An Officer of Civilization

by Nurit Buchweitz

  Nonetheless, the apocalyptic matrix shifts from the paradigm of divinity and solicitude, in which the disaster facilitates salvation and encompasses human sacrifice and redemption, to the postmodern sense of the term, as an apocalyptic disaster. In contemporary secular times, apocalypse is no longer an option, it is merely a pointless, cataclysmic event that does not rectify; it wipes out the former order without providing recourse.18 The literary genre of the apocalypse, depicting the violent end of time, emerges at times of marked socio-economic change, as a cleansing event, bringing about destruction. The apocalyptic pattern of crime and punishment enables the genre to address contemporary issues and project current anxieties onto the future.19 Houellebecq uses the apocalypse in its incomplete form, as an apocalyptic disaster without redemption, as a device that hinders the signification mechanisms. The apocalyptic calamity in Houellebecq’s work enunciates the disappearance of meaning embedded in the postmodern experience, as a disaster that offers an antidote but no long-term solution, as reparation that eventuates in depravation. ← 84 | 85 →

  The much yearned for utopia is transformed into a despondent dystopia. “The utopian intentions that sought out the Refutation of Humanism” (Possibility, p. 309.) [«Réfutation de L’Humanisme» (Possibilité, p. 435)] result not only in the extinction of humanity but also in the obliteration of humanistic values, bringing loneliness, bitterness, and ennui.20

  In the film adaptation of The Possibility of an Island, directed by Houellebecq himself,21 the apocalyptic aspects of the work are further emphasized. The cinematography uses bleak, monochromatic colors and lingers on images of dryness and darkness. The hero is seen wandering in a desolate landscape, the remnants of total devastation, the surface of a lifeless planet. This landscape was first captured by Houellebecq as a photographer, in pictures published in an appendix to the novella Lanzarote. Already in that work Houellebecq paid attention to the lunar landscape, the result of an earthquake, which he defined in its afterword.

  In the film, another neohuman, Marie23, is also roaming the landscape. She and Daniel25 move in concentric circles, unknowingly maintaining a distance from each other, approaching but never meeting. As director, Houellebecq leaves this possibility unresolved. The movement of two bodies, close by, yet at the same time distant and separate, instills the scene with obscure anticipation of the outcome, the possible encounter. This not only maintains suspense throughout the film’s journey but also clearly hints at what the characters lack: human contact and bonding.

  An apocalypse is directly connected to sin; in the entirety of Houellebecq’s futuristic project the original sin is the process of liberation that took place during the sixties. During this decade, sexuality was not only liberated but transformed into an idol to be worshipped, as the narrator of Whatever claims in his theory that “Sexuality is a system of social hierarchy” (Whatever, p. 92) [«La sexualité est un système de hiérarchie sociale» (Extension du domaine de la lutte, p. 93)]. The outcome of the sexual revolution was not only liberation, allowing us to express our sexuality, but the insistence that we express it liberally; this resulted in greater societal ← 85 | 86 → pressures on the individual and, ultimately, as Houellebecq reiterates, the utopian sixties divested humanity of civilization, throwing it back into an arena of merciless struggle and reducing man to the sum of his genetic features. So Daniel25 concludes that

  […] the genetic value of an individual, his power to pass on his characteristics to his descendants, could be summed up, very brutally by a single parameter: the number of descendants that he was, in the end, capable of procreating. (Possibility, p. 226).

  [«[…] la valeur génétique d’un individu, son pouvoir de transmettre à ses descendants ses caractéristiques, pouvait se résumer, très brutalement, à un seul paramètre: le nombre de descendants qu’il était au bout du compte en mesure de procréer.» (Possibilité, p. 320)]

  Utopia Becomes Dystopia

  Behind Houellebecq and Atwood’s dystopias, and preceding them, are to be found clearly utopian attempts. Both authors describe societies which are products of today’s world, an improvement upon it. Genetic engineering technologies and transplantation science make it possible to achieve eternal life (albeit of a bizarre nature) and physically modify the human body to the point of perfection. And indeed, Atwood and Houellebecq hint at the utopian genre: Atwood introduces her book with a citation from the last chapter of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a utopian novel and a piece of fictional writing that presents the structure, organization, and lifestyle of an ideal but nonexistent political entity. In a similar fashion, as was noted above, Houellebecq alludes to Huxley’s Island. The lands that Gulliver and Will Farnaby reach are utopias that exist on a different plane, in a far-away land that can only be reached by engaging in adventures. Houellebecq’s and Atwood’s utopian societies, however, are located in the future.

  The basis of the utopian world is the negation of effective reality, hence the isolation in space and time, the choice of norms of social justice and organizational totality. Creating an ideal lifestyle contrary to reality demarcates the latter’s principal deficiency. Utopias have always ← 86 | 87 → been located on islands,22 home to the ideal social entity far removed from real civilizations, usually thought of as an “island paradise”.23 Utopia is a social arrangement that requires a partial subjection of the private sphere for the sake of public good, which, in turn provides individual happiness. The island is also an image of the emotional and spiritual peace that man longs for, a refuge from the struggles of life,24 returning once more to the concept of the island as a haven. Yet an island is also the opposite of this, a symbol of loneliness: every man is an island, distant from the others and unable to bridge the gap between himself and those around him. All these meanings compete against each other and overlap on Houellebecq’s island.

  Houellebecq plays a thematic game of exchange between utopia and dystopia. As was already mentioned, an examination of his entire futuristic project, which began in The Elementary Particles, reveals that the roots of his utopia were sown in the 1960s, by the generation that liberated sexuality and further “stipulated liberalism in the field of morality” [«qui stipulait le libéralisme dans le domaine morale»].25 Michel and Bruno in Platform and Daniel1 in The Possibility of an Island are forced to live in a civilization demolished by the generation of their parents, whose concepts adhere perfectly to those of the dystopian society in Brave New World. ← 87 | 88 → The fin de millénaire of humans is a cynical dystopia, a constant reminder that it must be very bad before it can become very good. Indeed, the very good arrives at the end of The Possibility of an Island, with the eradication of the human race, by extinguishing dystopia and with the emergence of the new race of neohumans who establish a new utopia, one of liberation from sexuality. Yet it is revealed that this utopia too is a dystopian grotesque.

  As formulated by Jameson, the utopian form as a literary genre reflects a political program, a social totality of radical otherness, of radical difference, the enquiry of a different social system, emerging in “moments of need and crisis”.26 He maintains that leaps of the imagination to radical alternatives are no more than projections of our own social moment and the current historical situation. In drafting maps of utopia, the search for happiness is understood as the search for a good society. Utopian images of the good life are social and public, since the meaning of the social and the public are not in doubt; they are not yet fundamentally called into question or challenged.27 In Houellebecq’s future community, however, there is no integration between its members, despite the advocacy of a social totality. Even its architecture reflects an organized effort at separation: the compartmentalized, womb-like chambers in which neohumans reside (as portrayed visually in the film) increase the distance between individuals, keeping the community members confined indoors.28 This provides the “conditions of absolute physical isolation” (Possibility, p. 156) [«les conditions d’isolement physique absolu» (Possib
ilité, p. 221)] or “total physical separation” (Possibility, p. 294) [«la séparation physique totale» (Possibilité, p. 415)] advocated by the Supreme Sister. In Atwood’s novel, the restricted living areas are designed both to defend against the entry of savages from the outside and supervise those inside, preventing them from any deviation, violation from the norms, or escape. In this sense, the social formation is an anomaly, a society lacking integration, suffused with individuals whose consciousness is entirely preconditioned and controlled by ← 88 | 89 → the hegemonic order. Likewise, in the absence of society and community, there can be no ethics. Thus pornography and pedophilia, broadcasts of executions, suicides, and nudity – all for the amusement of an indifferent and bored audience – are ubiquitous in Atwood’s future society as depicted in Oryx and Crake. An earlier version of this phenomenon is described from Michel’s perspective in The Elementary Particles:

  Hence ACT UP activists thought it was important to run ads which others thought pornographic, depicting homosexual practices in close-up. Their lives seemed busier and more fulfilled, full of exciting incident. They had multiple partners, fucked each other in back rooms; sometimes the condom split or slipped off and they died of AIDS. Even then their deaths seemed radical, dignified. Television gave lessons in dignity, especially TF1. […]. What conferred dignity on people was television. (p. 100)

  [«Ainsi, les militants d’Act Up estimaient important de faire passer à la télévision certaines publicités, jugées par d’autres pornographiques, représentant différentes pratiques homosexuelles filmées en gros plan. Plus généralement leur vie apparaissait plaisante et active, parsemée d’événements variés. Ils avaient des partenaires multiples, ils s’enculaient dans des backrooms. Parfois les préservatifs glissaient, ou explosaient. Ils mouraient alors du sida; mais leur mort elle-même avait un sens militant et digne. Plus généralement la télévision, en particulier TF1, offrait une leçon permanente de dignité. […] Ce qui donnait à l’homme une dignité supplémentaire, c’était la télévision.» (Particules, p. 120)]

  In this manner, these ostensible utopias are proven to be diametrically opposed to the utopian concept: as super-societies they in fact completely lack any concept of society. The actions of Daniel25 when he leaves the compound are testimony to the failure of the utopian project and the persistence of the principle of human creativity, which aspires to achieve progress and change. Daniel25 finds it insufficient merely to comment on his predecessor’s real life experiences; doing so paralyzes human development. During his quest, Daniel25 symbolically finds a fragment of Plato’s Symposium, a text dealing with primary union and human relationships,29 which was created by virtue of a societal organization. Such a union has been completely eradicated from the utopia of the future.

  Underlying this utopia-turned-dystopia is western society as it stands today. In the modern, ‘liquid society’, human relationships have lost any ← 89 | 90 → institutional protection, which is now perceived as a nuisance and an intolerable restriction on human freedom and self-fulfillment. Liberation from institutional frameworks causes human relationships to become weaker and rarer, easily shattered and short-lived.30 The ultimate value of consumer society is a happy life. Not only is it the only society in human history to promise happiness in this life and to refrain from justifying any form of unhappiness, but it also refuses to tolerate misery, depicting it as an abomination.31 Nevertheless, as Daniel1 makes clear,

  To increase desires to an unbearable level while making the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based. (Possibility, p. 57).

  [«Augmenter les désirs jusqu’à l’insoutenable tout en rendant leur réalisation de plus en plus inaccessible, tel était le principe unique sur lequel reposait la société occidentale.» (Possibilité, p. 83)]

  Future societies resolve this problem by creating a world devoid of erotica and excitement, an emotionally impoverished world. Houellebecq’s futuristic society is based on simulacra and an alternative to reality. The neohumans are encouraged to consume rather than create: the protagonists do not experience reality, instead reading about it in accounts of their predecessors’ experiences. Baudrillard describes the simulacrum as a psychosomatic disease, in which the distinction between “things as they are” and “things as they pretend to be”, or reality and illusion, or the real state of affairs and its simulation, is blurred.32 According to Atwood, reality is exchanged for virtual images on screens. Moreover, the utopia of the consumer world is the dystopia of the civil world. A consumer, says Bauman, is the enemy of the citizen;33 but a society must be built on citizens. Indeed, with regard to The Elementary Particles, Jerry Andrew Varsava points out that the work’s very title “suggests a highly fragmented society in which […] individuals are inconsequential, dysfunctional particularities of a ← 90 | 91 → dysfunctional whole, and therein are living illustrations of the ‘atomization of society’.”34 Houellebecq portrays the implications of the tendencies currently prevalent in the developed world, in which decreasing interest in the acquisition and application of social skills, increasing political apathy, and a total lack of concern for community ties are all apparent.

  In the yet more developed world, the perfect one of the future, the humanistic discourse, which developed in western civilization within the society-civil structure, has completely collapsed. We learn this from what is missing: Houellebecq’s future society lacks any values associated with human advancement, individual rights and development. On the contrary, justice as an institutional/legal concept, real or abstract, grounded in a judicial system, is absolutely excluded from the futuristic program, as are democracy, partnership, freedom of thought, or speech. There is no rationalism, the criticism of reason, the casting of doubt (the value of criticism does not even exist, as is surmised from the avid adherence to the Supreme Sister’s preaching). Most importantly, this future society lacks the concept of progress, the sense that the future will be better than the past. This society is in a state of ethical, moral, and human stagnation and views itself practically as the end-of-history, allotting no more room to cultural creativity.

  As was noted, Houellebecq compares the developed society of today to the barbaric world which survived a series of global disasters wiping out everything human. The social environment of Daniel1, Bruno, and Michel bears an acute resemblance to that of pre-civilization human savages in their approach to the elderly, women, and the weak. Parallel scenes unveil the analogy between the two, such as the sexual hierarchical system. Compare the savages to the refined technology-wise prophet:

  I had almost got used to their appearance, their crude, craggy features, their exposed sexual organs […]. The chief was a male of about forty, with graying hair; he was assisted by two young males who had rather broad chests, by far the biggest and most robust individuals in the group; copulation with the females was reserved for them: when the females encountered one of the three dominant males, they crouched down on all fours and presented their vulva. (Possibility, pp. 317–318)

  [«Je m’étais à peu près habitué à leur aspect, à leurs traits burinés, grossiers, à leurs organes sexuels apparents […]. Le chef était un mâle d’une quarantaine d’années, au poil grisonnant; il était assisté par deux jeunes mâles au poitrail bien découplé, de très loin les individus les plus grands et les plus robustes du groupe; la copulation ← 91 | 92 → avec les femelles leur était réservée: lorsque celles-ci rencontraient un des trois mâles dominants, elles se mettaient à quatre pattes et présentaient leur vulve.» (Possibilité, p. 448)]

  The prophet took his place in his reclining chair; we sat on ottomans down below. At a sign from him, the young girls scattered and returned […] ‘Susan….’, said the prophet softly to a very blond girl […]. Obeying without a word, she knelt between his thighs, opened the dressing gown, and began to suck him off; his sex was short and thick. He wanted, apparently, to establish from the outset a clear position
of dominance. (Possibility, pp. 161–162)

  [«Le prophète s’assit dans son fauteuil relax; nous nous installâmes sur des poufs en contrebas. Sur un signe de sa main les jeunes filles s’égaillèrent et revinrent. […] ‘Susan…’, dit doucement le prophète à une jeune fille très blonde […]. Obéissant sans un mot, elle s’agenouilla entre ses cuisses, écarta le peignoir et commença à le sucer; son sexe était court, épais. Il souhaitait apparemment établir d’entrée de jeu une position de dominance claire.» (Possibilité, pp. 228–229)]

  Elsewhere in the text, when Daniel24 reads about the agony experienced by the elderly in the summer of 2003, he comments:

  ‘Scenes unworthy of a modern country,’ wrote the journalist, without realizing that they were in fact the proof that France was becoming a modern country, that only an authentically modern country was capable of treating old people purely as rubbish. (Possibility, p. 63; emphasis in the original)