Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory

Another extraordinary novel by Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory, which won him the Goncourt Prize in 2010, not an easy award to get, one which involves no less than the recognition by the French literary establishment of the author´s quality. And Houellebecq has not been the least domesticated, no matter what some may say. The Frenchman has not lost a single bit of his irresistible coldness. Reading him continues to be as gloomy as it is exciting and intense.

The novel moves along chronologically throughout the life of the protagonist: the artist and photographer Jed Martin, since the moment of his birth around 1975, until his death by the middle of the next century. (Although the 2010s is the story´s central time). As it progresses, the narration increasingly takes the shape of a kind of biographical essay by some unknown author, writing in a remote future, perhaps a century away. As an “essay”, the text has a very "humanistic" tone, with highly elaborate ideas and arguments about the impact that the main character (Jed Martin) had on the artistic culture of his time, his legacy and influence. And as it often happens in Michel Houellebecq, there is also the presence along the text of the two great forces of human civilization: science and technology. Without which it is impossible to build any serious intellectual discourse.

Life of Jed Martin

Artist Jed Martin, who is destined to become in the future (the "present" in this imaginary essay) a legendary figure in the history of art, shares space and time with some current and recognizable individuals like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or even Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea. This is something that helps the reader to mentally hold onto his or her time (which is ours) and later experience more effectively its progressive dissolution throughout the novel, as our present is gradually transmuted into a distant past. The map and the territory is, from that point of view, an effective (and momentary) antidote to this almost ludicrous presentism that western civilization has suffered for a century or more.

At a key moment in his career, and having made ​​the transition from an objectual avant-garde photographer into a falsely figurative painter, Jed Martin will "immortalize" two key individuals in the economic and technological development of the 2010s: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and he will capture them with the same psychological intensity as Velázquez. In the painting, which bears the title of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talking about the future of computer technology or The Palo Alto conversation,  Martin shows the two characters while chatting on the porch of Jobs´ s Californian mansion, relaxing before a chess board. And critics and scholars from the future will proclaim, with their usual symbolic penetration, that this work by Martin contains no less than the history of capitalism. 

And capitalism, indeed, and according to Houellebecq, or his narrator in the book, is in its very final moment: by 2016 another devastating global economic crisis will occur, worse than the 2008 one, which practically leads to the imminent liquidation of our current economic system. Although the author does not give us any idea on what could replace it.

Michel Houellebecq, a character in The Map and the Territory

The futuristic novel or imaginary essay exposes biographical details of Martin, the incidents of his life, vital and sexual experiences, and his intellectual and artistic itinerary, which is going to make of him, a century later, apparently an artist the size of a Picasso, Bacon or Kandinsky. Moreover, the narrative never fails to show who its author is. In its pages, we encounter, for example, the usual houellebecquian sadness before the physical decay of the body or the seeming impossibility of ever leaving our unfortunate condition of elementary particles.

And Michel Houellebecq himself will appear as a character in the novel. And he does so in an extremely talented way, transforming himself into a mysterious and at the same time believable literary creature, a sad and helpless one, but also subtle and poignant. Elements of the Michel Houellebecq media cliché co-exist in the character created with intimate and ironic reflections. And in the final stretch, this Houellebecq character is going to become the tragic core of what will become surprisingly a gripping detective story. In much the same way as The Elementary Particles (1998) became, also in its last section, an amazing science fiction narration.

There is truly stuff in the pages of The Map and the Territory: ideas, events, insights, joys and sorrows. Psychologies displayed. Bleak prospects. Creative inquiries. Reflections on the future of France, the necessity for the preservation of its culture and heritage. The Chinese, destined to become Europe´s new masters, will be a different kind of barbarians from what the Americans used to be: far more enlightened, their money will help to preserve the culture and traditions from the past. The novel also speaks at length with irony about the art market and the network of relations established by the representatives of the high culture world. The French writer Frederic Beigbeder also appears as a character in the book and he is presented as a close friend, or the only one, of that elusive Ireland-based writer whose name is Michel Houellebecq. 

But one main impression that the Map and the Territory leaves in the reader is this dissolution of the present into a distant past, of which only its art, ideas and science will remain, as has happened before with any other bygone era, after disappearing into the great river of Time. Our age, which we find so oppressive and overwhelming, so tangible: it too will be converted into text, history, thought, into some sort of borgesian dream. Achieving this effect means you have previously created a solid fabric: Houellebecq undoubtedly has.