The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq | The Coffin Factory

Knopf

January 2012

Michel Houellebecq’s fifth novel The Map and the Territory was awarded the Prix Goncourt, which is France’s highest literary honor.  Written with a flowing and disarming tone, the novel is about dour and dreamy Jed Martin, artist.  Jed is son to a wealthy architect, and a mother who committed suicide when Jed was six.  His father never told him why his mother killed herself, nor spoke of the matter at all.  He grew up not only motherless, but friendless.  In his early twenties, Jed has an understandably cynical view of the world, yet still feels the artists’ necessity to express himself. Though he becomes enthralled with taking photographs of common manufactured objects, he cannot make a living.  Then, when opening a Michelin department road map on a road trip with his father to attend his grandmother’s funeral in the country, Jed experiences a “great aesthetic revelation.”

Upon his return to Paris, Jed devotes his life to taking macro-photographs of the road maps using advanced photography equipment, and begins his career as a professional artist.  After the exhibition of the road map photographs, which is titled THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY Jed reaches a moderately high level of artistic fame, his work hailed as “the product of a cold, detached reflection on the state of the world.”  Satirizing the current popularity of the French idealization of theterroir, the theme of city versus country is threaded throughout the novel, with the tile of Jed’s exhibition firmly stamping Houellebecq’s opinion that the idea of the French countryside is much more pleasant than the actualFrench countryside.  The market price of Jed’s photographs quickly level at two thousand Euros each.  Jed forms a pleasant relationship with Olga, a beautiful Russian representative of Michelin, makes friends with celebrities, and is, generally, happy.

This fame of Jed Martin, and the market value of his art, is dwarfed seven years later, when he exhibits a series of figurative paintings.  The collection of paintings is called The Series of Simple Professions, and, as the name suggests, many of the paintings are of common people working in traditional yet disappearing professions, such as a Bar-Tabac café manager, and a butcher.  But many also reflect the larger change in the capitalist economic system, with paintings of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology(Jed’s most famous painting), or Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing up the Art Market (Jed’s last painting, remaining unfinished, depicting the battle between two world views: “fun, sex, kitsch” versus “trash, death, and cynicism.”)  These paintings sell, on average, for five hundred thousand Euros, with some going for several million. Jed becomes the best-paid French artist, and here, Michel Houellebecq clearly launches into the main question of the novel: how do you find meaning in something that has no meaning?

Jed doesn’t understand it—the setting of market value—and neither does his gallerist.  Returning to “the time of ancient-regime court painting,” businessmen and industrialists all over the world request that Jed paint their portrait, a million Euros a pop, and this is when Jed loses interest in art.  The one thing that provided meaning in his life has revealed itself to be devoid of meaning.  What does the ridiculousness of the art world say about the law of supply and demand?  It makes no sense, Jed decides, so it’s best not to ask.  As his finances and reputation increase, Jed’s interest in life declines.  Olga is sent back to Moscow by her company.  Jed doesn’t follow.  His father is wasting away in retirement, suffering from rectal cancer, requires an artificial anus implant, and longs for his life to end  At this point, Jed understands that a human life “doesn’t amount to much,” and “can be summed up in a small number of events.”  It is just before this time, when Jed’s still has hope for happiness, that Jed befriends the second main character in the book, Michel Houellebecq.

Yes, the author writes himself into his own novel when Jed requests that Houellebecq write a theoretical introduction to the catalogue of the artist’s Series of Simple Professions paintings exhibition.  Houellebecq portrays himself as a misanthropic writer living in Ireland (Houellebecq actually does live in Ireland), a man whose depression makes Jed’s personality seem chipper; Houellebecq downs wine by the bottle (even if the bottle costs four hundred Euros), stinks almost as bad a corpse, and has little to no human contact.  Eventually, Houellebecq comes through with the introduction, and in exchange Jed paints a portrait of the author.  Houellebecq having made himself a main character is nothing new—Borges, Foer, and countless others have employed such meta-fictional devices—but when Houellebecq takes off his own head, the reader is taken into new territory.

The third part of the novel consists of a police investigation, Investigator Jasselin taking center stage.  But by this time it’s too late to develop sympathy with a new character, so Houellebecq’s efforts at rounding out Jasselin are futile; we care about Jed.  Completely alienated from the art world and social life, Jed retires to his grandparent’s estate in the country, where Parisians are considers strangers, treated with hostility nearly on par with foreigners.  Decades pass, the economies of Russia and China and Brazil alternate as number one in the world, while France, currently one of the most industrialized nations, retreats to relying on an economy of “industrial tourism,” of hand-made cheeses and hand-woven baskets, touting the faux-traditional ideal that tourists have of a rural and quaint France.  Houellebecq presents “the end of the Industrial Age in Europe,” suggesting a vague, yet entrancing vision of the near future.

Everything, especially human industry and innovation, is transitory, as well as perishable.  Empires will rise and fall, cities will be built and crumble, humans will be born and die, but the beautiful and depressing truth is that life, whatever it is, will move on.  It is this ineffable and intoxicating all-encompassing idea which Jed spends the last thirty years of his life trying to capture in an innovative form of multi-media art.  The final product is a work that summarizes a life-time of Jed Martin’s artistic perspective, and is a work of art that achieves an affect that is the goal of any true artist, anywhere in the world, in any time period.  Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory magically achieves this goal, which is why it was awarded the Prix Goncourt, and why it should be read by anyone who loves reading.