(2010) La Carte et le Territoire
2010-09-04
Houllebecq's first novel to win the Prix Goncourt. While having many of the clichés of his other work, this one stays grounded enough to escape mundane stimulation, offering a good amount of philosophical reflection.
The novel is mostly traditional, following the point of view of Jed Martin, an artist. While mostly chronological, following Jed's career, there is a certain amount of 4th wall breaking, with some bits of narration presenting a biography of Jed Martin written retrospectively. In the last part of the novel, the point of view switches a bit to that of a detective, unrelated to the main character.
This distance with the narration allows reflecting on the actions of the artist, and the purpose of his artwork. This naturally puts one in a critical position behind the art. We question its techniques, purpose, and whether or not it resonates with us.
The story starts a bit later in Jed's career, centering his relationship with his father, who's living in an elder care center. By putting this element at the start of the novel, the theme of death and the relationship with your parents is centered, and provides a mood for the rest of the novel. Throughout it, we're very much concerned with death, and with the purpose of our work and lives.
After that introduction, we mostly follow Jed's career. We start in college, and his initial romantic (erotic) ventures. (Like all Houllebecq novels, no amount of bizarre eroticism and reflections on the sexual market are spared). He photographs many industrial elements, like screws, tools, and other such objects.
While this work has no commercial success, he ends up applying this skills towards his first exhibited work, that of creating photographs of Michelin road maps. Abroad, we might hear of Michelin stars, and not quite piece together that this moniker is shared by the maker of road maps, and tires. Michelin captured the French tire market so completely that they found themselves in need of increasing demand for driving itself. By creating maps, they facilitated the ambition to executing more complicated and novel road trips. And, by creating a guide of restaurants and sights to visit, they created demand for the destinations such elongated trips might target.
His work captures the intricacy of these maps, and lets us see the regions they represent in a new light. This continues the interest in industrial objects that manifested in his previous work. We can also see how the them of humans and their interaction with industry and abstraction plays out. Maps are abstractions humans create to squash their surroundings into a mental frame. A mass-produced map is also an full-fledged model of an industrial product. It requires advanced industry to produce, but also, in and of itself, represents the accumulation of precise knowledge. It's the rate object that is both the product of knowledge, and the representation of knowledge.
This exhibition lets our protagonist meet a long-lasting romantic relationship: Olga, a Russian, is working in France on behalf of Michelin, finding destinations to add to the guide. In this book, she represents the archetype of the failed muse, present in other novels of Houllebecq, especially Plateforme. The archetype involves a woman aiding in the main protagonist fulfilling their creative role, while not directly performing it themselves. They act as a support, or a catalyst to the creative reaction going on in the protagonist, but they are not creative in-and-of themselves.
One flaw, or characteristic, of Houllebecq's work as a whole, is that his misanthropy and cynicism often manifests in the flattening of characters beyond the scope of the main character. The protagonist is fleshed out, acts independently, has motivations, but other characters, especially women, exists as puppets to fulfill roles, rather than actors capable of responding on their own. These roles are like single-tinted shadows, meant to serve a purpose, or to be a symbol.
Ultimately, the relationship does not last, with Jed unwilling to follow Olga to Russia, after she gets reassigned there. After this breakup, Jed starts painting. Over the next decade, he successfully completes a series of paintings depicting people working various jobs. Considered as a whole, he has a complete representation of the economic activities that make up human society. This body of work proves to be extremely successful, catapulting Jed into riches.
Along the way, the author himself appears as a character, the writer Michel Houllebecq. (Many other celebrities also appear, or are mentioned). Jed wants the author to write a kind of literary guide for the exhibition, and is willing to compensate him, beyond a consulting fee, with a painting of the author at work; this constitutes the final painting in this collection.
We get some amount of self-mockery here, where the author is depicted as a sad and bored old man, in a kind of pitiful way. He has no friends, very little contact with the outside world, and very few personal ambitions.
In the last part, Michel Houllebecq is murdered gruesomely, and we follow a detective trying to resolve the case. This is never resolved, intentionally. Things peter out, and the detective does not get any satisfaction from their investigation.
At the very end, we observe the final life and works of Jed, who secludes himself in a country estate, and creates videos depicting nature overtaking industry.
There's a bleak and sad atmosphere throughout the book. Death is omnipresent. It starts the book out, and it provides a kind of pressure that permeates the rest. Actions are taken, ultimately, out of a need to create meaning in the face of death.
Art, perhaps, is an exception to this. It can be done without a need to escape death, in and of itself. Love, on the other hand, does not share this transcendantal status. Love, in Houllebecq tradition, is intimately tied to sex, and sex is intimately tied to the body itself, and the body decays. While human beings are motivated, profoundly, by sex, we are also forced to confront our ugliness and decay when faced with this, especially in a sexual marketplace, where our worth is ruthlessly judged; at least, that's the Houllebecqian conception of romanticism.
There is an admiration for the human condition though. Art is seen as being able to capture some of this ingenuity. The industrial objects being photographed convey an admiration for the technical precision of humans. The human aspects abstracted away from the body are able to be venerated. Whereas the body is decaying, ugly, and unworthy of worship. Humans turn their artistic impulses into objects that can outlive and transcend them.
Ultimately, human art fades away in the long run, and can be corrupted, or at the very least, commoditized in the short run. Jed's paintings turn into a source of wealth and competition among buyers, rather than pure artistic expression.
The reflections in this novel leave you in a much more meditative state than other works of his, which have a more crude attack to them. Here, the crudeness is set aside, to some extent, and you're left with a more open space and presentation of themes to reflect on.
The avant-garde elements of the writing style, like the meta-narration, and point of view shifts are very subdued, and the prose itself flows nicely, with an interesting obsession with the nuances of language. Some of the rhythm and phonetics probably don't translate all that well, so I'm glad to have read it in French. It's hard to capture the extent to which technical terminology integrates less well into French than English, leaving such jargon to sound like an Alien language forcefully shaping itself into something approximately French. Whereas, in English, our phonology is ever accommodating of words outside our experience.
The book is also very funny, with explicit commentary and criticism on French society, and also subtle jokes and references to media perception of art and writers. One running joke that always got me is how authors will be referred to as "The Author of XYZ". This joke in this book is that this journalistic cliché is extended to normal narration, made especially funny by the author being a character in the book. For example:
and other such things. For some reason, this made me laugh quite a bit. Perhaps this is because the French journalistic trope of refusing to repeat a subject in the same way always grated me. The number of times I've read obtuse metaphors to avoid saying "French language" twice, or "Paris" twice is crazy. You'll seriously see "French" then "The language of Molière", then "The language of Hugo" used in the same article. It's ridiculous.
All this to say that this was a good read, above other Houllebecq novels, and with a lot to think about regarding death and artistic motivations.