Map and area

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Map and Territory is a novel by the French writer Michel Houellebecq . The work was published in 2010 under the original title La carte et le territoire and was awarded the Prix ​​Goncourt . The German translation by Uli Wittmann was published in 2011 by DuMont Buchverlag .

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The novel tells the story of the Paris-based, lonely artist Jed Martin. This shows clear parallels with the author : Jed Martin is the only child of an architect and lost his mother to suicide . The father is a workaholic and he is pushing the son off to boarding school.

After attending school, the well-read Jed Martin applies to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris and submits a dossier with the title “Three hundred photos of objects from the hardware store ” as an application folder . It contains many thousands of photographs that he took of commercial and industrial products with a “ Linhof ” view camera found in his father's attic .

With photographs of Michelin road maps processed on the computer and juxtaposed with satellite images of the same regions, Jed Martin, born in 1975, finally achieved his breakthrough in the art scene after studying art . As has been emphasized several times, it is about the "years around 2010". A love affair that he entered into at the time with Olga, Michelin's Russian PR agent, ended when Michelin offered her a job in her home country. She leaves Martin “speechless”. When Olga returns to Paris later in the novel, Jed Martin cannot connect emotionally to the previous relationship.

Jed Martin finishes his work with road maps and begins a cycle of figurative paintings entitled “Series of Simple Professions”, on which he worked for many years. The exhibition of this cycle, his first since the road maps, signified his great breakthrough and made him the highest paid painter in France within a short period of time. The novel begins with Martin failing to complete the work “ Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons divide the art market among themselves”, a painting that would have belonged to the job cycle. The history of the artist emerges from various flashbacks. During the preparations for the job exhibition, he suggested to his gallery owner that the writer Michel Houellebecq write the foreword to the catalog. He expects that a text by the controversial author will have a positive influence on the perception of the works on display. Jed Martin therefore visits the extremely withdrawn writer Michel Houellebecq at his residence in Ireland in order to show him photographs of his works in preparation for the requested text. Martin suggests that Houellebecq portray him and give him the painting. The writer agrees. In mutual conversations, an almost amicable rapprochement develops between the two. In the same year, the writer bought the house where he was born in Souppes, a village far south of Paris, and moved there.

The long-planned exhibition will finally open in December of that year, on December 11, 2013 (?). She is a great success. All works are sold at surprisingly high prices. Jed Martin is a rich man and he quits painting.

The painter's father, who had left the architecture office he founded for many years, has been living in an elegant old people's home for some time. Colon cancer is a major problem for him. Unlike in previous years, Jed Martin doesn’t go out to eat with him in a restaurant on December 24th, but instead invites him to his studio. Against the background of a previously very distant relationship between father and son, an unexpectedly intimate atmosphere emerges between them on this evening and the father tells for the first time about the suicide of Jed's mother and his personal career.

After the portrait of Houellebecq was shown at the December exhibition, Martin traveled to Michel Houellebecq in the French province of Souppes on January 1, 2015, one month before his fortieth birthday, to give him his portrait. On this occasion, too, it becomes clear that Houellebecq lives alone with practically no social contact.

Well after the portrait was handed over, the writer was murdered in his country house (2018?). The perpetrator killed the writer and his dog. Then he brutally inflicted his victims. The investigating Paris police under the direction of Chief Inspector Jasselin find no traces or indications of the perpetrator. She's groping in the dark. At the funeral of Houllebecq, she photographs the mourners in the Montparnasse cemetery and thus comes across Jed Martin. He agrees to drive to the crime scene with Chief Inspector Jasselin. There he misses the portrait he made. It is found three years later. The driver of a Porsche driving at 210 km / h is arrested on the Côte d'Azur and through him the police get into the house of the just killed murderer of Michel Houellebecq. There, at the owner of a cosmetic surgery clinic, she finds u. a. the stolen painting. It is given in accordance with the will of the writer Jed Martin.

Jed Martin's father travels to Zurich in December of that year (2018?) To receive euthanasia from the Zurich association Dignitas . His son finds out and travels after him. When he gets there, he is only told that "the procedure went completely normally".

After Martin received the Houellebecq portrait, he decided to sell it. The proceeds for the gallery owner and the painter are twelve million euros. Half a year later, Martin moved into his grandparents' house in Châtelus-le-Marcheix , Creuse . Similar to the writer before, Jed Martin is now withdrawing from all social contacts, having his property, which has been huge through acquisitions, turned into a kind of fortress with a fence and wire under voltage. He only goes to Limoges once a week to go shopping: "The years have passed, as they say."

At 60, in 2035, he left his house for the first time in the direction of the village. It's hard to recognize. The predominantly agricultural place had long been a vacation spot for residents and foreigners. Now it's a kind of adventure park. The traditional rural dwellers have disappeared in favor of active city dwellers who are changing rural France with “an entrepreneurial spirit and sometimes moderate ecological convictions”. In the meantime it has been the same across the country. France lives from agriculture and tourism.

While Jed Martin was living in seclusion in the country, he developed a new phase of artistic practice. The public can find out more about this in a forty-page interview in Art Press. Over a period of around 10 years, Jed filmed most of the days of the week, sometimes several hours, of plant details in his forest, which he condensed / shortened through time lapse and cuts. As in his student days, he then devoted himself to documenting objects for over 15 years. This time, however, he filmed their decay process, which he accelerated with dilute sulfuric acid, among other things. "The result differed fundamentally from simple time-lapse recordings, as the process of decay did not appear to the viewer continuously, but gradually, with abrupt breaks."

Even when Martin fell ill with colon cancer, he continued his artistic practice (apparently until his death). His works, according to the interpretation offered at the end, can be seen "as nostalgic reflections on the end of the industrial age in Europe and the ephemeral character of all things man-made in general." - "The vegetation wins the final victory."

Form, interpretation

The conventionally written novel contains two unusual aspects. On the one hand, the author introduces himself as an actor into his novel. This can be understood as a reaction to the considerable public response to his person, possibly also as a flirtation with his own person and their public perception. Secondly, it concerns with map and area so far is a science fiction , is as the author's perspective on the novel happening significantly behind the action, somewhere in the period after 2035 (as Jed Martin is 60). Houellebecq develops the story around a point in time that is in the years after 2010 and introduces the prehistory of his protagonist with some flashbacks. The work takes on the character of a modern crime novel from the murder of the novel character of the writer Michel Houellebecq.

Houellebecq's novel takes a temporal distance to the present with its temporal perspective and describes current social developments such as the art market, the importance of internet and television, the role of consumption in the present with an “objective” tone. This becomes particularly clear when he describes Jed Martin's handling of his newly acquired Samsung camera or reports on the reasons for buying an Audi. Likewise, the artistic work of the protagonist outlined by the author points to issues that affect our present (losses and gains).

When the France around 2035 is described on the last pages of the book, the author is cautiously predicting in the realm of science fiction. This also applies to the Ruhr area described here , which the painter Martin visits.

Motives, role models

The murder of Houellebecq with the numerous corpse parts placed ornamentally in the crime room shows amazing parallels to the murder of the fictional character Pierre Vaudel in Fred Vargas' crime novel The Forbidden Place . In France, alleged takeovers of Houellebecq from the French-language Wikipedia, for example from articles on the housefly and Beauvais , were discussed. In May 2011, Houellebecq acknowledged his copy of the text from Wikipedia and added a "thanks" to the paperback edition of his work, in which he thanked various police officers for information in addition to Wikipedia.

Others

The French Minister of Economic Affairs Arnaud Montebourg justified his economic policy with the book: He was afraid that France would become a country that was only known as a tourist location and no longer had any industry. In the Get caught reading campaign , a Europe-wide campaign promoting literature reading, Montebourg presented the map and area as a book worth reading.

Trivia

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Perlentaucher.de
  2. ↑ parody of yourself on www.dradio.de (March 16, 2011)
  3. ↑ page 226
  4. ↑ page 356
  5. ↑ page 387
  6. ↑ page 407
  7. ↑ page 415
  8. ↑ Houellebecq sous license Creative Commons! - Florent Gallaire's blog . fgallaire.flext.net. Retrieved on July 10, 2011. In May 2011, Houellebecq acknowledged his copy of the text from Wikipedia and added a "thanks" to the paperback edition of his work, in which he thanked various police officers for information in addition to Wikipedia (Michel Houellebecq: La carte et le territoire. K'ai lu, Paris 2012, p. 415).
  9. ↑ M. Montebourg-relevant sa "bataille idéologique" en faveur du redressement productif in Le Monde on June 28, 2013
  10. ↑ Comment Houellebecq est devenu la caution intellectuelle de Montebourg , Lelab 12 August 2012
  11. ^ Arnaud Montebourg, Minister of Industrial Renewal of France, supports "Get Caught Reading"
  12. ↑ Indierock is stupid ( Memento of the original from January 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Interview by Prinz Pi with the Süddeutsche Zeitung @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de