ABSTRACT
The five shipwreck survivors in Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines immediately begin to procreate, and over the course of four generations of their offspring, humanity itself regresses, with the inhabitants ultimately wearing no clothes and falling into tribal warfare. The society on the Isle of Pines presents impossibility in its depiction of sexual anarchy and wanton procreation (the society eventually numbers 10,000). It also approximates the prelinguistic aspects of the Lacanian Real, as it depicts humanity regressing as far as possible in a post-linguistic, Symbolic world. As Lacan’s Real also exists in the realm of post-Symbolic law, the Isle of Pines also represents horrific lawlessness in the Civil War that eventually destroys the society. The eventual destruction of the society depicts on a microcosmic scale a literal apocalypse. The narrative of The Isle of Pines uses multiple narratives frames to further remove the reader and audience from the “reality” of the entirely “unreal” or “impossible” societal arrangements on the island.
