“It’s grandiose, this idea you’ve had of making my portrait, truly grandiose.”
“Really?” Jed asked, surprised. He finished tidying up the pieces of glass, put it all in a special garden garbage bag (Houellebecq, apparently, didn’t have any other kind), sat down again at the table and took a slice of sausage.
“You know,” he continued, unflustered, “I really intend to do this painting well. These last ten years, I’ve tried to portray people belonging to all layers of society, from the horse butcher to the chief executive of a multinational. My only failure was when I tried to portray an artist—more precisely, Jeff Koons, I don’t know why. Well, I also failed in the case of a priest, I didn’t know how to approach that subject, either, but in the case of Jeff Koons it’s worse. I’d started the painting, and I was obliged to destroy it. I don’t want to end on this failure—and with you, I believe, I will succeed. There’s something in your eyes, I don’t know what, but I believe I can transcribe it …”
The word passion suddenly crossed Jed’s mind, and all of a sudden he found himself ten years previously, during his last weekend with Olga. It was on the terrasse of the Château de Vault de Lugny, on the Sunday of Pentecost. The terrasse overlooked the immense park, whose trees swayed in a gentle breeze. Night was falling, and the temperature ideally mild. Olga seemed deep in contemplation of her pressed lobster. She had said nothing for at least a minute when she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes, and asked: “Do you know why you’re attractive to women?”
He muttered an inaudible reply.
“I suppose you’ve had the opportunity to notice it. You’re rather cute, but it’s not that, beauty’s almost a detail. No, it’s something else.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s very simple: it’s because you have an intense look in your eyes. A passionate look. And it’s that, above all, that women are looking for. If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive.”
Leaving him to meditate on this conclusion, she took a sip of Meursault and tasted her starter. “Obviously,” she said a little later with a slight sadness, “when this passion isn’t addressed to them, but to an artistic work, women are incapable of noticing it. Well, at least at the beginning.”
Ten years later, observing Houellebecq, Jed became aware that there was also passion in his eyes, even something wild. He must have aroused passions in women, maybe violent ones. Yes, from everything Jed knew about women, it seemed probable that some of them might have fallen for this tortured wreck who was now gently nodding his head in front of him while devouring slices of pâté de campagne, and who had manifestly become indifferent to anything connected to a loving relationship, and most probably any kind of human relationship.
“It’s true, I feel only a faint sense of solidarity with the human species …” Houellebecq said as if he’d read Jed’s thoughts. “I would say that my feeling of belonging diminishes a little more each day. Yet I like your last paintings, even if they portray human beings. They have something … general, I would say, which goes beyond the anecdotal. I mean, I don’t want to anticipate my text, otherwise I’ll write nothing. In fact, that doesn’t bother you too much, does it, if I haven’t finished it by the end of March? I’m really not well at the moment.”
“No problem. We’ll delay the exhibition; we’ll wait for as long as it takes. You know you’ve become important for me, and what’s more,” exclaimed Jed, “that’s happened so quickly! No human being has ever had this effect on me!
“What’s curious, you know,” he went on more calmly, “is that you expect a portrait painter to stress the singularity of the model, what makes him a unique human being. And that’s what I do in a way, but from another point to view I have the impression that people resemble one another more than is normally said; especially when I do the planes or the jawbones, I have the sense I’m repeating the motifs of a puzzle. I know very well that human beings are the subject of the novel, of the great Western novel, and one of the great subjects of painting as well, but I can’t help thinking that people are much less different than they generally think. That there are too many complications in society, too many distinctions and categories.”
“Yes, it’s a bit byzantinesque,” the author of Platform agreed heartily. “But I don’t feel that you’re really a portrait painter. Picasso’s portrait of Dora Maar, who gives a fuck about that? Anyway, Picasso’s ugly, and he paints a hideously deformed world because his soul is hideous, and that’s all you can say about Picasso. There’s no reason anymore to support the exhibition of his works. He has nothing to contribute, and with him there’s no light, no innovation in the organization of colors or forms. I mean, in Picasso’s work there’s absolutely nothing that deserves attention, just an extreme stupidity and a priapic daubing that might attract a few sixtysomethings with big bank accounts. The portrait of Fuckface, member of the Merchants’ Guild, by Van Dyck, now that’s something else; because it’s not Fuckface who interests Van Dyck, but the Merchants’ Guild. I mean, that’s what I understand in your paintings, but maybe I’ve got it completely wrong; anyway, if you don’t like my text you can just chuck it in the trash. Sorry, I’m becoming aggressive, it’s this damn athlete’s foot.” Before Jed’s terrified eyes, he began scratching his feet, furiously, until drops of blood began to appear. “I’ve got athlete’s foot, a bacterial infection, a generalized atopic eczema. I’m rotting on the spot and no one gives a damn, no one can do anything to help me. I’ve been shamefully abandoned by science, so what’s left for me to do? Just scratch and scratch myself endlessly, that’s what my life’s now become, one endless scratching session …”
Then he stood up, slightly relieved. “I’m a bit tired now, I think I’m going to have a rest,” he said, sounding like a man who had got out of a jam pretty well.
Houellebecq accompanied Jed to the door. At the last moment, just before he disappeared into the night, he told him: “You know, I realize what you’re doing, and I know the consequences. You’re a good artist—without going into detail, one could say that. The result is that while I’ve been photographed thousands of times, if there’s an image of me, just one, that will last for the centuries to come, it will be your painting.” He suddenly made a smile that was juvenile and this time truly disarming. “You see, I take painting seriously,” he said. Then he closed the door.
16
Jed stumbled into a baby carriage, only just regained his balance before the body scanner, then stepped back to retake his place in line. Apart from him there were mostly families, each with two or three children. In front of him, a blond child aged about four was whining, demanding God knows what, then suddenly threw himself on the floor screaming and trembling with rage; his mother exchanged an exhausted look with her husband, who tried to pick the vicious little bastard up again. It’s impossible to write a novel, Houellebecq had told him the day before, for the same reason that it’s impossible to live: due to accumulated inertia. And all the theories of freedom, from Gide to Sartre, are just immoralisms thought up by irresponsible bachelors. Like me, he’d added, attacking his third bottle of Chilean red.
There were no designated seats in the plane, and at boarding he tried to join a group of teenagers but was held back at the foot of the metal steps—his hand luggage was too big, he had to pass it to the flight crew—and found himself stuck between a five-year-old girl who was fidgeting in her seat, constantly demanding sweets, and an obese woman, with dull hair, holding in her lap a baby which began to scream just after takeoff; half an hour later, she had to change its diaper.
At the exit from the airport of Beauvais-Tillé, he stopped, put down his travel bag, and breathed slowly before picking it up again. The families loaded with buggies and children were rushing onto the bus bound for the Porte Maillot. Just next to it was a small white van, with big side windows, bearing the logo of Beauvaisis Urban Transport. Jed approached and asked for information: it was the shuttle fo
r Beauvais, the driver told him; the journey cost two euros. He bought a ticket; he was the only passenger.
“Shall I drop you at the station?” the driver asked a little later.
“No, in the center.”
The driver looked at him in surprise; Beauvaisis tourism, apparently, hadn’t benefited much from the presence of the airport. However, an effort had been made, as in almost every town in France, to reserve streets in the center for pedestrians, with signs giving historical and cultural information. The first traces of settlement on the site of Beauvais could be dated from 65000 B.C. A camp fortified by the Romans, the town took the name of Caesaromagus, then of Bellovacum, before being destroyed in A.D. 275 by the barbarian invasions.
Standing at a crossroads of trade routes, surrounded by very rich wheat fields, Beauvais enjoyed considerable prosperity from the eleventh century onwards, and a textile industry developed there; draperies made in Beauvais were exported as far as Byzantium. It was in 1225 that the count-bishop Milon de Nanteuil began building the Saint-Pierre Cathedral (three Michelin stars, worth the journey); and though incomplete, it nonetheless boasts one of the highest Gothic vaults in Europe. The decline of Beauvais, accompanying that of the textile industry, was to start at the end of the eighteenth century; it hadn’t really stopped since, and Jed had no difficulty finding a room in the Kyriad Hotel. He even thought he was the only guest, until dinner. As he tucked into his blanquette de veau—the dish of the day—he saw come in a solitary Japanese man, aged about thirty, who shot terrified looks around the room, then sat down at the next table.
The recommendation of a blanquette de veau plunged the Japanese man into anxiety; he opted for an entrecôte, which arrived a few minutes later and which he prodded sadly, and irresolutely, with the end of his fork. Jed feared he was going to strike up a conversation, which he did, in English, after sucking on a few chips. The poor man was employed by Komatsu, a machine-tool business that had managed to place one of its new-generation textile robots with the last cloth-manufacturing company still operating in the area. The programming of the machine had broken down, and he had come to try and repair it. For a journey of this order, he lamented, his firm used to send three or four technicians, or two at the very least; but budgetary restrictions were terrible, and he found himself alone in Beauvais, faced with a furious client and a machine with defective programming.
He was indeed in a nasty situation, Jed agreed. But wasn’t there some sort of help line he could call? “Time difference,” the Japanese man said sadly. Maybe, around one in the morning, he would get through to someone in Japan, when the offices opened; but until then he was on his own, and he didn’t even have Japanese cable channels in his room. For a moment he looked at his steak knife, as if he were contemplating seppuku, then decided to start eating his entrecôte.
In his bedroom, while watching Thalassa with the sound off, Jed switched on his cell phone. Franz had left three messages. He answered after the first ring.
“So? How did it go?”
“Well. Almost well. Except that I think he’ll be a bit late with the text.”
“Oh no, that’s not possible. I need it by the end of March, otherwise I can’t print the catalogue.”
“I told him …” Jed hesitated, then came to the point. “I told him that it wasn’t a problem; that he could take all the time he needed.”
Franz uttered a sort of incredulous grumble, then went silent before speaking in a voice that was tense and on the verge of exploding.
“Listen, we’ve got to meet up and talk about this. Can you come by the gallery now?”
“No, I’m in Beauvais.”
“Beauvais? What the fuck are you doing in Beauvais?”
“I’m taking some time out. It’s good, taking time out in Beauvais.”
There was a train at 8:47 a.m., and the journey to Gare du Nord took a little over an hour. At eleven Jed was at the gallery, facing a downcast Franz. “You’re not my only artist,” he said reproachfully. “If the exhibition can’t take place in May, I’m obliged to put it back to December.”
The arrival of Marylin, ten minutes later, improved the mood a little. “Oh, December’s perfectly fine by me,” she announced immediately, then continued with ferocious joviality. “That’ll give me more time to work the English magazines; you have to go right to the top with the English magazines.”
“Good, then December it is,” Franz conceded, morose and beaten.
“I am …” began Jed, lifting his hands slightly; then he stopped. He was going to say “I am the artist,” or words to that effect, but he came to his senses and simply added: “I also need the time to make the portrait of Houellebecq. I want it to be a good painting. I want it to be my best painting.”
17
In Michel Houellebecq, Writer, as most art historians stress, Jed Martin breaks with that practice of realistic backgrounds which had characterized his work all through the period of the Professions. He has trouble breaking with it, and you can sense that this break comes with much effort, that he strives through various artifices to maintain the illusion of a plausible realistic background as much as possible. In the painting, Houellebecq is standing in front of a desk covered with written or half-written pages. Behind him, at a distance of some five meters, the white wall is entirely papered with handwritten pages stuck to one another, without any interstices whatsoever. Ironically, those art historians stress, Jed Martin seems in this work to accord an enormous importance to the text, and focuses on it detached from any real referent. Now, as all the historians of literature confirm, if Houellebecq liked in the course of his work to pin various documents to the wall, most often they were photos, representing the places where he situated the scenes of his novels, and rarely written or half-written scenes. Jed Martin probably chose to portray him in the middle of a universe of paper neither to make a statement about realism in literature nor to bring Houellebecq closer to a formalist position that he had explicitly rejected. Without doubt, more simply, he was taken by a purely plastic fascination with the image of these branching blocks of text, engendering one another like some gigantic octopus.
Few people, when the painting was first put on display, would pay much attention to the background, which was eclipsed by the incredible expressiveness of the main figure. Captured at the moment of noticing a mistake on one of the pages on the desk in front of him, the author appears to be in a trance, possessed by a fury that some have not hesitated to describe as demonic; his hand holding the pen, treated with a certain blurring movement, throws itself on the page “with the speed of a cobra stretching to strike its prey,” as Wong Fu Xin writes in a visual way, probably giving an ironic twist to the clichés of metaphorical exuberance traditionally associated with the authors of the Far East (Wong Fu Xin wanted, above all, to be a poet; but his poems are almost never read now, and aren’t even easily available, while his essays on the work of Jed Martin remain a central reference point in art-history circles). The lighting, which is far more contrasting than in Martin’s previous paintings, leaves in shadow a large part of the writer’s body, concentrating uniquely on the upper half of the face and on the hands with their hooked, long, scrawny fingers, like the talons of a raptor. The expression in the eyes appeared at the time so strange that it could not, in the critics’ view, be compared to any existing pictorial tradition, but had rather to be compared to certain archival ethnological images taken during voodoo ceremonies.
Jed phoned Franz on 25 October to announce that his painting was finished. For a few months they hadn’t seen much of each other; contrary to his usual practice he hadn’t called to show him preparatory work or sketches. Franz for his part had concentrated on other exhibitions, which had gone rather well. His gallery had been quite prominent for a few years now, its reputation gradually increasing—though that hadn’t yet translated into substantial sales.
Franz arrived at about 6 p.m. The canvas was in the center of the studio, hung on a standard chassis of 116 ce
ntimeters by 89, well lit by halogen lamps. Franz sat on a folding canvas chair, just opposite, and looked at it wordlessly for about ten minutes.
“Okay …” he finally said. “You can be fucking annoying at times, but you’re a good artist. I must admit it was worth the wait. It’s a good painting; a very good painting. You sure you want to give it to him?”
“I promised.”
“And the text, is it arriving soon?”
“By the end of the month.”
“But are you in contact or not?”
“Not really. He just sent me an e-mail in August to tell me he was coming back to settle in France, that he’d managed to buy his childhood home in the Loiret. But he added that this didn’t change anything, and that I’d have the text by the end of October. I trust him.”
18
In fact, on the morning of 31 October, Jed received an e-mail accompanied by an untitled text of about fifty pages, which he immediately forwarded to Marylin and Franz, although he was a bit concerned: wasn’t it too long? Marylin reassured him immediately: on the contrary, she said, it was always preferable “to go big.”
Even if today it is considered a historical curiosity, Houellebecq’s text—the first of this size devoted to Martin’s work—nonetheless contains some interesting intuitions. Beyond the variation of themes and techniques, he asserts for the first time the unity of the artist’s work, and discovers a deep logic in the fact that having devoted his formative years to hunting for the essence of the world’s manufactured products, he is interested, during the second half of his life, in their producers.
Jed Martin’s view of the society of his time, Houellebecq stresses, is that of an ethnologist much more than that of a political commentator. Martin, he insists, is in no way a committed artist, and even if The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse, one of the rare crowd scenes, is reminiscent of the expressionist period, we are very far from the scathing, caustic treatment of a George Grosz or an Otto Dix. His traders in running shoes and hooded sweatshirts, who acclaim with blasé world-weariness the great German porn businesswoman, are the direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions directed by Fritz Lang in the Mabuse films; they are treated with the same detachment, the same objective coldness. In his titles as in his painting itself, Martin is always simple and direct: he describes the world, rarely allowing himself a poetic notation or a subtitle serving as commentary. He does this, however, in one of his most successful works, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, which he chose to subtitle The Conversation at Palo Alto.
The Map and the Territory Page 12
