Paradoxes of the postmodern reactionary Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq

This study examines two writers, Michel Rio and Michel Houellebecq, who have encountered opposite fortunes among the public and critics. However, they share numerous writing practices associated with postmodernism that include mixing literary forms, integrating epistemological discourses, doubling characters, avoidance of meta-narratives, and destabilizing interpretation through irony, fractured perspectives and the parodic recycling of popular genres such as detective fiction and eroticism. Moreover, both display putatively reactionary elements in their fiction: Houellebecq quite explicitly, Rio through his sexual and political imaginary (especially in the Francis Malone `enquêtes'). We conclude that both writers are indeed rooted in reactionary habits of thought, but Rio's practices place him in the camp of modernism (hierarchy of epistemologies, elitist stereotyping, scientism), while Houellebecq falls among the postmodernists (neutralizing voices of authority, erasing high/low cultural distinction, refusal of progress, denial of the subject). The di ference in their literary strategies no doubt accounts at least in part for their diverse receptions, with Rio remaining inside a familiar (albeit intellectually demanding) model while Houellebecq enacts a highly debatable but radical critique of the modern notions of humanism, the desiring subject, and the benefits of liberal democracy.