An Officer of Civilization

by Nurit Buchweitz

Consequently, the symbolic meaning of the boiler motif reaches far beyond its immediate novelistic context – it signifies the ‘warming up’ of Houellebecq’s novelistic project, from which a cold wind blows.3 In previous novels, the protagonist is either cut off from meaningful relationships or his relationships are short-lived. In terms of theme and narrative, Houellebecq portrays a Darwinist economic-sexual world, a permissive society that shrugs off all boundaries and modesty, in which the fabric of relationships has been transformed into one of suspense and disquiet. Aesthetically, these narratives are peppered with segments transferring the argument from the narrative to sociological exposition, scientific information, zoological specification, or paraphrases of philosophical arguments, cutting short the tranquil absorption in the narrative and disturbing its flow with their chilly style. Following the presupposition that Houellebecq’s five novels and one novella are an evolving project and constitute one coherent whole with shared thematic and aesthetic features, The Map and the Territory offers a keen understanding of these features through discontinuity and change.

  As Benjamin Kerstein correctly notes, the deeper meaning of Houellebecq’s project is the disintegration of society as a source of identity, continuity, and value – “an unfolding tale of horror”4 – and on a smaller scale, the collapse of the family unit. Hence, in The Map and the Territory, the most salient level of ‘warming up’ occurs within the father-son relationship. Previous novels by Houellebecq also feature a fragmented relationship between the protagonist and his father – Platform begins ← 5 | 6 → with the murder of the protagonist’s father, along with a description of the remote relationship the two shared; The Elementary Particles depicts the neglect of the two brother protagonists by both father and mother; in The Possibility of an Island the connection between the protagonist and his son is irreparably shattered. In The Map and the Territory, Jed’s mother is absent from his life, having committed suicide at a young age, and his relationship with his father is emotionally distant. However, for the first time in any of Houellebecq’s novels, in The Map and the Territory father and son draw closer together in the course of the novel. Indications of this are found in their warm meeting at Christmas and their long, intimate conversation,5 in which the father reveals his lifelong artistic yearnings. This ‘warming up’ is represented principally by Jed’s painting of his father’s portrait, because the subject is far from a neutral one for the artist. Even though the scene portrayed in this painting, which is entitled The Architect Jean-Pierre Martin Leaving the Management of his Business, fundamentally resembles that in the painting of Koons and Hirst, depicting yet another champion of the capitalistic economy, at its center lies the artist’s desire to make his own father visible.

  Furthermore, the most important aspect of the ‘warming up’ of Houellebecq’s project is the expression of instinctive, primary and unmediated emotion for the first time, albeit in Houellebecq’s token style, via violence. After learning that his father’s death was aided by proponents of euthanasia, Jed attempts to gather information from the leader of this group. Her obvious reluctance prompts the following reaction:

  The woman took back the file, obviously thinking their conversation was over, and got up to put it away in the filing cabinet. Jed stood up as well, approached, and slapped her violently. She made a stifled moan, but didn’t have the time to consider a riposte. He moved on to a violent uppercut to the chin, followed by a series of sharp cuffs. While she wavered on her feet, trying to get her breath back, he stepped back so as to run and kick her with all his strength at the level of her solar plexus. At this she collapsed to the ground, striking a metal corner of the desk as she fell; there was a loud cracking sound. The spine must have taken a blow, Jed thought. He ← 6 | 7 → leaned over her; she was groggy, breathing with difficulty, but she was breathing. (Map, p. 240)

  [«La femme reprit le dossier, pensant visiblement que l’entretien était terminé, et se leva pour le ranger dans son armoire. Jed se leva aussi, s’approcha d’elle et la gifla violemment. Elle émit une sorte de gémissement très étouffé, mais n’eut pas le temps d’envisager une riposte. Il enchaîna par un violent uppercut au menton, suivi d’une série de manchettes rapides. Alors qu’elle vacillait sur place, tentant de reprendre sa respiration, il se recula pour prendre de l’élan et lui donna de toutes ses forces un coup de pied au niveau du plexus solaire. Cette fois, elle s’effondra, heurtant violemment dans sa chute un angle métallique du bureau; il y eut un craquement net. La colonne vertébrale avait dû en prendre un coup, se dit Jed. Il se pencha sur elle: elle était sonnée, respirait avec difficulté, mais elle respirait.» (Carte, p. 375)]

  For the first time in Houellebecq’s writing, a violent scene contains an underlying justification: Jed’s violence symbolizes a heated act intended to counter the exacerbated cynicism of a lonely, organized death lacking the touch of a human hand, the care of family, or intimacy. This act of violence can be read as a protest against coldness and a rejection of it; the protagonist rises up against the chilly mechanism so indifferent to family and kinship. Jed refuses to accept what the director and institution represent: that a human being is simply an elementary particle in the world, a monad whose existence develops independently and is unable to maintain a relationship with another; who has no circle of belonging and hence no commitments. This scene reveals that the emphasis of the novel has shifted from the ideal of personal independence and strength, to one of mutual trust and love; they are the only glue that can reconnect all the elementary particles. This action, within the diegetic reality, realizes the symbolic act of destroying the painting of Koons and Hirst; in many senses, the scene in which Jed slashes the painting anticipated his attack on the euthanasia institute director and this scene thus represents the pinnacle of the novel’s ‘warming up’. In spite of the violence of the scene, and the fact that Jed breaks the woman’s neck, it remains moving and emotionally charged, expressing the natural-authentic feelings of a son towards his father. Jed’s violence emanates from familial emotion, a feeling of helplessness arising from his father’s disappearance, a protest against the order of elementary particles that causes his father to feel that he is old, has no right to exist and should die alone, cut off from his family. While the woman considers herself attentive by her discretion, Jed’s act exposes the cultural misapprehension of instinctual kinship. ← 7 | 8 →

  This episode encapsulates Houellebecq’s poetic style – the act of violence carried out by the protagonist results from complicity with an emotionally depleted culture. By selecting this narrative move, Houellebecq demonstrates the societal environment that has consequently narrowed the range of verbal responses and replaced them with physical gestures. This inarticulateness, which is considered legitimate, reflects a regression of sublimation and culture, an exchange of values between the body and the spirit, so that physicality is perceived as the strongest emotional expression, akin to the manner in which Houellebecq exchanges sex for love in many of the relationships he depicts. This episode is at the same time an act of protest: Jed’s violence is the only possible response to a conceptual-social environment capable of producing an institute which helps people to die in the name of the advanced ideas of individualism, human dignity, and individual freedom; concepts which have ostensibly been distorted in the wake of market liberalism, as many of the tracts included in Houellebecq’s novels reiterate.

  The Parable of the Map

  The very title of The Map and the Territory highlights the novel’s intention, shedding clearer and sharper light on the principles of the Houellebecqian project. This title can be interpreted in many ways; in the novel itself, it appears as the name of Jed’s exhibition “The Map is More Interesting than the Territory” (p. 45). [«La carte est plus intéressante que le territoire.» (Carte, p. 82)].6 The book offers a tentative conceptual map of interchanges between territories and other spaces – urban and peripheral, city and country, Paris and Provence – which cut across the distinctions between ar
t and craftsmanship, tradition and modernity,7 all of which ← 8 | 9 → are themes of the novel. The title is also a metaphor for the postmodern awareness of the simulacrum, inviting us to consider what is more real, the map or the territory, reality or its simulation; this extends to the question regarding signification of the myriad stimuli in the contemporary tangible space.8 Yet there is more to the map than meets the eye in the context of this novel. In a profound manner, the book’s title alludes to Borges’s famous parable of the map. Although the parable is not cited directly, it is clearly a deep intertext for Houellebecq,9 pointing to a material feature of his writing; a meta-fictional inference, signifying that Houellebecq’s prose vacillates between representation and reproduction.

  Borges’s parable of the map reads as follows:

  On Exactitude in Science

  “… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

  Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 165810

  Borges’s map is a peculiar one: on a scale of 1:1 it is a precise mirror of the world it depicts, a realization of the verbal sense of the ‘map’, in the sense of a piece of cloth or paper that covers an object. When the map completely covers the ground surface, it becomes a duplicate, the opposite of a ← 9 | 10 → representation. One cannot learn anything from it that one could not understand from observing the piece of land that it covers. Borges’s map reads as its title anticipates, as a critical commentary on the exactitude of sciences, positing the paradoxical situation in which the more detailed something is, the less understandable it becomes. Borges demonstrates how greed for knowledge and the drive to attain complete understanding of all natural phenomena often leads to the absurdity of duplication, to a representation devoid of any practical or theoretical content. The map that the emperor orders his people to draw up, instead of explaining the nature of the empire, conceals it completely, hiding it from his eyes. Borges’s map is an analogy for the absurd modern ideal of total documentation, the epistemological attempt to understand, extract meaning from and conceptualize the essence of things.

  However, Borges’s map can also be read as a meta-fictional commentary on novelistic territory, specifically on the subject of representation vs. duplication. A map is a form of visual description, a coded portrayal or, in other words, a representation. The goals of representation are: practical – to find one’s way within reality, as with maps; cognitive – to understand the rules; and aesthetic – as an artistic object. The practical goal of representation is attained only if there is a difference between what is represented and its representation. The map is a selective extraction of the characteristics of that which is represented; duplication cannot contribute to attaining the cognitive or aesthetic goals of representation. If the map is too complex, it loses its explanatory force, and duplication per se offers no added aesthetic value, since it is no more than repetition or a copy of the thing which requires explanation. Abstraction and difference are a necessary condition for all representation, in order that the representation perform its practical, essential, and aesthetic roles. Houellebecq refers to this problem in The Elementary Particles, employing the image of the map:

  On a map on the 1:200,000 scale, especially on a Michelin map, the whole world seems happy; on a map of a larger scale, like the one I had of Lanzarote, things deteriorate: you start to make out the hotels, the leisure infrastructures. On a scale of 1:1 you find yourself back in the normal world, which is not very pleasant; but if you increase the scale even more, you are plunged into a nightmare: you start to make out the dust mites, mycoses, and parasites that eat away at the flesh. (Possibility, p. 182).

  [«Sur une carte au 1/200 000e, en particulier sur une carte Michelin, tout le monde a l’air heureux; les choses se gâtent sur une carte à plus grande échelle, comme celle que j’avais de Lanzarote: on commence à distinguer les résidences hôtelières, les ← 10 | 11 → infrastructures de loisirs. À l’échelle 1 on se retrouve dans le monde normal, ce qui n’a rien de réjouissant; mais si l’on agrandit encore on plonge dans le cauchemar: on commence à distinguer les acariens, les mycoses, les parasites qui rongent les chairs.» (Possibilité, p. 258)]

  A perfect reproduction might blind the eye, but representation runs the risk of overlooking and failing to appreciate crucial phenomena without which the delineation is inaccurate. Houellebecq addresses these issues in The Map and the Territory through Jed Martin’s experiments in aesthetic expression: “He fleetingly wondered what had led him to embark on an artistic representation of the world, or even to think that any such thing was possible.” (Map, p. 167) [«il se demanda fugitivement ce qui l’avait conduit à se lancer dans une représentation artistique du monde, ou même à penser qu’une représentation artistique du monde était possible» (Carte, p. 268)]. When Jed “used […] very high focal lengths” (Map, p. 265) [«utilisait […] des focales très élevées» (Carte, p. 27)], he increases the picture to the point at which it fails to represent and becomes a pure aesthetic image. Yet Houellebecq’s dialogic relations with the intertext by Borges were exposed already in his first novel, suggesting that the author is preoccupied with the medium, and that the parable of the map calls attention not to the narrative but to the narration:

  The pages that follow constitute a novel; I mean a succession of anecdotes in which I am the hero. This autobiographical choice isn’t one, really: in any case I have no other way out. If I don’t write about what I’ve seen I will suffer just the same – and perhaps a bit more so. But only a bit, I insist on this. Writing brings scant relief. It retraces, it delimits. It lends a touch of coherence, the idea of a kind of realism. One stumbles around in a cruel fog but there is the odd pointer. Chaos is no more than a few feet away […]. To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself I will need, on the contrary, to prune. To simplify. To demolish, one by one, a host of details. In this I will be aided, moreover, by the simple play of historical forces. The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. (Whatever, pp. 12–14).

  [«Les pages qui vont suivre constituent un roman; j’entends, une succession d’anecdotes dont je suis le héros. Ce choix autobiographique n’en est pas réellement un: de toute façon, je n’ai pas d’autreissue. Si je n’écris pas ce que j’ai vu je souffrirai autant – et peut-être un peu plus. Un peu seulement, j’insiste. L’écriture ne soulage guère. Elle retrace, elle délimite. Elle introduit un soupçon de cohérence, l’idée d’un réalisme. On patauge toujours dans un brouillard sanglant, mais il y a quelques repères. Le chaos n’est plus qu’à quelques mètres […]. Pour atteindre le but, autrement ← 11 | 12 → philosophique, que je me propose, il me faudra au contraireé laguer. Simplifier. Détruire un par un une foule de détails. J’y serai d’ailleurs aidé par le simple jeu du mouvement historique. Sous nos yeux, le monde s’uniformise; les moyens de télécommunication progressent; l’intérieur des appartements s’enrichit de nouveaux équipements. Les relations humaines deviennent progressivement impossibles, ce qui réduit d’autant la quantité d’anecdotes dont se compose une vie. Et peu à peu le visage de la mort apparaît, dans toute sas plende
ur.» (Extension, pp. 14–16]

  The excerpt above is indicative of Houellebecq’s poetics as a struggle of reproduction and representation. Even if, fundamentally, Houellebecq’s form is the realistic novel, as many have claimed,11 it is composed of piles of unpolished, unclean, tainted hybrid materials, a duplication of reality. While mainly a realist, preferring the documentation of ‘a succession of anecdotes’, Houellebecq admits to the impossibility of representation and thereby clarifies his inability to offer valid explanations, since the very attempt to do so would be no more than a false pretension which may result in duplication. In this way, Houellebecq expresses deep doubts regarding the redeeming mission of literature as bearing a hidden message that understands reality, made convenient by representation. In this sense Houellebecq is quintessentially postmodernist, if postmodernism is distinct in premising that “‘reality’ [is] nothing but a composite of construals and fictions.”12 And as in postmodernism, which suspects that all explanations are preemptively false, Houellebecq turns to “a greater explicitness in the abandonment of mimetic claims, a more overt staging of narrative’s arbitrariness and lack of authority, a more open playfulness about fictionality”.13 Houellebecq’s postmodernist text is not distilled and therefore it does not fully exhaust its subject – like Borges’s map, it gropes through the fog of reality and can do nothing but copy it anecdotally. Yet Houellebecq goes further and also includes background noise.

  Typical of Houellebecq’s poetics is that normally unrelated entities are juxtaposed indifferently and neutrally to create disorder and a reality rich in information but poor in order. These unrelated materials are diverse, they can be scientific or expositional, as was mentioned earlier. They are also pastiches of earlier texts, which flicker in the background of the novel but ← 12 | 13 → do not mature into an unequivocal thesis.14 In this way, Whatever contains pastiche references to a variety of works ranging from Sartre’s Nausea and Camus’s The Stranger15 to Nietzsche’s On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,16 La Fontaine’s animal fables, and more. Various intertextual aspects are integrated into the structure of the novel’s meaning, but exactly what this meaning is and what these aspects tell us is not made clear. They come to mark the work as belonging to a tradition of conceptual literature, somehow becoming part of the current text. However any attempts to discipline the text, as well as the intertext, encounter a problem: there is no authority and seemingly no pragmatics; representation is ruptured. These quotes-imitations also indicate that representations are the result of conventions, as Maud Granger Remy explains; the textual simulations seek to foreground the structured nature of the language and the artificiality of the style.17 In this way, Houellebecq casts doubt on the validity of any conclusions that ← 13 | 14 → we may draw from his narrative and on the truth-value of representations, emphasizing the problematic nature of the verbal map.