.)

  1

  Father died last year. I don't subscribe to the theory that we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.

  As I stood before the old man's coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. "You had kids, you fucker," I said spiritedly. "You shoved your fat cock in my mother's cunt." I was a bit tense, I have to admit. It's not every day you have a death in the family. I'd refused to see the corpse. I'm forty, I've already had plenty of opportunity to see corpses. Nowadays, I prefer to avoid them. It was this that had always dissuaded me from getting a pet.

  I'm not married, either. I've had the opportunity several times, but I never took it. That said, I really love women. It's always been a bit of a regret, for me, being single. It's particularly awkward on vacations. People are suspicious of single men on vacation, after they get to a certain age: they assume that they're selfish, and probably a bit pervy. I can't say they're wrong. After the funeral, I went back to the house where my father lived out his last years. The body had been discovered a week earlier. A little dust had already settled around the furniture and in the corners of the rooms: I noticed a cobweb on the window frame. So time, entropy, all that stuff, .was slowly taking the place over. The freezer was empty. The kitchen cupboards mostly contained single-serving Weight Watchers instant meals, tins of flavored protein, and energy bars. I wandered through the rooms nibbling a granola bar. In the boiler room, I rode the exercise bike for a while. My father was over seventy and in much better physical shape than I was. He did an hour of rigorous exercise every day, laps in the pool twice a week. On weekends, he played tennis and went cycling with people his age. I'd met some of them at the funeral. "He coached the lot of us!" a gynecologist exclaimed.
"He was ten years older than us, but on a two-kilometer hill, he'd be a whole minute ahead." Father, Father, I said to myself, how great was your vanity! To the left of my field of vision I could make out a weightlifting bench, barbells. I quickly visualized a moron in shorts —his face wrinkled, but otherwise very like mine —building up his pectorals with hopeless vigor. Father, I said to myself. Father, you have built your house upon sand. I was still pedaling but I was starting to feel breathless —my thighs already ached a little, though I was only on level 1. Thinking back to the ceremony, I was aware that I had made an excellent general impression. I'm always clean-shaven, my shoulders are narrow, and when I developed a bald spot at about the age of thirty, I decided to cut my hair very short. I usually wear a gray suit and sober ties, and I don't look particularly cheerful. With my short hair, my lightweight glasses, and my sullen expression, my head bowed a little to listen to a Christian funeral-hymn mix,* I felt perfectly at ease with the situation —much more at ease than I would have been at a wedding, for example. Funerals, clearly, were my thing. I stopped pedaling, coughed gently. Night was falling quickly over the surrounding meadows. Near the concrete structure that housed the boiler, you could make out a brownish stain that had been poorly cleaned. It was there that my father had been discovered, his skull shattered, wearing shorts and an "I ❤ New York" sweatshirt. He had been dead for three days, according to the coroner. There was the possibility, very remote, that what happened was an accident, he could have slipped in a puddle of oil or something. That said, the floor of the room was completely dry, and the skull had been broken in several places. Some of the brain had even spilled onto the floor. In all probability, what we were dealing with was murder. Captain Chaumont of the Cherbourg police was supposed to come over to see me that evening.

  * This word and all others marked with an asterisk appear in English in the original French edition.

  Back in the living room. I turned on the television, a thirty-two-inch Sony widescreen with surround sound and an integrated DVD player. There was an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess on TFi, one of my favorite series. Two very muscular women wearing metallic bras and miniskirts made of animal hide were challenging each other with their sabers. "Your reign has gone on too long, Tagrathâ!" cried the brunette. "I am Xena, warrior of the Western Plains!" There was a knock at the door; I turned the sound down.

  Outside, it was dark. The wind gently shook the branches dripping with rain. A girl of about twenty-five who looked North African was standing in the doorway. "I'm Aïcha," she said. "I cleaned for Monsieur Renault twice a week. I've just come to get my things."

  "Well. ..." I said, ".. . well." I managed a gesture that was intended to be welcoming. She came in and glanced quickly at the television screen. The two warriors were now wrestling right next to a volcano; I suppose the spectacle had its stimulating side, for a certain kind of lesbian. "I don't want to disturb you," said Aïcha. "I'll only be five minutes."

  'You're not disturbing me," I said. "In fact, nothing disturbs me." She nodded her head as though she understood, her eyes lingered on my face; she was probably gauging my physical resemblance to my father, possibly inferring a degree of moral resemblance. After studying me for a few moments, she turned and climbed the stairs that led to the bedrooms. "Take your time," I said, my voice barely audible. "Take all the time you need." She didn't answer, didn't pause in her ascent; she had probably not even heard me. I sat down on the sofa again, exhausted by the confrontation. I should have offered to take her coat. That's what you usually do, offer to take someone's coat. I realized that the room was terribly cold —a damp, penetrating cold, the cold of a cellar. I didn't know how to light the boiler, I had no wish to try, now my father was dead and I had intended to leave right away. I turned over to FR3 just in time to catch the last part of Questions pour un champion. At the moment when Nadège from Val-Fourré told Julien Lepers that she was going to risk her title for the third time, Aïcha appeared on the stairs, a small travel bag on her shoulder. I turned off the television and walked quickly toward her. "I've always admired Julien Lepers," I told her. "Even if he doesn't know the actual town or village the contestant is from, he always manages to say something about the department or the region; he always knows a bit about the climate and the local scenery. Above all, he understands life. The contestants are human beings to him, he understands their problems and their joys. Nothing of what constitutes human reality for the contestants is entirely strange or intimidating to him. Whoever the contestant is, he manages to get them to talk about their work, their family, their hobbies —everything, in fact, that in their eyes goes to make up a life. The contestants are often members of a brass band or a choral society, they're involved in organizing the local fair, or they devote themselves to some charitable cause. Their children are often there in the studio. You generally get the impression from the program that these people are happy, and you feel better, happier yourself. Don't you think?"

  She looked at me unsmilingly. Her hair was in a chignon, she wore little makeup, her clothes were pretty drab—a serious girl. She hesitated for a moment before saying in a low voice, a little hoarse with shyness: "I was very fond of your father." I couldn't think of anything to say. It struck me as bizarre, but just about possible. The old man must have had stories to tell: he'd traveled in Colombia, Kenya, or I don't know where; he'd had the opportunity to watch rhinoceros through binoculars. Every time we met, he limited himself to making fun of the fact that I was a civil servant, about the job security that went with it. "Got yourself a cushy little number, there," he would say, making no attempt to hide his scorn. Families are always a bit difficult. "I'm studying nursing," Aïcha went on, "but since I stopped living with my parents I have had to work as a cleaner." I racked my brains to think of an appropriate response: was I supposed to ask how expensive rents were in Cherbourg?

  I finally opted for an "I see," into which I tried to introduce a certain worldly wisdom. This seemed to satisfy her and she walked to the door. I pressed my face to the glass to watch her Volkswagen Polo do a U-turn in the muddy track. FR3 was showing some rustic made-for-TV movie set in the nineteenth century, starring Tchéky Karyo as a sharecropper. Between piano lessons, the daughter of the landowner—he was played by Jean-Pierre Marielle—accorded the handsome peasant certain liberties. Their clinches took place in a stable. I dozed off just as Tchéky Karyo was energetically ripping off her organza panties. The last thing I remember was a close-up of a small litter of pigs.

  I was awakened by pain and by the cold; I had probably fallen asleep in an awkward position, and my cervical vertebrae felt paralyzed. I was coughing heavily as I stood up, my breath filling the glacial air of the room with steam. Bizarrely, the television was showing Très Pêche, a fishing program on TF1. I had obviously woken up, or at least reached a sufficient level of consciousness to work the remote control, but I had no memory of doing so. Tonight's program was devoted to silurids —huge fish with no scales that had become more common in French rivers as a result of global warming. They were particularly fond of the areas around nuclear power plants. The report was intended to shed light on the truth behind a number of myths: it was true that adult silurids could grow to as much as three or four meters; in the Drôme, specimens larger than five meters had been reported; there was nothing particularly improbable about this. However, there was no question of the animals ever behaving carnivorously, or attacking bathers. The public suspicion of silurids seemed, to some extent, to have rubbed off on the men who fished for them; the small group of silurid anglers were not well liked by the larger family of anglers. They felt they suffered as a result and wanted to take advantage of this program to improve their negative image. It was true they could hardly suggest gastronomy as their motive—the flesh of the silurid was completely inedible. But it was an excellent catch, intelligent and at the same time requiring sportsmanship; much like pike fishing, it deserved a wider following. I paced around the room a little, unable to get warm; I
couldn't bear the idea of sleeping in my father's bed. In the end I went upstairs, brought down pillows and blankets, and settled myself as best I could on the sofa. I switched off just after the credits of "The Silurid Demystified." The night was opaque, the silence also.

  2

  All things come to an end, including the night. I was dragged from my saurian lethargy by the clear, resonant voice of Captain Chaumont. He apologized, he hadn't had time to come by the previous evening. I offered him coffee. While the water was boiling, he set up his laptop on the kitchen table and hooked up a printer. This way he could have me reread and sign my statement before he left: I made a murmur of approval. The police force was so completely snowed under with administrative work that it did not have enough time to dedicate to its real task, namely, investigation —or at least this was what I had concluded from various television documentaries. He agreed, warmly this time. This interview was getting off to a good start, in an atmosphere of mutual trust. Windows started up with a cheerful little sound. The death of my father occurred in the evening or the night of November 14. I was working that day; I was working on the fifteenth, too. Obviously, I could have taken my car and killed my father, having driven there and back overnight. What was I doing on the evening or the night of November 14? Nothing, as far as I knew, nothing significant. At least, I had no memory of anything, though it was less than a week before, I had neither a regular sexual partner nor any real close friends, in which case how can you be expected to remember? The days go by, and that's it. I gave Chaumont an apologetic look. I would have liked to help him out, or at least point him in the right direction. "I'll have a look in my diary," I said. I wasn't expecting anything to come of this, but curiously, there was a cell-phone number written in the space for the fourteenth beneath the name Coralie. Who was Coralie? The diary was completely meaningless. "My brain is a mess," I said with a disappointed smile. "But, I don't know, maybe I was at an opening." "An opening?" He waited patiently, his fingers hovering some inches above the keyboard. "Yes, I work for the Ministry of Culture. I plan the financing for exhibitions, or sometimes shows." "Shows?" "Shows . . . contemporary dance . . . " I felt completely desperate, overcome with shame. "Generally speaking, then, you work on cultural events?" "Yes, that's it. You could put it like that." He looked at me with a compassion tinged with seriousness. He had a vague but definite awareness of the existence of a cultural sector. He must have had to meet people from all walks of life in his profession; no area of society could be completely alien to him. Police work is a truly humanist calling. The rest of the interview proceeded more or less normally; I had watched a few made-for-TV movies, so I was prepared for this kind of conversation. Did I know any enemies my father might have? No, but no friends either, to be honest. In any case, my father wasn't important enough to have enemies. Who stood to gain by his death? Well, me. When did I last visit him? August, probably. There's never much to do in the office in August, but my colleagues have to go on vacation because they have children. I stay in Paris, I play solitaire on the computer, and around the fifteenth I take a long weekend off; that was the extent of my visits to my father. On that subject, did I have a good relationship with my father? Yes and no. Mostly no, but I came to see him once or twice a year; that in itself wasn't too bad. He nodded. I could feel my statement was coming to an end, though I wanted to have said more. I felt overcome by a feeling of irrational, abnormal pity for Chaumont. He was already loading paper into his printer. "My father was very athletic!" I said brusquely. He looked up at me inquiringly. "I don't know . . . ," I said, spreading my hands in despair, "I just wanted to say that he was very athletic." He shrugged disappointedly and pressed Print. After I'd signed my statement, I walked Captain Chaumont to the door. I was aware that I had been a disappointing witness, I told him. "All witnesses are disappointing," he said. I pondered this aphorism for a while. Before us stretched the endless monotony of the fields. Chaumont climbed into his Peugeot 305; he would keep me informed of any developments in the investigation. In the public sector, the death of a parent or grandparent entitles one to three days' leave. As a result, I could very easily have taken my time going home, bought some local Camembert, but I immediately took the highway for Paris. I spent the last day of my grace period in various travel agencies. I liked holiday brochures, their abstraction, their way of condensing the places of the world into a limited sequence of possible pleasures and fares. I was particularly fond of the star-rating system, which indicated the intensity of the pleasure one was entitled to hope for. I wasn't happy, but I valued happiness and continued to aspire to it. 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, analyzes the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/ service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialized purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. Back at the office I told Marie-Jeanne that I needed a holiday. Marie-Jeanne is my colleague. Together we work on exhibition proposals; together we work for the benefit of the contemporary arts. She is a woman of thirty five, with lank blonde hair, and her eyes are a very light blue. I know nothing about her personal life. Within the office hierarchy, she has a position slightly senior to mine; but this is something that she ignores, preferring instead to emphasize teamwork within the office. Every time we receive a visit from a really important person—a delegate from the Department of Plastic Arts or someone from the ministry—she insists on this notion of teamwork. "And this is the most important man in the office!" she exclaims, walking into my office. "He's the one who juggles the figures and the financial statements . . . I would be completely lost without him." And then she laughs; the important visitors laugh in turn, or at least smile good-naturedly. I smile too, insofar as I can. I try to imagine myself as a juggler; but in reality it's quite enough to master simple arithmetic. Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing, her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends; having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist; it is an accusation from which she must defend herself and the institution. She is also in regular contact with artists, gallery owners, and the editors of obscure reviews —obscure, at least, to me. These telephone calls keep her happy, because her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it —I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting. Rather, I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing. It's not up to me to invent or adopt new attitudes or new affinities with the world —I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend toward melancholy. I've attended many exhibitions, openings, many performances that remain unforgettable. My conclusion, henceforth, is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine.