The Western Abyss

Reviewed by Benjamin Kerstein

The Possibility of an Island
by Michael Houellebecq
Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 352 pages.

At first glance, this may seem like mere provocation on Houellebecq’s part. Yet while it is most certainly that, it is also an attempt, in Houellebecq’s own words, to arrest “the extension of the domain of the struggle.” Through the medium of global capitalism, Michel and Valérie seek to create an oasis from the cruelty of Darwinian sex; for Houellebecq, a sexual marketplace, however debased, is still superior to the brutality of a system which relegates the majority of its participants to a pleasureless, solitary, inhuman existence. The sexual marketplace is in fact the ultimate revenge upon the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s: The creation of a sexual utopia based not on the negation of social norms, but on the embrace of them. After all, nothing is more normative in a globalized world than the free exchange of capital.

This being Houellebecq, however, the rebellion against the domain of the struggle is doomed to failure. The struggle reasserts itself through the current age’s symbol of reactionary force: Islamic terrorism. Bullets and bombs soon annihilate Michel and Valérie’s sexual oasis, leaving Valérie dead and Michel a walking corpse. His plans for vengeance destroyed, and the love of his life killed in the process, Michel has only his hatred left to sustain him:

It is certainly possible to stay alive animated simply by a desire for vengeance…. Islam had wrecked my life, and Islam was certainly something I could hate. In the days that followed, I devoted myself to trying to feel hatred for Muslims. I became quite good at it, and I began to follow the international news again. Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought of one less Muslim in the world. Yes, it was possible to live like this.

Eventually, however, even hatred dissipates, and Michel dies a desolate expatriate in a Bangkok slum. Houellebecq, however, was left to face the maelstrom of contemporary politics. With tensions in France between the restive Muslim community and the non-Muslim majority already seething, Houellebecq was charged with racist defamation for stating in an interview that Islam is “the most stupid religion.” The trial (and the oft-mentioned threat of a fatwa as a result) became a cause célèbre, one that Houellebecq eventually won by asserting that he in fact despises all religions, and not Islam specifically. While the trial made him a hero in some quarters, he understandably became persona non grata in others: France’s national Arabic-language newspaper printed Houellebecq’s picture over the caption “This man hates you.” Houellebecq was even induced to appear in public with a cordon of bodyguards. The entire affair could have been lifted straight from one of Houellebecq’s novels, an irony likely not lost on the writer.

As before, the shrieking of the gatekeepers of probity on the issues of Third World prostitution and Islamophobia obscured completely the book’s primary theme and its place in Houellebecq’s developing universe: The redemptive power of love, and modern society’s unrelenting desire to destroy it. Indeed, it is unfortunate that while Houellebecq has been called many things, a romantic is not one of them. For underneath the bile and porn that have made him famous, there is a childlike longing for, and a desperate belief in, love. We can only hope that once the controversies of the moment have faded away, it is for this strange and strangely moving paradox that Houellebecq will be remembered.

H.P. Lovecraft once described the horror story as “any mysterious and irresistible march towards a doom.” If this is so, then we may view the entirety of Houellebecq’s oeuvre as an unfolding tale of horror, one which achieves its totality in Houellebecq’s new novel, The Possibility of an Island. Told in two separate millennia, the book relates the story of Daniel, an aging comedian, and his cloned descendant. Named for the prophet of apocalypse, Daniel is a celebrity provocateur not unlike Houellebecq’s post-fame persona. As he reaches middle age, he witnesses the steady collapse of his career, his marriage, his relationship with a young lover, and ultimately himself at the hands of the universal, unforgiving struggle with modern life. Along the way, he encounters a new-age cult called the Elohimites, convinced that aliens called the Elohim created humanity and will someday return. Under the rule of a charismatic guru, they are obsessed by the possibilities of human cloning, willing even to stoop to murder and fraud in order to continue their quest for genetic immortality. The aging Daniel, forsaken by his young mistress (who has, in classic Darwinian fashion, chosen a younger lover to replace him), gives the Elohimites a sample of his DNA for future cloning and kills himself, choosing, in a classic Houellebecqian paradox, both suicide and eternal life simultaneously.

His descendant, Daniel25, lives an isolated, almost emotionless life in a small, hermetically sealed compound, connected to his fellow “neohumans” by an advanced form of the Internet. The earth has been scarred by natural and man-made catastrophes, and the few surviving humans have reverted completely to a state of savagery, serenely observed by the solitary clones. The only disturbance to this post-apocalyptic existence is the persistent rumor of a group of neohumans who have left their compounds to form an independent community on an island. Daniel25’s listless semi-existence is suddenly disrupted by a communication from Esther31, the cloned descendant of the young mistress who prompted Daniel1’s suicide. It contains a brief poem written by Daniel1 to Esther1 before his suicide. It constitutes, for Daniel25, his ancestor’s final testimony:

And love, where all is easy,

Where all is given in an instant;

There exists in the midst of time

The possibility of an island.

Driven by these enigmatic words that point, perhaps, to the redemptive power of love, Daniel25 sets off in search of the neohuman community. All he finds, however, is the end of his perpetual existence in the wasteland that is the earth. “I would never reach the goal I had been set,” he says. “The future was empty; it was the mountain…. I was, I was no longer. Life was real.”

Thus does Houellebecq bring down the curtain on his blasted, wasted world. His tragedy is complete: Even immortality cannot redeem mankind. In The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq, like his hero Lovecraft, has succeeded at last in annihilating the real. He has drawn himself into Lovecraft, deconstructing the world he hates until it is no longer. But Houellebecq has gone further than Lovecraft ever did, for even the fantastic is impossible in this final annihilation. In the end, nothing remains.

This separate but equal annihilation of literature and its subject has not met with much approval. In John Updike’s review in the New Yorker of The Possibility of an Island, for example, he describes what has become the central critique of Houellebecq’s work:

It is to Houellebecq’s discredit, or at least to his novel’s disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts and aspirations the reader can care about. The usual Houellebecq hero, whose monopoly on self-expression sucks up most of the narrative’s oxygen, presents himself in one of two guises: A desolate loner consumed by boredom and apathy, or a galvanized male porn star. In neither role does he ask for, nor does he receive, much sympathy.

Avoiding the unfashionably puritanistic or unduly PC position, Houellebecq’s critics have turned to simple rejection. Houellebecq is, for Updike, simply uninteresting. His vision of life is shallow, apathetic, and fundamentally boring. He lacks the energy or sophistication to deal with those aspects of the world that threaten his convenient (and profitable) despair. Pessimism has made Houellebecq famous, but it has not made him a great writer; he is, quite simply, a fashion.