The Map and the Territory
Page 29
At around the same time, he began filming photographs of all the people he had known, from Geneviève to Olga, including Franz, Michel Houellebecq, his father, some other people too, in fact all those he had photographs of. He fixed them to a neutral gray waterproof canvas, and shot them just in front of his home, this time letting natural decay take its course. Subjected to the alternations of rain and sunlight, the photographs crinkled, rotted in places, then decomposed into fragments, and were totally destroyed in the space of a few weeks. More curiously, he acquired toy figurines, schematic representations of human beings, and subjected them to the same process. The figurines were more resilient, and in order to accelerate their decomposition, he again had to use his carboys of acid. He now fed exclusively on liquids, and every evening a nurse came to give him an injection of morphine. But in the morning he felt better, and until his last day he could work for at least two or three hours.
It was thus that Jed Martin took his leave of an existence for which he’d never totally signed up. Some images now returned to him, and, curiously, while his erotic life had had nothing exceptional about it, they were above all images of women. Geneviève, sweet Geneviève, and poor Olga pursued him in his dreams. He found himself remembering Marthe Taillefer, who had revealed desire to him, on a balcony in Port-Grimaud, at the moment when, taking off her Lejaby bra, she had exposed her breasts. She was then fifteen, he thirteen. That very evening he had masturbated, in the toilet of the company flat that had been allocated to his father for overseeing the building site, and had been astonished to find so much pleasure in it. There returned to him other memories of supple breasts, agile tongues, and tight vaginas. Come on, he hadn’t had such a bad life.
About thirty years before (and it is the only indication outside the strictly technical plan he gives in the interview to Art Press), Jed had made a trip to the Ruhrgebiet, where a big retrospective of his work was being organized. From Duisburg to Dortmund, from Bochum and Gelsenkirchen, most of the old steel factories had been transformed into places for exhibitions, shows, and concerts, at the same time as the local authorities tried to set up an industrial tourism, based on the re-creation of the working-class way of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, the whole region, with its blast furnaces, slag heaps, abandoned railway tracks where freight wagons rusted, its lines of identical and neat and tidy terraced houses, sometimes brightened up by allotments, was like a conservatory of the first Industrial Age in Europe. Jed had been impressed at the time by the menacing density of the forests that, after scarcely a century of inactivity, surrounded the factories. Only those which could be adapted to their new cultural vocation had been rehabilitated, while the others were gradually disintegrating. These industrial colossi, where once was concentrated the bulk of German productive capacity, were now rusted, half-collapsed, and plants colonized the former workshops, creeping between ruins that they gradually covered with impenetrable jungle.
The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin’s life can thus be seen—and this is the first interpretation that springs to mind—as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type little figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart, then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation extending to infinity. That feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming in the last videos to make themselves the symbols of the generalized annihilation of the human species. They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I don’t normally thank anyone, because I gather little information, very little in comparison with, say, an American author. But in this case I was impressed and intrigued by the police, and it seemed to me necessary to do a bit more.
This time, I therefore have the pleasure of thanking Teresa Cremisi, who took all the necessary steps, as well as the principal private secretary Henry Moreau and the police commander Pierre Dieppois, who gave me a kind welcome at the quai des Orfèvres, and provided very useful information on their difficult profession.
I also thank Wikipedia (http://fr.wikipedia.org) and its contributors, whose entries I have occasionally used as a source of inspiration, notably those concerning the housefly, the town of Beauvais, and Frédéric Nihous.
It goes without saying that I felt free to modify the facts, and that the opinions expressed are exclusively those of the characters; in short, this is a work of fiction.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michel Houellebecq is a poet, essayist, and novelist. He is the author of five novels, Whatever, The Elementary Particles, Platform, The Possibility of an Island, and The Map and the Territory, which won the Prix Goncourt. He lives in Ireland.