I first
read Michel Houellebecq when I was fresh out of university and working a dead
end job in the early 2000s. At that time I was the kind of person who would
drink too much, rant about politics, throw a pint glass through a window and
then burst into tears. Every night of
the week. And this, it seemed to me at the time, was essentially what
Houellebecq did on the page. For that I had to love him. Then he got taken to
court in France for saying that Islam was the stupidest of all world religions,
and he was wholly contemptuous of the entire affair. His responses to questions
at the trial were indicative of the caustic sarcasm running through his
fiction. When asked in court about his views on religion, Houellebecq famously
replied that if the Qur'an was a joke, the Judeo-Christian bible was so boring
that it made one want to shit. Who could fail to love that?
But a decade later, I'm not the sort of person who drinks a litre of whiskey and throws Nazi salutes at parties anymore. That kind of lifestyle is not really sustainable, nor, arguably, desirable. It comes about in the first place more through a kind of desperation than out of any coherent worldview. Going back to Houellebecq now, I wondered if it would be like meeting up with an old friend and discovering your paths have diverged so much that you no longer understand each other at all. For Houellebecq too is supposed to have grown up. Certainly, that's the hype around the Map and the Territory. And the same French literary establishment who once looked upon him as a reactionary, a charlatan and a chancer saw fit in 2010 to award the book the Prix Goncourt.
The Map and the Territory tells the story of Jed, a contemporary artist, from his time at university through to the end of his career, with particular focus on his first two periods of production. Jed initially uses photography as his medium, and creates a series of photographs of Michelin maps of France. He meets a beautiful Russian PR executive from Michelin who helps him become relatively famous for these works. In true Houellebecq style, she also becomes his girlfriend. But here some of Houellebecq's fabled maturity is evident, because his treatment of the subject of contemporary art is actually quite subtle. At the same time as he uses Jed's work and career to quietly satirise the corporate nature of the contemporary art world and to investigate the cultural decline of France (all the buyers are foreign, as are the people who now travel to Michelin starred hotels), he steers well clear of the ignorant and ugly treatment of visual art as a con job that so many writers and journalists seem to think passes as incisive satire.
Jed really has no idea of his motivations, nor any coherent message to articulate through his work. None, at least, of which he is aware. When a newspaper reviewer gives his debut show its first theoretical interpretation, Jed is interested in how the journalist reads the work. "It's not stupid, what he's saying," says Jed. And it's not. But equally, it's an arbitrary reading foisted upon the photographs by someone filling pages in the culture section. In all of this, Houellebecq draws art quite well, and with some sympathy, without making any claims for or against its value. This is one of the major strengths of the book, and also the strongest element of Jed's characterisation.
Jed's girlfriend returns to Russia and the second period of his career begins. He starts to make paintings, as he did before art school. He paints images of people and these images represent different types of vocation. As his second major show approaches, he needs a piece of writing for his exhibition booklet. Jed's gallerist recommends Michel Houellebecq as a French writer who, while unpopular at home, can bring in the overseas money.
Now, generally this kind of self-referential postmodernist inclusion of the author as a character in his own work would piss me off to the degree that I wouldn't be able to finish the book, but this is another thing Houellebecq gets right. In fact, when Houellebecq the character is in the novel, the book is at its most entertaining. A bizarre recluse of a man, who admires pigs but has a guilty addiction to a variety of cold hams, the fictional Houellebecq is both sympathetic and pathetic. Houellebecq the writer plays entertainingly with his public image as a depressed, misanthropic alcoholic without ever glamorising any of those things.
Jed offers to paint the writer's portrait, and since the two men are alone in the world and neither has any friends, they form a kind of attachment. Here we see a familiar trait of Houellebeqc's fiction, which always concerns itself with isolated male characters, adrift from social norms and social relationships. Houellebecq has never been interested in realistic depictions of how affection develops between people. For him, the family is dead and the world inherently lonely. The Map and the Territory is no different in this respect. In fact, many of the ideas underlying the earlier Houellebecq books are present in this one, including many that I always took to be pure provocation. The eulogising of prostitution as a vocation, for example, which sat so comfortably in the gleefully amoral Platform, is rehashed here when Jed paints an image of an escort. Here again are reflections over the cultural corrosion of Europe. And when Jed is too drunk or too reticent to ask for a blowjob, he is said to have neglected his "sexual rights." Many of the clearly reactionary views about race and gender that were so brazenly flaunted in other novels are taken for granted throughout this book.
So I wonder now whether I misunderstood this writer all along. What I thought he was saying for the sheer joy of the shattered taboo may always simply have been garden-variety bigotry, just entertainingly expressed. And while I for one am not against a reactionary writer expressing reactionary views, it seems bizarre that these views have suddenly become acceptable to wider literary culture now that he has stopped expressing himself in the amusing and irreverent fashion that made his earlier work so enjoyable. This goes also for the bleak pessimism of the work. When the world as a meaningless, cruel and cold theatre of the absurd is presented in reckless and boisterously offensive prose, it's actually a lot more interesting than when someone tries to paint the same picture using the realist tradition. The nihilistic pessimism that was such an essential colour of the earlier satires just seems like a narrow and blinkered view of the world here.
Stylistically, this book also shares much with earlier works. The narrator of Atomised is a faux-objective semi-academic voice from the future, looking back upon events. In The Map and The Territory, the narrator is a future art historian, looking back at Jed's career, who goes into long factual digressions. In the final part of the novel there are several familiar touches of grotesque horror. And, like the vast majority of this writer's books, the novel closes with a meditation upon the end of the human race. One major difference between this book and earlier ones is however that Vintage have done an appalling job of proof reading the translation, leaving in place many grammatical errors and bizarre constructions such as "this further complicated the situation further."
In the end then, coming back to Houellebecq after ten years away was more the experience of meeting with an old friend and discovering you never knew him in the first place. He is more or less the same as he was, but you see him differently now. He has assets that you had always missed through your own youthful self-absorption. And it turns out that what you liked about him most was probably in truth never really there, but only what you saw of yourself.
But a decade later, I'm not the sort of person who drinks a litre of whiskey and throws Nazi salutes at parties anymore. That kind of lifestyle is not really sustainable, nor, arguably, desirable. It comes about in the first place more through a kind of desperation than out of any coherent worldview. Going back to Houellebecq now, I wondered if it would be like meeting up with an old friend and discovering your paths have diverged so much that you no longer understand each other at all. For Houellebecq too is supposed to have grown up. Certainly, that's the hype around the Map and the Territory. And the same French literary establishment who once looked upon him as a reactionary, a charlatan and a chancer saw fit in 2010 to award the book the Prix Goncourt.
The Map and the Territory tells the story of Jed, a contemporary artist, from his time at university through to the end of his career, with particular focus on his first two periods of production. Jed initially uses photography as his medium, and creates a series of photographs of Michelin maps of France. He meets a beautiful Russian PR executive from Michelin who helps him become relatively famous for these works. In true Houellebecq style, she also becomes his girlfriend. But here some of Houellebecq's fabled maturity is evident, because his treatment of the subject of contemporary art is actually quite subtle. At the same time as he uses Jed's work and career to quietly satirise the corporate nature of the contemporary art world and to investigate the cultural decline of France (all the buyers are foreign, as are the people who now travel to Michelin starred hotels), he steers well clear of the ignorant and ugly treatment of visual art as a con job that so many writers and journalists seem to think passes as incisive satire.
Jed really has no idea of his motivations, nor any coherent message to articulate through his work. None, at least, of which he is aware. When a newspaper reviewer gives his debut show its first theoretical interpretation, Jed is interested in how the journalist reads the work. "It's not stupid, what he's saying," says Jed. And it's not. But equally, it's an arbitrary reading foisted upon the photographs by someone filling pages in the culture section. In all of this, Houellebecq draws art quite well, and with some sympathy, without making any claims for or against its value. This is one of the major strengths of the book, and also the strongest element of Jed's characterisation.
Jed's girlfriend returns to Russia and the second period of his career begins. He starts to make paintings, as he did before art school. He paints images of people and these images represent different types of vocation. As his second major show approaches, he needs a piece of writing for his exhibition booklet. Jed's gallerist recommends Michel Houellebecq as a French writer who, while unpopular at home, can bring in the overseas money.
Now, generally this kind of self-referential postmodernist inclusion of the author as a character in his own work would piss me off to the degree that I wouldn't be able to finish the book, but this is another thing Houellebecq gets right. In fact, when Houellebecq the character is in the novel, the book is at its most entertaining. A bizarre recluse of a man, who admires pigs but has a guilty addiction to a variety of cold hams, the fictional Houellebecq is both sympathetic and pathetic. Houellebecq the writer plays entertainingly with his public image as a depressed, misanthropic alcoholic without ever glamorising any of those things.
Jed offers to paint the writer's portrait, and since the two men are alone in the world and neither has any friends, they form a kind of attachment. Here we see a familiar trait of Houellebeqc's fiction, which always concerns itself with isolated male characters, adrift from social norms and social relationships. Houellebecq has never been interested in realistic depictions of how affection develops between people. For him, the family is dead and the world inherently lonely. The Map and the Territory is no different in this respect. In fact, many of the ideas underlying the earlier Houellebecq books are present in this one, including many that I always took to be pure provocation. The eulogising of prostitution as a vocation, for example, which sat so comfortably in the gleefully amoral Platform, is rehashed here when Jed paints an image of an escort. Here again are reflections over the cultural corrosion of Europe. And when Jed is too drunk or too reticent to ask for a blowjob, he is said to have neglected his "sexual rights." Many of the clearly reactionary views about race and gender that were so brazenly flaunted in other novels are taken for granted throughout this book.
So I wonder now whether I misunderstood this writer all along. What I thought he was saying for the sheer joy of the shattered taboo may always simply have been garden-variety bigotry, just entertainingly expressed. And while I for one am not against a reactionary writer expressing reactionary views, it seems bizarre that these views have suddenly become acceptable to wider literary culture now that he has stopped expressing himself in the amusing and irreverent fashion that made his earlier work so enjoyable. This goes also for the bleak pessimism of the work. When the world as a meaningless, cruel and cold theatre of the absurd is presented in reckless and boisterously offensive prose, it's actually a lot more interesting than when someone tries to paint the same picture using the realist tradition. The nihilistic pessimism that was such an essential colour of the earlier satires just seems like a narrow and blinkered view of the world here.
Stylistically, this book also shares much with earlier works. The narrator of Atomised is a faux-objective semi-academic voice from the future, looking back upon events. In The Map and The Territory, the narrator is a future art historian, looking back at Jed's career, who goes into long factual digressions. In the final part of the novel there are several familiar touches of grotesque horror. And, like the vast majority of this writer's books, the novel closes with a meditation upon the end of the human race. One major difference between this book and earlier ones is however that Vintage have done an appalling job of proof reading the translation, leaving in place many grammatical errors and bizarre constructions such as "this further complicated the situation further."
In the end then, coming back to Houellebecq after ten years away was more the experience of meeting with an old friend and discovering you never knew him in the first place. He is more or less the same as he was, but you see him differently now. He has assets that you had always missed through your own youthful self-absorption. And it turns out that what you liked about him most was probably in truth never really there, but only what you saw of yourself.
