The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq

  This far from brilliant memory led me, at the end of the night, after suffering near-total insomnia, to lay the foundations of a script with the provisional title “Highway Swingers,” which would allow me to cleverly combine the commercial advantages of pornography and ultra-violence. In the morning, as I devoured brownies in the bar of the Lutétia, I wrote the pre-credits sequence.

  An enormous black limousine (perhaps a Packard from the sixties) was driving slowly along a country road, bounded by prairies and bright yellow broom bushes (I thought of filming in Spain, probably the Hurdas region, which is very pretty in May); as it moved, it emitted a low rumble (like a bomber returning to base).

  In the middle of a prairie, a couple were making love amid nature (it was a prairie full of flowers, with high grass, poppies, cornflowers, and yellow flowers whose name escaped me for the moment, but I noted in the margin: “Force her on the yellow flowers”). The girl’s skirt was hitched up, her T-shirt lifted above her breasts, in short she looked a right tart. Having unbuttoned the man’s trousers, she was gratifying him with fellatio. A tractor’s engine slowly running in the background let you believe that you were dealing with a couple of farmhands. A little blow job between plowing, the Rite of Spring, etc. A tracking outward informed us, however, that the two lovebirds were getting it on in front of a camera, and that in fact we were looking at the making of a pornographic film—probably quite a high-quality one, since there was a complete crew.

  The Packard limousine stopped, overlooking the prairie, and two executioners got out, dressed in black double-breasted suits. Pitilessly, they machine-gunned the young couple and the crew. I hesitated, then crossed out “machine-gunned”: it was better to use more original equipment, for example a launcher of sharp steel discs, which would spin around in the atmosphere before cutting flesh into pieces, particularly that of the two lovers. There wouldn’t need to be any skimping, the cock could be severed when it was in the girl’s throat etc.; all in all, it needed what my production director on Diogenes the Cynic would have called quite cool images. I noted in the margin: “foresee a ballripping machine.”

  At the end of the sequence, a fat man with very black hair, a face that was shiny and pockmarked by syphilis, and who also wore a black double-breasted suit, got out of the back of the car, accompanied by a skeletal and sinister old man, looking a bit like William Burroughs, whose body floated inside a gray raincoat. The latter contemplated the carnage (fragments of red flesh in the prairie, yellow flowers, men in black suits), sighed gently, and turned round to his companion, saying: “It’s a moral duty, John.”

  Eventually, after various massacres had been perpetrated, most often on young, if not teenage, couples, it emerged that these rather unsavory characters were members of an association of Catholic fundamentalists, perhaps affiliated with Opus Dei; this dig at the return of the moral order was, in my mind, going to win me the sympathy of left-wing critics. A little later, it appeared, however, that the killers had themselves been filmed by a second crew, and that the true aim of the whole business was the commercialization not of porn films, but of ultra-violence. Plot within a plot, film within a film, etc. A watertight project.

  In a nutshell, as I said to my agent that very evening, I was making progress, I was working, in other words I was getting back to my old rhythm; he declared himself happy, and confessed that he had been worried. Up to a certain point, I was sincere. It was only two days later, as I boarded the plane for Spain, that I realized I would never finish the script—not to mention produce it. There is a certain social agitation in Paris that gives you the illusion of having plans; back in San José, I knew I was going to freeze completely. Try as I might to play at being elegant, I was shriveling like an old monkey; I felt myself worn down, diminished beyond redemption; my mutterings and murmurs were those of an old man. I was now forty-seven, it was thirty years since I had started making my peers laugh; now I was finished, washed out, inert. The spark of curiosity that remained in my vision of the world was soon going to be extinguished, and then I would be as dead as the stones, only with some vague suffering on top of that. My career had not been a failure, at least not on the commercial level: if you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give you back joy.

  Daniel24, 11

  NO DOUBT LIKE MARIE22 at the same age, Marie23 is a playful and graceful neohuman. Even if aging does not have for us the tragic character it had for humans of the last period, it is not without certain forms of suffering. These are moderated, as are our joys; but there still remain variations between individuals. Marie22, for example, seems to have been at times strangely close to mankind, as shown by the message below, which is not at all neohuman in tone, and which in the end she did not send (it is Marie23 who found it yesterday while consulting her archives):

  An old woman in despair,

  With a hooked nose,

  In her raincoat crosses

  St. Peter’s Square.

  37510, 236, 43725, 82556. Bald, old, reasonable human beings, dressed in gray, crisscross one another, a few meters apart, in their wheelchairs. They move around in an immense gray empty space—there is no sky, no horizon, nothing; there is just grayness. Each one mutters to himself, head sunk into shoulders, without noticing the others, without even paying attention to the space around them. A closer examination reveals that the surface on which they move is slightly sloping; small variations in level form a network of curves that guide the movement of the wheelchairs, and normally prevent any possibility of them bumping into one another.

  I have the impression that Marie22 wanted, in creating this image, to express what humans of the old race would feel if they found themselves confronted with the objective reality of our lives—this is not the case with the savages: even if they move between our residences, they quickly learn to keep their distance, nothing allows them to imagine the real technological conditions of our existence.

  Marie22’s commentary shows that, at the end, she seems to have begun to feel a certain sympathy for the savages. This could bring her close to Paul24, with whom, incidentally, she had engaged in a continual correspondence; but while Paul24 adopts Schopenhauerian accents to evoke the absurdity of the savages’ existence, devoted entirely to suffering, and calls for them to be blessed with a swift death, Marie22 goes as far as imagining that their fate could have been different, and that they could, in certain circumstances, have known a less tragic end. It has, however, been shown countless times that the physical pain that accompanied the existence of humans was consubstantial with them, that it was the direct consequence of an inadequate organization of their nervous system, just as their inability to establish interindividual relations in a mode other than that of confrontation resulted from a relative insufficiency of their social instincts in relation to the complexity of the societies that their intellectual means enabled them to found—that was already patently true in the case of a medium-size tribe, not to mention those giant conglomerations that remain associated with the first stages of the effective disappearance.

  Intelligence permits the domination of the world; this can appear only within a social species, and through the medium of language. This same sociability, which had enabled the appearance of intelligence, was later to hinder its development—once technologies of artificial transmission had been perfected. The disappearance of social life was the way forward, teaches the Supreme Sister. It is no less the case that the disappearance of all physical contact between neohumans has been able to have, and sometimes still has, the character of an asceticism; moreover, this is precisely the term that the Supreme Sister uses in her messages, at least in their intermediary formulation. In my own messages to Marie22, there were some that owe much more to the affective than to the cognitive or propositional. Without going as far as feeling for her what humans described as desire, I was sometimes able to briefly slide down the slope of feeling.

  The fragile, hair
less, badly irrigated skin of the humans was terribly sensitive to the lack of caresses. Better circulation of the cutaneous blood vessels and a slight decrease in the sensitivity of type L nervous fibers have both allowed, from the first neohuman generations onward, a decrease in the suffering linked to absence of contact. The fact still remains that I would have difficulty imagining a day of my life spent without running my hand through Fox’s coat, without feeling the warmth of his little loving body. This necessity does not diminish as my strength wanes, I even have the impression that it becomes more and more pressing. Fox can feel it, asks less to play, presses against me, lays his head on my knees; we spend whole nights in this position—nothing equals the sweetness of sleep when it happens in the presence of the loved one. Then dawn returns and rises over the residence; I prepare Fox’s bowl and I make myself a coffee. I now know that I will not finish my commentary. I will leave with no real regret an existence that brought me no real joy. Considering death, we have reached a state of mind that was, according to the monks of Ceylon, the one sought by the Buddhists of the Lesser Vehicle; our life at the moment of its end “is like blowing out a candle.” We can also say, to use the words of the Supreme Sister, that our generations follow one another “like flicking the pages of a book.”

  Marie23 sends me a few messages, then I leave without reply. It will be the role of Daniel25 to prolong contact, if he so wishes. A slight cold has invaded my extremities; it is the sign that I am entering the final hours. Fox senses it, moans softly, licks my toes. I have already seen Fox die several times, before being replaced by his replica; I have known the closing of his eyes, the cardiac rhythm which stops without altering the profound, animal peace of those beautiful brown eyes. I cannot attain that wisdom, no neohuman will be able to attain it really; I can only get closer to it, and slow down voluntarily the rhythm of my breath and my mental projections.

  The sun rises again, and reaches its zenith; however, it becomes colder and colder. Some vague memories appear briefly, then disappear. I know that my asceticism will not have been in vain; I know that I will be part of the essence of the Future Ones.

  The mental projections also disappear. There probably remain only a few minutes. I feel nothing but a very slight sadness.

  Daniel1, 12

  DURING THE FIRST PART of your life, you only become aware of happiness once you have lost it. Then an age comes, a second one, in which you already know, at the moment when you begin to experience true happiness, that you are, at the end of the day, going to lose it. When I met Belle, I understood that I had just entered this second age. I also understood that I hadn’t reached the third age, in which anticipation of the loss of happiness prevents you from living.

  With regard to Belle, I will just say, without exaggeration or metaphor, that she gave life back to me. In her company, I lived moments of intense happiness. It was perhaps the first time I had had the opportunity to utter this simple sentence. I lived moments of intense happiness; inside her, or just next to her; when I was inside her, or just before, or just after. Time, at this stage, stayed always in the present; there were long moments when nothing moved, and then everything fell back again into an “and then there was.” Later, a few weeks after we met, these happy moments fused, became joined; and my whole life, in her presence, before her eyes, became happiness.

  Belle, in reality, was called Esther. I have never called her Belle out loud—never in her presence.

  It was a strange story. Heartrending, so heartrending, my Belle. And undoubtedly the strangest thing is that I wasn’t really surprised. Undoubtedly, I had had the tendency, in my relations with people (I almost wrote: “in my official relations with people”; and it was a bit like that, in fact), undoubtedly, I had had the tendency to overestimate my state of despair. Something in me therefore knew, had always known, that I would end up finding love—I’m talking about reciprocated love, the only one that counts, the only one that can effectively lead us to a different order of perception, where individuality fissures, where the conditions of the world appear modified, and its continuation legitimate. I was not, however, naive; I knew that the majority of people are born, grow old, and die without having known love. Not long after the epidemic of “mad cow disease,” new measures had been introduced to ensure that people knew where their beef had come from. In the meat section of supermarkets, in fast-food establishments, small labels appeared, generally worded thus: “Born and raised in France. Slaughtered in France.” A simple life, in fact.

  If you look at the circumstances, the beginning of our love story was extremely banal. I was forty-seven when we met, she was twenty-two. What’s more, she was an actress, and it’s well known that film producers sleep with their actresses; some films, even, appear to only have been created for that purpose. That said, could I be considered a film producer? As producer I only had Two Flies Later to my name, and I was about to give up producing Highway Swingers—in fact, I had already given up on it the moment I returned from Paris; when the taxi pulled up in front of my residence in San José I sensed infallibly that I no longer had the strength, and that I was not going to pursue this project, nor any other. Nonetheless, things had followed their usual course, and waiting for me were about ten faxes from European producers, who wanted to know a bit more about it. My treatment kept itself to one sentence: “To bring together the commercial advantages of pornography and ultra-violence.” This was not a treatment, at most it was a pitch, but it was good, my agent had told me, lots of young producers proceeded like that today; I was, without knowing it, a modern professional. I had also been sent three DVDs from the main Spanish artistic agents; I had begun to prospect for potential actors, indicating that the film had a “possible sexual content.”

  And so, that was how the greatest love affair of my life started: in a predictable, conventional, and even, if you like, vulgar way. I put a plate of Arroz Tres Delicias in the microwave, put a DVD at random into the player. As the meal heated up, I had the time to eliminate the first three girls. After two minutes, the machine beeped, I took the meal out of the oven, and added some Suzi Weng pepper purée; at the same time, on the giant screen at the back of the living room, Esther’s trailer was beginning.

  I skipped rapidly over the first two scenes, taken from some sitcom and what was undoubtedly an even more mediocre police series; however, my attention had been attracted by something, I had my finger on the remote, and at the moment of the second change of scene I pressed immediately to return to normal speed.

  She was naked, standing in a room that was difficult to make out—no doubt an artist’s atelier. In the first image, she was being splattered with a jet of yellow paint—the one who was throwing the paint was out of shot. Then you found her stretched out in the middle of a dazzling pool of yellow paint. The artist—you could see only his arms—was pouring a bucket of blue paint on her, then spreading it over her belly and breasts; she looked in his direction with trusting amusement. He guided her by taking her hand, she turned over on her front, he poured some more paint on the small of her back, spread it all over her back and her ass; her ass moved, accompanying the movement of the hands. There was in her face, in each of her gestures, a deeply moving innocence and sensual grace.

  I knew the work of Yves Klein, I had done research since my meeting with Vincent, I knew that there was nothing original or interesting about this happening on an artistic level; but who still thinks of art when happiness is possible? I watched the clip ten times in a row: I had a hard-on, sure, but I think I understood a lot of things, as well, from those first minutes onward. I understood that I was going to love Esther, that I was going to love her violently, without caution or hope of return. I understood that this affair would be so strong that it might kill me, that it was even probable that it was going to kill me, as soon as Esther ceased loving me, because ultimately there are certain limits—however much any one of us might have a certain capacity for resistance, one always ends up dying of love, or rather of the abse
nce of love, it’s inevitably fatal. Yes, a lot of things were already determined, from these first minutes on, the process was already up and running. I could still interrupt it, I could avoid meeting Esther, destroy this DVD, go traveling, very far away, but in actuality I called her agent the following day. Naturally, he was delighted, yes it’s possible, I think she’s doing nothing at the moment, you know better than me that the current situation is not easy, I think I’m right in saying we have never worked together, it will be a pleasure—Two Flies Later had undoubtedly had a certain impact, everywhere other than France; he spoke decent English, and in general Spain was modernizing surprisingly quickly.

  Our first meeting took place in a bar in the Calle Obispo de León, a fairly big, fairly typical bar, with dark-wood paneling and tapas—I was rather grateful to her for not choosing a Planet Hollywood. I arrived ten minutes late, and from the moment she looked up at me there was immediately no longer any question of free will, we were already in the domain of the given. I sat down in front of her on the bench, experiencing something like the sensation I had had a few years previously when I went under general anesthetic: the impression of an easy, approved departure, the intuition that at the end of the day death would be a very simple thing. She was wearing tight, low-cut jeans, and a clinging pink top that left her shoulders uncovered. When she stood up to go and order, I caught sight of her thong, also pink, showing above her jeans, and I began to get hard. When she came back from the counter, I had a lot of difficulty taking my eyes off her belly button. She noticed this, smiled, and sat next to me on the bench. With her light blond hair and her very white skin, she did not really look like a typical Spanish girl—I would have rather said a Russian. She had pretty, attentive brown eyes, and I no longer really remember my first words but I think I indicated almost immediately that I was going to drop my film project. She looked surprised rather than really disappointed. She asked me why.