The map and the territory - M. Houellebecq

I don’t really have the necessary mental space for essays right now, so I had to postpone (among others) both the jungian and oulipo reads, and I didn’t want to read more sci-fi either. Imporre these conditions had the effects of completely vacating my short term reading lists - I’m very happy, it’s the first time the legenda turned out useful. I knew it had to happen at some point.

This book by Houllebecq was one of the first on the list. A friend of mine is a fan and I had read two books from the author, which I found very similar, so I decided to not read anything else from him, being under the impression that I wouldn’t have been able to read anything else anyway. I’m happy I was wrong and got to experience it!

Houllebecq’s themes can be a bit delicate. Among others, there’s the discomfort of young men in a world where they lost their privilege. In a short story by Dino Buzzati, a retired composer is depicted crying in pain after a colleague, a kind man that the composer always deemed inferior and a bit dumb, writes a wonderful symphony and gains worldwide acclaim, dwarfing all of the composer’s achievements. In the last few lines the composer just wanders aimless and desperate through the city, while the author comments that God has no compassion for such kinds of pain - my point being that pain and discomfort dovrebbero essere curati per se, independently of their cause. This not aufgrund some ethical reasoning, but for simple convenience: people who are aching tend to act more than those who are not:

Coloro che hanno quel gusto di fare il male, ci mettono più diligenza, ci stanno dietro fino alla fine, non prendono mai requie, perché hanno qualche canchero che li rode.

Il canchero che gli rode is exactly the pain that pushes to action. So while I personally think that the discomfort of (some) young men is closer to that of the composer than to those who are victims of wrongful actions, I still maintain it’s wrong to turn a deaf ear like the God of Buzzati’s novel.

So anyway. The book has something borgesian to it, with Houllebecq describing life and works of an artist that never existed, Jed Martin. Jed has four phases of artistic production:

• Photographs of small mechanical components;
• Photographs of maps;
• Ritratti di lavoratori e artigiani;
• Weird last work.

The theme “La mappa e il territorio” is mostly affine to the second phase of Jed’s art, but it’s the third phase that gets most of the attention. About the map and the territory:

Così, il liberalismo ridisegnava la geografia del mondo in funzione delle attese della clientela, si spostasse essa per ragioni turistiche o per guadagnarsi da vivere. Alla superficie piana, isometrica della carta del mondo si sostituiva una topografia anormale in cui Shannon era più vicina a Katowice che a Bruxelles, a Fuerteventura che a Madrid.

La mappa è isometrica, it reflects the actual territory, while humans equipped the territory with a new topology. The map is static ma il mondo ribolle, the jobs depicted by Jed are already outdated by the time he grows old, everything spirals out of control and nobody seems to care. The fact that nobody seems to care comes again and again.

Some of the lines I saved:

Bisogna interessarsi a qualcosa nella vita, trovo che aiuti¹.

È impossibile scrivere un romanzo per la stessa ragione per cui è impossibile vivere: a causa delle pesantezze che si accumulano.

Alcuni secondi possono bastare se non a decidere di una vita, perlomeno a rivelare il carattere del suo orientamento principale².

L’ostinazione è forse in fin dei conti l’unica qualità umana che valgo non soltanto nella professione di poliziotto ma in molte professioni, in tutte quelle almeno che hanno a che vedere con la nozione di verità.