Houellebecq delivers stark assessment of society
THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY
By Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95; 269 pp.
Originally published as La Carte et le territoire in 2010
For Michel Houellebecq, the end will come, in T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase, “not with a bang but a whimper,” that collapse of Western Civilization predicted some 90 years ago in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1923). Despite the material splendor wrought by two centuries of industrial revolution, despite the freedoms engendered by revolutions against the traditional order, Western Civilization is hollow: unfettered consumption joined to moral anarchy.
Houellebecq has pursued this argument relentlessly in a series of novels both lauded and excoriated, but more important, widely read and widely argued in many languages throughout the western world. His fifth and latest, The Map and the Territory, won France’s most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
The story is entirely approachable and compelling, never predictable, shrewdly perceptive and wickedly funny. The protagonist is Jed Martin, an artist who finds fame and fortune. He is the perfect example of Houellebecq’s deadly accurate definition of art in contemporary society: “The question of beauty is secondary … the great painters … were considered such when they had developed a worldview that was both coherent and innovative, which means that they always painted in the same way … in a manner that was specific to them and had never been used before.”
And so Martin establishes himself as a photographer of manufactured objects, no different than in advertisements, but critics exalt them as “homage to human labor.” He moves on to photographing Michelin road maps, rendered in large scale, which the critics revere for adopting “the point of view of God co-participating, alongside man, in the (re)construction of the world.”
Finally, he paints two series of portraits, 42 of “Simple Professions,” 22 of “Business Composition.” The last is “Michel Houellebecq, Writer,” and thus the author becomes a character in his own novel.
Martin has asked Houellebecq to write the catalogue for the grand exposition of his paintings, and the two develop a wary friendship. Each has a keen sense of the absurd. When the Michelin Corporation adopts Martin as its favorite artist, the perquisites include a beautiful public relations specialist to be the proof of his virility. At a Paris reception with French folk art as its theme, Martin finds Vendée peasants mounting guard with pitchforks, Alsatian waitresses offering sausages, Corsicans singing polyphony, and Breton bagpipers drowning out all conversation.
Houellebecq has taken refuge in Ireland to escape exactly these excesses. He tells Martin, “I feel only a faint sense of solidarity with the human species,” and declares that he has renounced sausage, indeed all charcuterie, because the pig is “an admirable animal, intelligent, sensitive, and capable of sincere and exclusive affection for its master.”
For a more worthy time, both look back to William Morris, the 19th-century English champion of reviving traditional artisanal production. Far from a vague dreamer, he established a workshop in which each artisan was responsible for his product from beginning to end. Morris & Co. turned out furniture, stained-glass, leather goods, jewelry, cloth, and tapestries, always at a profit. By contrast in the modern world, design and execution are definitively separated, and products appear or disappear through the whim of novelty.
Houellebecq’s commentary is corrosive. About the banality of Western Civilization: “What defines a man? … It’s his place in the productive process.” Education is “teaching contradictory absurdities to social-climbing cretins.” Aging is “a succession of levels, separated by sudden falls,” and to compensate for how old age destroys the sense of taste, “digestive problems and prostate cancer remain.” Regarding love: “life sometimes offers you a chance … but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away.”
To reveal more of the plot would spoil the many surprises waiting, but be assured, you will learn about bangs as well as whimpers. Michel Houellebecq is the most important novelist writing in any language today. If you drink from his bitter fountain, the taste may indeed be the truth.
Benjamin Franklin Martin is the Price Professor of History at LSU.