Jacques Henric on Houellebecq's Poetry and the Structure of Suffering

In a 2013 essay for artpress, Jacques Henric examines Michel Houellebecq's poetry collection "Configuration du dernier rivage" (Flammarion), arguing that Houellebecq's use of alexandrines and obscenity constitutes a deliberate structural choice rather than nihilism. Henric compares Houellebecq's shocking verse—such as "D'abord j'ai trébuché dans un congélateur" (1997) and "Les hommes cherchent uniquement à se faire sucer la queue" (2013)—to the surrealist turn of Aragon and Éluard toward formal poetry in the 1940s, which provoked similar outrage. He notes that Houellebecq's prosaic, often obscene subjects (hypermarchés, porn cinemas, a forgotten phone on a beach) serve as "splinters in the flesh" that ground poetry in bodily reality, echoing Kierkegaard's cry "Give me a body!" Henric contends that Houellebecq neither confesses nor prophesies but articulates suffering within a "structure"—the poem itself. Despite themes of disenchantment, Henric highlights Houellebecq's insistence on the possibility of love, quoting "Voilà ce sera toi…" and "Certains êtres en s'aimant ont fait trembler la terre." The essay references Rimbaud's "surhuman promise," Hölderlin's lament "But we come too late," and the poet Roger-Gilbert Lecomte's question "Can one call oneself a poet without having written a song?" Henric concludes that Houellebecq's work, far from nihilistic, affirms love as a possibility on "the possibility of an island."