The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  “But, you know, I find these maps very beautiful.”

  “That’s obvious. That’s obvious in your photos.”

  It was only too easy to invite her to his place to show her more pictures. When the taxi entered the avenue des Gobelins, however, he was filled with unease.

  “I’m afraid the flat is a bit untidy,” he said.

  Obviously she replied that it wasn’t a problem, but while they climbed the stairs his malaise got worse, and on opening the door he looked at her briefly: she had winced a bit all the same. Untidy was truly an understatement. Around the trestle table on which he had installed his Linhof camera, the entire floor was covered in prints, sometimes several layers of them, probably thousands in all. There was only a narrow passageway between the trestle table and the mattress on the floor. And not only was the flat untidy, it was dirty—the sheets were almost brown and spattered with organic stains.

  “Yes, it’s a bachelor pad,” said Olga lightheartedly; then she advanced into the room and knelt down to examine a print. Her miniskirt ran far up her thighs. Her legs were incredibly long and slender. How could she have legs so long and slender? Jed had never had such an erection, it was truly sore. He was trembling on the spot and had the impression that he would soon pass out.

  “I …” he croaked. Olga turned around and noticed it was serious: she immediately recognized that blinded, panicked look of a man who can no longer withstand his desire. She made a few steps toward him, enveloped him with her voluptuous body, and kissed him on the lips.

  4

  It was best, however, to go to her place. Obviously, it was completely different there: a ravishing two-room flat, on the rue Guynemer, overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg. Olga was one of those endearing Russians who have learned in the course of their formative years to admire a certain image of France—gallantry, gastronomy, literature, and so on—and who are then regularly upset that the real country corresponds so badly to their expectations. It is often believed that the Russians made the great revolution to get rid of communism with the unique aim of consuming McDonald’s fare and films starring Tom Cruise; this is partly true, but a minority of them also had the desire to taste Pouilly-Fuissé or visit the Sainte-Chapelle. By her level of studies and her general knowledge, Olga belonged to this elite. Her father, a biologist at Moscow University, was a specialist in insects—a Siberian lepidopteran even bore his name. He and his family had not really benefited from the great carving-up that had taken place when the empire fell, but neither had they sunk into poverty; the university where he taught had retained a decent level of funding, and after a few uncertain years they had settled at a status that was reasonably middle-class. And while Olga could live the high life in Paris, renting a flat in the rue Guynemer and dressing in designer clothes, she owed it exclusively to her salary from Michelin.

  After they became lovers, a rhythm was quickly established. In the morning, Jed left the flat with her. She went up in her MINI Park Lane to work in the avenue de la Grande Armée, and he took the Métro to his studio in the boulevard de l’Hôpital. He came back in the evening, generally a little before her.

  They went out a lot. In the two years since her arrival in Paris, she had had no problem creating a dense network of social relations. Her professional activity led her to frequent the press and the media—or rather the frankly unglamorous sectors of travel and food journalism. But, anyway, a girl of her beauty would have had an entrée anywhere and been admitted to any circle. It was surprising that when she met Jed she did not have a lover; it was even more surprising that she had set her heart on him. Certainly, he was quite a pretty boy, but of a small and slim kind not generally sought out by women. The image of the virile brute who is good in bed had been coming back in force recently, and it was indeed much more than a simple change of fashion; it was the return to the fundamentals of nature, of sexual attraction in its most elemental and brutal form. Just as the era of anorexic models was well and truly over, and exaggeratedly curvy women no longer interested anyone except some Africans and perverts, in every domain the early third millennium was returning, after various oscillations whose importance had never in fact been very great, to the adoration of a simple tried-and-tested type: beauty expressed in plenitude in the woman, physical power in the man. Such a situation did not really put Jed at an advantage. His artistic career was nothing impressive, either; he wasn’t even an artist, to tell the truth, having never exhibited solo, or had an article written about his work and explaining its importance to the world. He was almost completely unknown at the time. Yes, Olga’s choice was astonishing, and Jed certainly would’ve been astonished if his nature had allowed him to be astonished by this sort of thing, or even to notice it.

  Anyway, in the space of a few weeks, he was invited to more vernissages, premieres, and literary cocktail parties than he had ever been to during all his years at the Beaux-Arts. He rapidly assimilated the appropriate behavior. It wasn’t obligatory to be brilliant, and was actually best most often to say nothing at all, even if it was indispensable to listen to your interlocutor with seriousness and empathy, relaunching the conversation with a “Really?” meant to register interest and surprise, or a “That’s for sure” colored with understanding and approval. What’s more, Jed’s small size facilitated a posture of submission generally appreciated by cultural figures—just as it is, truth be told, by anyone. In short, it was an easy milieu to enter, like all milieus, no doubt; and Jed’s courteous neutrality, his silence about his own work, served him greatly by giving the then-justified impression that he was a serious artist, an artist who really worked. Floating among the others with polite disinterest, Jed adopted, without knowing it, the groovy attitude that had made Andy Warhol successful in his time, while adding to it a nuance of seriousness—immediately interpreted as a concerned seriousness, a citizen’s seriousness—which had become indispensable fifty years on. One November evening, at some literary prize ceremony, he was even introduced to Frédéric Beigbeder, then at the height of his media fame. The writer and publicist, having kissed Olga several times on the cheek (but so ostentatiously, so theatrically that it became innocent through the all-too-clear indication of playful intent), turned toward Jed with an intrigued look, before being distracted by an acclaimed porn actress who’d just published a book of interviews with a Tibetan religious leader. Nodding regularly at what the ex–hardcore star was saying, Beigbeder flashed looks at Jed out of the corner of his eye as if asking him not to get lost in the crowd, which became denser and denser as the petits fours disappeared. Having lost a lot of weight, the author of SOS Forgiveness had at that time a thin beard, with the obvious aim of looking like the hero of a Russian novel. At last, the girl was taken aside by a tall, rather flabby man with medium-length hair, who seemed to have editorial responsibilities at Grasset, and Beigbeder was able to free himself. Olga was a few meters away, surrounded by her usual swarm of male admirers.

  “So it’s you?” he finally asked Jed, looking him straight in the eyes with worrying intensity—and then he really did look like the hero of a Russian novel, though the gleam in his eyes no doubt owed more to cocaine than to religious fervor. But was there really any difference? Jed wondered. “It’s you who’s having her?” Beigbeder asked again with increasing intensity. Not knowing what to say, Jed remained silent.

  “You know that you’re with one of the five most beautiful women in Paris?” His tone had returned to being serious, professional; he visibly knew the other four. Jed had no reply to that, either. What can you reply, in general, to human questions?

  Beigbeder sighed, suddenly appearing very weary, and Jed thought that the conversation was finally going to become easy again, that he was going to be able, as usual, to listen and implicitly approve the conceptions and anecdotes developed by his interlocutor; but there was none of it. Beigbeder was interested in him, and wanted to know more about him. That in itself was extraordinary, as Beigbeder was one of the most courted celebrities in P
aris, and the people around them were astonished, probably drawing conclusions, and turning their eyes toward them. Jed coped at first by saying that he did photography, but Beigbeder wanted to know more: what kind of photography? The reply left him flustered: he knew publicity photographers, fashion photographers, and even a few war photographers—although he’d met them doing the work of paparazzi, which they did while more or less hiding it, since it was generally considered less noble in the profession to photograph Pamela Anderson’s breasts than the scattered remains of a Lebanese suicide bomber; the lenses used are, however, generally the same, and the physical requirements almost similar: it is difficult to avoid the hand trembling when you shoot, and the maximum apertures can only make the best of already bright light—such are the problems you meet with telephoto lenses with very high magnification. On the other hand, people who photographed road maps, no, that was new to him. Becoming a bit confused, Jed ended up saying that yes, in a certain sense, you could say he was an artist.

  “Ha-ha-haaa!” The writer gave an exaggerated laugh, making a dozen people turn round, including Olga. “But yes, of course, you have to be an artist! Literature, as a plan, is completely old hat! To sleep with the most beautiful women today, you have to be an artist! I too want to become an ar-tist!”

  And in a surprising manner, stretching his arms out wide, he intoned, very loudly and almost without a false note, “The Businessman’s Blues”:

  I would have liked to be an artiiiist

  To reinvent the world

  To be an anarchiiiist

  And live like a millionaire!

  His glass of vodka was trembling in his hands. Half the room was now looking at them. He dropped his arms, and added, in a bewildered voice, “Words by Luc Plamondon, music by Michel Berger,” and burst out sobbing.

  “That went well … with Frédéric,” Olga told him as they walked home, along the boulevard Saint-Germain. “Yes …” Jed replied, perplexed. Among his reading as an adolescent, at his Jesuit school, there had been those realist novels of the French nineteenth century where it happens that ambitious young men succeed through women; but he was surprised to find himself in a similar situation, and in truth he had rather forgotten those realist novels of the French nineteenth century. For a few years he had been able to read only Agatha Christie, and even more specifically, only those involving Hercule Poirot, which could hardly help him in the present circumstances.

  At least he was launched, and it was nearly with ease that Olga convinced her director to organize Jed’s first solo exhibition, in the firm’s premises on the avenue de Breteuil. He visited the space, which was vast but quite sad, with walls and a floor of gray concrete; this bareness seemed to him rather a good thing. He suggested no modification, requesting only the installation at the entrance of a big supplementary panel. However, he gave very precise instructions for the lighting and spent the weeks leading up to the exhibition making sure that they were followed to the letter.

  The date of the vernissage had been fixed for 28 January, which was quite clever; it left the critics time to return from their winter holidays, then organize their schedules. The budget allocated for the buffet was very decent. The first real surprise for Jed was the press officer: filled with preconceived ideas, he had always imagined press officers to be absolute stunners, and was shocked to find himself standing before a small, sickly thing, thin and almost hunchbacked, inappropriately called Marylin, who was probably neurotic as well. Throughout their first conversation she anxiously twisted her long and flat black hair, gradually composing knots impossible to untie and then abruptly tearing out the offending lock. Her nose constantly dripped, and in her enormous handbag, which was more like a shopping bag, she carried about fifteen packs of disposable paper tissues—almost her entire daily consumption. They met in Olga’s office, and it was troubling to see side by side this sumptuous creature, with infinitely desirable forms, and this poor little runt of a woman, with her unexplored vagina; Jed wondered for a moment if Olga had not chosen her precisely for her ugliness, to avoid having any female competition around her. But no, certainly not, she was far too conscious of her own beauty, and too objective as well to feel competitive when her supremacy wasn’t objectively threatened—and this had never happened in her real life, even if she had had occasion to fleetingly envy Kate Moss’s cheekbones or Naomi Campbell’s ass during a fashion-show broadcast on M6. If Olga had chosen Marylin, it was because she had the reputation of being an excellent press officer, undoubtedly the best in the field of contemporary art, at least in the French market.

  “I’m very happy to work on this project …” Marylin announced in a whiny voice. “Deeply happy.”

  Olga, bending down to try and match her height, felt atrociously uncomfortable and ended up indicating to them a small conference room next to her office. “I’ll let you get on with your work,” she said before leaving with relief. Marylin took out an oversize diary and two packs of tissues before continuing.

  “First of all, I studied geography. Then I turned toward human geography. And now I am exclusively into humans. Well, if you can call them human beings,” she added.

  She initially wanted to know if he had any “pet media” as far as the written press was concerned. This certainly wasn’t the case; in fact, Jed couldn’t remember ever buying a newspaper or a magazine. He liked television, especially in the morning. You could comfortably jump from cartoons to news from the stock exchange; occasionally, when a subject particularly interested him, he connected to the Internet. But the printed press seemed a strange remnant, probably doomed in the short term, and whose interest in any case escaped him.

  “Okay …” Marylin commented politely. “So, I suppose I have more or less carte blanche.”

  5

  She did indeed have carte blanche, and used it to the best of her ability. When they went into the hall in the avenue de Breteuil on the evening of the vernissage, Olga was shocked. “There’s a lot of people,” she finally said, impressed. “Yes, people have come along,” Marylin confirmed with a muted satisfaction that seemed bizarrely mixed with rancor. There were about a hundred people, but what she meant was that there were some important people, and how could you know that? The only person Jed knew by sight was Patrick Forestier, Olga’s immediate superior, the director of communications for Michelin France, a typical product of the École Polytechnique who had spent three hours trying to dress artistically, going through his entire wardrobe before opting for one of his usual gray suits—worn without a tie.

  The entrance to the hall was barred by a big panel, leaving two-meters-wide passageways at either side, on which Jed had displayed a satellite photo taken around the mountain of Guebwiller next to an enlargement of a Michelin Departments map of the same zone. The contrast was striking: while the photograph showed only a soup of more or less uniform green sprinkled with vague blue spots, the map developed a fascinating maze of departmental and scenic roads, viewpoints, forests, lakes, and cols. Above the two enlargements, in black capital letters, was the title of the exhibition: THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.

  In the hall itself, on big movable walls, Jed had hung about thirty photographic enlargements—all borrowed from Michelin Departments maps, but choosing the most varied geographical zones, from the high mountains to the Breton coast, from the bocage of the Manche to the cereal-growing plains of Eure-et-Loir. Flanked by Olga and Jed, Marylin stopped on the threshold to observe the crowd of journalists, personalities, and critics like a predator surveys a herd of antelope at a watering hole.

  “Pépita Bourguignon is there,” she finally said with a dry sneer.

  “Bourguignon?” asked Jed.

  “The art critic for Le Monde.”

  He almost stupidly repeated “For the world?” before remembering that it was an evening newspaper, and resolved to shut up, as much as possible, for the rest of the soirée. Once separated from Marylin, he had no problem walking peacefully among his photos, withou
t anyone recognizing him as the artist, and without even attempting to listen in on the conversations. It seemed to him, in relation to other vernissages, that the hubbub was rather less loud; the atmosphere was concentrated, almost reverential, and many people were looking at his work—this was probably a good sign. Patrick Forestier was one of the few exuberant guests; with a glass of champagne in his hand, he was turning around to widen his audience while congratulating himself loudly on the “end of the misunderstanding between Michelin and the art world.”

  Three days later, Marylin burst into the conference room near Olga’s office, where Jed had taken a seat to wait for the press reviews. She took out of her shopping bag a pack of paper tissues and that day’s Le Monde.

  “Have you not read it?” she exclaimed with what for her was overexcitement. “Well, it’s just as well I came.”

  Written by Patrick Kéchichian, the article—a full page, with a very beautiful color reproduction of Jed’s photograph of the map of Dordogne and the Lot—was ecstatic in its praise. From the very first lines, he likened the point of view of the map—or of the satellite image—to that of God. “With that profound tranquility of the great revolutionaries,” he wrote, “the artist—a man of tender age—moves away, starting with the inaugural piece by which he makes us enter his world, from that naturalist and neo-pagan vision by which our contemporaries exhaust themselves in an attempt to retrieve the image of the Absent One. Not without gallant audacity, he adopts the point of view of a God co-participating, alongside man, in the (re)construction of the world.” He then wrote, at length, about the works, displaying a surprising knowledge of photographic technique, before concluding: “Between mystical union with the world and rational theology, Jed Martin has made a choice. The first perhaps in Western art since the great figures of the Renaissance, he has, to the nocturnal seductions of Hildegard of Bingen, preferred the difficult and clear constructions of the ‘silent bull,’ as his fellow students at the University of Cologne had the habit of nicknaming the Aquinite. If this choice is of course questionable, the loftiness of vision it implies is scarcely that. Here is an artistic year that begins under the most promising of auspices.”