After two weeks, Jed began to get really worried. He sent more and more text messages and e-mails. Houellebecq finally replied. His voice was so listless that he almost sounded dead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going through a few personal problems. Well, you can come and take your photos.”
15
The flight leaving Beauvais at 1:25 p.m. for Shannon the following day was offered, on Ryanair.com, at a price of €4.99, and Jed’s first thought was that this was a mistake. Further into the booking process he noticed there were extra charges and taxes; the final price came to €28.01, which was still very modest.
A shuttle linked the Porte Maillot to Beauvais Airport. On getting into the bus he noticed there were mainly young people, probably students, who were leaving on vacation, or were going home—it was the February holidays. There were also some pensioners, and a few Arab women accompanied by young children. In fact, there was almost every type except active, productive members of society. Jed also realized that he felt rather at home on this shuttle, which gave him the impression of going on holiday—while the last time, on the Air France flight, he’d felt like he was going to work.
Leaving the rough residential suburbs to the north of Paris, the bus rapidly crossed fields of wheat and beetroot on an almost deserted motorway. Some isolated and enormous crows crossed the gray sky. No one was speaking around him, and gradually Jed felt touched by a sort of peace.
It was already ten years, he thought; ten years during which he had worked in an obscure, very solitary way. Working alone, without ever showing his paintings to anyone—except Franz, who he knew arranged discreet private showings, without ever giving him any feedback—and going to no openings, no debates, and almost no exhibitions, Jed had gradually let himself slip, in the course of the last few years, outside the status of professional artist. He had gradually, in the eyes of the world and even to some extent his own, turned into a Sunday painter. This exhibition was going to return him brutally to that milieu, the circuit, and he wondered if he really wanted this. No doubt no more than you want, at first, on the Breton coast, to plunge into a cold and rough sea—while knowing that after a few strokes you’ll find the coolness of the waves delicious and invigorating.
While waiting on the little airport’s benches for his flight’s departure, Jed opened the instruction manual for the camera he’d bought the day before at the Fnac. The Nikon D3X he normally used for preparatory pictures had struck him as too imposing, too professional. Houellebecq had a reputation for harboring a deeply ingrained hatred of photographers; he had felt that a more playful, family-friendly camera would be more appropriate.
From the outset, the Samsung firm congratulated him, not without a certain grandiloquence, on having chosen the ZRT-AV2. Neither Sony nor Nikon would have thought of congratulating him: those firms were too arrogant, too sure of their professionalism, unless it was the arrogance characteristic of the Japanese; anyway, those well-established Japanese companies were unbearable. The Germans tried to maintain the fiction of a sensible, loyal choice, and reading the owner’s manual of a Mercedes remains a real pleasure; but on the level of value for money, the magical fiction, the social democracy of gremlins could no longer stand the pace. There remained the Swiss and their policy of extreme prices, which might tempt some. Jed had, in certain circumstances, considered buying a Swiss product, generally an Alpa camera, and on another occasion a watch, but the price differential, from 1 to 5 in relation to a normal product, had quickly put him off. Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung.
The Samsung ZRT-AV2 combined, according to the manual’s introduction, the most ingenious technological innovations—such as, for example, the automatic detection of smiles—with the legendary easiness of use that had made the brand’s reputation.
After this lyrical passage, the rest became more factual, and Jed flicked through it quickly, looking to identify just the essential information. It was clear that a reasoned, ample, and unifying optimism had underscored the design of the product. Prevalent in modern technological objects, this tendency was not, however, a fatality. Instead of, for example, the programs FIREWORKS, BEACH, BABY1, and BABY2 proposed by the cameras in scene mode, you could just as well have encountered FUNERAL, RAINY DAY, OLDMAN1, and OLDMAN2.
Why BABY1 and BABY2? Jed wondered. By going to page 37 of the manual, he learned that this function enabled you to set the birthdays of two different babies, in order to enter their ages into the electronic settings linked to the pictures. Further information was given on page 38: these programs, the manual promised, were designed to reproduce the “fresh and healthy” complexion of the babies. After all, their parents would probably have been disappointed if, on their birthday photos, BABY1 and BABY2 appeared with wrinkled and jaundiced faces; but Jed did not, personally, know any babies; nor would he have had the occasion to use the PET program, and hardly the PARTY one; at the end of the day, this camera was perhaps not made with him in mind.
Rain was falling steadily on Shannon, and the taxi driver was a malicious imbecile. “Come for holidays?” he asked, as if rejoicing in advance at his bad luck. “No, working,” replied Jed, who didn’t want to give him this joy, though the other man obviously didn’t believe him. “What kind of job do you do?” he asked, his tone clearly implying that he thought it improbable that he’d be given any kind of work. “Photography,” Jed told him. The driver sniffed, admitting defeat.
He hammered on the door for at least two minutes, under a heavy downpour, before Houellebecq came to open it. The author of The Possibility of an Island was wearing gray-striped pajamas that made him vaguely resemble a prisoner in a television series; his hair was ruffled and dirty, his face red, almost with broken veins, and he stank a little. The inability to wash, Jed remembered, is one of the surest signs of depression.
“I’m sorry to bang on your door, I know you’re not doing very well. But I’m impatient to start on my portrait of you,” he said, producing a smile which he hoped was disarming. Disarming smile is an expression you still encounter in certain novels, and therefore must correspond to some kind of reality. But unfortunately Jed, for his part, didn’t feel sufficiently naive to be able to be disarmed by a smile; and he suspected Houellebecq wasn’t, either. Nevertheless, the poet of The Art of Struggle stepped back a meter, just enough to allow Jed to take shelter from the rain, without, however, really giving him access inside.
“I’ve brought a bottle of wine. A good bottle!” Jed exclaimed with slightly fake enthusiasm, rather like how you offer sweets to children, as he took it out of his travel bag. It was a Château Ausone 1986, which had cost him four hundred euros—a dozen Paris–Shannon flights with Ryanair.
“Just one bottle?” asked the poet of The Pursuit of Happiness while stretching his neck toward the label. He stank a little, but less than a corpse; worse things could have happened, after all. Then he turned round without saying a word, and Jed interpreted this as an invitation.
The main room, the living room, had been empty the last time, as far as he remembered; it was now furnished with a bed and a television.
“Yes,” said Houellebecq, “after your visit I realized you were the first visitor to enter this house, and that you would probably be the last. So I told myself, what’s the point of maintaining the fiction of a reception room? Why not just have my bedroom in the main room? After all, I spend most of my days in bed; I most often eat in bed, watching cartoons on Fox TV; it’s not as if I throw dinner parties.”
Indeed, bits of toast and scraps of mortadella were strewn on the sheets, which were stained with wine and cigarette burns in places.
“We’ll go into the kitchen, all the same,” proposed the author of Renaissance.
“I came to take the photos.”
“Your camera doesn’t work in kitchens?”
“I’ve relapsed … I’ve completely relapsed into
charcuterie,” Houellebecq went on darkly. The table was covered with packages of chorizo, mortadella, and pâté de campagne. He handed Jed a corkscrew, and once the bottle was open he downed a glass of wine in one long swallow, without even pretending to taste it. Jed took a dozen close-ups, trying to vary the angles.
“I’d like to have some photos of you in your office … the place where you work.”
The author groaned unenthusiastically, but got up and led him down a corridor. The moving boxes piled up along the walls had still not been opened. He’d put on some weight since the last time, but his neck and his arms were still just as spindly; he looked like a sick old turtle.
The office was a large rectangular room with bare walls, almost empty except for three garden tables in green plastic lined up against a wall. On the central table were a twenty-four-inch iMac and a Samsung laser printer; sheets of paper, printed or handwritten, were scattered on the other tables. The only luxury was a black leather executive armchair with a tall back and fitted with casters.
Jed took a few photos of the room as a whole. As he saw Jed approach the tables, Houellebecq suddenly became nervous.
“Don’t worry, I won’t look at your manuscripts, I know you hate that. However …” He thought for a moment. “I’d like to see what your annotations and corrections look like.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I’m not looking at the content, not at all. It’s just to have an idea of the geometry of it all. I promise you that in the painting no one will recognize the words.”
Reticently, Houellebecq took out a few sheets of paper. There were very few crossings-out, but numerous asterisks in the middle of the text, accompanied by arrows that led to new blocks of text, some in the margin, others on separate sheets. Inside these blocks, which were roughly rectangular, new asterisks led toward other blocks, forming a sort of tree diagram. The handwriting was slanting, almost illegible. Houellebecq didn’t take his eyes off Jed all the time he was taking pictures, and sighed with visible relief when he moved away from the table. On leaving the room, he closed the door carefully behind him.
“It’s not the text about you, I haven’t yet started,” the author said while returning to the kitchen. “It’s a preface to a new edition of Jean-Louis Curtis with Omnibus—I have to submit it soon. You want a glass of wine?” He was speaking with exaggerated cheerfulness now, no doubt to make Jed forget the initial coolness of his welcome. The Château Ausone was almost finished. He extravagantly opened a cupboard, revealing about forty bottles.
“Argentina or Chile?”
“Chile, for a change.”
“Jean-Louis Curtis is totally forgotten today. He wrote about fifteen novels, novellas, an extraordinary collection of pastiches … France Exhausts Me contains, in my view, the best pastiches in French literature: his imitations of Saint-Simon and Chateaubriand are perfect; he also does Stendhal and Balzac very well. And yet today there’s nothing left, no one reads him anymore. It’s unfair, he was rather a good author, in a slightly conservative and classical kind of way, but he tried to do his job honestly. Quarantine is a very well-written book, I find. There’s a real nostalgia, a sensation of loss in the transition from traditional France to the modern world, and you can completely relive that moment by reading him; it’s rarely caricatural, except occasionally with some characters who are left-wing priests. And then A Young Couple is a very surprising book. Tackling exactly the same subject as Georges Perec in Things, he manages not to be ridiculous in comparison, and that’s already saying something. Obviously he doesn’t have Perec’s virtuosity, but who did, in his century? You might also be astonished to see him take the side of the young, the tribes of hippies who were apparently crossing Europe at the time, wearing backpacks and rejecting ‘consumer society,’ as they called it then; his rejection of consumer society is, however, as strong as theirs, and rests on a much more solid basis, as subsequent events have shown all too clearly. Conversely, Georges Perec accepts the consumer society, and he rightly considers it the only possible horizon; his observations on the happiness found in Orly Airport are in my view completely convincing. It’s quite wrongly that Jean-Louis Curtis has been classified as a reactionary. He’s just a good author who’s slightly sad, and convinced that mankind can hardly change, in one way or the other. A lover of Italy, he’s fully conscious of the cruelty of the Latin view of the world. Well, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, you don’t give a damn about Jean-Louis Curtis, but you’re wrong not to. It should interest you, for I also sense in you a sort of nostalgia, but this time it’s nostalgia for the modern world, for the time when France was an industrial country, or am I wrong?” He took out of the fridge some chorizo, sausage, and brown bread.
“That’s true,” Jed replied after a few moments’ thought. “I’ve always loved industrial products. I would never have imagined photographing, for example … a sausage.” He held his hand out toward the table, and then immediately apologized. “Well, it’s very good, I don’t mean that, I like eating it … But photographing it, no. There are those irregularities of organic origin, those venules of fat that vary from one slice to the next. It’s a bit … off-putting.”
Houellebecq nodded, opening his arms as if he were entering a tantric trance; he was, more probably, drunk, and trying to keep his balance on the kitchen stool where he’d crouched. When he spoke again his voice was soft and deep, filled with naive emotion. “In my life as a consumer,” he said, “I’ve known three perfect products: Paraboot walking boots, the Canon Libris laptop-printer combination, and the Camel Legend parka. I loved those products, with a passion; I would’ve spent my life in their presence, buying regularly, given wear and tear, identical products. A perfect and faithful relationship had been established, making me a happy consumer. I wasn’t completely happy in all aspects of life, but at least I had that: I could, at regular intervals, buy a pair of my favorite boots. It’s not much but it’s something, especially when you’ve quite a poor private life. Ah yes, that joy, that simple joy, has been denied me. My favorite products, after a few years, have disappeared from the shelves, their manufacture has stopped purely and simply—and in the case of my poor Camel Legend parka, no doubt the most beautiful parka ever made, it will have lived for only one season …” He slowly began to cry, big tears streaming down his face, and served himself another glass of wine. “It’s brutal, you know, it’s terribly brutal. While the most insignificant animal species take thousands, sometimes millions of years to disappear, manufactured products are wiped off the surface of the globe in a few days; they’re never given a second chance, they can only suffer, powerless, the irresponsible and fascistic diktat of product-line managers who of course know better than anyone else what the customer wants, who claim to capture an expectation of novelty in the consumer, and who in reality just turn his life into one exhausting and desperate quest, an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.”
“I understand what you mean,” Jed interjected. “I know that a lot of people were heartbroken when they stopped manufacturing the doublelens Rolleiflex. But maybe then … maybe you’d have to reserve your trust and love for extremely expensive products that enjoy a mythical status. I can’t imagine, for example, Rolex stopping production of the Oyster Perpetual Day-Date.”
“You’re young … You’re so terribly young … Rolex will do like all the others.” He then seized three slices of chorizo, put them on a bit of bread, gulped it down, and poured himself another glass of wine. “You’ve just bought a new camera, you told me … Show me the manual.”
For two minutes he went through the owner’s manual of the Samsung ZRT-AV2, nodding his head as if each of the lines confirmed his dark predictions. “Ah, yes,” he finally said, handing it back. “It’s a beautiful product, a modern product that you can love. But you must know that in a year, or two at most, it will be replaced by some new product with supposedly improved features.
“We too are products,�
� he went on, “cultural products. We too will become obsolete. The functioning of the system is identical—with the difference that, in general, there is no obvious technical or functional improvement; all that remains is the demand for novelty in its pure state.
“But that’s nothing, that’s nothing,” he went on lightheartedly. He began to cut up a second sausage and then, with his knife in his hand, stopped to intone in a powerful voice: “To love, laugh, and sing!” His sweeping hand knocked over the bottle of wine, which shattered on the tiles.
“I’ll tidy it up,” said Jed, springing up from his stool.
“No, leave it, it’s not a problem.”
“Yes it is, there’re bits of broken glass, you could cut yourself. Do you have a mop?” He looked around him: Houellebecq was just nodding his head. In a corner, he saw a small brush and a plastic dustpan.
“I’m going to open another bottle,” said the writer. He stood up and crossed the kitchen, zigzagging past the shards of glass that Jed was doing his best to sweep up.
“We’ve already drunk a lot … and I’ve done all my photos.”
“Come on, you’re not going to leave now! The fun’s just started,” he announced before gulping down a glass of Chilean wine. “Foucra bouldou! Bistroye! Bistroye!” he added with conviction. For some time now, the famous writer had contracted this mania for using bizarre, outmoded, or frankly inappropriate words, as if they weren’t infantile neologisms worthy of Captain Haddock. His few remaining friends, like his publishers, allowed him this weakness, as you do almost anything from a tired old decadent.
The Map and the Territory Page 11