Excessive Candour
The Man Who Missed Liberty Valance

Michel Houellebecq's fourth novel, even more than his first three, is a reductio. It is a reducing agent, a corrosive even more fatal to the pomp and circumstance of human self-esteem than anything this already very famous French novelist and destroyer of pretenses has yet published (it first appeared last year in France). It reduces the "Human Condition"—Andre Malraux's jowly philosophical novel from 1933 is instanced slurringly in The Possibility of an Island, though the old poseur is not himself named—to a distillate which is nothing but truth, for what that is worth.

The first flat unremitting truth from Houellebecq about the Human Condition is a scatological reiteration of what Darwin began to tell us long ago: that everything we humans plead to high heaven about ourselves—shouts of faith, hope and charity, etc., have echoed throughout human history against the walls of Nada—is nothing but background noise, because in raw truth everything we do, except the performance of those acts of sex which further the gene, is froth and delusion; "an animal, any animal, [will] sacrifice its happiness, its physical well-being, and even its life, in the hope of sexual intercourse alone." The second flat unremitting truth about the Human Condition is that the obscenitites of aging soon exile us from being able to do the only real thing in the world, which is begetting or bearing.

Before the end of this review we will demur, of course. We will say that truth—at least this kind of truth—is not enough, that we need a story to get on with; that we are story. But first we must think about The Possibility of an Island as an example of SF. SF as nothing but blind signal separation wrought to its uttermost, so that you can hear nothing but raw truth in the crowded restaurant of life. SF wrought to its reductio.

It is impossible, in fact, one way or another, not to think about The Possibility of an Island quite a lot. The book is very long, deeply French in its incessant extraction of maxim from sense-data, totally unremitting in its conveyance of message. It rubs one's face in the mirror it holds up, and rubs, and rubs. The tale is set partly at the beginning of the 21st century in France and Spain, and partly two millennia hence, long after the First Decrease has flooded the planet, reducing world population to less than a billion, and a good while after the Second Decrease, in which the planet thins into a shrill desert. It is narrated either by Daniel1 in the early 21st century, a partially autobiographical rendering of the protagonist as a kind of visitor from Porlock, as a kind of embodied, salted-snail, desiccating gaze; and partly by various clonelike iterations of Daniel1 (Daniel24, etc.) in their desert enclaves. The later Daniels are talking heads; they are direct consequences of Daniel1. They make you think. They do nothing else.

SF sings an explosive tune

As I read I found myself drifting into thoughts of a 1965 movie I've always loved, The Bedford Incident, starred Richard Widmark, Sidney Poitier, Martin Balsam and, in a small but essential role, Wally Cox. Here is the story. Dumped by helicopter into a Cold War destroyer on active duty, dumped therefore into an ideal forcing-house for the examination of human nature in its essence, comes a reporter (Poitier), whose questioning of the obsessive, hard-nosed, unremitting captain (Widmark) evokes a savagely Gallic clarity of response from this tyrant of truth, who continues remorselessly to intensify his harassment of a trapped Russian nuclear sub. This is that we humans amount to (says Capt. Widmark, surveying his stressed, meme-exudating, sweat-drenched crew as the hunt continues), and this is what humans do. This is what life is. It boils down to hunt. It boils down to kill. Nothing else. "If he fires one," says Widmark of his Russian foe, "I'll fire one." "Fire One!" says insanely overstressed and exhausted Seaman Merlin Queffle (Wally Cox), mishearing his lord, and pushes the button that launches the destroyer's own nuclear missile. From this point, until the end of the film a minute or so later, all we hear on the soundtrack is a high-pitched sound of alarm and consequence and recognition.

I have always taken the last sequence of The Bedford Incident, which ends in the nuclear destruction of both submarine and destroyer, as a kind of acoustic rendering of the tune true SF makes in the mind at its purest moments, the sound of Thought Experiment as it comes to climax. It is as though all the tensions of the preceding hour or so, all the inconceivable clangor of human beings emoting in the hell of human life, reduce to this single piercing note that tells us that for all eternity the thesis has been proved: The high-pitched intensifying note of irredeemable outcome is diagnostic of human life stripped to its nub. The sound that The Possibility of an Island makes in the sensorium of the mind is (I am suggesting) exactly the same sound that ends The Bedford Incident.

The problem is that the movie ends (even though it is on a freeze-frame) but that the book is interminable—because the ear-piercing note of consequence that makes it SF contains no principle of further change. Daniel1 is as ruthless about himself as he is about the rest of life as she is lived (he is more ruthless than Richard Widmark, whose visceral demolitions of any humane Poiteresque understanding of the world are self-exculpatory). He makes it very clear that what we are reading and understanding is what he means us to read and understand: that the cruelty of his behavior to his first wife has been necessitated by the sheer obscenity of her aging body; that the dervishy abjectness of his passion for the second great love of his life has exactly the 40-something danse-macabre lameness mandatory upon anyone his age (like Houellebecq, he is in his late 40s). Only the gene escapes the treadmill of calvary. Each carrier of the gene, living in utter solitude despite his utter resemblance to the billions of his ilk, is a penis island, an iteration diagnostic of the outcome of being human.

Daniel has written this autobiography, stopping just before lust drives him into terminal paroxysms of self-display typical of males about to be culled (we learn this from a short sequence of parallel narrative discovered by a later Daniel). He has written out his life at the behest of those who run a quasi-religion he has joined, the Elohimites, who advocate a "joyous" eternity for its members (after initial iterations like Daniel1 have deposed their DNA in chilled vaults and committed suicide); through heavily financed genetic engineering sleight-of-hand, the sect begins to generate clonelike subsequent iterations before the First Decrease. These clonelike neohumans, who survive as exemplary of what the species has to say for itself to the universe, have been stripped of the two mandatory curses, sex and aging, which pinion 21st-century humans to the wheel of fire. But that is not enough: To re-create the minds of original donors like Daniel1, it is necessary to encode the patterns of neural usage of selected humans like himself, those patterns which, conjoined and palimpsested and tweaked over the normal span of appalling servitude to the gene, generate identifiable selfs. All that need be done is to distillate free minds from messes like Daniel1: So the story he tells is diagnostic of two worlds: the hell we live in; and the necessary outcome, the necessary shrill note of alarm and recognition which is the native sound of minds (like the future Daniels) no longer in bondage.

Liberty makes life more tolerable

None of this may be very good nor very original SF; but it is, all the same, the genuine article, which is manifestly appropriate to Houellebecq's project: because if he had treated the future that follows Daniel1 grim world as wetdream or metaphor or delusion, Island would have collapsed into mere sourness. But it does not. To repeat: Daniel1 is diagnostic of the future. The outcome described in The Possibility of an Island is literally the case of the book. It is pure SF. To write an SF novel about the contemporary world is to say: I mean what I say.

What is intolerable about Houellebecq is not the fleering misanthropy, nor the near pornography that fills so many of his pages (some of it arousing, some of it nakedly effective in its conveying of the anguish of sexual beauty when beheld by a gene-bearer, some of it unrelentingly mechanical); nor is it the chill inerrancy of his instinct for articulating what his readers may find all too convincing an articulation of irrecoverable despair about our lot. What is intolerable about him is not the fact he means what he says, but that he has learned how to create the kind of text—it is the kind of text latter-day SF is capable of generating in 2006—where what he means is allowed to be mandatory. As readers, we can say no, we can say we allow the fiction but not the world the fiction tells us we occupy. We can say no, that between truth and legend we tell the legend. We can say we shot Liberty Valance. Here. I will say it. I am not an iteration of the gene, or not solely. Because I shot Liberty Valance.

There may be a lot wrong with Houellebecq's vision, but what is wrong with his vision is not the book he tells it in.