Houellebecq et le “Prix Clone-court”

"Landep News"

Liberally quoting word for word segments of Wikipedia articles in your schoolwork may discredit its value, but omitting altogether to mention the free online encyclopedia as your original source would clearly be tantamount to un plagiat (plagiarism), which can cause you serious trouble. But do it in France nowadays, and as long as you’re “sold” as an “intellectual outcast” and a “misunderstood provocateur“, you may very well earn yourself a prestigious prix littéraire (literary award) of the Goncourt caliber!

Hard to tell l’original from le clone? (Compare with the two videos right below)
Michel Houellebecq and the 2010 Prix Goncourt: Un clone d’un triste clown (a clone of a sad clown) earns what ought to be rechristened today, point blank, as the “Prix Clone-court”, tout court !

Click here to view the embedded video.
Visibly at a loss for “deeper”-sounding words (and probably for enough hair on the front too, to adopt in the eyes of his duped fans a more appropriate “emo”-style at the occasion of this interview), Houellebecq openly pleads for “psychological depression” (see the “French malaise social” and the “Unheimlich“) as a necessary condition for life to be “suffisamment intéressante” (“interesting enough”) 

And so has the age that compensated “le meilleur ouvrage d’imagination en prose paru dans l’année” (“the best work of imagination in prose published during the year”), since its inception more than a hundred years ago, officially come to an end in France. The tournant décisif (“decisive watershed”), or the coup de grâce (final blow) was dealt in the form of the reward, yesterday, of the oldest prix littéraire (literary prize) known in France, the much coveted Prix Goncourt, to an author who seemed to have so far exhausted every option to appear “noteworthy” to his literati peers, after a long string of desperately predictable and grotesquely unimaginative attempts that ultimately owed him the unflattering title of a “Baudelaire de supermarché” (something like a “small-time Baudelaire”, or a “Beaudelaire of supermarkets.” See “Michel Houellebecq revisité” by Murielle Lucie Clément)—the latest being “cloning” verbatim whole paragraphs from Wikipedia.fr articles, without bothering to mention or even allude to them as being the original source!

Does the last charge sound a bit too big, too crude, to be true?
Does he even deny it?

Peut-être allez-vous être surpris, mais non !
(Perhaps will you be surprised, but no!)

Why not after all allow Monsieur Houellebecq offer you the explanation himself in this vidéo-réponse, after the scandalous plagiat affair regarding his latest book “La Carte et le Territoire” became common knowledge:

Click here to view the embedded video.

* Here’s the translation of the “best parts”, or like the French like to say: “Ze Very Best Of”:

- “Beaucoup de gens l’ont fait” (“Many people did it”)!
- “Other people were better than me at this.”
- “Ça fait partie des méthodes de la littérature depuis assez longtemps quand même” (“It’s part of the methods of literature since a rather long time.”) To which he adds: “And if you don’t know this, then you’re incompetent“!
- “J’aimerais être capable de les modifier un peu moins que je ne le fais” (“I wish I could modify them [the quotes] a bit less than I already do”): Of course, one wonders how it is even possible to achieve the extraordinary feat of “modifying less” a text that you simply copied as is, word for word! Perhaps does he mean to type it by hand, instead of doing it as a copier/coller (copy/paste)…

* * *

In a way, through this Goncourt, the French literary scene is henceforth fully embracing the advent of “le meilleur des mondes” in its most official form, or the “Brave New World” as it is known in the original English title of Huxley’s work.

Aldous Huxley’s “Le meilleur des mondes“, originally published in English as “Brave New World” (1931) prefigured his last novel, “Island” (1962), which may have in turn “suggested” the openly raëlien (see below) book of Houellebecq “la Possibilité d’une île” (“The Possibility of an Island”) dealing with the topic of human cloning.

In fact, Monsieur Houellebecq is no stranger to this Nouvel-Âge (New Age) of clonage dawning on the world of French literature. And the use of the expression “New Age” is here far from being  fortuite (fortuitous), in light of the close ties that link the author to one of the most bizarre “New Age”-UFO-apocalyptic cults in the planet. Ties which, curiously enough, don’t seem to have enjoyed very much media scrutiny, or at least not as of yet. This rather insane cult, called the “Raëliens”, who hosted Michel Houellebecq as no less than their invité d’honneur (honorary guest) of their movement meeting in 2003, is famous to have one major obsession-you may have guessed it already- it is le clonage (cloning)—not the cloning of wikipedia articles in this case, but above all of human beings!

Michel Houellebecq is l’invité d’honneur (the honorary guest) of the UFO-apocalyptic leader “Raël” (real name: Claude Vorilhon) in 2003, whose teachings form the basis of the author’s book published two years later, “La Possibilité d’une île” (The Possibility of an Island”)…
If, as the poète anglais (English poet) John Donne said almost 400 years ago, “no man is an island“, then what can be properly said of the “clone” of a man, if not an outright fraud?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Qu’est-ce que “Raël“? What is “Raël”?
C’est le Nouvel-Âge du clonage de clowns raëliens—Cloning Clowns with the “Prix Clonecourt” is now “Raëlity”!

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