The Possibility of a Pornographic Moralist

The Possibility of an Island takes Houllebecq’s anti-liberal grandstanding to misanthropic heights. An uneasy amalgam of satire, science-fiction, and fantasy, the novel chooses as its premise a genetic breakthrough that creates a new human race from the old. These “neo-humans” are self-sufficient, evolved copies of their predecessors, built to pursue sanitized and carefree lives that start at eighteen and end in middle age with their committing suicide, at which point a replacement is promptly sent along from a cloning factory. In the novel’s rendering, such existence is the summa of the secular-materialist world view: an effortless, responsibility-free heaven on earth. This is paradise digitally preset, a period of maximum pleasure and minimum pain as determined by the half-religion/half-biotech corporation that rules the world. The book tests out this futuristic experience through parallel life stories—from Daniel, a lovelorn shock-comic living in the early twenty-first century just before human-cloning experiments reach fruition, and from the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth instantiations of Daniel1, as the original comes to be known.

The novel initially reads like an overview of its author’s sensational rise, in the guise of Daniel1 reviewing his livelihood. Describing himself as “genuinely excessive” in his material, he is bemused by the fact that he has won more adulation and made more money with every new provocation: “In a few minutes I reviewed the whole of my career.... Racism, pedophilia, cannibalism, parricide, acts of torture, and barbarism: in less than a decade, I had creamed off all the lucrative niches.” Daniel1’s oeuvre peaks with a show he entitles We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts, which outrages righteous Muslims and leads the righteous French intelligentsia to “cast [him] in the role of a hero of free speech.” Daniel1 shrugs off his headline-grabbing and enters into comfortable semi-retirement in Spain, where he has two broken relationships. The first is with Isabelle, a publishing executive with whom he has happiness everywhere except in the bedroom: she’s approaching middle age, her breasts and buttocks are drooping, and he considers mediocre sex to be a self-evident injustice. The two part after agreeing to a visitation schedule for their dog. Daniel1 then meets Esther, a nubile actress decades his junior. In exchange for shiny baubles of upper-tier living, she affords him the “infinite joy” of doing whatever he wants to her body and of commanding her to do likewise to his.

But when the young woman turns her attentions elsewhere, Daniel1 is left with a broken heart and an aching crotch. Neither reconciliation with Isabelle nor stalking Esther solves his malaise, so he devotes himself to a simple existence with his dog, Fox, and to getting increasingly involved with a cult headquartered in the Canary Islands—the organization that will eventually rule the world. Once this convoluted premise has been established, the novel moves past Houellebecq’s standard contemporary satire into a dark futuristic fantasy. The Elohimites, led by a New Age cult leader, believe that humanity was created by aliens. They experiment with cloning, to perfect the human race in preparation for the return of its creators. Houellebecq appears to base the group on the Raelians—the kooky organization that flashed across the news for a few minutes a few years ago with unsubstantiated claims to have cloned a person—but he refuses an easy takedown. Instead, he depicts their ambitions as globally successful so as to lacerate his progress-minded readership. The Raelians’ fictional counterparts eventually outpace enfeebled Christianity and surging Islam to become the world’s dominant religion, since they give the “leisure civilization” borne of bloated liberalism what it truly wants: the sensation of permanent well-being at any cost save personal suffering. “Imposing no moral constraints, reducing human existence to categories of interest and of pleasure,” Houellebecq writes, “[made] its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimensions, it simply limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the promise associated with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life.”

The first adherents of “the Church” provide it with their dna and life savings and then commit painless suicide, dying with the promise that they will be genetically resurrected without the difficulties and ugliness of their first go-rounds. Daniel1 is an early convert. His own life, as he repeatedly describes it, is so empty of higher meaning and authentic love that he gives the Elohimites his dna despite first-hand knowledge of the cult leadership’s falsehoods, unblinking brutality, and manipulation of its pie-eyed followers. Fearful of the “pure terror of space” that stands in front of him—a wintertime of life without sex or companionship—he commits suicide as well, making way for the advent of a higher, less troubled version of himself.

In a stilted back-and-forth rhythm, Daniel1’s autobiography alternates with that of Daniel24 and Daniel25. They live two millennia later, after the rise of the neo-humans to global dominance and the retreat of the few remaining original human beings into a hunter-gatherer existence. The shorter, colder reports of the latter-day Daniels describe their vacuous lives without complaint or complication; their daily doings involve the companionship of clones of Daniel1’s dog and instant-message relationships with women looking for nothing more than point-and-click hook-ups. Their lives also consist of reading through their avatar’s life story, upon which they comment dispassionately. Daniel24 is the more perfect specimen of his species: he is dismissive of past humanity in its many flaws, immersed in the sacred science-speak of his religion, and eventually off to his death with “nothing but a very slight sadness.” Daniel25, though engineered to be the same, becomes curious about Daniel1’s constant laments over his failure to find love and sex. From his evolved perspective, such expressions of unfulfilled longing are supposed to be evidence of his predecessors backward humanness, but the more he contemplates them, the more vexed his own life becomes. This regression culminates in his decision to escape his pod-like existence in order to wander over the wasted plains of the earth, searching for whatever it was that his predecessor so badly wanted.

Along the way, Daniel25 encounters old-style humans whose selfish, violent, hedonistic lifestyles are little different from those of contemporary Westerners, as imagined in the Daniel1 sections of the novel. In short order, he recoils from contact with them. He never really comes to understand what so moved his predecessor, his own beloved dog dies without replacement, and he is left in contemplative alienation. None of which moves him to anything beyond a state of indifference familiar to Houellebecq’s past characters, despite the intervention of millennia and species evolution. Daniel25 accepts the world as a dull place, devoid of potentialities, from which light was absent. With many such statements in its closing pages, the novel proposes total hopelessness for anyone who seeks more from life than indulgence and ease, despite its earlier raging against these as lethal comforts. The end result, despite the novel’s innovative premise and aspirations to push against our dehumanized trajectory, is a lazily despairing vision of the future: “The future was empty.... I was, I was no longer. Life was real. ”

Recalling in its ambition novels like H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island posits a horrific future so as to offer a more immediate moral critique. Unlike straight satire, which exposes an era’s triumphs as its defects, dystopic science fictions imagine the rise of such defects to dominate a future that’s even further along in its accomplishments (and ruin) than the past that birthed it. Such novels matter to the extent that they are capable of effecting shocks of recognition about worlds only partway distant from our own. But the power of Houellebecq’s latest is limited by its utter nihilism, and its refusal to countenance the possibility of any enduring good in human life—a hope past writers have held out, however tenuously, as correctives against our tendency toward enlightened vacancy and efficient excess. Houellebecq’s novel wants to be both a contemporary satire of empty satisfactions and a dystopic fantasy about their unchecked proliferation, provocative in its moral alarums and blasé about the whole business. It’s a book fit for an age done in by wanting too much for itself.