An Officer of Civilization

by Nurit Buchweitz

  [«‘Des scènes indignes d’un pays moderne’, écrivait le journaliste sans se rendre compte qu’elles étaient la preuve, justement, que la France était en train de devenir un pays moderne, que seul un pays authentiquement modern était capable de traiter les vieillards comme de purs déchets.» (Possibilité, p. 90]

  This description is highly reminiscent of the savages’ neglect of the old and weak (Possibility, pp. 320–321 [Possibilité, p. 462–463]). According to Ruth Cruickshank, fin de millénaire societies in crisis are marked by an overflow of discomfort resulting from various concerns (she mentions in particular the mass media, commercialized psychoanalysis and sexual frustration, neo-liberalism and global market economies);35 yet the crisis of individualism is what transfigures into egocentrism, nihilism, and the atomization of individuals. ← 92 | 93 →

  Daniel1 summarizes his generation’s plight, while locating human suffering in the context of the changing psychologies of our times, stemming from the breakdown of social bonds:36

  When a social system is destroyed, this destruction is definitive, and there can be no going back; the laws of social entropy, valid in theory for any human-relational system, were rigorously demonstrated by Hewlett and Dude two centuries later; but they had already, for a long time, been understood intuitively. (Possibility, pp. 247–248)

  [«Lors qu’un système social est détruit, cette destruction est définitive, et aucun retour en arrière n’est possible; les lois de l’entropie sociale, valables en théorie pour n’importe quel système relationnel humain, ne furent démontrées en toute rigueur que par Hewlett et Dude, deux siècles plus tard; mais elles étaient déjà depuis longtemps intuitivement connues.» (Possibilité, pp. 350–351)]

  Daniel25’s quest, his physical journey to attain a goal, also involves an internal voyage, during which he ponders the realness of his life and his disposition and at the same time his mental and psychic space undergo change. For Daniel25, the meaning of the quest is to reaffirm his human nature as a social creature; it is a quest in search of a community. Thus, the enigmatic final sentence in the book “I was, I was no longer. Life was real.” (Possibility, p. 337) [«J’étais, Je n’étais plus. La vie était réelle.» (Possibilité, p. 474)] should be read in this context. The term “real” appears already earlier in the text, when it is identified with bonding with others, as opposed to abstract communication:

  Isabelle had always liked theoretical discussions, it’s partly what had attracted me to her; inasmuch as the exercise is sterile, and can prove fatal when practiced for its own sake, it is also profound, creative, and tender immediately after making love – immediately after real life. (Possibility, p. 242; emphasis added)

  [«Isabelle avait toujours aimé les discussions théoriques, c’est en partie ce qui m’avait attiré en elle; autant l’exercice est stérile, et peut s’avérer funeste lorsqu’il est pratiqué pour lui-même, autant il est profond, créatif et tendre immédiatement après l’amour – immédiatement après la vraie vie.» (Possibilié, p. 343)] ← 93 | 94 →

  This citation, even though its direct context is love and sex, is part of the larger issue of meaningful and enduring contact between human beings. Houellebecq’s book clearly ends in loss and desolation, yet despite this, the protagonist feels that his life is finally real. His statement articulates the value of setting out on the quest to seek interpersonal connections, to “vanquish the separation of individuals” [«vaincre la séparation individuelle»].37 Indeed, halfway through Daniel25’s journey “it had become a matter of indifference to me whether or not I reached my destination” (Possibility, p. 311) [«mais il m’était devenu indifférent d’atteindre ma destination» (Possibilité, p. 439)]. The end of The Possibility of an Island brings together the failure of the quest and the dystopia, which is the failure of utopia. This is resistance as style: the process is more important than the consequence.

  Analyzing the last scene of The Possibility of an Island, Anne-Marie Picard-Drillien concludes that in this final stage, when Daniel25 faces the endless sea, he realizes that the object of his desire has failed him, revealing itself as a void that can never be filled.38 Thus there is no possibility of an island. In its essence, this failure embodies a suspensive irony, characteristic of postmodernism in which the aspiration to master disorder is relinquished. As Alan Wilde explains, “the world, in all its disorder is simply (or not so simply) accepted.”39 Houellebecq’s postmodernist suspensiveness emanates from observing this world. The suspensive irony marks the place of the moral quandary, which cannot be evaded, as a claim that one is forced into one fine day and never lets one go again. This irony comes to take the place of the moral injunction. Ultimately Houellebecq’s utopia is in a sense a disruption, as Jameson explains:

  Disruption is, then, the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form such disruption necessarily takes. And this is now the temporal situation in which the ← 94 | 95 → Utopian form proper – the radical closure of a system of difference in time, the experience of the total formal break and discontinuity – has its political role to play, and in fact becomes a new kind of content in its own right. For it is the very principle of the radical break as such, its possibility, which is reinforced by the Utopian form […]. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there are no alternatives to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break.40

  Above the narrative in The Possibility of an Island hovers a process involving the writing of human history by Daniel25. This began with Hubczejak in The Elementary Particles, who discloses and sets out his goals in this respect:

  This species which, for the first time in history, was able to envision the possibility of its succession and, some years later, proved capable of bringing it about. As the last members of this race are extinguished, we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, an homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind. (Particles, p. 264)

  [«Cette espèce aussi qui, pour la première fois de l’histoire du monde, sut envisager la possibilité de son propre dépassement; et qui, quelques années plus tard, sut mettre ce dépassement en pratique. Au moment où ses derniers représentants vont s’éteindre, nous estimons légitime de rendre à l’humanité ce dernier hommage, hommage qui, lui aussi, finira par s’effacer et se perdre dans les sables du temps; il est cependant nécessaire que cet hommage, au moins une fois, ait été accompli. Ce livre est dédié à l’homme.» (Particules, pp. 316–317)]

  It continues with Daniel1 in The Possibility of an Island, who writes his life-story, testifying on the pre-apocalyptic life and manners, and concludes with Daniel25, who rejects writing commentaries on his predecessors’ lives in favor of a new composition based on his own life-experience. The moral authority to write the historiography of humanity is that of those who have become disillusioned by utopia, those aware of its limitations, its injustices and boundaries. Similarly to Daniel1, the Snowman in Oryx and Crake is also driven by the impetus to preserve human culture; he memorizes words so that they are not lost forever.41 This is not the case ← 95 | 96 → with the clone Daniel25; even though he will never return to the living compound and no one will read his story, in the very act of writing down his experiences – paradoxically and symbolically through his wounded feet – he makes it possible for the real to persist. ← 96 | 97 →

  1 Intimate and extensive knowledge of science and philosophy is perceived to be characteristic of great literature, see Eric Sartori, “Michel Houellebecq, romancier positiviste”, in Sabine van Wesemael (ed.), Michel Houellebecq: Etudes Réunies (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 143–152.

  2 Atwood herself uses the term ‘speculative fiction’ to define her writing, with the narrative deriving fro
m the speculative question ‘what if’: “What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?” See Carol Ann Howells, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”, in idem (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 161–175. This is also the very term Houellebecq mentions in Possibility: «La disparition des civilisations humaines, au moins dans sa première phase, ressembla assez à ce qui avait été pronostiqué, dès la fin du XXe siècle, par différents auteurs de fiction spéculative.» (Possibilité, p. 447) [“The extinction of human civilizations, at least in its first stage, looked quite like the predictions already made from the end of the 20th century by various science fiction authors”]. The genre is otherwise referred to in criticism as roman d’anticipation, see Maud Granger Remy, “La Possibilité d’une Ile, ou ‘le livre des Daniel’”, in Murielle Lucie Clément et Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq à la Une (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 221–232.

  3 The intertextual relations between the novels have been largely discussed as counterfactual intertextuality. See Jerry Andrew Varsava, “Utopian Yearnings, Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism”, College Literature 32/4 (2005): pp. 145–166.

  4 Ben Jeffery, Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism (Winchester, UK and Washington, USA: Zero Books, 2011), p. 64.

  5 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2007), p. 384.

  6 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 16.

  7 This also exemplifies that the characteristic of realistic plenitude is a basic component of the science fiction genre, which seeks to create a reality of the intangible by means of tangible details. See Haviva Yonnay, Science Fiction as an Institutionalizing Popular Genre (Dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 1990) [Hebrew].

  8 Ben Jeffrey has also noted the connections between the novels, see Jeffrey, Anti-Matter, pp. 59–75.

  9 See Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why we Tell Stories (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 69–86, and also Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 42–46.

  10 For a reading of Oryx and Crake as a survival narrative, see Carol Ann Howells, “Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake”, pp. 161–175.

  11 Famous quest stories include the biblical account of the Children of Israel wandering in the desert for 40 years on their way to Canaan; Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Iliad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Richard Adams’s Watership Down and many others.

  12 The poem was composed and performed by Carla Bruni (Bruni, Comme Si De Rien N’était). It is available on audio CD (Down Town, 2008).

  13 Atwood meticulously documents the hero’s survival, in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and his survival journey; see, for example, the detailed account of the Snowman’s first steps as a survivor in the chapter “Nooners” (Oryx and Crake, pp. 41–48).

  14 Such as rakunks, wolvogs and pigeons, most of them produced at the OrganInc farms (Oryx and Crake, pp. 25–32).

  15 The next stage is that of the final torments, or the final and most difficult test. At this stage, the hero is already close to his goal, it is visible to him and this is when the final tribulation, the most difficult of all, begins. The final struggle is necessary in order for the hero to obtain the prize. This obstacle appears to be an impossible task, and often indeed is so, forcing the hero to divert his goal.

  16 This landscape appears in Houellebecq’s writings already in novels set in the present day. For example in The Elementary Particles, p. 10, the protagonist travels on the expressway to reach Paris and “something in the air evoked a dry apocalypse.” [“Quelque chose dans l’atmosphère évoquait une apocalypse sèche.” (p. 15)]

  17 See Nurit Buchweitz, “Visions of the Future, Humans and Posthumans in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” in Faces of the Apocalypse [forthcoming].

  18 David Gurevitz and Dan Arav, Encyclopedia of Ideas: Culture, Thought, Media (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2012), p. 153 [Hebrew].

  19 Rob Cover, “Population Decline and the End(s) of Civilization: Cultural and Media Approaches to Apocalypse from the Perspective of Population and Demography”, Lecture given at the conference Apocalypse: Imagining the End, Oxford, Mansfield College, July 2013.

  20 Frédéric Sayer argues that Houellebecq disrobes apocalypse of its infernal content and associates it with psychiatric illness. See Frédéric Sayer, «La transformation de symbols du mal en signes du vide chez Michel Houellebecq et Bret Easton Ellis», in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 145–156. See also Bellanger’s analysis of the apocalyptic chapters in Possibility: Aurélien Bellanger, Houellebecq Ecrivain Romantique (Edition Léo Scheer, 2010), pp. 267–275.

  21 Houellebecq, La Possibilité d’une Ile /Film (2009).

  22 Toumson discusses the island as one of the founding ideological myths of the modern age: it enables meditations about l’ailleurs et l’altérité (elsewhere and otherness); the probable continent is a symbol of unification and orthodoxy whereas the improbable island is one of dissimilarity and heterodoxy. See Roger Toumson, «L’île, l’archipel et le continent. Imaginaire et représentations», In Dominque Berthet, L’utopie: Art, Littérature et Société (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), pp. 239–248. He goes on to suggest a third, intermediary category of archipelago, as a mode of thinking about otherness: «Pour comprendre la modernité, pour saisir conceptuellement les mutations sociales et culturelles dont résultent les sociétés postmodernes; les «archipels de la différence», comme autant de lieux heuristiques fournissent un axe de thématisation où convergent, dans leurs modalités inédites les enjeux de la connaissance de notre présent immédiat.» (p. 245). [“To understand modernity, to conceptually comprehend the social and cultural changes from which postmodern societies result; the ‘Archipelagos of the Difference’, just as so many other heuristic places, offer an axis of thematization on which, according to their totally new modalities, the issues of the knowledge proper to our immediate present meet.”] (my translation)

  23 Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings behind Them, trans. by James Hulbert (New York: Meridian Penguin, 1994), p. 186.

  24 Jack Tresidder, Dictionary of Symbols: An Illustrated Guide to Traditional Images, Icons and Emblems (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1997), p. 109.

  25 Sabine van Wesemael, Le Roman Transgressif Contemporain: de Bret Easton Ellis à Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), p. 260 (my translation).

  26 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 211.

  27 Zygmunt Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 27.

  28 This stands in ironic contrast to the utopian idea as the program for an ideal community. In his oeuvre, Houellebecq makes reference to several social utopian thinkers who architecturally executed a plan for partnership and communion. See, for example, the discussion of Charles Fourier, designer of the phalanstère, in chapter 10 of The Map and the Territory.

  29 A text of love that served as a basis for human consciousness and, according to Aurélien Bellanger, laid down the foundations of human aspirations for love and interpersonal connection. See Bellanger, Houellebecq Ecrivain Romantique, p. 274.

  30 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011 [2003]).

  31 Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance?; and Gadi Taub, A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 19
97), pp. 47–137 [Hebrew].

  32 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glazer (The University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1981]).

  33 Bauman, Does Ethics Have a Chance? p. 90.

  34 Varsava, Utopian Yearnings, p. 146.

  35 Although Cruickshank limits her analysis of the fin de millénaire crisis to l’exception française, focusing only on French society, this is a useful term and fits well with the description of the general western European turn-of-the-century crises. See Cruikshank, fin de millénaire.

  36 See Svend Brinkmann, “Changing Psychologies in the Transition from Industrial Society to Consumer Society”, History of Human Sciences 21/2 (2008): pp. 85–110; Michel David, La Mélancolie de Michel Houellebecq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pp. 125–137.

  37 Fanny van Cuenebroeck, “Michel Houellebecq ou la possibilité d’une bible”, in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq à la Une (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), p. 218 (my translation).

  38 In a psychoanalytical reading, Picard-Drillien goes on to connect the lost object of desire with melancholy, as opposed to depression, see Anne-Marie Picard-Drillien, “No Future! Le désistement mélancolique de Michel Houellebecq”, in Murielle Lucie Clément and Sabine van Wesemael (eds.), Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 185–200.

  39 Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Ironic Imagination (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1987), p. 9.

  40 Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, pp. 231–232.

  41 Paula López Rúa, “The Manipulative of Word-Formation Devices in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake”, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 18 (2005): pp. 149–165.

  Art, Literature, and the Market: The Viewer/Reader as Voyeur

  At the beginning of The Map and the Territory, artist Jed Martin, the protagonist, gazes at his painting of Jeff Koons and Damian Hirst, entitled Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing up the Art Market [«Damien Hirst et Jeff Koons se partageant le marche de l’art»]. The two men in the painting are dressed in business suits and sitting in a fashionably appointed, anonymous room; in the background tall buildings stretch across the horizon.