Michel Houellebecq is the David Gilmour of France. Like Gilmour, Houellebecq has been consistently scorned by the literary establishment in his own country. But Gilmour’s crime was only to write novels about adult men who fall in love with teenage girls.
Houellebecq, on the other hand, has been accused by his French colleagues of being not merely an ephebophile, but a racist as well. For those who crave a first taste of Houellebecq, his latest novel, The Map and the Territory, is a good place to start. All Houellebecq novels are preoccupied with sex and death. However, The Map and the Territory deals mainly with death, and this may be the reason it recently won the prestigious Prix Goncourt.
What is it about Houellebecq that so angers his fellow countrymen? I recently spoke to a Frenchman who dislikes Houellebecq. The young man said: “He’s a bit harsh.” That understatement goes a long way toward explaining why so many either hate Houellebecq’s work or adore it.
The Map and the Territory revolves around the life and death of an extremely successful, misanthropic, Warholesque artist named Jed Martin. The novel is in three parts. The first part deals mainly with Martin’s art career and his affair with a beautiful Russian businesswoman named Olga. In the second part, Martin forms an on-and-off friendship with a character named Michel Houellebecq, who becomes the subject of one of his paintings.
Up until this point, the novel seems mostly to be a tongue-in-cheek critique of the intersection between art and commerce. But an engrossing and horrifying murder mystery surfaces in the third part of the book, a crime with fascinating links to the art world (and to Jackson Pollock!).
That Houellebecq chose to make himself a character in one of his own books is of course related to his infamy in his own country. He has fun with this; he presents himself as both lovable and repellent, much like any character in a Houellebecq novel.
Houellebecq is one of the least sentimental authors I have ever read. There is certainly no danger he will ever end up as an Oprah (or Heather Reisman) favourite. His narrative voice, whether in the first or third person, is as brutally unsentimental as nature itself (but with a sense of humour, if nature has a sense of humour).
All of Houellebecq’s novels feature male leading characters obsessed with smoking, food, alcohol and sex, while at the same time disdaining the annoyingly persistent heterosexual habit of procreation, and incidentally rejecting organized religion. Houellebecq himself seems somewhat cranky and angry (he certainly presents himself that way in this novel) and critics are often tempted to psychoanalyze him. It didn’t help that his mother penned a memoir in 2008 (at the age of 83) attacking her own son.
But to criticize Houellebecq for being amoral – or simply for being a monumentally unpleasant and neurotic human being – is beside the point. He may indeed be all of those things, but his work is despised by his contemporaries simply because he dares to set before them – without judgment – the sheer, unadulterated animality of humanity.
Houellebecq is a stylist, and his flawless, analytical prose often features massive, obsessive digressions in which he carefully catalogues scientific, historical or technological information. His novels – not unlike computers – contain a wealth of information and informed opinion. The Map and the Territory features several mini-essays on William Morris directly related to Houellebecq’s omnipresent and often hilarious ambivalence toward Western technology and consumerism.
But although Houellebecq critiques modern life, his novel is also about every novel’s inability to capture reality. The title directly refers to a quote by philosopher Alfred Korzybski (“the map is not the territory”). Korzybski (1879-1950) was a radical anti-Aristotelian indebted to Wittgenstein; both theorized that language is a trap that will not allow us to see the world clearly. One of Korzybski’s ideas is that there is no such thing as an object in isolation. For instance, merely to speak of an object implies a relation between the object and the speaker.
Korzybski’s philosophy is epitomized in a sentence from The Map and the Territory where the narrator notes sarcastically that a “disarming smile is an expression you still encounter in certain novels, and therefore must correspond to some kind of reality.” Houellebecq’s evident distrust of traditional banal novelistic language indicates a desire to somehow arrive at an accurate approximation of our reality through words. But not to worry; his detached, encyclopedic style always leaves room for entertaining rants about subjects such as kids (“no, he didn’t like children, or in any case, human children”) and Picasso (“his soul is hideous, and that’s all you can say about Picasso”).
The Map and the Territory is an excellent introduction to Houellebecq for the uninitiated. But be forewarned: Your taste for his work may be related to your own ability to tolerate a lacerating, all too accurate representation of the modern world.
Sky Gilbert’s new novel, Come Back, will be published this spring. He blogs at skygilbert.blogspot.com.
