July 14, 2006
Depraved New World
By Michael Lukas
Possibility of an Island
By Michel Houellebecq
Translated by Gavin Bowd
Knopf, 352 pp., $24.95
When it was first published in 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther
provoked more than 2,000 suicides across Europe. Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an
Island, probably won’t have this same effect. But if any contemporary novelist can spark a wave of suicides,
it’s Michel Houellebecq.
If he did, Houellebecq would probably be amused. A caustic cocktail of Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley,
Larry Flynt, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Houellebecq is a writer of extraordinary and unsettling brilliance. He
asks big questions. What does it mean to be human? Where is Western Civilization headed? Does love exist?
And his answers are bleak and deeply troubling. Like his previous two novels, The Possibility of an Island is
characterized by a fanciful, almost science-fictionesque utopianism, a number of wantonly pornographic sex
scenes, and a radically conservative philosophy. Houellebecq may well be many unsavory things—a racist, a
misogynist, and a proponent of eugenics—but he is never boring. And, unlike most of what’s out there, he
actually makes you think.
The plot of The Possibility of an Island is relatively simple. The protagonist, Daniel, is a successful French
comedian who finds love, loses it, finds it again, and, after losing it a second time, becomes involves with a
bio-utopian cult that promises its members eternal life through cloning. Alternating chapters with the story of
Daniel is commentary from Daniel24 and, later, Daniel25, “neohuman” clones of the original Daniel who live a
solitary existence in the post-apocalyptic future.
Daniel (or Daniel1, as he is known to the clones) lives in a Houellebecqian version of contemporary France, a
materialist, secular-scientific world devoid of any real meaning aside from sexual desire. As a comedian, he
lays bare the hypocrisies of the European liberal bourgeoisie, barbequing its sacred cows in sketches and
films like “We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts” and “Two Flies,” the story of a “cultivated man, a great
reader of Pierre Louÿs” whose “second favorite pastime” is “having his cock sucked by little prepubescent
girls.” (For the record, his favorite pastime is “killing flies with an elastic band.”) Imagine a nihilistic, white
Dave Chappelle and you’ll have a good sense of Daniel.
Like Chappelle, Daniel becomes disillusioned with his career and drops out at the height of his fame. Daniel’s
disenchantment, however, is sparked not by racist laughter, but by an abiding disgust with humanity. “If man
laughs,” Daniel says, just before dropping out and moving to Andalusia. “If he is the only one, in the animal
kingdom, to exhibit this atrocious facial deformation, it is also the case that he is the only one … to have
attained the supreme and infernal stage of cruelty.” This obviously isn’t a very healthy philosophy for a
comedian. “Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire sheet of Xanax. Every time the
audience laughed … I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those hideous faces those, hundreds of faces
moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.”
Unfortunately for him, Daniel’s love life is doomed in advance by Houellebecq’s misanthropy (his last book
was subtitled Against the World, Against Life)—and more pertinently his misogyny. In Houellebecq’s world,
women are either “right tarts” who wear “tight, low-cut jeans” and have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for
fellatio or “Fat Asses” with “flabby thighs” and no redeeming qualities to speak of. Should it come then as any
surprise that Daniel has a hard time finding romantic love? Daniel’s pitiful fate is made even more depressing
by the inordinate amount of hope he stakes on love, a game we know is rigged to fail. To Houellebecq’s
credit, the female characters in The Possibility of an Island are better drawn than those in his previous two
novels. That, however, isn’t saying much.
As cold and meaningless as Daniel’s world may be, the post-apocalyptic “utopian” future of Daniel24 and
Daniel25 is not much more appealing. Isolated from social contact, these neohuman clones live a life devoid
of desire and attachment, a “solitary routine, intercut solely by intellectual exchanges.” In the words of
Daniel25, they seek a “state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy.
… We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference.” Think Buddhism without the enlightenment.
Fenced in and miles from any other neohuman, Daniel’s clones spend their days alone, reading Spinoza and
contemplating the teachings of the Supreme Sister. Their only social interaction is through the computer, their
only glimpse of love in the eyes of a dog. It may not sound like much fun, but the question is: Are they happy?
Have they reached “the freedom of indifference”? Houellebecq’s answer is a resounding no. Attachment may
be the source of all suffering, but it is also the source of happiness. To live as the clones do, without desire, is
to be unhappy. As Daniel25 reflects, “Happiness should have come, the happiness felt by good children
guaranteed by the respect of small procedures, by the security that flowed from them, by the absence of pain
and risk; but happiness had not come, and equanimity had led to torpor.”
Like all utopian novels, The Possibility of an Island is mainly just a vehicle for social critique..Houellebecq’s
forte has always been his acidic and deeply disturbing vision of late 20th century Western civilization. But in
this book, he doesn’t just skewer our meaningless, materialist world. He also disassembles the utopian ideal.
In his second, and probably most interesting novel, Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes, “Desire—
unlike pleasure—is a source of suffering, pain, and hatred. The utopian solution—from Plato to Huxley by
way of Fourier—is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately.” If we
believe Daniel25, however, the absence of suffering, pain, and hatred does not necessarily lead to happiness.
Life without desire, without highs and lows, is just plain boring.
The Possibility of an Island doesn’t really advocate for anything, which is not to say that it has to. Sometimes
a good critique is all you need. The closest Houellebecq comes to a solution, the only time he even remotely
approaches “happily ever after,” is the Epilogue, when Daniel25 leaves his compound to search for a colony
of renegade neohumans on the Canary Islands. In his search, he begins to understand pain, suffering, and the
beauty of the human condition. His brutally devastating last words are, “I was, I was no longer. Life was
real.” Humans 1, Clones 0.
And so the book ends, relatively simply. Or does it? Ever the trickster, Houellebecq leaves the reader (at
least this reader) wondering if there isn’t more than meets the eye. At first glance, the relationship between
Daniel and his clones seems straightforward: Daniel24 and Daniel25 are distant progeny of Daniel, adult
clones made from the DNA he gave to his bio-utopian cult two thousand years earlier. But when Daniel25
goes out into the world, the world he finds doesn’t quite fit this narrative. It’s highly doubtful, for example,
that the cell phones, cameras, and t-shirts that he finds would have survived two millenia of nuclear war and
global flooding. Maybe it’s just sloppiness on Houellebecq’s part. Or maybe, just maybe, things aren’t as
they seem.
For those who aren’t into science fiction, pornography, and conservative philosophy, it’s tempting to dismiss
Houellebecq outright, to brand him as a wacko misogynist, and move on to happier books—to say, as John
Updike does, “The sensations that Houellebecq gives us are not nutritive.” But to do so is to miss the entire
point. Houellebecq’s world may be stark, ugly, and profoundly disturbing. But Johnny, so is ours.
Depraved New World
By Michael Lukas
Possibility of an Island
By Michel Houellebecq
Translated by Gavin Bowd
Knopf, 352 pp., $24.95
When it was first published in 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther
provoked more than 2,000 suicides across Europe. Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an
Island, probably won’t have this same effect. But if any contemporary novelist can spark a wave of suicides,
it’s Michel Houellebecq.
If he did, Houellebecq would probably be amused. A caustic cocktail of Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley,
Larry Flynt, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Houellebecq is a writer of extraordinary and unsettling brilliance. He
asks big questions. What does it mean to be human? Where is Western Civilization headed? Does love exist?
And his answers are bleak and deeply troubling. Like his previous two novels, The Possibility of an Island is
characterized by a fanciful, almost science-fictionesque utopianism, a number of wantonly pornographic sex
scenes, and a radically conservative philosophy. Houellebecq may well be many unsavory things—a racist, a
misogynist, and a proponent of eugenics—but he is never boring. And, unlike most of what’s out there, he
actually makes you think.
The plot of The Possibility of an Island is relatively simple. The protagonist, Daniel, is a successful French
comedian who finds love, loses it, finds it again, and, after losing it a second time, becomes involves with a
bio-utopian cult that promises its members eternal life through cloning. Alternating chapters with the story of
Daniel is commentary from Daniel24 and, later, Daniel25, “neohuman” clones of the original Daniel who live a
solitary existence in the post-apocalyptic future.
Daniel (or Daniel1, as he is known to the clones) lives in a Houellebecqian version of contemporary France, a
materialist, secular-scientific world devoid of any real meaning aside from sexual desire. As a comedian, he
lays bare the hypocrisies of the European liberal bourgeoisie, barbequing its sacred cows in sketches and
films like “We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts” and “Two Flies,” the story of a “cultivated man, a great
reader of Pierre Louÿs” whose “second favorite pastime” is “having his cock sucked by little prepubescent
girls.” (For the record, his favorite pastime is “killing flies with an elastic band.”) Imagine a nihilistic, white
Dave Chappelle and you’ll have a good sense of Daniel.
Like Chappelle, Daniel becomes disillusioned with his career and drops out at the height of his fame. Daniel’s
disenchantment, however, is sparked not by racist laughter, but by an abiding disgust with humanity. “If man
laughs,” Daniel says, just before dropping out and moving to Andalusia. “If he is the only one, in the animal
kingdom, to exhibit this atrocious facial deformation, it is also the case that he is the only one … to have
attained the supreme and infernal stage of cruelty.” This obviously isn’t a very healthy philosophy for a
comedian. “Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire sheet of Xanax. Every time the
audience laughed … I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those hideous faces those, hundreds of faces
moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.”
Unfortunately for him, Daniel’s love life is doomed in advance by Houellebecq’s misanthropy (his last book
was subtitled Against the World, Against Life)—and more pertinently his misogyny. In Houellebecq’s world,
women are either “right tarts” who wear “tight, low-cut jeans” and have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for
fellatio or “Fat Asses” with “flabby thighs” and no redeeming qualities to speak of. Should it come then as any
surprise that Daniel has a hard time finding romantic love? Daniel’s pitiful fate is made even more depressing
by the inordinate amount of hope he stakes on love, a game we know is rigged to fail. To Houellebecq’s
credit, the female characters in The Possibility of an Island are better drawn than those in his previous two
novels. That, however, isn’t saying much.
As cold and meaningless as Daniel’s world may be, the post-apocalyptic “utopian” future of Daniel24 and
Daniel25 is not much more appealing. Isolated from social contact, these neohuman clones live a life devoid
of desire and attachment, a “solitary routine, intercut solely by intellectual exchanges.” In the words of
Daniel25, they seek a “state where the simple fact of being constitutes in itself a permanent occasion for joy.
… We must, in a word, reach the freedom of indifference.” Think Buddhism without the enlightenment.
Fenced in and miles from any other neohuman, Daniel’s clones spend their days alone, reading Spinoza and
contemplating the teachings of the Supreme Sister. Their only social interaction is through the computer, their
only glimpse of love in the eyes of a dog. It may not sound like much fun, but the question is: Are they happy?
Have they reached “the freedom of indifference”? Houellebecq’s answer is a resounding no. Attachment may
be the source of all suffering, but it is also the source of happiness. To live as the clones do, without desire, is
to be unhappy. As Daniel25 reflects, “Happiness should have come, the happiness felt by good children
guaranteed by the respect of small procedures, by the security that flowed from them, by the absence of pain
and risk; but happiness had not come, and equanimity had led to torpor.”
Like all utopian novels, The Possibility of an Island is mainly just a vehicle for social critique..Houellebecq’s
forte has always been his acidic and deeply disturbing vision of late 20th century Western civilization. But in
this book, he doesn’t just skewer our meaningless, materialist world. He also disassembles the utopian ideal.
In his second, and probably most interesting novel, Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes, “Desire—
unlike pleasure—is a source of suffering, pain, and hatred. The utopian solution—from Plato to Huxley by
way of Fourier—is to do away with desire and the suffering it causes by satisfying it immediately.” If we
believe Daniel25, however, the absence of suffering, pain, and hatred does not necessarily lead to happiness.
Life without desire, without highs and lows, is just plain boring.
The Possibility of an Island doesn’t really advocate for anything, which is not to say that it has to. Sometimes
a good critique is all you need. The closest Houellebecq comes to a solution, the only time he even remotely
approaches “happily ever after,” is the Epilogue, when Daniel25 leaves his compound to search for a colony
of renegade neohumans on the Canary Islands. In his search, he begins to understand pain, suffering, and the
beauty of the human condition. His brutally devastating last words are, “I was, I was no longer. Life was
real.” Humans 1, Clones 0.
And so the book ends, relatively simply. Or does it? Ever the trickster, Houellebecq leaves the reader (at
least this reader) wondering if there isn’t more than meets the eye. At first glance, the relationship between
Daniel and his clones seems straightforward: Daniel24 and Daniel25 are distant progeny of Daniel, adult
clones made from the DNA he gave to his bio-utopian cult two thousand years earlier. But when Daniel25
goes out into the world, the world he finds doesn’t quite fit this narrative. It’s highly doubtful, for example,
that the cell phones, cameras, and t-shirts that he finds would have survived two millenia of nuclear war and
global flooding. Maybe it’s just sloppiness on Houellebecq’s part. Or maybe, just maybe, things aren’t as
they seem.
For those who aren’t into science fiction, pornography, and conservative philosophy, it’s tempting to dismiss
Houellebecq outright, to brand him as a wacko misogynist, and move on to happier books—to say, as John
Updike does, “The sensations that Houellebecq gives us are not nutritive.” But to do so is to miss the entire
point. Houellebecq’s world may be stark, ugly, and profoundly disturbing. But Johnny, so is ours.