The descriptions of characters’ eating habits recurring in Michel Houellebecq’s novels make a complex system of signs functioning at the textual and intertextual level as well as in reference to the extratextual reality, i.e., the situation of the Western society at the turn of the 21st century. The aim of this article is to identify the key points of this system and determine the possible directions of interpretation of these culinary motifs. For contemporary decadents from Houellebecq’s novels, lone feasts are a new kind of ritual, which – unlike the traditional “ceremonies of eating” – does not help maintain interpersonal relationships but only provides temporary relief and helps them forget about problems.

The thread that runs through this article is made of silk, a fabric with a fascinating history of origins in China and a long record of projects aimed at organizing and mechanizing its production in Europe. The silk motif recurs throughout 19th century literature. As an object of realist description it gives the writer the opportunity to explore its sensuous material appeal and, also, to create around it a web of additional references and associations. For Honoré de Balzac and Bolesław Prus silk carries connotations of elegance, social status and social aspirations. In the fiction of Eliza Orzeszkowa it is one of the regularly recurring elements of descriptions of outward appearance of characters. It can interpreted as a mechanical repetition or, perhaps, the foregrounding of the stereotype meaning of silk intended as an invitation to the moral judgment of characters furnished with that mark.