The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Notably: In 2001 the French novelist and literary shock jock Michel Houellebecq published Plateforme (Platform in Chaucer’s English) about sex tourism in Thailand. The book culminates with a terrorist attack in one of those pleasure pots, anticipating the trio of Bali terrorist attacks against tourist spots in October 2002. In 2010 Susannah Hunnewell, who would end her career, before cancer’s assassination, as the Paris Review’s publisher, interviewed him for the Art of Fiction segment (No. 206, fall 2010). He seems not to have made a pass at her, as he usually does, or did, with his female interviewers, sometimes with the kind of insistence that could land him in harassment jail, though it never has (he was sued for inciting a riot after calling Islam the stupidest religion, which was the stupidest suit despite his occasional but since diminished Islamophobia). Hunnewell asked him about Platform. He had apparently done his own research–he is a great fan of prostitution in principle, though he says fame has made it unnecessary for him–with a trip to Pattaya, the Babylon of his Thailand. His answer struck me as essentially describing Epcot, with only very, very small differences. Houellebecq tells Hunnewell : “ I was completely fascinated by Pattaya, where the book’s ending takes place. Everyone goes there. The Anglo-Saxons go there. The Chinese go there. The Japanese go there. The Arabs go there, too. That was the strangest part. It was something I read in a guidebook that made me make the trip to Thailand. They said that in one hotel in Bangkok, the Thai prostitutes wore veils to please their Arab clients. I found that fascinating, that adaptability. There are lots of French Algerians from the projects who go to Pattaya for the whores. So the Thai girls speak French but with a ghetto accent. “Ouais, j’tassure! Ouais, ta mère!” There are karaoke bars for the Japanese, restaurants for Russians with lots of vodka. And there’s a poignant side to it, too, something end-of-the-road about all these people, especially the old Anglo-Saxons. You sense they’ll never be able to leave. And there’s the dust, in the afternoon, when the go-go bars are still closed. There’s something very poignant about that moment when the girls start arriving on their scooters and you see the old Anglo-Saxon tourists start to come out like turtles walking in the dust. There is something very, very strange about that town.” Exactly as there is about Epcot and its different moods–the arrival, the climax, the mass departure as we all wave to the huge-gloved attendants. 

—P.T.

 

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“That’s precisely what’s so extraordinary about you, you enjoy giving pleasure. Offering your body as an object of pleasure, giving pleasure unselfishly: that’s what Westerners don’t know how to do any more. They’ve completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren’t up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It’s impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it’s not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we’re obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love.”

–From Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2001).
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