Chacun sur son île et Dieu pour tous ? Solitude existentielle, isolation et insularité dans l’œuvre de Michel Houellebecq

Abstract

The island mentioned in the title of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Possibility of an Island does not exist, it is an imaginary place which corresponds to an ideal. We could call it the island of happiness and say that the entire novel cycle tends towards this goal. It is an island because it is necessarily a place separated from the continent, it is an isolated place because true love can only exist, it seems, far from society. In fact, the Houellebecquian hero is an isolated being in the middle of the crowd. Sexual liberation therefore did not have the expected effects. Instead of the community ideal, the exact opposite happened. And we will see how Michel Houellebecq, based on this observation, will introduce the notion of insularity into his work. Existential loneliness, characteristic of the contemporary era, will result in the complete isolation of each man in a “residence”, a territory in which he will be alone and cut off from others. The work as a whole describes a situation which is very degraded but paradoxically insists on the importance of love and on the role of literature in encouraging human beings to go in search of imaginary islands which are islands of resistance in a world of loneliness.

Keywords

• island
• loneliness
• love
• imaginary