Penser la narrativité contemporaine La Carte et le territoire, formidable autoportrait de l'ecrivain Michel Houellebecq

The novels by Michel Houellebecq constitute a large corpus in which different artistic tendencies are combined and even compete one with the other in one particular text. The author has imagined two artists in La Carte et le territoire, a novel which contains as a result many metadiscursive and autoreflexive passages. The author while discussing the art works by Jed Martin and Michel Houellebecq, the character, takes position in the debate around the return of the narrative, a tendency which is supposed to have marked literature from the eighties on. At the same time this novel expresses a desire for sincerity and integrity in the contact with the other and in artistic expression. For the first time in the oeuvre of Michel Houellebecq, the suffering of the protagonists is partially compensated through artistic creation.