This article seeks to emphasise the importance of addressing authors’ multimedia works for their links and relevance to their literary work and broader cultural context. Despite being a deeply literary author (as evidenced in his extensive intertextual referencing), his transmediality shows that he refutes both the marginalisation of the non-literary amongst other authorial projects and also the literary within the non-literary. Joining a lineage of French authors who work across various media from Victor Hugo to Jean Cocteau, Houellebecq encourages new forms of artistic contribution in a growing espace de possibilités (Bourdieu 1983). Houellebecq’s statement reflects the author’s usage of media other than text, and an increasing preference to do so as part of a juxtapositional, non-linear vision of creative production. I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition-that of poetry and of painting” 3 (Houellebecq 2010: 259).
“Houellebecq,” autofictional character from La Carte et le Territoire states “I’ve just about finished with the world as narration - the world of novels and films, the world of music too. This challenges the nature sacrée (Barthes 1957) of the text and the author, refuting the restrictions and boundaries placed upon them. Each of these types reveals the extension of Houellebecq’s worlds across media, contesting teleological interpretations of text as closed and autonomous.
ILMU UKUR TANAH SKIN
In addition to his use of a network of multimedia references in his novels (intermediality) in order to inhabit “the skin of the ordinary spectator” (Houellebecq 2008: 17), 2 Houellebecq participates in three main types of multimedia activity: plurimedial combination, expansive adaptation and post-textual work. 1 This contributes to a broader understanding of Houellebecq while also shedding light on the media and technology-obsessed context.
ILMU UKUR TANAH TV
This article seeks to consider Houellebecq as more than a writer so as not to “render invisible a swathe of the measures that he has set up in the media spotlight (songs, poems, films, exhibitions, published correspondence, radio and TV shows, websites, etc.)” (Meizoz 2016). Despite an evident and purposeful engagement with media other than text, there is no substantial critical analysis of this aspect of Houellebecq’s work or investigation into the methods, reasons and consequences. As this paper will uncover, Houellebecq has already conquered several media forms and continues to do so as part of a process of transmediality. In this way, he destabilises the boundaries between media, mobilising the edges of his texts. Furthermore, Houellebecq adapts his texts, expanding them into film, exhibitions, comics, and music, spreading his influence across media. In this technological and mediatised context, Houellebecq directs and stars in films, participates on music albums, collaborates with artists and saturates his novels with photographs and multimedia references. Such developments have transformed the limitations, pressures and possibilities of artistic production.
The resulting transmedial œuvre (Saint-Gelais 2011) reflects the passage of literature into the Digital Age, a period recognised for the imbricated rise of the Internet and mass media.