The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  An important breakthrough had been made: for several decades, the depopulation of the West (which in fact was not specific to the West; the same phenomenon could be seen in any country or culture once a certain level of economic development was reached) had been the subject of vaguely hypocritical and suspiciously unanimous lamentation. For the first time, young, educated people, in a good position on the socioeconomic scale, declared publicly that they did not want children, that they felt no desire to put up with the bother and expense associated with bringing up offspring. Such a casual attitude, obviously, could only inspire imitation.

  Daniel24, 5

  FAMILIAR WITH THE SUFFERING of man, I contribute to the decoupling, I accomplish the return to calm. When I kill a savage who, more audacious than the others, lingers too long at the protective fence—it is usually a female, with prematurely sagging breasts, brandishing her baby like a supplication—I have the sensation of accomplishing a necessary and legitimate act. The similarity of our faces—all the more striking as the majority of those who wander in the region are of Spanish or North African origin—is for me the sure sign of their death sentence. The human species will disappear, it must disappear so that the words of the Supreme Sister can be accomplished.

  The climate is mild in the north of Almería, the great predators are rare; it is no doubt for these reasons that the density of savages remains high, albeit in constant decline—a few years ago I even saw, not without horror, a herd of some hundred individuals. My correspondents note the contrary, almost everywhere across the globe: in very general terms, the savages are on the road to extinction; in numerous sites, their presence has not been signaled for several centuries; some of us have even come to consider their existence a myth.

  There is no strict limit to the domain of the intermediaries, but there are some certainties. I am The Door. I am The Door, and The Guardian of The Door. The successor will come; he must come. I maintain the presence, to make possible the coming of the Future Ones.

  Daniel1, 6

  There are excellent toys for dogs.

  —Patricia Dürst-Benning

  LIVING TOGETHER ALONE is hell between consenting adults. In the life of a couple, most often there will be at the beginning certain details, certain discordances about which it is decided to say nothing, in the enthusiastic certainty that love will end up solving all problems. These problems grow little by little, silently, before exploding a few years later and destroying all possibility of living together. From the beginning, Isabelle had preferred that I take her from behind; every time I tried another approach she went along with it at first, then turned around, as if in spite of herself, with an uneasy half-laugh. During all those years I had attributed this preference to a peculiarity of her anatomy, an inclination of the vagina or something along those lines, one of those things that men can never, despite all their goodwill, be exactly conscious of. Six weeks after our arrival, while I was making love to her (I usually penetrated her from behind, but there was a big mirror in our bedroom), I noticed that as she approached her climax she closed her eyes, and only reopened them a long time afterward, once the act was finished.

  I thought of it again throughout the night while emptying two bottles of pretty disgusting Spanish brandy: I relived our acts of love, our embraces, all those moments that had united us: I saw her again looking away each time, or closing her eyes, and I began to cry. Isabelle let herself come, she made you come, but she did not like to come, she did not like the outward signs of orgasm; she didn’t like them in me, and no doubt she liked them even less in herself. Everything coincided: each time I had seen her marvel at the plastic expression of beauty, it was over painters like Raphael, and especially Botticelli: something occasionally tender, but often cold, and always very calm; she had never understood the absolute admiration I had for El Greco, she had never appreciated ecstasy, and I cried profusely because this animal side, this limitless surrender to pleasure and ecstasy, was what I liked best in myself, while I had only contempt for my intelligence, sagacity, and humor. We would never know that infinitely mysterious double look of the couple united in happiness, humbly accepting the presence of organs, and limited joy; we would never truly be lovers.

  What was worse, however, was that this ideal of plastic beauty, to which she could never again have access, was going to destroy Isabelle before my very eyes. First of all, there were her breasts, which she could no longer stand (and it’s true they were beginning to droop a bit); then her buttocks, which were following the same course. More and more often, it became necessary to turn off the light; then sexuality itself disappeared. She could no longer stand herself; and, consequently, she could no longer stand love, which seemed to her to be false. I could, however, at the beginning, still get a hard-on, at least a little bit; that too disappeared, and from that moment on, it was over; all that remained was a memory of the deceptively ironical words of the Andalusian poet:

  Oh, the life men try to live!

  Oh, the life they lead

  In the world they live in!

  The poor souls, the poor souls…

  They don’t know how to love.

  When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements, and smells; even the presence of this body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known. The disappearance of tenderness always closely follows that of eroticism. There is no refined relationship, no higher union of souls, nor anything that might resemble it, or even evoke it allusively. When physical love disappears, everything disappears; a dreary, depthless irritation fills the passing days. And, with regard to physical love, I hardly had any illusions. Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism. In short, I was in the shit.

  One solution presented itself, on a link road of the A2 highway, between Saragossa and Tarragona, a few dozen meters from a service station where Isabelle and I had stopped to have lunch. The existence of pets is relatively recent in Spain. A country with a traditionally Catholic, macho, and violent culture, Spain, until only a little while ago, treated animals with indifference, and occasionally with a dark cruelty. But standardization was doing its work, on this level as on others, and Spain was approaching European, and especially English, norms. Homosexuality was more and more widespread and accepted; vegetarian food was becoming increasingly available, as were New Age baubles; and pets, here given the pretty name of mascotas, were gradually replacing children in the family. However, the process had only just begun, and there were many failures: often a puppy, given as a toy at Christmas, was abandoned by the roadside a few months later. Thus, on the central plains, packs of stray dogs formed. Their existence was brief and miserable. Infested with scabies and other parasites, they found their food in the dustbins of service stations, and generally ended their days under the wheels of a truck. They suffered terribly, and above all, from the absence of human contact. Having abandoned the pack millennia before, and chosen the company of men, the dog has never been able to readapt to the wild. No stable hierarchy established itself in the packs—fights were constant, whether for food or for the possession of females; the pups were abandoned, and occasionally devoured by their older brothers.

  I was drinking more and more during this time, and it was after my third anisette, on stumbling toward the Bentley, that I was astonished to see Isabelle pass through an opening in the fence, and approach a group of about ten dogs who were stationed on a piece of wasteland near the car park. I knew that she was naturally rather timorous, and that these animals were generally considered dangerous. The dogs, however, watched her approach without aggression or fear. A little white-and-ginger mongrel, with pointed ears, aged about three months at most, began to creep toward her. She stooped, took it in her arms, and returned to the car. This is how Fox entered our lives; and, with him, unconditional love.

  Daniel24, 6<
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  THE COMPLEX INTERWEAVING OF PROTEINS constituting the nuclear envelope among primates made human cloning, for several decades, dangerous, risky, and, at the end of the day, almost impracticable. The operation was, on the other hand, an immediate and total success with the majority of pets, including—though with a slight delay—dogs. It is therefore exactly the same Fox who rests at my feet as I write these lines, adding my commentary, according to tradition, as my predecessors have done, to the life story of my human ancestor.

  I live a calm and joyless life; the surface of the residence permits short walks, and a complete array of equipment enables me to tone my muscles. As for Fox, he is happy. He gambols around the residence, content with the imposed perimeters—he quickly learned to keep away from the protective fence; he plays with the ball, or with one of the small plastic animals (I have several hundred of them, bequeathed to me by my predecessors); he really likes musical toys, especially a duck made in Poland, which emits various tuneful quacks. Above all, he likes me to take him in my arms, and rest like that, bathed in sunshine, his eyes closed, his head placed on my knees, in a happy half-sleep. We sleep together, and every morning is a festival of licks and scratches from his little paws; it is an obvious joy for him to be reunited with life and daylight. His joys are identical to those of his ancestors, and they will remain identical among his descendants; his nature in itself contains the possibility of happiness.

  I am only a neohuman, and my nature includes no possibility of this order. Humans, or at least the most advanced among them, already knew that unconditional love is the condition for the possibility of happiness. A full understanding of the problem has not yet enabled us to advance toward some kind of solution. The study of the lives of the saints, on whom some based so much hope, has shed no light. Not only did the saints, in their quest for salvation, obey motives that were only partially altruistic (even though submission to the will of the Lord, which they professed, must have often been simply a convenient way of justifying to others their natural altruism), but prolonged belief in a manifestly absent divine entity provoked in them displays of idiocy incompatible in the long term with the maintenance of a technological civilization. As for the hypothesis of a gene for altruism, it caused so many disappointments that no one dares today to openly put it forward. It has certainly been demonstrated that the centers of cruelty, moral judgment, and altruism were situated in the prefrontal cortex; but research has not enabled us to go beyond this purely anatomical observation. Since the appearance of the neohumans, the thesis of the genetic origin of moral sentiments has given rise to at least three thousand scientific papers, emanating each time from the most authoritative scientific milieus; but not one has been able yet to cross the barrier of experimental verification. What’s more, the Darwinian theories explaining the appearance of altruism by a selective advantage that might result for the whole of the group from it have been the object of imprecise, multiple, and contradictory calculations, which finally sank into confusion and oblivion.

  Goodness, compassion, fidelity, and altruism therefore remain for us impenetrable mysteries, contained, however, within the limited space of the corporeal exterior of a dog. It is on the solution to this problem that the coming, or not, of the Future Ones depends.

  I believe in the coming of the Future Ones.

  Daniel1, 7

  Play entertains.

  —Patricia Dürst-Benning

  NOT ONLY ARE DOGS CAPABLE of love, but the sex drive does not seem to pose them any insurmountable problems: when they meet a female in heat, she is ready for penetration; when the contrary is true, they seem to feel neither desire nor a lack of it.

  Not only are dogs in themselves a subject of permanent wonderment, but they constitute for humans an excellent subject of conversation—international, democratic, and consensual. It is thus that I met Harry, a German ex-astrophysicist, accompanied by Truman, his beagle. A peaceful naturist, around sixty years old, Harry devoted his retirement to the observation of the stars—the sky of the region was, he explained to me, exceptionally unpolluted; in the daytime he did some gardening, and a little tidying up. He lived alone with his wife, Hildegarde—and, naturally, Truman: they hadn’t had children. It is glaringly obvious that without dogs I would have had nothing to say to this man—even with a dog, as it was, the conversation dragged a little (he invited us to dinner the following Saturday; he lived five hundred meters away, he was our closest neighbor). Fortunately he didn’t speak French, any more than I spoke German; the fact of having overcome the language barrier (a few phrases in English, a smattering of Spanish) gave us therefore, in the end, the sensation of a successful evening, when in fact we had only, for two hours, shouted banalities (he was pretty deaf). After the meal, he asked me if I wanted to observe the rings of Saturn. Of course, of course, I wanted to. Well, it was indeed a wonderful spectacle, of natural or divine origin—who knows?—offered for contemplation by man: what more could be said? Hildegarde played the harp, I guess she played it marvelously, but frankly I don’t know if it’s possible to play the harp badly—I mean that the way it’s constructed, the instrument has always seemed to me incapable of making anything other than melodious sounds. Two things, I think, stopped me from getting angry: for one thing, Isabelle was wise enough to pretend to be tired, and to want to return home early, at least once I’d finished the bottle of kirsch; for another, I had noticed in the Germans’ house a complete, bound edition of the works of Teilhard de Chardin. If there is one thing that has always plunged me into sadness or compassion, I mean into a state that excludes all manner of nastiness or irony, it is the existence of Teilhard de Chardin—not only his existence, but the very fact that he has, or could have had, readers, however small the number. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard de Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears. At the age of fifteen I had fallen by chance on The Divine Milieu, left by a presumably disgusted reader on a bench at the railway station in Étréchy-Chamarande. In the space of a few pages, the book had torn screams from me; out of despair, I had smashed my bicycle pump against the walls of the cellar. Teilhard de Chardin was, of course, what one properly calls a first-class fanatic; this didn’t make him any less totally depressing. He resembled a little those German Christian Scientists, described by Schopenhauer in his time, who, “once they have put down retort or scalpel, start philosophizing on concepts they received at their first communion.” There was also within him this illusion common to all left-wing Christians, or rather centrist Christians, let’s say to Christians contaminated by progressive thought since the Revolution, based on the belief that concupiscence is a venal thing, scarcely important, unfit to turn man away from the path to salvation—that the only true sin is the sin of pride. Where, in me, was concupiscence? Or pride? And was I a long way from salvation? The answers to these questions, it seems to me, were not very difficult; Pascal would never, for example, have stooped to such absurdities: you felt when you read him that the temptations of the flesh were not foreign to him, that libertinage was something that he could have felt; and that if he chose Christ over fornication or cards it was neither through distraction nor incompetence, but because Christ seemed to be definitively more acid; in short, he was a seriousauthor. If erotica had been found on Teilhard de Chardin, I believe that would have reassured me, in a sense; but I didn’t believe it for a second. What had he ever experienced, with whom had he ever associated, this pathetic Teilhard, in order to have such a benign and naive understanding of mankind—while at the same time, in the same country, bastards as considerable as Céline, Sartre, or Genet were running wild? Through his dedications, the addresses on his correspondence, one could manage little by little to divine who they were: posh Catholics, those who were more or less aristocratic, and, frequently, Jesuits. Innocents.

  “What are you muttering about?” interrupted Isabelle. I then became conscious that we had left the Germans’ house, that in fact we were going along the coast, and that we were
about to arrive home. She informed me that for two minutes I had been talking to myself, and she had understood almost nothing. I made a summary of the main elements of the problem.

  “It’s easy to be an optimist…,” I concluded bitterly, “it’s easy to be optimistic when you are content to have a dog, and haven’t had children.”

  “You are in the same situation, and, frankly, that hasn’t made you optimistic…,” she remarked. “What it is, is that they are old…,” she continued indulgently. “When you grow old you need to think of reassuring and gentle things. You need to imagine that something beautiful awaits us in heaven. In fact we train ourselves for death, a little. When we’re not too stupid, or too rich.”

  I stopped and considered the ocean and the stars. Those stars to which Harry devoted his waking nights, while Hildegarde gave herself up to free classical improvisations on Mozart themes. The music of the spheres, the starry sky; the moral law in my heart. I considered the trip, and what separated me from it; the night was so mild, however, that I placed a hand on Isabelle’s backside—I could feel its shape easily, through the light fabric of her summer dress. She stretched out on the dune, took off her panties, and opened her legs. I penetrated her—face to face, for the first time. She looked straight into my eyes. I remember clearly the movements of her pussy, her little cries at the end. I remember it all the better as it was the last time we made love.