Read The Possibility of an Island Online
Authors: Michel Houellebecq,Gavin Bowd
The Possibility of an Island
Contents
Part One: Commentary of Daniel24
Part Two: Commentary of Daniel25
Part Three: Final Commentary Epilogue
For Antonio Muñoz Ballesta and his wife, Nico,
without whose friendship and great kindness
this novel could not have been written
WELCOME TO ETERNAL LIFE,
my friends.
This book owes its existence to Harriet Wolff, a German journalist I met in Berlin a few years ago. Before putting her questions to me, Harriet wanted to recount a little fable. For her, this fable encapsulated my position as a writer.
I am in a telephone box, after the end of the world. I can make as many telephone calls as I like, there is no limit. I have no idea if anyone else has survived, or if my calls are just the monologues of a lunatic. Sometimes the call is brief, as if someone has hung up on me; sometimes it goes on for a while, as if someone is listening with guilty curiosity. There is neither day nor night; the situation is without end.
Welcome to eternal life, Harriet.
Who, among you, deserves eternal life?
My current incarnation is deteriorating; I do not think it will last much longer. I know that in my next incarnation I will be reunited with my companion, the little dog Fox.
The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation—similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks—and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.
The first time I met Marie22 was on a cheap Spanish server; the connection times were appallingly long.
The weariness brought on
By the old dead Dutchman
Is not something attested
Well before the master’s return.
2711, 325104, 13375317, 452626. At the address indicated I was shown an image of her pussy—jerky, pixelated, but strangely
real.
Was she alive, dead, or an intermediary? Most likely an intermediary, I think; but it was something you did not talk about.
Women give an impression of eternity, as though their pussy were connected to mysteries—as though it were a tunnel opening onto the essence of the world, when in fact it is just a hole for dwarves, fallen into disrepair. If they can give us this impression, then good for them; my words are meant sympathetically.
The immobile grace,
Conspicuously crushing,
Flowing from the passage of civilizations,
Does not have death as corollary.
I should have stopped. Stopped the game, the intermediation, the contact; but it was too late. 258, 129, 3727313, 11324410.
The first sequence was filmed from a hill. Immense sheets of gray plastic covered the plain; we were north of Almería. The harvesting of the fruit and vegetables that grew beneath the plastic used to be done by agricultural laborers—most often of Moroccan origin. After mechanization was introduced, the workers evaporated into the surrounding sierras.
In addition to the usual equipment—electric generator powering the protective fence, satellite network, sensors—the unit Proyecciones XXI.13 also benefited from a generator of mineral salts and its own source of drinking water. It was far away from the main thoroughfares, and did not figure on any of the recent maps—its construction came after the last surveys. Since the cessation of all air traffic and the permanent jamming of satellite transmission frequencies, it had become virtually impossible to locate.
The following sequence could have been a dream. A man with my face was eating a yogurt in a steel mill; the manual for the machine tools was written in Turkish. It was unlikely that production would start up again.
12, 12, 533, 8467.
The second message from Marie22 was worded thus:
I am alone like a silly cunt
With my
Cunt
245535, 43, 3. When I say “I,” I am lying. Let us posit the “I” of perception—neutral and limpid. Put it next to the “I” of intermediation—when you look at it this way, my body belongs to me; or, more exactly, I belong to my body. What do we observe? An absence of contact. Fear what I say.
I do not want to keep you outside this book; living or dead, you are readers. Reading is done outside of me; and I want it to be done—in this way, in silence.
Contrary to received ideas,
Words don’t create a world;
Man speaks like a dog barks
To express his anger, or his fear.
Pleasure is silent,
Just like the state of happiness.
The self is the synthesis of our failures; but it is only a partial synthesis. Fear what I say.
This book is intended for the edification of the Future Ones. Men, they will tell themselves, were able to produce this. It is not nothing; it is not everything; we are dealing with an intermediary production.
Marie22, if she exists, is a woman to the same extent that I am a man; to a limited, refutable extent.
I too am approaching the end of my journey.
No one will be present at the birth of the Spirit, except for the Future Ones; but the Future Ones are not beings, in our sense of the word. Fear what I say.
