The Map and the Territory

by Michel Houellebecq

  It was in this indirect manner, in some ways by cross-checking, that he realized that he himself had just turned sixty. This was surprising: he wasn’t aware of having aged to this point. It’s through relations with others, and through their eyes, that you become aware of your own aging; you always have the tendency to see yourself as somehow eternal. Certainly, his hair had gone white, his face had become lined; but all of this had happened imperceptibly, without anything coming to confront him directly with images of his youth. Jed was then struck by this incongruity: he who had made, in the course of his artistic life, thousands of pictures did not own a single photograph of himself. Nor had he ever thought of making a self-portrait; never had he regarded himself, even remotely, worthwhile as an artistic subject.

  For over ten years, the southern gate of his estate, the one opening out onto the village, had not been activated; it opened, however, without difficulty, and Jed again congratulated himself on having called on the services of that company in Lyons which a former colleague of his father’s had recommended.

  He had only a vague memory of Châtelus-le-Marcheix. It was, as far as he could remember, a decrepit, ordinary little village in rural France, and nothing more. But after his first steps in the streets of the small town, he was filled with amazement. First of all, the village had grown a lot: there were at least twice, perhaps three times, as many houses. And these houses were attractive, decorated with flowers, and built with a maniacal respect for the traditional Limousin habitat. Everywhere on the main street, shop windows were selling regional products and arts and crafts; over one hundred meters he counted three cafés offering low-price Internet connections. You would have thought you were in Ko Phi Phi, or Saint-Paul-de-Vence, much more than in a rural village of the Creuse.

  Slightly dazed, he stopped in the main square, and recognized the café facing the church. Or rather, recognized the site of the café. The interior, with its art nouveau lamps, its dark wood tables with forged iron bases, and its leather seats, manifestly wanted to conjure up the atmosphere of a Parisian café of the Belle Époque. Each table was, however, equipped with a docking station for laptops with 21-inch screens, plugs conforming to European and American norms, and a leaflet explaining how to connect to the network Creuse-Sat; the departmental council had financed the launch of a geostationary satellite in order to improve the speed of Internet connections in the department, Jed learned on reading the leaflet. He ordered a Menetou-Salon rosé, which he drank pensively while thinking about these transformations. At this early hour, there were few people in the café. A Chinese family was finishing their full Limousin breakfast, offered at twenty-three euros a head, Jed noticed on looking at the menu. Closer to him, a hefty bearded man, his hair tied up in a ponytail, was absentmindedly consulting his e-mails; he sent an intrigued look to Jed, frowned, hesitated about addressing him, then plunged back into his computer. Jed finished his glass of wine, went out, and stayed for a few minutes pensively at the wheel of his Audi electric SUV—he’d changed cars three times over the last twenty years, but had remained faithful to the brand that had given him his first real joy as a driver.

  During the weeks that followed, he gently explored, in small stages, without really leaving Limousin—apart from a brief passage through the Dordogne, and another even briefer one in the mountains of Rodez—this country, France, which was irrefutably his own. Obviously, France had changed a lot. He connected to the Internet, many times, had a few conversations with hoteliers, restaurant owners, and other service providers (a garage owner in Périgueux, an escort girl from Limoges), and everything confirmed the first, astounding impression he had had on walking through Châtelus-le-Marcheix: yes, the country had changed, and changed profoundly. The traditional inhabitants of rural areas had almost completely disappeared. Incomers, from urban areas, had replaced them, motivated by a real appetite for business and, occasionally, by moderate and marketable ecological convictions. They had set about repopulating the hinterland—and this attempt, after many other fruitless attempts, based this time on a precise knowledge of the laws of the market, and on their lucid acceptance, had been a total success.

  The first question Jed asked himself—displaying, in this way, typical artistic egocentrism—was whether his Series of Simple Professions, almost twenty years after he had conceived it, had kept its relevance. In fact, not entirely. Maya Dubois, Assistant in Remote Maintenance no longer had any raison d’être: remote maintenance was now a hundred percent outsourced—essentially to Indonesia and Brazil. Aimée, Escort Girl, however, kept all its relevance. Prostitution had even enjoyed, on the economic level, a genuine upturn, due to the persistence, in particular in South America and Russia, of a fantasy image of the Parisienne, as well as the tireless activities of immigrant women from West Africa. For the first time since the 1900s or 1910s, France had once again become a favorite destination for sex tourism. New professions too had appeared—or rather, old professions had come back into favor, such as wrought-ironwork and brassmaking; market gardens had also made a reappearance. In Jabreilles-les-Bordes, a village three kilometers from Jed’s, a blacksmith had moved back in—the Creuse, with its network of well-tended paths, its forests and clearings, was admirably suited for horse riding.

  More generally, France, on the economic level, was in good shape. Having become a mainly agricultural and tourist country, she had displayed remarkable robustness during the various crises which followed one another, almost without interruption, in the preceding twenty years. These crises had been increasingly violent and burlesquely unpredictable—burlesque at least from the point of view of a mocking God, who might draw infinite amusement from financial convulsions that suddenly plunged into opulence, then famine, entities the size of Indonesia, Russia, or Brazil: populations of hundreds of millions of people. Having scarcely anything to sell except hôtels de charme, perfumes, and rillettes—what is called an art de vivre—France had had no difficulty confronting these vagaries. From one year to the next, the nationality of the clients changed, and that was all.

  Back in Châtelus-le-Marcheix, Jed took up the habit of a daily walk, just before midday, through the streets of the village. He generally took an aperitif at the café on the square (which had, curiously, kept its old name of Bar des Sports) before returning home for lunch. He quickly realized that many of the newcomers seemed to know him—or, at least, had heard of him—and looked upon him with no particular animosity. In fact, the new inhabitants of the rural areas in no way resembled their predecessors. It was not fate that had led them to do traditional basket weaving, renovation of rural cottages, or cheesemaking, but a business plan, a carefully weighed, rational economic choice. Educated, tolerant, and affable, they cohabited easily with the foreigners present in their region—besides, they had reason to, since the latter constituted the core of their clientele. Most of the houses that their former owners from northern Europe no longer had the means to maintain had, in fact, been bought up. The Chinese certainly formed a rather closed community, but, truth be told, no more, and even rather less so, than the English had done in the past—and at least they didn’t impose the use of their own language. They displayed an excessive respect, almost a veneration, for local customs—that the newcomers at first knew little about, but which they’d striven, by a sort of adaptive mimicry, to reproduce; thus there was seen a more or less decisive return to regional recipes, dances, and even costumes. That said, it was certainly the Russians who formed the most appreciated clientele. Never would they have haggled over the price of an aperitif, or the rental of a four-by-four. They spent with munificence, with largesse, faithful to an economics of the potlatch that had easily survived successive political regimes.

  This new generation turned out to be more conservative and more respectful of money and social hierarchies than all those preceding it. More surprisingly, the birth rate had by this time actually risen in France, even without taking into account immigration, which, anyway, had fallen to almost zero since the d
isappearance of the last industrial jobs and the drastic reduction of social security coverage imposed at the beginning of the 2020s. Making their way to the newly industrialized countries, African migrants now exposed themselves to a very perilous journey. Crossing the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, their boats were frequently attacked by pirates, who stripped them of their last savings, when they didn’t, purely and simply, throw them into the sea.

  One morning, as he sipped a glass of Chablis, Jed was approached by the bearded man with the ponytail—one of the first inhabitants he’d noticed in the village. The latter, without knowing exactly his line of work, had identified him as an artist. He himself painted “a little,” he confessed, and offered to show him his work.

  Formerly a mechanic at a garage in Courbevoie, he’d borrowed money to set up in the village, where he’d started a quad-bike rental business—fleetingly, Jed thought again of the Croat in the avenue Stephen-Pichon, and his sea scooters. Personally, this man’s passion was for Harley-Davidsons, and for a quarter of an hour Jed had to put up with the description of a machine that had pride of place in his garage, and of the way in which, year after year, he’d customized it. That said, quads were in his view “beautiful machines,” which allowed “fun rides.” And on the maintenance level, he pointed out with common sense, it was, after all, less restrictive than a horse; well, let’s say business was good. He had no reason to complain.

  His paintings, manifestly inspired by heroic fantasy, mainly depicted a bearded, ponytailed warrior who bestrode an impressive metal charger, obviously a space-opera interpretation of his Harley. Sometimes he was fighting tribes of slimy zombies, sometimes armies of military robots. Other canvases, figuring rather the warrior’s repose, revealed a typically male imagination based on eager sluts, with avid lips, generally going about in pairs. In short, they were autofictions, imaginary self-portraits; his faulty painting technique unfortunately did not enable him to achieve the level of hyperrealism and brushstrokes classically required by heroic fantasy. All in all, Jed had rarely seen anything so ugly. He hunted for an appropriate comment for more than an hour, while the other man tirelessly took his paintings out of their boxes, and ended up mumbling that it was work of “great visionary power.” He immediately added that he had kept no contact with the art world. Which was, in fact, the gospel truth.

  The methodology of the work that occupied Jed Martin during the last thirty years of his life would have remained completely unknown to us if he hadn’t, a few months before his death, agreed to give an interview to a young female journalist from Art Press. Although the interview takes up just over forty pages of the magazine, he speaks almost exclusively about the technical procedures used for the fabrication of those strange ideograms, now kept at the MoMA in Philadelphia, that are like nothing else in his previous work, nor, in fact, like anything known, and which, thirty years later, continue to arouse in visitors a sense of apprehension mixed with unease.

  As for the meaning of this work which had occupied him during all the last part of his life, he refuses all comment. “I want to give an account of the world … I want simply to give an account of the world,” he repeats for more than a page to the young journalist, who is paralyzed by the situation, and turns out to be incapable of stopping this senile chatter, and this is perhaps for the best: the chatter of Jed Martin unfolds, senile and free, essentially concentrating on questions of diaphragm, amplitude of focusing, and compatibility between softwares. It is a remarkable interview, where the young journalist “let her subject speak,” as was commented drily by Le Monde, which was dying of jealousy at having missed out on this exclusive, which led a few months later to her being appointed editor in chief of their magazine—on the very day that Jed Martin’s death was announced.

  Even if he speaks at length about it over several pages, the camera equipment used by Jed had, in itself, nothing very remarkable about it: a Manfrotto tripod, a Panasonic semi-professional cameoscope—which he’d bought for the exceptional luminosity of its sensor, allowing him to film in almost total darkness—and a hard disk of two teraoctets linked to the USB outlet of the cameoscope. For more than two years, every morning except Tuesday (always reserved for shopping), Jed Martin loaded this equipment into the trunk of his Audi before driving along the private road he’d built for himself, which crossed his estate. It was scarcely possible to venture beyond this road: the grass, very high and dotted with thorn bushes, quickly led to a dense forest, with an impenetrable floor. The trace of paths through the forest had long been obliterated. The edges of the ponds, dotted with short grass which had difficulty growing on the spongy ground, remained the only more or less accessible area.

  Although he had at his disposal an extensive range of lenses, he almost always used a Schneider Apo-Symmar, which had the astonishing particularity of opening to 1.9 while reaching a maximum focal length of 1200 mm in 24-by-26 equivalent. The choice of his subject “responded to no pre-established strategy,” he asserts, several times, to the journalist; he “was simply following the spur of the moment.” In any case, he almost always used very high focal lengths, concentrating occasionally on a branch of a beech tree waving in the wind, sometimes on a tuft of grass, the top of a bush of nettles, or an area of loose and saturated earth between two puddles. Once the framing was done, he plugged the power supply of the cameoscope into the cigarette lighter socket, switched it on, and walked back home, leaving the motor to run for several hours, sometimes during the rest of the day and even overnight—the capacity of the hard disk would have allowed him almost a week of continuous shooting.

  The responses based on the appeal to the “spur of the moment” are essentially disappointing for a general-interest magazine, and the young journalist, this time, tries to find out more: after all, she surmises, the shots done on a certain day were to influence the shots done on following days; a project had to be gradually elaborated and constructed. Not at all, maintains Martin: each morning, when he started the car, he had no idea what he intended to film; every day, for him, was a new day. And this period of total uncertainty was to last, he adds, almost ten years.

  He then treated the images obtained according to a method that belongs essentially to montage, even if it is a very particular form of montage, where he occasionally keeps only a few photograms out of three hours’ shooting; but it is well and truly montage that enables him to achieve those moving plant tissues, with their carnivorous suppleness, peaceful and pitiless at the same time, which constitute without any doubt the most successful attempt, in Western art, at representing how plants see the world.

  Jed Martin “had forgotten”—that is, in any case, his assertion—what had pushed him, after about ten days uniquely devoted to filming vegetation, to return to the portrayal of industrial objects—first a cell phone, then a computer keyboard, a desk lamp, and many other objects—that were very diverse at the beginning, before gradually he concentrated almost exclusively on those containing electronic components. His most impressive images remain undoubtedly those of computer motherboards on the scrapheap, which, filmed without any indication of scale, resemble strange futurist citadels. He filmed these objects in his cellar, against a neutral gray background destined to disappear after their insertion in videos. In order to accelerate the process of decomposition, he doused them with diluted sulfuric acid, which he bought in carboys—a preparation, he added, usually used for killing weeds. Then he also did a montage, sampling a few photograms separated by long intervals; the result is very different from simple accelerated motion, in that the process of decomposition, instead of being continuous, takes place by levels, by sudden upheavals.

  After fifteen years of shooting and montage, he now had at his disposal about three thousand modules, all of which were more or less strange, and of an average duration of three minutes. But his work only really began to develop when he went in search of double-exposure software. Used mainly in the early years of silent cinema, double exposure had almost completely di
sappeared from the production of professional filmmakers, as from that of amateur video makers, even those who worked in the artistic field; it was considered to be a dated, outmoded special effect, due to its unashamedly self-proclaimed lack of realism. After a few days’ searching, however, he ended up discovering a simple double-exposure freeware. He contacted its author, who lived in Illinois, and asked him if he would agree, for a fee, to develop for him a more complete version of his software. They struck a deal, and a few months later Jed Martin had exclusive use of a quite extraordinary tool, which had no equivalent on the market. Based on a principle quite similar to that of Photoshop layers, it allowed you to superimpose up to ninety-six videotapes, by setting for each of them the brightness, saturation, and contrast; by making them, also, progressively pass to the foreground, or disappear in the depth of the image. It was this software that allowed him to obtain those long, hypnotic shots where the industrial objects seem to drown, progressively submerged by the proliferation of layers of vegetation. Occasionally they give the impression of struggling, of trying to return to the surface; then they are swept away by a wave of grass and leaves and plunge back into a plant magma, at the same time as their surfaces fall apart, revealing microprocessors, batteries, and memory cards.

  Jed’s health was declining: he could no longer eat anything other than dairy products and sugary foods, and he began to suspect that he would, like his father, die of cancer of the digestive tract. Some examinations done at the hospital in Limoges confirmed this prognosis, but he refused to be treated, to begin radiation therapy or other heavy treatments, and just took comfort medication—that relieved his pains, which were particularly acute in the evening—and massive doses of sleeping pills. He made his last will and testament, leaving his fortune to various animal-protection associations.