Anti-Matter

by Ben Jeffery

  5

  Utopia

  The neo-human paradise Houellebecq imagines at the end of Atomised returns, ruined, in The Possibility of an Island. Where the decoding and reconstruction of the genome meant a cure for the human condition in the former novel, in the latter neo-humans live in a state of numbed isolation, free of death, protected from physical harm, but half-alive, hypnotised with nostalgia for their ancestors’ desires. Genetic engineering has not gifted a new identity so much as a hollow copy of an identity, an emptiness undisguised by pain and striving.

  The Possibility of an Island is told from two points of view. Chapters alternate between Daniel, the human comedian, and his neo-human descendent, Daniel24 – a partially-modified clone of the original Daniel, living by himself in a gated compound roughly two millennia in the future when Earth has been devastated by drought and nuclear war. It emerges that Daniel (or Daniel1, as he is identified) was a witness to the global triumph of the Elohimite Church, a cult – copied by Houellebecq from the real-life Raelian sect – that claims victory over death via the artificial preservation and duplication of human genetic code. Whenever an Elohimite dies, a clone is immediately made as a replacement. Daniel1 was among the first to participate in this procedure, and before committing suicide he records his life story as a testimony to the neo-human dawn. The comedian’s insoluble misanthropy, and in particular the relationship with Esther that shattered his will to live, made him, in the eyes of the cult’s leaders, ‘quite representative of the limitations and contradictions that were to drive the [human] species to ruin’. His autobiography is kept as a monument to the virtues of neo-human modification. In addition to reincarnation, neo-humans have been scripted so as to minimise the power of personal initiative – restlessness being symptomatic of dissatisfaction with one’s status as an individual, and therefore the root of will, attachment and desire; the instruments of misery. To this end, a complete repertoire of behaviour was assembled by the neo-human engineers. Psychology is supposed to have become ‘as predictable as the functioning of a refrigerator’. The neo-human mind is designed for ascetic contemplation. Infrastructure in the post-apocalyptic world is barely described, though it seems as if it consists of little more an automated Central City, administrating material needs. A quasi-religious ethos exists, but no general society. Individuals live apart and have little more than fleeting, electronic contact with others of their kind. Study of their human origins is encouraged as a touchstone for meditation. The chapters narrated by Daniel24 (succeeded by Daniel25 halfway through the story) take the form of a commentary on Daniel1’s life. ‘Consciousness of a total determinism was without doubt what differentiated us most clearly from our human predecessors’, Daniel25 tells us. However, the neo-human project ends as a failure: both Daniel24 and Daniel25 are corrupted by Daniel1’s story, and finally Daniel25 deviates from the behavioural map, leaving his enclosure on a pilgrimage to the site of the first Elohimite Church on Lanzarote. His trip is the novel’s 40-page epilogue.

  In one obvious sense, Houellebecq’s dystopia is just a recent example in a series going back, at least, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) – a book that’s prominently discussed in Atomised – of science fiction pitting desensitised, engineered happiness against ‘natural’, vigorous misery. The Possibility of an Island, however, is more like a mirror-image of the iconic scene in Brave New World, where the Savage claims the value of poetry, danger, freedom, goodness and sin against medicated peace:

  ‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’

  ‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’

  ‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.

  ‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.

  Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

  In Possibility human wants are semi-mythic states for creatures meant to have developed past them. It bears a comparison to that seminal document of human imperfection, Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), and a novel that reads like a dramatic interrogation of that text, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003). In Oryx and Crake, like Atomised and The Possibility of an Island, disgust for the human condition motivates the search for a solution through genetic engineering. The disgust belongs to Crake, the God-like scientist who splices together a new type of human animal, and arranges a flood – a laboratory-spawned plague – to sweep away the one already existing. Evaluating his creations, named ‘Crake’s Children’ or ‘Crakers’:

  It was amazing – said Crake – what once-unimaginable things had been accomplished by the team here. What had been altered was nothing less than the ancient primate brain. Gone were its destructive features, the features responsible for the world’s current illnesses. For instance, racism… had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the [Crakers] simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it. …the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired. They ate nothing but leaves and grass and roots and a berry or two; thus their foods were plentiful and always available. Their sexuality was not a constant torment to them, not a cloud of turbulent hormones: they came into heat at regular intervals, as did most mammals other than man.

  In fact there would never be anything for these people to inherit, there would be no family trees, no marriages, and no divorces. They were perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money. Best of all, they recycled their own excrement.

  The Crakers are designed to expire at thirty. Fear of death, the very foreknowledge of it, is edited out of their brains. So too the want of religion (the ‘G-Spot’, Crake calls it). The great irony of Oryx and Crake is that, after the apocalypse and Crake’s death, it takes mythology to lure the Children out from the lab into the world bequeathed to them – the seed for the religion that takes shape at the novel’s climax with Crake as its godhead, the creator celebrated against his design. A similar irony is at play in The Possibility of an Island where it gradually becomes clear that the neo-humans have their own ideas of paradise; their own belief, in fact, in a race of supreme beings that will succeed them – the mysterious Future Ones, whose perfection is such that they are almost impossible to conceive. ‘The Future Ones, unlike us, will not be machines, nor truly separate beings. They will be one, whilst also being many. Nothing can give us an exact image of the nature of the Future Ones.’ The gods have their own gods.

  The infamous conceit of Civilisation and its Discontents is that it is not merely the particular civilisation or society we happen to inhabit that generates human neuroses, it is civilisation as such that does this, since it is impossible to reconcile the restrictions needed to keep a social group together with the satisfaction of individual desires. More substantially, the irreconcilability between the urge to belong in society and the urge to meet one’s own appetites is a non-contingent part of human nature. Untranquil, frustrated animals is what we are; fundamentally mal-adapted and misshapen. Psychoanalysis might be seen as offering a retort, of a fashion, to the religious-mystic idea that the path to fulfilment is through the elimination of desire and the exultation of immediate being – even if such a state were achievable, it would be (in the proper sense of the word) inhuman. The engineered beings in The Possibility of an Island are creatures in which the dilemma has been attacked but not defeated. Harmful natural impulses have been deprogrammed, but th
e mental spaces these impulses occupied are left unfilled, leaving the neo-humans with the sensation that they have been diluted rather than enhanced. ‘Planning the extinction of desire in Buddhist-like terms,’ says Daniel25, ‘[the Elohimite designers] had banked on the maintenance of a weakened, non-tragic energy, purely conservative in nature, which would have continued to enable the functioning of thought… This phenomenon had only been produced in insignificant proportions, and it was, on the contrary, sadness, melancholy, languid and finally mortal apathy that had submerged our disincarnated generations. The most patent indicator of failure was that I had ended up envying the destiny of Daniel1.’ If human nature were truly corrected, it is possible we would be unable to sympathise with, or even relate to, its products (which is why the Future Ones are, necessarily, unimaginable). In the end it is the anomaly, the ‘weakness’, of religion that makes the Crakers intriguing.

  Unfortunately, up until the epilogue, the dystopian scenes in The Possibility of an Island rather confirm the dullness of neo-human life by being solemn, obscure and laughably unconvincing bits of fiction (Daniel24, a posthuman monk, still insists on calling his penis his ‘virile member’, for whatever reason). Possibility is disagreeable on purpose – Houellebecq has some fun (insofar as Daniel, the celebrity shock-comic, resembles Michel Houellebecq, the provocateur author) implying that his audience are stupid to listen to him, and that he hates them – but it’s a rotten piece of work largely because there’s so much mud between the scenes where its real interests lie. Transparently, the energy core in the book is not genetic engineering, or posthumanity, or cults, or the state of Western civilisation, but mortal frenzy. The bitterness about human embodiment that simmered through Whatever and Atomised boils up, at the end of Daniel1’s story, into a kind of ecstasy of hatred:

  it wasn’t long before the heat settled on the south of Spain; naked young girls began to tan themselves, especially on weekends, on the beach near the residence, and I began to feel the return, albeit weak and flaccid, of something that wasn’t even really desire – for the word would seem to me, despite everything, to imply a minimum belief in the possibility of its fulfilment – but the memory, the phantom of what could have been desire. I could now make out clearly the cosa mentale [the desire for desire], the ultimate torment, and at that moment I could say at last that I understood. Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there was no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures – whether associated with rich food, tobacco, alcohol or drugs – were only derisory and desperate compensations, mini-suicides that did not have the courage to speak their name, attempts to speed up the destruction of a body that no longer had access to the one real pleasure. Thus human life was organised in a terribly simple fashion, and for twenty years or so, in my scripts and sketches, I had pussy-footed around a reality that I could have expressed in just a few sentences. Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. … Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities whilst ceaselessly bearing witness – powerless and shamefilled – to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies… From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people’s bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favour of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.

  This is probably the most unvarnished passage in Houellebecq’s fiction. That it is hysterical, reductive, ugly, inconsistent (since earlier in the book Daniel says it’s not sex that is most desirable, but sex with love), and involves more than one false generalisation is also quite true. But it has a pulse the rest of the book, for the most part, lacks. Still – to digress for a moment – it’s tempting to say that the failure of The Possibility of an Island is not only that there’s too much padding between the bits where its blood rises, but also that there’s not enough when it finally does. In Atomised it’s Bruno who acts as Houellebecq’s avatar for his theories about sex and its resemblance to free-market capitalism, but there the disenchantment is at least tempered by humour and pity, e.g. during his farcical visit to the Lieu de Changement, or the variously inept efforts at seduction (‘I had to stick to my “liberal humanist” position’, he notes, bitterly, ‘I knew in my heart that it was my only chance of getting laid’), or the brilliantly banal awfulness of the scenes describing his and Christiane’s visits to Parisian sex clubs, where Bruno ‘could not help but feel that many of the women they met… were somewhat disappointed when they saw his penis. No one ever commented; their courtesy was exemplary, and the atmosphere was always friendly and polite; but their looks couldn’t lie and slowly he realised that, from a sexual viewpoint, he just didn’t make the grade.’ Whereas The Possibility of an Island is almost totally humourless, starring a comedian who hates laughter (‘you always end up crashing into the same difficulty, which is that life, fundamentally, is not comical’), and whose egotism is barely embellished. The novel is an archetypal work of post-fame indulgence, simultaneously ‘purer’ and less appealing. It can be a minor shock, actually, to return to Atomised after Possibility and to realise how conventionally tender much of the earlier book is – in the passages recalling the young Djerzinski’s life with his grandmother, for instance; or the death of his lover. In Possibility, on the other hand, everything is fully subsumed to the numbers and figures of erotic pleasure – how much you can get, with who, for how long; the unequal resources and their bullying power; the hierarchies and basic indifference of the haves for the have-nots. For Daniel and the other Houellebecq hedonists, what’s suffered is not some philosophical or artistic disorientation, but a super-orientation, a surplus -orientation: they know too well what they want. It’s this clarity that disorientates art and philosophy, by making everything so blindingly simple. But the more plainly Houellebecq insists the more specious he seems. This is the peculiarity of truth in art – that truth should require ‘art’ (a synonym for deception, as we know) to make itself felt. It’s why The Possibility of an Island, although it contains the least ‘pussyfooting’ of all the books, lacks purchase.

  The science-fiction in Atomised and The Possibility of an Island is interesting mainly for its poverty. Neither case is well-imagined, nor do they play a key role in the stories they belong to. Unlike the grandiose philosophising or lurid sex writing, it’s pretty easy to imagine both novels functioning just as well without the futurism. Atomised could have stopped at the results of Djerzinski’s research, not least because the nirvana it creates is barely sketched before the book finishes. Almost all the (neo-human) narrator tells us is that:

  Having broken the filial chain that linked us to humanity, we live on. Men consider us to be happy; it is certainly true that we have succeeded in overcoming the monstrous egotism, cruelty and anger which they could not; we live very diffe
rent lives. Science and art are still part of our society, but without the stimulus of personal vanity, the pursuit of Truth and Beauty has taken on a less urgent aspect. To humans of the old species, our world seems a paradise.

  Possibility’s dystopia, although it’s described in much greater detail, may exist only to debunk the promise made in Atomised. The key difference between the two futures is that in Atomised sex has been done away with; whereas in the later book, although the neo-humans do not have sex, their ‘sexual biochemistry… had remained almost identical’ with that of humans. This ‘was undoubtedly the real reason for the sensation of suffocation and malaise’, reports Daniel25, ‘that overcame me as I advanced through Daniel1’s story’. So it is still sex, indirectly, that disrupts the neo-humans and causes their unhappiness, Houellebecq seeming literally (and literarily) incapable of imagining life otherwise. His utopias are either empty or they crumble under the old pressures of human life. Marcuse described the inability to imagine historical difference as the atrophy of the utopian imagination, and it seems supremely fitting that Houellebecq’s fiction – perhaps the literary product from the underbelly of the liberal-capitalist End of History – so thoroughly fails to envision a better world.