The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  At about the same time, I bought a second home, in Andalusia, in a zone that was then very wild, a little north of Almería, called the Cabo de Gata Nature Reserve. The architect’s plan was sumptuous, with palm trees, orange trees, Jacuzzis, and cascades—which, given the climate (it was the driest region in Europe), could be interpreted as slightly mad. I didn’t know it at all, but this region was the only one on the Spanish coast up until then to have been spared by tourism; five years later, the land prices had tripled. In short, in those years, I was a bit like King Midas.

  It was then that I decided to marry Isabelle; we had known each other for three years, which placed us precisely in the average of premarital association. The ceremony was discreet, and a little sad; she had just turned forty. It seems obvious to me today that the two events were linked; that I wanted, as a proof of affection, to minimize her shock at turning forty. Not that it manifested itself in complaints, or a visible anguish, or anything clearly definable; it was both more fleeting and more poignant. Occasionally—especially in Spain, when we were preparing to go to the beach, and she was putting on her swimsuit—I could feel her, at the moment when I glanced at her, wincing slightly, as if she had felt a punch between the shoulder blades. A quickly stifled grimace of pain distorted her magnificent features—the beauty of her fine, sensitive face was of the kind that resists time; but her body, despite the swimming, despite the classical dance, was beginning to suffer the first blows of age—blows which, she knew all too well, were going to multiply rapidly, leading to total degradation. I didn’t fully know what it was that happened to my facial expression in those moments that made her suffer so much; I would have given a great deal to avoid it, for, I repeat, I loved her; but manifestly that wasn’t possible. Nor could I reiterate that she was still as desirable, still as beautiful; I never felt, in the slightest way, capable of lying to her. I recognized the look she wore afterward: it was that humble, sad look of the sick animal that steps away from the pack, puts its head on its paws, and sighs softly, because it feels itself wounded and knows that it can expect no pity from its fellow creatures.

  Daniel24, 3

  THE CLIFFS TOWER above the sea, in their vertical absurdity, and there will be no end to the suffering of man. In the foreground I see rocks, sharp and black. Further, pixelated slightly on the surface of the screen, is a muddy, indistinct area that we continue to call the sea, and which was once the Mediterranean. Creatures advance in the foreground, along the crest of the cliffs, like their ancestors did, several centuries before; they are less numerous and more dirty. They fight, try to regroup, form packs or hordes. Their faces are now just a surface of red flesh, bare and raw, attacked by worms. They shiver with pain at the slightest breath of wind, which sweeps up gravel and sand. Occasionally they throw themselves on each other, fight and wound each other with their blows or their words. One by one they detach themselves from the group, their pace slows, they fall on their backs. Elastic and white, their backs can withstand contact with the rock; they then resemble upturned turtles. Insects and birds land on bare flesh, peck at it and devour it; the creatures still suffer a little, then are still. The others, a few feet away, continue their struggles and little games. From time to time they come closer to watch the agony of their companions; in these moments their eyes express only an empty curiosity.

  I quit the surveillance program; the image disappears, returns to the toolbar. There is a new message from Marie22:

  The enumerated lump

  Of the eye that closes

  In the squashed space

  Contains the last term.

  247, 214327, 4166, 8275. Light appears, grows, and rises; I rush into a tunnel of light. I understand what man felt, when he penetrated woman. I understand woman.

  Daniel1, 4

  Since we are men, it is right, not to laugh at the misfortunes of mankind, but to lament them.

  —Democritus of Abdera

  ISABELLE WAS GROWING WEAKER. Of course, it wasn’t easy, for a woman already wounded in the flesh, to work for a magazine like Lolita, where every month there arrived new tarts who were always younger, sexier, and more arrogant. I remember I was the first to touch on the question. We were walking along the top of the cliffs of Carbonera, which plunged, pitch black, into sparkling blue water. She didn’t seek any escape route, she didn’t evade the issue: indeed, indeed, in her line of work you had to maintain a certain atmosphere of conflict, of narcissistic competition, but of which she felt more incapable with every passing day. “Life debases,” Henri de Régnier once noted; life wears you out, above all—there doubtless remains in some people an unde-based core, a kernel of being; but what weight does this residue carry, in the face of the general decay of the body?

  “I’ll have to negotiate my severance package,” she said. “I don’t see how I’m going to be able to do that. The magazine is doing better and better, as well; I don’t know what pretext to invoke for my departure.”

  “Go and see Lajoinie, and explain to him. Simply tell him what you told me. He’s old already, I think he can understand. Of course, he’s a man of money, and power, and those are passions that die slowly; but, after all you’ve told me, I think he’s a man who can be sensitive to burnout.”

  She did what I proposed, and her conditions were accepted in their entirety; of course, the magazine owed her almost everything. For my part, I couldn’t yet call a halt to my career—not completely. Bizarrely entitled Forward Snowy! Onwards to Aden!, my last show was subtitled “100% Hateful”—the inscription was emblazoned across the poster, in Eminem-style handwriting; it was in no way hyperbole. From the outset, I got onto the subject of the conflict in the Middle East—which had already brought me a few significant media successes—in a manner which, wrote the Le Monde journalist, was “singularly abrasive.” The first sketch, entitled “The Battle of the Tiny Ones,” portrayed Arabs—renamed “Allah’s vermin”—Jews—described as “circumcised fleas”—and even some Lebanese Christians, afflicted with the pleasing sobriquet of “Crabs from the Cunt of Mary.” In short, as the critic for Le Point noted, the religions of the Book were “played off against each other”—in this sketch at least; the rest of the show included a screamingly funny playlet entitled “The Palestinians Are Ridiculous,” into which I slipped a variety of burlesque and salacious allusions about sticks of dynamite that female militants of Hezbollah put around their waists in order to make mashed Jew. I then widened this to an attack on all forms of rebellion, of nationalist or revolutionary struggle, and in reality against political action itself. Of course, I was developing throughout the show a vein of right-wing anarchy, along the lines of “one dead combatant means one less cunt able to fight,” which, from Céline to Audiard, had already contributed to the finest hours of French comedy; but beyond that, updating St. Paul’s premise that all authority comes from God, I sometimes elevated myself to a somber meditation, not unlike that of Christian apologetics. I did it, of course, by evacuating any theological notion and developing a structural and essentially mathematical argument, based notably on the concept of “well-ordering.” All in all, this show was a classic, and was heralded as such overnight: it was, without a shadow of a doubt, my biggest critical success. According to the general view, my comedy had never attained such heights; or it had never plumbed such depths—that was another way of looking at it, but in the end it meant much the same thing. I found myself being frequently compared to Chamfort, or even La Rochefoucauld.

  In the public arena, success was a little slower to arrive, until, that is, Bernard Kouchner declared himself “personally sickened” by the show, which enabled me to sell out the remaining weeks. On Isabelle’s advice, I wrote a little response to him in the “Right to Reply” section of Libération, which I entitled “Thanks, Bernard.” So things were going well, really well, which put me in a state that was all the more curious, because I was sick of it all, and, truth be told, only a hairsbreadth away from giving up; if things had turned bad, I believe
I would have taken off without a word. My attraction to film as a medium—i.e., a dead medium, as opposed to what they pompously called at the time a living spectacle—had undoubtedly been the first sign in me of a disinterest in, even a disgust for, the general public—and probably for mankind in general. I was working at that time on my sketches with a small video camera, fixed on a tripod and linked to a monitor on which I could control in real time my intonations, funny expressions, and gestures. I had always had a simple principle: if I burst out laughing at a given moment, it was this moment that had a good chance of making the audience laugh as well. Little by little, as I watched the cassettes, I became aware that I was suffering from a deeper and deeper malaise, sometimes bordering on nausea. Two weeks before the premiere, the reason for this malaise became clear to me: what I found more and more unbearable wasn’t even my face, nor was it the repetitive and predictable nature of certain standard impersonations that I was obliged to do: what I could no longer stand was laughter, laughter in itself, that sudden and violent distortion of the features that deforms the human face and strips it instantly of all dignity. If man laughs, if he is the only one, in the animal kingdom, to exhibit this atrocious facial deformation, it is also the case that he is the only one, if you disregard the natural self-centeredness of animals, to have attained the supreme and infernal stage of cruelty.

  The three-week run was a permanent calvary; for the first time, I truly experienced those notorious, atrocious tears of the clown; for the first time, I truly understood mankind. I had dismantled the cogs in the machine, and I knew how to make it work, whenever I wanted. Every evening, before going on stage, I swallowed an entire sheet of Xanax. Every time the audience laughed (and I could predict it, I knew how to dose my effects, I was a consummate professional), I was obliged to turn away so as not to see those hideous faces those, hundreds of faces moved by convulsions, agitated by hate.

  Daniel24, 4

  THIS PASSAGE from the narration by Daniel1 is undoubtedly, for us, one of the most difficult to understand. The videocassettes he alludes to have been retranscribed and annexed to his life story. I have had the opportunity to consult these documents. Being genetically descended from Daniel1, I have, of course, the same features, the same face: most of our gestures and expressions, even, are similar (although my own, living as I do in a nonsocial environment, are naturally more limited); but that sudden expressive distortion, accompanied by the characteristic chuckles, which he called laughter, is impossible for me to imitate; I cannot even imagine its mechanism.

  The notes made by my predecessors from Daniel2 to Daniel23 generally indicate the same incomprehension. Daniel2 and Daniel3 assert that they are still able to reproduce the phenomenon, under the influence of certain liqueurs; but for Daniel4, already, it is an inaccessible reality. Several studies have been done on the disappearance of laughter among the neohumans; all concur that it happened quickly.

  A similar, though slower, evolution can be observed for tears, another characteristic trait of the human species. Daniel9 notes that he cried, on a very precise occasion (the accidental death of his dog Fox, electrocuted by the protective fence); but from Daniel10 onward there is no more mention of it. Just as laughter is rightly considered by Daniel1 to be symptomatic of human cruelty, tears seem in this species to be associated with compassion. “We never cry for ourselves alone,” notes an anonymous human author somewhere. These two emotions, cruelty and compassion, evidently no longer hold much meaning in the conditions of absolute solitude in which we lead our lives. Some of my predecessors, like Daniel13, display in their commentary a strange nostalgia for this double loss; then this nostalgia itself disappears, giving way to a more and more fleeting curiosity; one can now, as all my contacts on the network corroborate, consider it practically extinct.

  Daniel1, 5

  I relaxed by doing a bit of hyperventilation; and yet, Barnaby, I could never stop dreaming of the great mercury lakes on Saturn.

  —Captain Clark

  ISABELLE WORKED OUT her three months’ notice, and her last issue of Lolita appeared in December. A small cocktail party was organized in the magazine offices. The atmosphere was a little tense, insofar as all the guests were asking themselves the same question without being able to say it out loud: Who was going to replace her as editor-in-chief? Lajoinie appeared for a quarter of an hour, ate three blinis, and gave out no useful information.

  We left for Andalusia on Christmas Eve; then followed three strange months, spent in almost complete solitude. Our new residence was sited just south of San José, near Playa de Monsul. My agent thought this period of isolation was a good thing; it was good, he said, that I step back a little, in order to stoke up the curiosity of the public; I didn’t know how to confess to him that I intended to drop it all.

  He was about the only one who knew my telephone number; I couldn’t say that I had made many friends during my years of success; I had, on the other hand, lost a lot of them. The only thing that can rid you of your last illusions about mankind is to earn a large sum of money very quickly; then you see them emerge, the hypocritical vultures. For your eyes to be opened thus, it is essential to earn this sum of money: the truly rich, those who are born rich, and have never breathed any atmosphere other than wealth, seem inoculated against the phenomenon, as if they have inherited with their wealth a sort of unconscious, unthinking cynicism, which makes them aware from the outset that they will have to encounter people whose only aim is to wrest their money from them, by any conceivable means; they behave, therefore, with prudence, and generally keep their capital intact. For those who are born poor, the situation is much more dangerous; speaking for myself, I was enough of a cynical bastard to understand the situation, I had succeeded in avoiding most of the traps; but as for friends, no, I no longer had any. The people I associated with in my youth were for the most part actors: future failed actors; but I don’t think the situation would have been different in another milieu. Isabelle didn’t have friends either, and, especially in the final years, she had been surrounded only by people who dreamed of taking her place. Thus we never had anyone to invite round to our sumptuous residence; no one with whom to share a glass of rioja while watching the stars.

  What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It’s precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said. Isabelle was something of a hypochondriac, and she’d just turned forty; but prenatal examinations had made a lot of progress, and I felt that the problem wasn’t one of age; the problem was me. There was not only in me that legitimate disgust that seizes any normal man at the sight of a baby; there was not only that solid conviction that a child is a sort of vicious dwarf, innately cruel, who combines the worst features of the species, and from whom domestic pets keep a wise distance. There was also, more deeply, a horror, an authentic horror at the unending calvary that is man’s existence. If the human infant, alone in the animal kingdom, immediately manifests its presence in the world through incessant screams of pain, it is, of course, because it suffers, and suffers intolerably. Perhaps it’s the loss of fur, which makes the skin so sensitive to variations in temperature, without really guarding against attacks by parasites; perhaps it’s an abnormal sensitivity of the nervous system, some kind of design flaw. To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people’s existence as intolerable as his own—his first victims generally being his parents.

  Armed with these scarcely humanist convictions, I laid down the foundations of a script, with the working title “The Social Security Deficit,” which addressed the main elements of the issue. The first fifteen minutes of the film consisted of the unremitting explosion of babies’ skulls under the impact of shots from a high-cali
ber revolver—I had envisaged it in slow motion, then with slight accelerations—anyway, a whole choreography of brains, in the style of John Woo; then, things calmed down a little. The investigation, led by a police inspector with a good sense of humor, but rather conventional methods—I was thinking of Jamel Debbouze again—unearthed the existence of a network of child killers, brilliantly organized and inspired by ideas rooted in Deep Ecology. The MED (Movement for the Extermination of Dwarves) called for the disappearance of the human race, which it judged irredeemably harmful to the balance of the biosphere, and its replacement by a species of bears of superior intelligence—research had been done in the meantime to develop the intelligence of bears, and notably to enable them to speak (I thought of Gérard Depardieu in the role of the chief of the bears).

  Despite the convincing casting, and despite also my notoriety, the project never saw the light of day; a Korean producer declared an interest, but proved incapable of securing the necessary finances. This uncommon failure could have awoken the sleeping moralist in me (peacefully asleep, in general): if there was a failure, and the project was rejected, it was because there still existed taboos (in this case the killing of children), and perhaps, for this reason, all was not lost forever. The thinking man, however, was not slow to take over from the moralist: if there was a taboo, that meant there was, in fact, a problem; it was during those same years that there appeared in Florida the first “child-free zones,” high-quality residences for guiltless thirtysomethings who confessed frankly that they could no longer stand the screams, dribbles, excrement, and other environmental inconveniences that usually accompany little brats. Entry to the residences was therefore, quite simply, forbidden to children younger than thirteen; hatches were installed, like those in fast-food restaurants, to enable contact with families.