The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
Alfred A. Knopf 2006 341 pp.
Copyright © Steven E. Alford
Is
he a forever drunk, monosyllabic sensualist from that F-word country, France,
or a blazing intellect whose novels have analyzed the fatal defects of our
late-capitalist Western society with surgical precision? Center-stage in the book chat circles
of late is Michel Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck), author of the celebrated (and reviled) Whatever, The Elementary Particles, and Platform.
HouellebecqÕs new novel comes saddled with the
baggage of his disagreeable personality, his previous books, and his trial, in
France, in reaction to comments characters in Platform make about Islam.
If
this sounds vaguely Rushdie-like, it is—and it isnÕt. Like Rushdie, he finds himself in
trouble for his previous novelÕs treatment of Islam, but no fatwa was issued. However, exactly like Rushdie, HouellebecqÕs critics make the freshman-level
interpretative mistake of identifying the charactersÕ views with those of the
author.
His
new book, The Possibility of an Island,
will no doubt be subject to the same sadly ignorant critique. Its protagonist, Daniel, aged 47, is a
wildly successful comedian, whose topics for his standup, songs, and short
films include Òracism, pedophilia, cannibalism, parricide, acts of torture, and
barbarism.Ó In his view, he shares
a social position with the political revolutionary.
ÒLike
the revolutionary, the comedian came to terms with the brutality of the world,
and responded to it with increased brutality. The result of his action, however, was not to transform the
world, but to make it acceptable by transmuting the violence, necessary for any
revolutionary action, into laughter—in addition, also, to making a lot of
dough. To sum up, like all clowns
since the dawn of time, I was a sort of collaborator. I spared the world from painful and useless
revolutions—since the root of all evil was biological, and independent of
any imaginable social transformation; I established clarity, I forbade action,
I eradicated hope; my balance sheet was mixed.Ó
DanielÕs
views of the world, for which he is handsomely rewarded, are vulgar and
hilarious. ÒThere 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.Ó
On
one level, DanielÕs story centers on the failure of his love life with two
women, in particular, the humiliation he suffered from Esther, a sexually
insatiable but morally vacant twenty-two-year-old. However, there is another Daniel in the novel, whose
narrative alternates with the first.
The second Daniel is Daniel24 who, we learn, is the 24th
generation clone of Daniel1. As
Daniel1 tells his life story, Daniel24 (and later, Daniel25), comment on
Daniel1Õs sad life, and the difference between human life and clone life.
Daniel1Õs
cloning came about owing to his connection with a new religion, Elohimism: Òimposing no moral constraints, reducing human
existence to categories of interest and of pleasure, it did not hesitate, for
all that, to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all
monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimension, it simply
limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the promise associated
with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life, that is to say the
unlimited satisfaction of physical desires.Ó The story of Daniel1Õs immortality through cloning, granted
by his association with Elohimism, gives the novel an
opportunity to reflect on the traditional concerns of most novels--time,
mortality, and desire--while enacting an ongoing cynical and depressing
critique of the fate of Western culture.
The Possibility of an Island rehearses
ideas readers will recognize from his earlier works, combining lurid sexuality
with an avalanche of philosophically informed reflections on desire and
death. Its initially humorous
shtick gives way to a more elegiac tone, befitting its themes.