The Map and the Territory (23 page)

At that same instant, Plato stirred in his basket, his paws beat the air, and he made a long groan in his dream, before settling down again.

“Birds are nothing,” Houellebecq went on, “just small living spots
of color who sit on their eggs and devour thousands of insects while fluttering pathetically here and there. A busy and stupid life, entirely devoted to the devouring of insects—and with, occasionally, a modest feast of larvae—and the reproduction of the same. A dog already carries within it an individual destiny and a representation of the world, but his drama has something undifferentiated about it that’s neither historical nor even genuinely narrative. I think I’ve more or less finished with
the world as narration
—the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I’m now only interested in
the world as juxtaposition
—that of poetry and painting. Do you want a little more
pot-au-feu
?”

Jed declined the offer. Houellebecq took out of the fridge a Saint-Nectaire and an Époisses, cut some slices of bread, and opened another bottle of Chablis.

“It’s nice of you to bring me this painting,” he added after a few seconds. “I’ll look at it sometimes. It’ll remind me I had an intense life—sometimes.”

They went back into the living room to have some coffee. Houellebecq added two logs to the fire, then went away to busy himself in the kitchen. Jed went back to examining the bookcase, and was surprised by the small number of novels—classics, essentially. However, there was an astonishing number of books by social reformers of the nineteenth century: the best known, like Marx, Proudhon, and Comte, but also Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux, Owen, Carlyle, as well as others whose names meant almost nothing to him. The author came back, carrying on a tray a cafetière, some macaroons, and a bottle of plum eau de vie. “You know what Comte asserts,” he said, “that mankind’s dead outnumber the living. Well, I agree with him now. Above all I’m in contact with the dead.” Jed couldn’t find anything to say in reply to that. An old edition of Tocqueville’s
Memoirs
was lying on the coffee table.

“He was an astonishing case, Tocqueville,” the writer continued. “
Democracy in America
is a masterpiece, a book of unheard-of visionary power, which innovates absolutely, in every domain; it’s undoubtedly the most intelligent political book ever written. And after producing this astounding work, instead of continuing, he devotes all his energy
to being elected deputy for a modest arrondissement of the Manche, then taking responsibilities in the governments of his day, just like an ordinary politician. And yet he had lost nothing of his acuity, his powers of observation.” He leafed through the
Memoirs
while stroking the back of Plato, who had stretched out at his feet. “Listen to this, when he talks about Lamartine! Ah, he really goes after Lamartine! …” He read, in a pleasant and well-accentuated voice: “ ‘I do not know if I have ever met, in this world of selfish ambitions in which I have lived, a mind as empty of thought for the public good as his. I have seen a crowd of men trouble the country for self-aggrandizement; but he is the only one, I believe, who seemed to me always ready to change the world for personal entertainment.’

“Tocqueville can’t get over being in the presence of such a specimen. He himself is fundamentally an honest guy, who tries to do what he thinks is best for his country. Ambition, greed, he can understand all that; but such a thespian temperament, such a mixture of irresponsibility and dilettantism, that leaves him flabbergasted. Listen to this next part: ‘Nor have I ever known a less sincere mind, who had nothing but the utmost contempt for the truth. When I say that he had contempt for it, I am wrong; he did not honor it enough to be bothered about it in the slightest. When speaking and writing, he leaves the truth and returns to it without paying attention; uniquely concerned with a certain effect that he wants to have at that moment …’ ”

Forgetting his guest, Houellebecq continued to read to himself, turning the pages with increasing jubilation.

Jed waited, hesitated, then emptied his glass of plum brandy and cleared his throat. Houellebecq looked up at him. “I’ve come …” Jed said, “to give you this painting, of course, but also because I’m waiting for a message from you.”

“A message?” The writer’s smile gradually disappeared, and his face was overcome with an earthy, mineral sadness. “The impression you have,” he finally said slowly, “is that my life is ending, and that I’m disappointed, is that it?”

“Um … yes, more or less.”

“Oh, well, then you’re right: my life is coming to an end, and I am disappointed. Nothing I’d hoped for in my youth has happened. There were
interesting moments, but they were always difficult to reach, always won at the limit of my strength. Nothing was ever offered to me on a plate, and now I’ve just had enough. I would just like everything to end without excessive suffering, without debilitating illness, without infirmity.”

“You sound like my father,” Jed said softly. Houellebecq started at the word
father
, as if he’d pronounced an obscenity, then his face filled with a blasé smile that was courteous without being warm. Jed swallowed three macaroons in succession, then a big glass of plum brandy, before continuing.

“My father,” he finally repeated, “spoke to me of William Morris. I wanted to know if you know him, what you think of him.”

“William Morris …” His tone was again disengaged, objective. “It’s funny that your father talked to you about him; almost no one knows William Morris.”

“Apparently they do in his circle of architects and artists.”

Houellebecq got up and rummaged in his bookcase for at least five minutes before taking out a thin volume with a faded yellowish cover, adorned with a tracery of art-nouveau motifs. He sat down again and carefully turned the blemished and stiffened pages; the book obviously hadn’t been opened in years.

“Look,” he finally said, “this situates his point of view a little. It’s taken from a lecture he gave in Edinburgh in 1889: ‘There, in short, is our position as artists: we are the last representatives of the artisans to whom commodity production has dealt a fatal blow.’

“In the end he rallied to Marxism, but at the beginning it was different, truly original. He starts from the point of view of the artist when he produces a work, and then he tries to generalize it to the whole of the world of production—industrial and agricultural. Today we have difficulty imagining the richness of political thought at that time. Chesterton paid homage to William Morris in
The Return of Don Quixote
. It’s a curious novel, in which he imagines a revolution based on the return to artisan industry and medieval Christianity spreading gradually over the British Isles, supplanting the other socialist and Marxist workers’ movements, and leading to the abandonment of the industrial system of production for both artisan and agrarian communities. Something completely implausible, treated in a fairy-tale atmosphere, not very far
from
Father Brown
. Chesterton put a lot of his personal convictions into it, I believe. But it must be said that William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.”

A log collapsed in the fireplace, projecting a cascade of sparks. “I should’ve bought a fireguard,” Houellebecq grumbled before sipping his glass of brandy. Jed was still staring at him, motionless and attentive, filled with an extraordinary and incomprehensible nervous tension. Houellebecq looked back at him with surprise, and Jed realized with embarrassment that his left hand was trembling convulsively. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, relaxing all of a sudden. “I’m going through … a peculiar period.”

“William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,” Houellebecq continued. “However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough—he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.”

Houellebecq stopped, shook his head in resignation, and passed his hand gently over Plato’s spine, provoking a satisfied moan.

“Also right until the end,” he said slowly, “he fought Victorian prudishness and he campaigned for free love.

“You know,” he added, “I’ve always hated that disgusting yet so credible idea that militant, generous, and apparently disinterested action is merely compensation for problems in your private life.”

Jed said nothing, and waited for at least a minute. “Do you think he was a utopian?” he finally asked. “Completely unrealistic?”

“In a sense, yes, undoubtedly. He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet …” Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words. “Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labor camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river. All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage, which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentry they became interested in jewelry, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth, and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organize the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …”

He stopped speaking again. In the room, the light was beginning to fade. He got up, lit a lamp, and added a log to the fire before sitting
down again. Jed was still staring at him intently, his hands on his knees, totally silent.

“I don’t know,” said Houellebecq, “I’m too old, I no longer have the desire or the habit to come to conclusions, even to do very simple things. There are portraits of him, you know, drawn by Burne-Jones: trying a new mixture of vegetable dyes, or reading to his daughters. A stocky, hirsute guy, with a ruddy and lively face, small glasses and a bushy beard, in all the drawings he gives an impression of permanent hyperactivity, of inexhaustible goodwill and candor. What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.”

Jed waited again, for a long time, while night fell on the surrounding fields. “Thank you,” he finally said as he got up. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your retreat, but your opinion means a lot to me. You’ve helped me a lot.”

In the doorway, they were struck by the cold. The snow gleamed faintly. The black branches of the denuded trees stood out against the dark gray sky. “There’ll be some black ice,” said Houellebecq, “drive carefully.” When he turned the car to leave, Jed saw him waving his hand very slowly at shoulder height, in farewell. His dog, squatting at his side, seemed to nod as if in approval of his departure. Jed intended to see the writer again, but he had a feeling this wouldn’t happen, that there would be all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and various setbacks. His social life was undoubtedly going to be simplified now.

Via winding and deserted departmental roads he slowly reached, without going faster than 30 km per hour, the A10 motorway. When he entered the access slip road he noticed, down below, an immense luminous ribbon of headlights and realized that he was about to be caught up in an endless traffic jam. The outside temperature had fallen to 10 degrees, but inside it was still 66. The heater was working perfectly, so he felt no impatience.

Putting on France-Inter, he came across a program that analyzed the cultural news of the week; the commentators guffawed loudly and their scripted yelps of laughter were unbearably vulgar. France Musique was broadcasting an Italian opera whose grandiose and fake brio quickly
annoyed him, and he switched the radio off. He’d never liked music, and now apparently liked it even less. 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. The world was anything but a subject for artistic emotion. The world presented itself absolutely as a rational system, devoid of magic or any particular interest. He switched on Motorway FM, which confined itself to giving concrete information: there had been accidents near Fontainebleau and Nemours, and the delays would probably continue as far as Paris.