Slant Magazine

The Map and the Territory begins with the composition of a painting, but it's truer to say it emerges from out of the painting—or out of its description. A little more than a paragraph in, the fiction of the scene yields: "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." An investigation of the interior leads to a revelation about the exterior. It's a small turn in the sea of them that we find in Michel Houellebecq's new novel, but it's one that deserves our attention. As readers, it's the first sign of our conditioning to a world where reality is the continuity or discontinuity between texts. This particular text, a painting called Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, depicts what it says. If the irony of the conceit isn't lost on us, the passing affinity Houellebecq himself has with Hirst's epithet isn't either: "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…" The painting itself suggests an analogy to its over-text, to the parallel aesthetics—classical and iconoclastic, conservative and decadent—at work in The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq's protagonist, Jed Martin, is painting the ersatz mythology of the world of art in the time of hyper-capitalism; his two contemporaries are symbolic, godlike, free as representations to take refuge in a kind of essential commercialism through the rite that the sale of this painting would renew. But the latter will never come to pass: "On closer inspection, the night itself wasn't right: it didn't have that sumptuousness, that mystery one associates with nights on the Arabian Peninsula; he should have used a deep blue, not ultramarine. He was making a truly shitty painting. He seized a palette knife, cut open Damien Hirst's eye, and forced the gash wider; it was a canvas of tight linen fibers, and therefore very tough." This time the path from interior to exterior leads through an act of violence that renders the boundary between the two meaningless. Continue Reading »