Michel Houllebecq and Sarah Wiame: La Peau, excerpt translated by Delphine Grass

Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq is an internationally recognised French novelist and poet, born on the French island of La Réunion in 1958. His first collection of poems, The Pursuit of Happiness (La Poursuite du Bonheur) won the “Prix Tristan Tzara”, and his subsequent book of poetry, The Way of the Struggle (Le Sens du Combat), won the “Prix de Flore”, up until then only attributed to fiction.

Michel Houellebecq later became widely known for his thought-provoking novels on modern France. Whatever (Extension du Domaine de la Lutte), which tells of the sexual and existential frustrations of a computer engineer in Paris, won him instant fame in France. His second novel Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires), published in 1998, won the “Prix Novembre” and was translated into more than 25 languages. The highly controversial Platform (Plateforme), published in 2000, is a love story set in the Paris artworld and the sex-tourism industry of Thailand.

His latest novel, The Possibility of an Island (La Possibilité d'une île), which he adapted into a film screened at the London Film Festival of 2008, explores the idea of cloning, both philosophically and emotionally. Houellebecq describes it as “the consecration of poetry within the novel”.
He currently lives in Ireland.

Sarah Wiame

Sarah Wiame is a graduate of the “École des Beaux Arts de Paris”. Between 1972 and 1995, she has exhibited her works on faces and masks in France and internationally. In 1995, after completing the book La peau with Michel Houellebecq, Sarah Wiame created her own publishing company called “Les Céphéides”. This was the starting point for her to produce more than sixty artist books with thirty different contemporary poets, including the British writer Susan Wicks. Her books emphasize the visual and tangible aspect of writing and could be compared to manuscripts. She also likes to use translations of poems in her works. The self-portrait for this bibliography is part of a series of Sarah’s latest art-work in which she reproduced photos of her face using serigraphic printing.

Note to The Skin:

Presentation and translation by Delphine Grass.

The Skin (La Peau) is a work mixing the drawings and collages of Sarah Wiame and the poems of Michel Houellebecq. Their collaboration was first suggested by the French poet Juliette Darles at the festival of Art and Poetry in Aubigny sur mer, where she presented Michel Houellebecq with the Tristan Tzara prize for his first poetry book The Pursuit of Happiness (La Poursuite du Bonheur). The Skin was completed a year later, on the 1st of May 1993 (picture 1). It was exhibited in Aubigny sur mer and later at the French Assembly where Michel Houellebecq worked as a computer programmer. Soon after, they decided to transform the painting into a book containing sixteen fragments of the work (picture 2). The book was completed in 1995. They also did another painting and book together called La Ville.

La Peau
Picture 1

La Peau
Picture 2

The poems for La Peau were chosen by Michel Houellebecq after he had come to Sarah Wiame's workshop in Paris and looked at her engravings of masks (picture 3). Their working relationship in creating La Peau was thus not that of a poet and an illustrator. The visual dimension of the poems themselves is highlighted by the fact that they were handwritten by Michel Houellebecq on the canvas. In contrast, we do not see Sarah Wiame’s brush strokes, but prints of her engravings that she then assembled into a collage using, as one might for a text, the techniques of cutting, printing and editing.

La Peau
Picture 3

La Peau
Picture 4

In the preface to the book, Michel Houellebecq writes in the following way about the nature of the relationship between image, poetry and novel in his works:

Like pure, detached moments, poems exist by themselves; they can be recited, or sung; sometimes they proliferate under the form of posters, or pamphlets (and it is always in moments of freedom deprivation that they find their impact again, their original strength). Eisenstein already noted that, as soon as two separate fragments of film are put together in a montage, they are invested with continuity, a story (individual or collective), for the human mind finds it difficult to think in terms of absolute discontinuity. This is how the multiple streams of occidental culture meet in the temporal flow of the novel. And it is the only way in which I can think of a novel: a novel is built out of pure fragments, from each other of these fragments’ independent origins. Yet a novel lies there, still, of sorts.