Submission Failure

In his latest novel Soumission (Submission), Michel Houellebecq has abandoned his trademark realism and acerbic satire for fantasy. This entry is a hatchet job of the novel, which I will argue is as weird and disconcerting as the author's latest publicity photos (see below). But my ire is directed as much towards the novelist as towards critics who seem unable to get a handle on the book’s sensitive subject matter and to appraise it for what it is. In the absence of a satisfactory review, I offer my own.

Don’t get me wrong – Michel Houellebecq is not a bad writer. I wrote a MA thesis about him when he was still the new enfant terrible on the block. Like many millennials, I was struck and awed by his raw portrayal of our morally bankrupt, decadent and selfish society. In my research, however, I argued that the French literary press was way off the mark in labelling him a radical “avant-garde.” He was an edgy realist writing tales for our times, voilà tout. Hadn’t they read Balzac?

Houellebecq - Syphilis Chic

If you’re reading this, you probably know who Houellebecq is. He is small man with a big literary presence – by far the biggest-selling French novelist of the past decade. He emerged on the scene in the mid-1990s with Extension du domaine de la lute (translated into English as Whatever), the story of an IT technician’s disaffection and debauchery that bleakly equates sexual satisfaction with market economics. The novel, which was successful thanks to word-of-mouth reviews, established Houellebecq as a writer-to-watch.

He followed up this success with Les Particules Élémentaires (Atomised in English) – a thought-provoking novel that tackles cults, hippies, the legacy of 1968 and the genetic possibility of doing away with man. His third novel, Platform, is about a 40-year-old male who finds true love in the midst of a sex tourism enterprise, and is in many ways his most mature and humanistic novel. In La Possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island) he returned to the dystopian theme of cults and cryogenics, coupled with his trademark pessimism about contemporary life in France.

La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), the fictional biography of a star of the modern art world, was published in 2010. This ambitious novel cleverly experiments with genres and reader-expectations, ending as a detective story after a fictional character named Michel Houellebecq is murdered. More temperate and more salubrious than previous works, it achieved Houllebecq academic recognition by winning the Prix Goncourt – France’s equivalent of the Man Booker Prize.

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Sousmission is Houellebecq’s sixth major novel. In brief, it tells the story of François, Professor at the Sorbonne and specialist in the nineteenth-century writer Huysmans. Indifferent to his life and career, though not to his subject, he is swept up in a tidal wave of extremist politics that pits the French far right against a “Republican front” led by Ben Abbes, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. After his election, the Islamisation of France occurs at breakneck speed, with French women wearing the veil, men taking multiple wives and professors having to publically convert in order to keep their positions.

In a twist of fate that only a writer could have imagined, Soumission was published the very same day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.[1] The satirical newspaper even had a caricature of Houellebecq on the front page of that day’s edition, with a caption saying that in 2022 he would be celebrating Ramadan. Inextricably linked to the Charlie tragedy, he fled Paris under police protection. Assuming his new book would be his coup de grace to Mohammedists, critics readied their knives.[2] Some of them fell straight into the trap laid for them, hammering Houellebecq for his racism and intolerance before opening the book.[3]

Cover of Charlie Hebdo, 7 January 2015

The catch is that Soumission, believe it or not, is not anti-Islam. At all. The religion is presented without irony as a utopian solution of kinds to France’s fundamental flaws, a means of filling the moral gap left by the demise of Christianity and restoring order after the disappearance of patriarchy. Houellebecq’s satirical bile is aimed almost exclusively at the effete French political classes and professors, who are more interested in microwave meals and shagging students than any form of political engagement.

Taken aback by the absence of Islamophobia in Soumission, the vast majority of literary critics in the press have reviewed the novel positively. Alex Preston for instance observes in the Guardian that it is “both a more subtle and less immediately scandalous satire than the brouhaha surrounding it might suggest.”[4] If it isn’t racist hogwash, such critics tend to conclude that it must be rather good – a satire of Orwellian foresight and Swiftian subtlety. It isn’t, for reasons I’ll go into here.

The problems are manifold, but essentially boil down to this. While it is not unthinkable that French Islam could get some form of political representation (one such party, the UDMF, already exists), the prospect of it gaining enough mainstream support to front a winning collation in seven years’ time is totally and utterly unthinkable. The establishment would never allow them to progress this far, and if ever there were a situation where France had to choose between the National Front and an Islamic-led coalition, could anyone seriously doubt that the former would not waltz into power?

Equally preposterous is the form of Islam adopted in France. It is an orientalised Islam that offers a libertine paradise for Frenchmen. Those who struggled to find partners in the old regime – pathetic men like scholars – are now patriarchal heroes able to find wives to cook for them, keep them company and, above all, satisfy their every sexual desire. The title of the novel, incidentally, is foremost a reference to this. Alcohol still abounds, for some unexplained reason. Could this male utopia exist any place on earth, other than in the warped fantasia concocted by Michel Houellebecq? In essence, the novel’s prophecies for 2022 are about as serious and far off the mark as Back to the Future’s depiction of 2015.

Another problem is that one senses early on that Houellebecq is as interested in politics as his protagonist, who is “about as political as a bath towel.” Houellebecq’s novels trade in the dirty and gritty, but politics, ugh. At best it’s a spectator sport for old people. But given that the novel is principally about just that, it is a further fail point of the novel. Incidentally, it is remarkable that Houellebecq is able to openly satirise a generation of French politicians – no doubt counting on the fact that a liable suit would be too damaging to their public image.

Another criticism of the novel is the way in which Houellebecq undertakes a potentially fascinating parallel with Huysmans. Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans’ masterpiece À rebours, embodies the decadent idea par excellence that contentment lies in withdrawing from society and retreating into one’s own “den of delights.” In this work, Huysmans radically broke with Emile Zola, whose Naturalists naively believed they could make the world a better place by exposing injustices and promoting nice values like socialism. Des Esseintes is François’, and by extension Houellebecq’s, alter ego – the original escapist fantasist. Yet François chooses a different path – that of the engagé accidentel (the “accidental activist”). It is so much less romantic than Des Esseintes’ glorious isolation, and so further exacerbates our disappointment. 

Des Esseintes - Houellebecq's Fantasy Alter Ego

The satire on university life is more credible, even if Houellebecq insists on reminding us in a rather odd end note that he has never set foot in a university. Academic fortunes are made and broken according to who they sleep with or are related to – and positions are given to people who have recycled dissertations on Rimbaud found in provincial university cupboards. The notion that French intellectuals would agree to quit without protest in exchange for Saudi petrol dollars is funny, but again, not realistic.

Houellebecq’s treatment of scholarly life becomes a little more unstuck when he pushes his outmoded and puerile theory that “an author is above all a human being, present in his books.” This is at odds with the mainstay of literary theory that resists any crass equivalence between an author’s life and his work. Does Houellebecq want us to read his novel uniquely as an expository of his own hang-ups? It is well known that his mother converted to Islam after years as a hippy libertine. Has he finally come to peace with her abandonment – is that what this is all about?

In the same passage, Houellebecq’s protagonist insists that “to love a book is, above all, to love its author: we want to meet him again, we want to spend our days with him.” It is hard to love Houellebecq (or at least to publically admit to it) – he takes such a masochistic pleasure in infusing his own bodily decrepitude in his character’s, dwelling on the revolting ailments at length and with glee. It was much easier to read his nihilistic passages on sex in earlier novels. It was also easier to stand up for him when he had something important to say.

Houellebecq’s detractors often claim he is a media phenomenon masquerading as a maître and this latest novel gives fodder to this point of view. Indeed, whereas each of his previous novels explored new directions for humanity – plausible dystopias that are exaggerated versions of present-day reality – Soumission merely presents us with a ludicrously implausible fantasy. At its core, the novel seems to be a response to contemporary Islamophobia and a product of Houellebecq’s fantastical relationship with the religion, without having anything serious to say about it. One might even allege that the spectacular plot was conceived as a sure-fire way to garner spectacular sales.

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[1] On the morning of 7 January 2015 at about 11:30 local time, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi stormed the office of Charlo Hebdo on 7 January killing twelve people. The newspaper had caused offence due to its controversial depictions of Muhammad.

[2] In 2002, Houellebecq was prosecuted, albeit unsuccessfully, for saying in an interview that “Islam was the stupidest of religions.” (“La religion la plus con, c’est … l’islam.”)

[3] The writer Christine Angot has said: “Submission is a novel… that dirties anyone who reads it. It isn’t a tract but a work of graffiti: ‘shit’ to anyone who reads it!” Fouad Laroui writes: “… Houellebecq is participating in a quasi-biological resurgence of racism that we thought had definitively disappeared.”

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/08/submission-michel-houellebecq-review-satire-islamic-france