The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  “‘We mu-st’—he spoke bizarrely, detaching each syllable, almost like he was speaking in a foreign language—‘my coll-eagues are, it is my im-pre-ssion, much too pre-occ-u-pied by the Am-er-i-can press. We re-main Eur-o-pe-ans…Our ref-er-ence point, is what happ-ens in En-gland…’

  “All right, 21 was obviously copied from an English format, but so was GQ; that did not explain why he’d felt he had to move from one to the other. Had there been studies done in England, a shift in readership?

  “‘Not to my know-ledge…You are very pretty…,’ he continued, without any apparent connection to what he’d said before. ‘You could be more me-di-a friend-ly…’

  “I was sitting right next to Karl Lagerfeld, who was eating constantly: he used his bare hands to serve himself from a plate of salmon, dipped the pieces in the cream-and-dill sauce, and stuffed them down. From time to time, Tom Cruise threw him distraught looks. Björk, on the other hand, seemed absolutely fascinated—it has to be said that, although she always tried to play with the poetry of the sagas, Icelandic energy, etc., she was in fact conventional and mannered to the extreme; she must have been fascinated to find herself in the presence of a real savage. I suddenly realized that you needed only to take off the couturier’s frilly shirt, his tie and silk-lined smoking jacket, and cover him with animal skins: he would have been perfect in the role of a primitive Teuton. He speared a boiled potato and smothered it with caviar, before saying to me: ‘You must be media friendly, even if it’s just a little bit. I, for example, am very media friendly. I am a big cheese in the media.’ I think he must have just given up on his second diet—in any case, he had already written a book on the first one.

  “Someone put on some music, the crowd stirred slightly, and I think Naomi Campbell began to dance. I continued to stare at Lajoinie, waiting for his proposal. In despair, I started a conversation with Jade Jagger, we must have talked about Formentera or something of that kind, an easy subject, but she made a good impression on me, she was an intelligent girl, without airs and graces; Lajoinie’s eyes were half-closed, he seemed to have dozed off, but I think now that he was observing how I behaved with the others—that too was part of his method of personnel management. At one point he grumbled something, but I couldn’t hear what, the music was too loud; then he threw an irritated look to his left: in a corner of the room, Karl Lagerfeld had begun to walk on his hands; Björk stared at him, laughing her head off. Then the couturier came and sat down again, giving me a big slap on the shoulders, screaming: ‘You all right? Everything all right?’ before swallowing three eels one after the other. ‘You’re the most beautiful woman here! You wipe the floor with them!’ then he seized the cheese board; I believe that he had really taken a shine to me. Lajoinie watched with incredulity as he devoured the Livarot. ‘You really are a big cheese, Karl,’ he said in one breath; then he turned to me and pronounced: ‘Fifty thousand euros.’ And that’s all; that’s all he said to me that day.

  “The following morning, I passed by his office, and he explained a little bit more. The magazine was to be called Lolita. ‘It’s a question of agap in the market…,’ he said. I understood more or less what he meant: 20 Ans, for example, was bought mainly by fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girls, who wanted to be emancipated in all things, sex in particular; with Lolita, he wanted to find the opposite gap in the market. ‘Our target readership starts at ten years old…,’ he said, ‘but there is no upper limit.’ His bet was that, 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. His bet was that the feeling of ridiculousness, which had been so strong among women, and Frenchwomen in particular, was going to gradually disappear and be replaced by pure fascination with limitless youth.

  “The least you can say is that his gamble paid off. The average age of our readers is twenty-eight—and that increases a little every month. For the advertisers, we are becoming the women’s magazine—I am telling you what I’ve been told, and I’ve some difficulty believing it. I am steering, I am trying to steer, or rather I’m pretending to steer, but basically I don’t understand anything anymore. I am a good professional, that’s true, I told you I was a bit psychorigid—it stems from that: there are never any typos in the magazine, the photos are well laid out, we always publish on the scheduled date; but the content…It’s understandable that people are afraid of getting old, especially women, that’s always been true, but in this case…It’s gone beyond anything you could imagine; I think women have gone completely mad.”

  Daniel24, 2

  NOW THAT EVERYTHING is appearing, in the clarity of emptiness, I am free to watch the snow. My distant predecessor, the unfortunate comedian, chose to live here, in the residence that once stood—excavations prove it, as do photographs—on the site of the unit Proyecciones XXI, 13. Back then it was—it is strange to say, and also a little sad—a seaside residence.

  The sea has disappeared, and with it the memory of waves. We possess audio and visual documents; none of them enable us to truly experience the tenacious fascination that gripped man, revealed in so many poems, in the face of the apparently repetitive spectacle of the ocean crashing upon the sand. Nor are we able to understand the thrill of the chase, the pursuit of prey; nor religious feeling, nor that kind of immobile, objectless frenzy that man called mystical ecstasy.

  Before, when humans lived together, they gave each other mutual satisfaction through physical contact; we understand that, for we have received the message of the Supreme Sister. Here is the message of the Supreme Sister, in its intermediary formulation:

  Admit that men have neither dignity nor rights; that good and evil are simple notions, scarcely theorized forms of pleasure and pain.

  Treat all men as animals—deserving understanding and pity, for their souls and their bodies.

  Remain on this noble and excellent path.

  By turning from the path of pleasure, without managing to find an alternative, we have only prolonged the latter tendencies of mankind. When prostitution was definitively outlawed, and the ban effectively applied across the entire surface of the planet, men entered the gray age. They were never to leave it, at least not before the sovereignty of the species had disappeared. No truly convincing theory has been formulated to explain what bears all the hallmarks of mass suicide.

  Android robots appeared on the market, equipped with a versatile artificial vagina. A high-tech system analyzed in real time the configuration of male sexual organs, arranged temperatures and pressures; a radiometric sensor allowed the prediction of ejaculation, the consequent modification of stimulation, and the prolonging of intercourse for as long as was wished. It had a curiosity value for a few weeks, then sales collapsed completely: the robotics companies, some of whom had invested hundreds of millions of euros, went bankrupt one by one. The event was commented on by some as a desire to return to the natural, to the truth of human relationships; of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as subsequent events would clearly demonstrate: the truth is that men were simply giving up the ghost.

  Daniel1, 3

  A drinks machine dispensed an excellent hot chocolate. We swallowed it in one go, with unconcealed pleasure.

  —Patrick Lefebvre, AMBULANCE DRIVER FOR ANIMALS

  THE SHOW We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts was undoubtedly the pinnacle of my career—from a media point of view, I mean. I briefly migrated from the “Theater” pages to “Home Affairs.” There were complaints from Muslim associations, bomb threats; in other words, a bit of action. I was taking a risk, it’s true, but a calculated one; the Islamic fundamentalists, who had appeared in the 2000s, had suffered more or less the same fate as the punks. At first they had been made obsolete by the appearance of polite, gentle, and pious Muslims from the Tabligh movement—a kind of equivalent of New Wave, to continue the analogy; the girls at this time still wore the veil, but it w
as pretty, decorated, with lace and see-through material, rather like an erotic accessory, in fact. And of course, subsequently, the phenomenon had progressively died out: the expensively built mosques were deserted, and the Arab immigrant girls were once again available in the sexual marketplace, like everyone else. It was something of a done deal; when you bear in mind the society we lived in, it could hardly have been otherwise; nevertheless, in the space of one or two seasons, I had found myself cast in the role of a hero of free speech. Personally, as regards freedom, I was rather against; it’s amusing to observe that it’s always the enemies of freedom who find themselves, at one moment or another, most in need of it.

  Isabelle was at my side, and she gave me acute advice.

  “What you must do,” she said from the outset, “is have the rabble on your side. With the rabble on your side, no one can get at you.”

  “They are on my side,” I protested; “they come to my shows.”

  “That’s not enough; you’ve got to go further. What they respect is money. You’ve got money, but you don’t show it off enough. You’ve got to blow it a bit more.”

  On her advice, I therefore bought a Bentley Continental GT, a “magnificent and racy” coupe which, according to L’Auto-Journal, “symbolized the return of Bentley to its original vocation: offering sports cars of very high standing.” A month later, I was on the cover of Radikal Hip-Hop—or, rather, my car was. Most of the rappers bought Ferraris, some of the more original ones bought Porsches; but a Bentley completely trounced them. They had no culture, those little cunts, even when it came to cars. Keith Richards, for example, had a Bentley, like all serious musicians. I could have chosen an Aston Martin, but it was dearer, and anyway the Bentley was better, the hood was longer, you could have lined up three sluts on it with no problem. For 160,000 euros, it was almost a bargain; in any case, as far as credibility among the rabble goes, I think I made a good profit from the investment.

  That show also marked the beginning of my brief—but lucrative—movie career. I had inserted a short film into the performance; my initial project, entitled Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!, already had that tone of light Islamophobic burlesque which was later going to contribute so much to my renown; but, on Isabelle’s advice, I had had the idea of introducing a touch of anti-Semitism, aimed at counterbalancing the rather anti-Arab nature of the show; it was a wise route to take. I therefore finally opted for a porn film, or rather a parody of a porn film—a genre that, it’s true, is easy to parody—entitled Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler). The actresses were authentic Arab immigrant girls, guaranteed to originate from the hardest Parisian suburbs—sluts but veiled, just the right type; we had filmed the outside shots at the Sea of Sand, in Ermenonville. It was comical—a rather elevated form of comedy, that’s true. People had laughed; or at least most people. In an interview with Jamel Debbouze, he described me as a “super-cool dude”; you couldn’t have asked for more. In fact, Jamel had told me just before the program: “I can’t wind you up, dude. We’ve got the same audience.” The TV presenter Marc Fogiel, who had organized the meeting, quickly realized our complicity, and began to shit his pants; I have to admit that for a long time I had been wanting to eviscerate that little prick. But I contained myself: I was very good—super-cool, in fact.

  The producers of the show had asked me to cut a part of my short film—a part that, in fact, was not very funny; it had been filmed in a block of flats being demolished in Franconville, but was supposed to take place in East Jerusalem. It involved a dialogue between a terrorist from Hamas and a German tourist that took the form of, at one moment, Pascalian dialectics on the foundations of human identity, and, at another, a meditation on economics—a bit à la Schumpeter. The Palestinian terrorist began by establishing that, on the metaphysical level, the value of the hostage was nil—because he was an infidel; it wasn’t, however, negative, as would have been the case, for example, of a Jew; his destruction was therefore not desirable, it merited simply indifference. On the economic level, however, the value of the hostage was considerable—as he belonged to a rich nation known for showing solidarity with its citizens. Having made these introductory remarks, the Palestinian terrorist carried out a series of experiments. First, he tore out one of the hostages’ teeth—with his bare hands—before observing that his negotiable value had remained unchanged. Then he proceeded to do the same operation on a fingernail—with the help, this time, of pincers. A second terrorist intervened, and a brief discussion took place between the two Palestinians, on a more or less Darwinian basis. In conclusion, they tore off the hostage’s testicles, without omitting to carefully sew up the wound to avoid a premature death. By mutual agreement, they concluded that the biological value of the hostage was the only value to emerge modified from the operation; his metaphysical value remained nil, and his negotiable value very high. In short, it became more and more Pascalian—and, visually, more and more unbearable; incidentally, it was a surprise to me to realize how inexpensive the special effects used in gore movies really were.

  The uncut version of my short film was screened a few months later at the Festival of Strangeness, and it was then that the movie proposals began to flood in. Curiously, I was contacted once again by Jamel Debbouze, who wanted to break out of his usual character type to play a bad boy, a real villain. His agent quickly made him see that it would be an error, and finally nothing was done, but the anecdote seems significant to me.

  To contextualize it better, you must remember that in those years—the last years of an economically viable French cinema industry—the only attestable successes of French production, the only ones that could pretend to, if not rival American productions, then at least more or less cover their costs, belonged to the comedy genre—subtle or vulgar, they all managed to work. On the other hand, artistic recognition, which enabled both access to the last remaining public subsidies and decent coverage in the respectable media, went first of all, in cinema as in the other arts, to productions that praised evil—or, at least, that challenged moral values conventionally described as “traditional,” in a sort of institutionalized anarchy perpetuating itself through mini-pantomimes whose repetitive nature did not blunt their charms in the eyes of the critics, all the more so as they facilitated the writing of reviews that were predictable and clichéd, yet in which they were still able to present themselves as groundbreaking. The putting to death of morality had, on the whole, become a sort of ritual sacrifice necessary for the reassertion of the dominant values of the group—centered for some decades now on competition, innovation, and energy, more than on fidelity and duty. If the fluidification of forms of behavior required by a developed economy was incompatible with a normative catalog of restrained conduct, it was, however, perfectly suited to a perpetual celebration of the will and the ego. Any form of cruelty, cynical selfishness, or violence was therefore welcome—certain subjects, like parricide or cannibalism, in particular. The fact that a comedian, who was known as a comedian, was able to move easily into the domains of cruelty and evil, was therefore necessarily going to constitute, for the profession as a whole, an electric shock. My agent greeted what can truly be described as a stampede to his door—in less than two months, I received forty different script proposals—with qualified enthusiasm. I was certainly going to earn a lot of money, he said, and he was going to as well; but, in terms of notoriety, I was going to lose. The scriptwriter may well be an essential element in the making of a film, but he remains, first of all, absolutely unknown to the general public; and anyway, second of all, writing scripts represented a lot of work, which risked distracting me from my career as a showman.

  If he was right on the first point—my participation, as scriptwriter, co-scriptwriter, or simply consultant on the credits of around thirty films, was not going to add one iota to my notoriety—he made a wild overestimate on the second. Filmmakers, I quickly realized, are not very intelligent: you need only bring them an idea, a situation, a fragment of stor
y line, all the things they would be incapable of thinking up themselves; you add a bit of dialogue, three or four silly witticisms—I was capable of producing about forty pages of script per day—you present the product, and they are thrilled. Then they change their minds all the time, on everything—them, the production, the actors, anyone. You need only go to the meetings, tell them they are completely right, that you will rewrite according to their instructions, and Bob’s your uncle; never had I known such easy money.

  My biggest success as a principal scriptwriter was certainly Diogenes the Cynic; contrary to what the title might suggest, it was not a costume drama. The cynics—and it is a generally forgotten point of their doctrine—instructed children to kill and devour their own parents as soon as the latter, becoming unsuitable for work, represented useless mouths to feed; a contemporary adaptation about the problems posed by the development of the fourth age was scarcely difficult to imagine. At one point I had the idea of offering the lead role to the philosopher Michel Onfray, who, naturally, was enthusiastic; but the indigent graphomaniac, so at ease in front of television presenters, or before reasonably amicable students, completely collapsed when faced with a camera, and it was impossible to get anything out of him. The producers returned, wisely, to more tried-and-tested formulas, and Jean-Pierre Marielle was, as usual, masterly.