by Louis Betty
Early in the narrative, Daniel meets Isabelle, a beautiful woman in her late thirties who, like Daniel, has become rich by exploiting Western civilization’s crumbling moral and religious foundations. The editor of a popular teen magazine called Lolita, Isabelle witnesses firsthand the desperation with which women thirty and older have begun to venerate the nubile flesh of adolescent girls: “More and more, mothers would tend to copy their daughters. Obviously there’s something ridiculous about a thirty-year-old woman buying a magazine called Lolita; but no more so than her buying a clinging top, or hot pants. [ . . . ] the feeling of ridiculous [ . . . ] was going to gradually disappear and be replaced by pure fascination with limitless youth” (29). Isabelle acknowledges the ridiculousness of her magazine’s clientele, even while she remains as obsessed as her readers with warding off the physical effects of aging. She and Daniel live happily in southern Spain for a number of years, but as Isabelle nears her fortieth birthday, she begins to despair at the sight of her body: “I [Daniel] could feel her, at the moment when I glanced at her, wincing slightly, as if she had felt a punch between the shoulder blades [ . . . ]. The beauty of her fine, sensitive face was of the kind that resists time; but her body [ . . . ] was beginning to suffer the first blows of age—blows which [ . . . ] were going to multiply rapidly, leading to total degradation” (38). Daniel does not love Isabelle any less for the decline of her beauty. But in lieu of making love, the two adopt a dog, Fox, who brings them joy despite the gnawing lack of tenderness between them.
Things do not improve, however, and while Daniel is away on vacation Isabelle goes on a physically catastrophic drinking binge. Afterward, disgusted by her body and unable to feel love, Isabelle leaves Daniel and returns to France: “She could no longer stand herself; and, consequently, she could no longer stand love, which seemed to her to be false” (50). Faced with his marriage’s collapse, Daniel remarks, “The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism [ . . . ]. When physical love disappears, everything disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days. And, with regard to physical love, I hardly had any illusions. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism” (50–51).
Optimistically, one might read this passage as a protest on Daniel’s part against the glorified youth culture that has been the source both of Isabelle’s wealth and of her ruin. If, after all, what is required for physical love—and thus love generally—is a society of Nazis, perhaps Daniel will attempt to find some new basis for his relationship with Isabelle. But such an exercise in optimism would be out of character for Houellebecq. Daniel is indeed far from done with love—or to put things in more Houellebecquian terms, he is far from done with sex. Soon after Isabelle’s departure, he meets the beautiful twenty-one-year-old Esther, a Spanish actress with whom he begins a wild, desperate, and ultimately destructive affair. Daniel says of her, “I will just say, without exaggeration or metaphor, that [Esther] gave life back to me. In her company, I lived moments of intense happiness. It was perhaps the first time I had had the opportunity to utter this simple sentence. I lived moments of intense happiness; inside her, or just next to her; when I was inside her, or just before, or just after” (119). Typical of Houellebecq’s male protagonists, Daniel is unable to live according to his own principles: while he may recognize the materialist horror of contemporary culture (he has made a career doing precisely this), he still prefers a society of “Nazis” to preserving his marriage on grounds other than sex. He is some mixture of helpless animal and moral coward, incapable of overcoming the flesh that, as he knows all too well, will ultimately ruin him.
At forty-seven, Daniel is terrified that Esther will abandon him for a younger man. He spends what time he can with her in Madrid, where she lives with her much older sister, and when back home at his residence in Andalusia he waits frantically for Esther to return his phone calls. The affair drags on, and though Daniel experiences moments of intense happiness with her (though it is happiness of a mostly sexual nature), he knows deep down that this relationship, which is bound to end when Esther finds someone her own age, is going to be his undoing: “love makes you weak, and the weaker of the two is oppressed, tortured, and finally killed by the other, who in his or her turn oppresses, tortures, and kills without having evil intentions, without even getting pleasure from it, with complete indifference; that’s what men, normally, call love” (130). Esther is a creature well suited to the materialistic, hedonistic twenty-first-century European environment of Possibility. She refuses to kiss Daniel: like many of the young people of her generation, she does not have a great interest in love, while she certainly has a tremendous penchant for sex. Daniel “loves” Esther, Houellebecq assures us, but Daniel is too old to be naïve about the sort of person she is:
Esther was certainly not well educated in the normal sense of the term, the thought never crossed her mind to empty an ashtray, or to clear away what was left on her plate, and she didn’t mind in the slightest about leaving the lights on behind her in the rooms she had just left; there was also no question of asking her to think of doing the shopping, to bring anything back from a shop that was not intended for her own use, or more generally to do any kind of favor for anyone. Like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else. (152)
Esther is, Daniel says, a “little animal, who [is] innocent, amoral, neither good nor evil, who [is] simply in search of her ration of excitement and pleasure” (234). It is therefore no surprise that, offered an acting job in New York, Esther rather flippantly abandons Daniel, humiliating him on the eve of her departure during a party she throws in Madrid for her twenty-third birthday. It is at this party that Daniel is directly confronted with Esther’s frivolity and, by extension, her infidelity:
I realized I hadn’t caught sight of Esther for some time, and I began vaguely to search for her [ . . . ]. In the end I discovered her in one of the far bedrooms, stretched out in the middle of a group; she had taken off most of her clothes [ . . . ]. A boy lying behind her [ . . . ] was caressing her ass, and readying himself to penetrate her. She was speaking to another boy [ . . . ] whom I didn’t recognize; at the same time, she was playing with his sex, tapping it against her nose and her cheeks and smiling all the while. I closed the door discreetly; I didn’t know it yet, but this was to be the last image I would keep of her. (237)
Abandoned by his capricious lover, Daniel tends slowly toward suicide, having declared, “All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything; it is the same for men” (154). Daniel is a man whose principal concern in life has been with being able to get and maintain an erection; he has never made any real distinction between happiness and sex; and a sense of purpose outside of his carnal predilections is utterly absent. After discovering Esther fornicating with her friends, Daniel’s dejection is so total that he masturbates in public, a desperate attempt to call attention to his threatened virility: “Later still, as dawn was breaking on Madrid, I masturbated quickly near the pool. A few meters away from me there was a girl dressed in black, with a vacant look in her eyes; I thought she wouldn’t even notice my presence, but she spat to one side when I ejaculated” (237). Terrified by physical aging, decline, and the prospect of abandonment, while at the same time unable to console himself with even the vaguest notion of an ultimate purpose, Daniel is one more casualty in Houellebecq’s catalog of the victims of materialism. His suicidal thoughts come as no surprise: “He wallowed in humiliation, and in the most abject manner possible. He went as far as offering [Esther] money, lots of money, just to spend a last night with her [ . . . ]. She had even thought of contacting the police, but he just hung around the area [ . . . ] and finally he disappeared” (298).
During the course of this appalling commentary on the fate of the old—or, more prec
isely, the not-young—in a culture where youth has become the ultimate and unquestionable good, the reader encounters the Elohimites, a group of New Age religious practitioners who believe life was brought to earth by extraterrestrials and who place their hope for immortality in the prospect of cloning. Elohimism is well adapted to the prevailing materialism of the day: basing its entire appeal on the promise of physical immortality, the cult offers its members an eternity of health and pleasure, free from any confusing spiritual or metaphysical considerations:
More and more, men were going to want to live freely, irresponsibly, on a wild quest for pleasure; they were going to want to live like those who were already living among them, the kids, and when old age would make its weight felt, when it would become impossible for them to continue to struggle, they would put an end to it all; but in the meantime they would have joined the Elohimite Church, their genetic code would have been safeguarded, and they would die in the hope of an indefinite continuation of that same existence that was devoted to pleasure. (291)
The Elohimites’ desire is to live as perpetual Esthers, pursuing physical gratification without any fear of abandonment or consequence, while avoiding the fate of Daniel and Isabelle, who can no longer continue to struggle and will disappear forever with the death of their bodies. Elohimism represents a solution to the problem of aging that the novel poses, but that solution is nothing if not radical: we waste our time trying to reconcile ourselves to death; it is better simply to overcome it, by whatever means necessary.
Elohimism is a resounding success in the secular, post-Christian West of The Possibility of an Island. While it draws many of its initial members from the “atheistic, well-off, modern milieus” (283), the Elohimite Church quickly becomes the dominant religion of Europe and then of the entire world, even managing to overwhelm Islam. The clones of the church’s original members, who appear at the beginning of the text, have survived a series of wars and natural disasters, and they lead solitary lives inside heavily fortified compounds, which have been built to protect them from the few “human savages” that remain at the beginning of the fifth millennium. The neohuman clones have kept detailed records of their human predecessors, and the picture they paint of the last years of human civilization is shocking. Daniel25—the twenty-fifth incarnation of the original Daniel—writes of old age in Daniel1’s time, “In the years preceding the disappearance of the species, [old age] had manifestly become atrocious to the point where the level of voluntary deaths, prudishly renamed departures [ . . . ] was nearing 100 percent, and the average age of departure [ . . . ] was falling toward fifty in the most developed countries” (62). Following a tradition begun by Daniel1, each clone is required to produce a “life story” for his or her subsequent incarnation: according to Daniel25, the life stories of the original members agree without exception on the “unbearable nature of the mental suffering caused by old age” (62). While, in the text, events such as the massive dying-off of elderly men and women during a 2003 European heat wave manage at first to provoke the “obligatory indignation,” Daniel24 explains that this indignation “quickly faded, and the development of active euthanasia—or, increasingly often, active voluntary euthanasia—would, in the course of the following decades, solve the problem” (63).
Such criminal disregard for the happiness and suffering of the old, who, unable to participate in the culture of youth, come progressively to be treated “purely as rubbish” (63), would be “inconceivable in Africa, or in a traditional Asian country” (63), where ancestors are venerated. But in “an authentically modern country” (63), such as France, scenes similar to what occurred in the summer of 2003 are characteristic:
More than ten thousand people [ . . . ] had died in the country; some had died alone in their apartments, others in the hospital or in retirement homes, but all had essentially died because of a lack of care. In the weeks that followed, [Libération] published a series of atrocious reports [ . . . ] relating the agony of old people crammed into communal rooms, naked on their beds, in diapers, moaning all day without anyone coming to rehydrate them or even to give them a glass of water; describing the rounds made by nurses unable to contact the families who were on vacation, regularly gathering up the corpses to make space for new arrivals. (62–63)
Elohimism makes the repetition of these gruesome scenes unnecessary. Fear of death need not force one to cling foolishly to a decrepit life: the Elohimite wisely relinquishes the body once it becomes a source of suffering and awaits reincarnation in a new, youthful form. Though primarily a cult of youth, Elohimism is also a cult of death: promoting the elimination of physical undesirables, the religion provides moral justification for ridding society of its older members, whose physical appearance has become a source of terror and disgust for the young and whose care requirements interfere with the life of carefree pleasure that twenty-first-century Westerners have come to expect.
The rise of the Elohimite Church confirms a thesis that Houellebecq has been developing throughout his work: Western civilization, for lack of any reference to an ultimate principle that might found some sense of social unity and satisfy the human desire for immortality, is reverting to barbarism. The extermination of the old is the final stage of the process: for the first time in history, aging humans are consenting en masse to their own extinction, while the younger generation, à la Esther, participates in more and more superficial and bestial forms of pleasure. The similarities between Daniel25’s description of the “savages” of the fifth millennium and Western culture in the twenty-first century in Possibility are exemplary in this regard. Daniel25 recounts a fight between two older members of a tribe wandering in a post-apocalyptic Spain:
At first the fight took place in the utmost silence; but from the first sight of blood the savages began to shout and whistle to encourage the antagonists. I understood immediately that it would be a fight to the death, with the aim of eliminating the individual least able to survive; the combatants struck each other without inhibition, trying to reach the face or other sensitive parts of the body [ . . . ]. The most corpulent one seemed in difficulty, he had lost a lot of blood [ . . . ]. [He] staggered to his feet; without wasting a second, his adversary leaped onto him and plunged his dagger into his eye. He fell to the ground, his face spattered with blood, and the scramble for the spoils began. With lifted daggers, the males and females of the tribe threw themselves screaming onto the wounded man [ . . . ]. At first they cut off bits of flesh that they roasted in the embers, but as the frenzy increased they began to devour the body of the victim directly [ . . . ]. I supposed that it was a rite of union, a way of strengthening bonds in the group—at the same time as eliminating weakened or sick members; all of this seemed to conform to what I had been taught about mankind. (320–21, my emphasis)
The verdict in The Possibility of an Island leaves little room for ambiguity: materialism leads not simply to nihilism, despair, and suicide—this much was already apparent in The Elementary Particles—but, in the end, materialism results in the reanimalization of the human species. In the face of this final degradation, Elohimism represents a last-ditch effort to preserve some minimum of humanity, if only by staving off the animal terror of extinction. At the same time, it fully acquiesces to the bestial, pleasure-seeking worldview that has become typical of the age.
Can a Cloning Cult Be a Religion?
The Elohimite Church unites its adherents around a simple proposition: God may be dead, and with him the soul, but technology, through the process of cloning, grants people the possibility of at least some minimal transcendence. Is this singular emphasis on immortality enough to make Elohimism a religion? As I discussed above, a consensus on the definition of religion has historically eluded scholars, with the debate often centering on the degree to which belief in the supernatural should be included in the definition. In other cases—such as the debate between Geertz and Asad—the issue has been to determine whether religion is simply a recent anthropological category, which onl
y became distinct as religion when practices today deemed to be “religious” became disembedded from other cultural institutions. Below, I subject Elohimism to analysis under several criteria, including the traditional concept of religare, or “binding,” of both man to man and man to God; Durkheim’s classical distinction between the sacred and the profane; belief in the supernatural; and the interpretation of religion as a recently disembedded (and largely Christian) anthropological category. Elohimism fits comfortably into the first two conceptions of religion, but its materialistic foundations make it difficult, though not impossible, to identify the movement as a religion within a supernatural paradigm. Additionally, it is possible to interpret both the decline of Christianity charted in The Elementary Particles and the rise of Elohimism in Possibility as a mise-en-scène of the Asadian model—that is, an attempt to embed (or reembed) religion within a total cultural system, where identification of the political, the religious, the economic, and so on as distinct and separate spheres is no longer appropriate or even intelligible.