Cloning and Nausea in the Possibility of an Island

Abstract

This paper investigates the physical and metaphorical meanings of nausea in Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. Through the trope of cloning, Houellebecq likens the human body to a ship, and conflates existential nausea with nausea caused by inhabiting a body. The future clones of the narrator Daniel inhabit a world of ‘neohumans’ that are clones like themselves, and old-style, barbaric humans. Neohumans change their bodies through cloning, which after a while give them ship-sickness, or nausea. Daniel’s nausea is shaped by his relationship with the Mediterranean throughout. The novel asks the question ‘What happens to human consciousness when the body keeps changing and the white male body is propagated into the future?’ Thus, the novel works as an allegory for the way the Mediterranean functions today both as a curative and lethal space for European endeavor.