The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  It was, in fact, impossible, I told Vincent a little later, to stay alive in such a place for more than ten minutes. “I call this space love,” he said. “Man has never been able to love, apart from in immortality; it is undoubtedly why women were closer to love when their mission was to give life. We have discovered immortality, and presence in the world; the world no longer has the power to destroy us, it is we, rather, who have the power to create through the power of our vision. If we remain in a state of innocence, and under the approving gaze of one pair of eyes, we also remain in love.”

  Having taken my leave of Vincent, once I was in the taxi, I gradually calmed down; my state of mind as I crossed the Parisian suburbs remained, however, quite chaotic, and it was only after Porte d’Italie that I regained my sense of irony, and was able to repeat to myself mentally: “Could this be possible? This immense artist, this creator of ethics, he hasn’t yet learned that love is dead!” At once I felt a certain sadness as I realized that I had still not given up being what I had been for my entire career: a sort of Zarathustra of the middle classes.

  The receptionist at the Lutétia asked me if my stay had been fine. “Impeccable,” I told him as I looked for my Premier credit card, “things are really humming.” He then wanted to know if they would have the privilege of seeing me again sometime soon. “No, I don’t think so…,” I replied, “I don’t think I will be back here for a long time.”

  Daniel25, 15

  “WE TURN OUR EYES to the heavens, and the heavens are empty,” writes Ferdinand12 in his commentary. It was around the twelfth neohuman generation that the first doubts regarding the coming of the Future Ones appeared—that is to say a millennium after the events related by Daniel1; it was at almost the same time that the first defections were heard of.

  Another millennium has passed, and the situation has remained stable, the proportion of defections unchanged. Inaugurating a tradition of nonchalance in relation to scientific data that was to lead to the demise of philosophy, the human thinker Friedrich Nietzsche saw in man “the species whose type is not yet fixed.” If humans in no way merited such an assessment—less so than most of the animal species in any case—it certainly no longer applies to the neohumans who followed them. It can even be said that what characterizes us best, in relation to our predecessors, is undoubtedly a certain conservatism. Humans, or at least humans of the last period, adhered, it seems very easily, to any new project, quite independently of the direction of the proposed movement; change in itself was apparently, in their eyes, a value. On the contrary, we greet innovation with the utmost reticence, and only adopt it if it seems to us to constitute an undeniable improvement. Since the Standard Genetic Rectification, which made us the first autotrophic animal species, no modification of any real significance has been developed. Projects have been submitted for our approval by the scientific authorities of the Central City, proposing, for example, to develop our aptitude for flight, or for survival in underwater environments; they have been debated, debated at length, before finally being rejected. The only genetic characteristics that separate me from Daniel2, my first neohuman predecessor, are minimal improvements, guided by common sense, for example an increase in metabolic efficiency in our use of minerals, or a slight decrease in sensitivity to pain of the nervous fibers. Our collective history, like our individual destinies, therefore appears, compared to that of the humans of the last period, peculiarly calm. Sometimes, at night, I get up to observe the stars. Huge climatic and geological transformations have remodeled the physiognomy of this region, as they have most of the regions of the world, over the course of the two last millennia; the brightness and position of the stars, their constellations, are undoubtedly the only natural elements that have, since the time of Daniel1, undergone no transformation. As I consider the night sky my thoughts turn to the Elohim, to that strange belief that was finally, in a roundabout away, to unleash the Great Transformation. Daniel1 lives again in me, his body knows in mine a new incarnation, his thoughts are mine; his memories are mine; his existence actually prolongs itself in me, far more than man ever dreamed of prolonging himself through his descendants. My own life, however, I often think, is far from the one he would have liked to live.

  Daniel1, 27

  BACK IN SAN JOSÉ I kept on going, that’s about all there is to say. On the whole, things went rather well, for a suicide, that is, and it was with surprising ease that I completed, during July and August, the narration of events that were, nonetheless, the most significant and atrocious of my life. I was an author venturing into the field of autobiography, although I wasn’t really an author at all, which no doubt explains why I never realized, in the course of those days, that it was the simple fact of writing, which gave me the illusion of having control over events, that prevented me from sinking into states which justified what psychiatrists, in their charming jargon, call shock treatment. It is surprising that I didn’t realize I was walking along the edge of a precipice; and all the more so as my dreams should have alerted me. Esther reappeared in them more and more often, more and more friendly and coquettish, and they took a naively pornographic turn, becoming the veritable hallucinations of a starving man, which boded nothing good. I had to go out, from time to time, to buy beer and biscuits, generally I would come back along the beach, obviously I would come across naked young girls, a lot of them even: they would turn up again at night in the middle of pathetically unrealistic orgies, in which I was the hero and Esther the organizer; I thought increasingly often about the nocturnal emissions of old men that drive the nurse’s aides to despair—while telling myself over and over again that I would never reach that point, that I would carry out the fatal gesture in time, that I still had, all the same, a certain dignity (of which, however, nothing, in my life, had yet to offer an example). Perhaps it was not completely certain that I would commit suicide, perhaps I might be one of those individuals who piss people off right up until the end, all the more so because I had enough cash to ensure I could piss off a considerable number of people. I hated mankind, it’s true, I had hated it since the beginning, and as misfortune makes you nasty, I now hated it even more. At the same time, I had become a right little pooch, for whom just one lump of sugar would have been enough to appease him (I wasn’t even thinking of Esther’s body especially, anything would have done: breasts, a bush); but no one would hand me this sugar lump, and I was well on the way to ending my life as I had begun it: in dereliction and rage, in a state of hateful panic, further exacerbated by the summer heat. It is under the influence of an ancient animal sense of belonging that people have so many conversations about meteorology and the climate, influenced by a primitive memory, inscribed in the sense organs, and linked to the conditions of survival in the prehistoric era. These circumscribed, clichéd conversations are, however, the symptom of a real issue: even when we live in apartments, in conditions of thermal stability guaranteed by reliable and well-honed technology, it remains impossible for us to rid ourselves of this animal atavism; it is thus that a full awareness of our ignominy and misfortune, and of their complete and definitive nature, can only manifest itself in sufficiently favorable climatic conditions.

  Gradually, the chronology of my narration caught up with the chronology of my real life; on August 17, in scorching heat, I gave a shape to my memories of the birthday party in Madrid—which had taken place a year before, to the day. I passed quickly over my last stay in Paris, and the death of Isabelle: all this seemed to me to be already inscribed in the previous pages, it was predictable, part of the common fate of mankind, and I wanted, on the contrary, to do the work of a pioneer, to bring about something surprising and new.

  The full scale of the lie was now apparent to me: it extended to all aspects of human existence, and its usage was universal; philosophers without exception had swallowed it, as well as almost all writers; it was probably necessary for the survival of the species, and Vincent was right: my life story, once distributed and commented on, was going to put
an end to mankind as we knew it. My godfather, to speak in mafia terms (and we were dealing, well and truly, with a crime, and even, strictly speaking, a crime against humanity) would be satisfied. Mankind was going to change direction; it was going to convert.

  Before coming to the end of my story I thought back for the last time to Vincent, the true inspiration of this book, and the only human being who had ever inspired in me the feeling that was so foreign to my nature: admiration. Vincent had been right to discern in me the abilities of a spy or a traitor. There have always been spies and traitors in human history (not as many as you might think, however, just a few, at well-spaced intervals, it was quite remarkable to observe on the whole how much men had behaved as nice guys, with the goodwill of the bull, who climbs joyfully into the truck that will take it to the slaughterhouse); but I was no doubt the first to be living at a time when technological conditions could give my treason its full impact. Besides, I would only accelerate, by conceptualizing it, an inevitable historical development. 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 the 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. Such was the direction of the movement of history, which would not be limited only to the West, the West was just happy to take the lead and scout out the road ahead, as it had been doing since the end of the Middle Ages.

  After that the species, in its current form, would disappear; after that, something different would emerge, whose name could not yet be spoken, and which would perhaps be worse, perhaps better, but certainly more limited in its ambitions, and in any case more calm, the importance of impatience and frenzy should not be underestimated in human history. Perhaps that crude imbecile Hegel had, at the end of the day, seen things correctly, perhaps I was a servant of the cunning of reason. It was scarcely plausible that the species destined to succeed us would be, to the same degree, a social species; since my childhood the idea that concluded all discussions, that put an end to all disagreements, the idea around which I had most often seen an absolute peaceful consensus form, could be summed up pretty much as follows: “Essentially, you’re born alone, you live alone, and you die alone.” Accessible to even the simplest minds, this sentence was also the conclusion of the nimblest thinkers; it provoked in all circumstances unanimous approval, and it seemed to everyone, once these words were uttered, that they had never heard anything so beautiful, profound, and true—this, regardless of the age, sex, and social position of the interlocutors. The fact was already clear to my generation, and even more to Esther’s. A frame of mind such as this can scarcely, in the long term, favor a rich sociability. Sociability had had its day, it had played its historic role; it was indispensable in the early years of the appearance of human intelligence, but it was today just a useless and encumbering vestige. The same could be said of sexuality, since the spread of artificial procreation. “To masturbate is to make love with someone you truly love”: the phrase was attributed to various celebrities, from Keith Richards to Jacques Lacan; it was, in any case, at the moment it was uttered, ahead of its time, and could not therefore have a real impact. Besides, sexual relations were certainly going to continue for some time, as an advertising ploy and a principle of narcissistic differentiation, while increasingly becoming the preserve of specialists, a certain erotic elite. The narcissistic battle would last for as long as it could feed upon consenting victims, eagerly seeking their ration of humiliation within it, it would probably last as long as sociability itself, it would be its last vestige, but would end up dying with it. As for love, it could no longer be counted on: I was undoubtedly one of the last men of my generation to love myself sufficiently little to be able to love someone else, although I had only been in love rarely, twice in my life to be exact. There is no love in individual freedom, in independence, that’s quite simply a lie, and one of the crudest lies you can imagine; love is only in the desire for annihilation, fusion, the disappearance of the individual, in a sort of what used to be called oceanic feeling, in something anyway that was, at least in the near future, condemned.

  Three years before, I had cut out of Gente Libre a photo in which the sex of a man, of whom you could only make out the pelvis, was stuck halfway, effortlessly so, into a woman of about twenty-five, who had long curly chestnut hair. All the photographs in this magazine aimed at “liberal couples” revolved more or less around the same theme: why did this image charm me so much? Leaning on her knees and forearms, the young woman turned her face to the lens as if she was surprised by this unexpected intromission, which came at a moment when she was thinking of something completely different, like washing her tiled floor; she seemed, however, rather pleasantly surprised, her eyes betrayed a bland and impersonal satisfaction, as if it was her mucous membrane that was reacting to this unexpected contact, rather than her mind. Her sex itself seemed supple and soft, with good dimensions, comfortable, it was in any case pleasantly open, and gave the impression of being able to open easily, on demand. This friendly hospitality, without tragedy, without any kind of fuss, was now all I asked of the world, I realized it week after week as I looked at this photograph; I also realized that I would never manage to obtain it, that I would no longer really even try to obtain it, and that Esther’s departure hadn’t been a painful transition, but an absolute end. Perhaps by then she had come back from the United States, it was even quite likely, it seemed scarcely plausible to me that her career as a pianist would experience any great developments, besides she didn’t have the necessary talent, nor the dose of madness that accompanies it, she was basically a very reasonable little creature. Whether she was back home or not, I knew it wouldn’t change anything, she wouldn’t want to see me again, for her I was ancient history, and, frankly, I was ancient history for me as well, any idea of embarking again on a public career, or more generally of having relations with my fellow men, had this time definitively left me, with her I had used up the last of my strength, I had surrendered to the present; she had been my happiness, but she had also been, as I had sensed from the beginning, the death of me; this premonition hadn’t, for all that, made me hesitate, inasmuch as we all have to meet our own death, see it in front of us at least once, and each one of us, in our heart of hearts, knows this, it is, when you think of it, preferable that death, rather than being clad normally in boredom and attrition, should wear the rare robes of pleasure.

  Daniel25, 16

  IN THE BEGINNING was created the Supreme Sister, who is the first. Then were created the Seven Founders, who created the Central City. If the teachings of the Supreme Sister are the basis of our philosophical theories, the political organization of the neohuman communities owes almost everything to the Seven Founders; but it was only, by their own admission, an inessential parameter, conditioned by biological evolutions, which had increased the functional autonomy of the neohumans, as much as by the historical shifts, already widely begun in previous societies, that led to the withering away of relationship functions. The reasons that led to a radical separation between neohumans have nothing absolute about them, and everything indicates that this took place only in a gradual manner, probably over the course of several generations. To tell the truth, total physical separation constitutes a possible social configuration, compatible with the teachings of the Supreme Sister, and generally along the same lines as them, rather than being a consequence of them in the strict sense of the word.

  The disappearance of contact was followed by that of desire. I had felt no physical attraction to Marie23—no more naturally than I hadn’t felt it for Esther31, who had, anyway, passed the age of arousing those kinds of manifestations. I was convinced
that neither Marie23, despite her departure, nor Marie22, despite the strange episode preceding her end, related by my predecessor, had known desire either. On the other hand what they had known, and in a singularly painful way, was nostalgia for desire, the wish to experience it again, to be irradiated like their distant ancestors with that force that seemed so powerful. Although Daniel1 shows himself, on this theme of nostalgia for desire, particularly eloquent, I have for my part been spared the phenomenon up until now, and it is with the greatest calm that I discuss with Esther31 the detail of the relations between our respective predecessors; on her part she displays a coolness that is at least equivalent to mine, and it is without regret, without distress, that we leave one another at the end of our occasional intermediations, and return to our calm, contemplative lives, which would probably have appeared, to humans of the classical age, unbelievably boring.

  The existence of a residual mental activity, detached from all everyday concerns and oriented toward pure knowledge, constitutes one of the key points of the teachings of the Supreme Sister; up until now nothing has allowed its existence to be put into doubt.

  A limited calendar, punctuated by sufficient episodes of mini-grace (such as are offered by the sun slipping across the shutters, or the sudden retreat, under the influence of violent wind from the north, of a threatening cloud formation) organizes my existence, the precise duration of which is an indifferent parameter. Identical to Daniel24, I know that I will have, in Daniel26, an equivalent successor; the limited, respectable memories we keep of existences that have identical contours do not have any of the pregnancy that would be necessary for an individual fiction to take hold. The life of each man, in its broad brushstrokes, is similar, and this secret truth, hidden throughout the historical periods, was able to find expression only in the neohumans. Rejecting the incomplete paradigm of form, we aspire to rejoin the universe of countless potentialities. Closing the brackets on becoming, we are from now on in unlimited, indefinite stasis.