“Houellebecq” - obligingly true to his real life reputation as a depressed, abrasive, inebriated loner living in Ireland - agrees to write up the introduction to the catalogue of Jed’s second retrospective. Frozen forever in time, they exist only in a painting that the protagonist of the book, Jed Martin, is struggling to finish and will soon tear apart out of frustration with Koon’s expression, as difficult to render as that of “a Mormon pornographer.” What we thought was an in medias res opening was, in fact, in medias ars.įrom there, we follow Martin from his first solo exhibition in the early 2000s (a series of magnificent photographic enlargements of Michelin maps depicting France’s rural regions) through various artistic phases that lead him to beat Koons and Hirst on the art market and to meet, and paint, the famed author Michel Houellebecq. The first few paragraphs of The Map and the Territory alone are a little masterpiece of hyperrealism and ambiguity: The reader is lured by the depiction of an imminent clash between Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst only to discover, a few paragraphs later, that the two richest living artists will never exchange a word. One can only wonder what it would have been had Houellebecq actually believed in the novel as an art form. In the process, and without the usual heavy-handed provocations familiar to Houellebecq, it offers original insights into the museumification of contemporary France, the eerie coincidence between art and death, an exegesis of socialist writer William Morris, and a meditation on art as a practice, a product, and a business. In its seamless collage of artful pastiche, the novel captures with perfect irony the tone and texture of twenty-first-century discourses, from Wikipedia articles to operating instructions, from tacky pop songs to pompous art reviews in Le Monde. It is part crafty page-turner, part sociological inquiry, part satire, part mystery novel, part artist’s biography. The Map and the Territory is a tour de force, a consummate postmodern construction where representation and reality (the map and the territory of the title) constantly spiral in and out of one another in vertiginous mirroring patterns. Rarely will you have as much fun reading a contemporary novel that is also a serious reflection on art, death, and contemporary society (not necessarily in that order). His latest book, though, is anything but dreary. “Flat,” “terse”: These adjectives aptly describe Houellebecq’s conspicuously neutral prose. The individual self is an obsolete and destructive fallacy, and all human destinies follow a single, boring plot: decay.Īnd then there is: Th progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel.…The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented. In this cheerful formulation, the novelist does not exactly have a head start. The sensation of the self a machine designed to fabricate feelings of failure. Individuality is for the most part just a failure. There is no more edifying death the sun is missing. What’s the point of telling a string of new anecdotes? Of the uselessness of the novel. In his early poetic work, the joyously titled Rester Vivant, méthode ( Staying Alive, A Method), Houellebecq states: ll human beings are alike. He has repeatedly declared the novel a minor genre compared to poetry. “I’ve always found telling stories a pain in the ass, and I have no talent as a storyteller,” he declared to Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2008. Yet Houellebecq claims he does not believe in the novel. That his books consistently sell over 200,000 copies, and that he garnered a slew of literary prizes for them (including, finally, the time-honored Goncourt for his latest opus, The Map and the Territory), tells you how cheery contemporary France’s zeitgeist is. Since Extension du domaine de la lutte (translated as Whatever) and The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq’s misogynist, apocalyptic novels have earned him the label of inventor of “depressionist literature” and a devilish reputation as an über-provocateur. Other characters usually fall into two main categories: the anti-hero who observes the nullity of the human species, and the few specimens of this species he encounters, who never fail to confirm his views. The bad boy of French letters has made his name building post-humanist novels where dogs and clones are the rare creatures achieving a modicum of happiness.
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