Depth and Deceptibility: The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
Let’s get this clear from the start, this is not a review of Michel Houellebecq’s Prix Goncourt award winning novel The Map and the Territory. It is neither a concern of mine that others are moved to read this or any other book from the author; nor is it my prerogative to pass any sort of judgement on the book’s plot, characters, style or content.
I am simply going to examine the book as it is of interest to me.
How did I come to pick up The Map and the Territory? Recently, strolling through a well-stocked bookstore not searching for any particular title, I let my eyes wander across the piles of books on the tables, shouting “Read me! Buy me!”. Towards the back of the crowded main floor was a table with a sign stating that the books stacked on THIS table were all award winners. Directly under the sign was a short tower of a book whose cover depicted a surreal portrait of a face merged with a hand. The cover image led me to picking up the book. You might not be able to judge a book by the cover, but the is often incentive enough to pick the book up and read the blurb on the back or the inside flap. A a surreal portrait and the word “map” was an enticing combination; I’ve been thinking a lot about mapping, and specifically how maps and portraiture relate. Here in this book, according to the cover at least, the two seemed to overlap.
And then there was the quote from The New York Times Book Review on the back cover with its proclamation of the novel as “powerful”, “singular”, and “Archly sarcastic, cheerily pedantic, willfully brutal.” Sounds like my kinda book! Described as a mixture of künstlerroman and crime novel, ideas and “an authorial self-reflection” it was screaming my name whilst dancing on the table. So I bought it.
Putting the “künstlerroman” element aside for now and starting with the crime novel portion, which composes the final third of the book...a novel in three parts, Houellebecq’s ‘crime novel’ eliminates the deeper psychological elements one finds in crime novels by enlarging them to a scale where what appears to be an in depth analysis of the characters and the crime, only reveals the superficiality, the banality of both. What appears to have great significance, what we want to be full of meaning, just isn’t. The artist, Jeb Martin, is as flat as the paper upon which are printed the Michelin maps he finds success in photographing in a way that creates a depth so artificial that one experiences standing in the landscape and not just staring at a symbolic rendering of it. Switching to the medium of oil paint and the subject of humans and their professions does nothing to eliminate this flatness. The lie carries across media and subject matter.
Any expression of depth of any kind is artificial as depth does not exist.
Houellebecq shows in the character Jeb Martin moments when just maybe something resembling depth appears, but then.the sparks of desire for depth quickly fade away. I’m not sure what Jeb experiences is ‘desire’, an instinctive urge perhaps, but desire, no; yet because of this ability that Martin has to see through the desire for this non-existing depth he is able to provide the clue that leads to solving the murder of the writer, Michel Houellebeqc, which the police inspector Jasselin could not.
Jasselin was distracted by the surface brutality of the crime, which in fact, was like all crimes, not so much driven by the brutal as by the banal. But the inspector did not want to believe this. He was looking for clues as to why someone would quickly kill a man and his dog, behead them both with a surgical laser cutter, and then layer by layer slice their meat from their bones like prosciutto, tossing the naked bones into the cold fireplace while flinging the human-canine charcouterie randomly about the salon. It is not unusual to be repulsed by such an extremely brutal and violent situation...but as Houellebecq writes it, it is so extreme the crime is not only beyond any reasonable explanation, it is beyond any reasonable belief. Could such a brutal killing occur? Sure, why not? Or perhaps such brutal banality is just as likely as the existence of depth.
We humans know brutality, it is intrinsic to who we are. We believe to know depth, but we are shallow. The unplanned, hot brutality that accompanies rage; the obsessively calculated, cold brutality of a seething system are foreign to none of us. The murder of the writer Houellebecq combines these two types of brutality in a way that they become farce. Beheadings and bloody dismemberment appear before us almost daily through the media; but these are not done with surgical laser cutters, usually. Jasselin knows this. The police investigation into the life of the murder victim shows no indication of this being a ‘planned’ attack, despite the known non-conforming eccentricities of the fictional character as shielded by the factual Houellebecq. There is no indication that the killer was driven into a passionate, vengeful rage; just as the ‘desire’ expressed through Jeb Martin’s artworks is questionable, Houellebeqc puts to question the truth behind the passionate reactions to his writings through the murder of his fictional doppelganger. Inspector Jasselin knows the murder must be about that shallowest of incentives...money. But he would rather believe there is something more meaningful at the basis; something cleaner, more valuable, more creative, more artistic.
Then the artist, Jeb Martin, provides the ‘evidence’ that the reason is money. The portrait he painted of Houellebecq is missing from the scene of the crime.
And what is more valuable than art?
This brings me to another reason I was drawn into reading this book, the role played by ‘art’ in the narrative. After a copy of the book had lept off the table and into my hands, I began to read:
“Jeff Koons had just got up from his chair, enthusiastically throwing his arms out in front of him. Sitting opposite him, slightly hunched up, on a white leather sofa partly draped with silks, Damien Hirst seemed to be about to express an objection; his face was flushed, morose. Both of them were wearing black suits--Koon’s had fine pinstripes--and white shirts and black ties. Between them, on the coffee table, was a basket of candied fruits that neither paid any attention to. Hirst was drinking a Bud light.
Behind them, a bay window opened onto a landscape of tall buildings that formed a Babylonian tangle of gigantic polygons that stretched across the horizon. The night was bright, the air absolutely clear. They could have been in Qatar, or Dubai; the decoration of the room was, in reality, inspired by an advertisement photograph, taken from a German luxury publication, of the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.
Koon’s forehead was slightly shiny. Jed shaded it with his brush and stepped back three paces. There was certainly a problem with Koons. Hirst was basically easy to capture: you could make him brutal, cynical in an “I shit on you from the top of my pile of cash” kind of way; you could also make him a rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death; finally, there was in his face something ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him look like a rank-and-file Arsenal supporter. In short, there were various aspects to him, but all of them could be combined into a coherent, representative portrait of a British artist typical of his generation. Koons, on the other hand, seemed to have a duality, an insurmountable contradiction between the basic cunning of the technical sales rep and the exaltation of the ascetic. It was already three weeks now that Jeb had been retouching Koon’s expression as he stood up from his chair, throwing his arms as if he were trying to convince Hirst of something. It was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer.
He had photographs of Koons on his own, in the company of Roman Abramovich, Madonna, Barack Obama, Bono, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates...Not one of them managed to express anything of the personality of Koons, to go beyond the appearance of a Chevrolet convertible salesman that he had decided to display to the world, and this was exasperating. In fact, for a long time photographers had exasperated Jed, especially the great photographers, with their claim to reveal in their snapshots the truth of their models. They didn’t reveal anything at all, just placed themselves in front of you and switched on the motor of their camera to take hundreds of random snapshots while chuckling, and later chose the least bad of the lot; that’s how they proceeded, without exception, all those so-called great photographers. Jed knew some of them personally and had nothing but contempt for them; he considered them all about as creative as a Photomaton.[1]
Houellebecq is painting portraits in words, capturing the world and its makers in all their flatness; and he’s painted a pretty good picture of Mr. Koons and Mr. Hirst. The contrast in the characters of Koons and Hirst, the ease of capturing the rough and rowdy Hirst as opposed to the difficulties of grasping the excessively well lubricated Koons, reveals less the expanse between the two superpowers bent over a map of the Twenty-first century art market, dividing it between themselves like Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, than the lack of distance between the two types. Like Inspector Jasselin the artist Martin’s difficulty in capturing the essence of Koons is because he is not accepting this lack of distance, he wants to believe something greater is there although he knows there is nothing there. In frustration, a passionless rage he destroys the painting at the very start of the novel, an attempt to nullify its existence, yet its essence remains throughout the story. The portrait of Hirst and Koons as painted by the author Houellebecq is so vivid despite knowing it has never existed, upon reading the description and memories of it, it is hard to accept this fact. But then, we’re always more ready to believe the lies rather than to acknowledge what we know is the truth.
[1] Houellebecq, Michel. The Map and the Territory. New York. 2011. pages 3-4.