Submission - Michel Houellebecq

‘Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if’ histories the preserve of conservative historians?’ asked Slavoj Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books in 2005. There is a definite tendency within the form towards right-wing wish-fulfilment: the focus of Zizek's review was an essay exploring how much more prosperous Russia would have been if Lenin had been assassinated at Finland Station. The same volume also contained a scaremongering essay imagining a hypothetical Al Gore presidency. The Daily Mail’s hysterical ‘first 1,000 days of Corbyn’ piece is just the latest high-profile example of the trend.

Zizek identifies the key feature of the counterfactualist’s mindset: a desire to do away with notions of predeterminism, and put in its place the actions of Great Men. The editor of one of these books, Andrew Roberts, summed up this view: ‘if we accept that there is no such thing as historical inevitability and that nothing is preordained, political lethargy – one of the scourges of our day – should be banished, since it means that in human affairs anything is possible’.

Submission, the latest novel from Michel Houellebecq, is exactly the type of counterfactual thought experiment critiqued by Zizek, this time pushed forward into the speculative near future, and political lethargy is at the heart of the problem as the author sees it. The year is 2022, and the French Presidential elections have turned into a shoot-out between Marine Le Pen’s National Front and the Muslim Brotherhood, led by the charismatic Mohammed Ben Abbas. The political situation is tense, pre-revolutionary even; a party of academics gathering to watch a Presidential debate is disturbed by the sound of gunfire and an explosion, emerging to find that ‘Place de Clichy was completely in flames’. On the day of the elections themselves, armed gangs storm polling stations and make off with ballot boxes, triggering a constitutional crisis. Ahead of the re-arranged election day, the Socialist party swings behind the Brotherhood, allowing Ben Abbas a crushing victory.

In line with the conservative view of history, Ben Abbas is certainly a Man of Destiny, a veritable ‘new Augustus’ capable of rebuilding the Roman Empire within a generation, as his more devoted admirers claim. By contrast, Houellebecq argues, the West is no longer capable of breeding such heroes. Submission begins with a quote from JK Huysmans, ‘my heart is hardened and smoked dry by dissipation. I am good for nothing’. This forms the basis for Houellebecq’s critique of Western culture. Bored of the worship of money and the ‘fleeting icons’ of Spectacular society, the Western bourgeoisie has become effete and, even worse, lethargic. 

This period of change is narrated by Francois, a 44 year old academic whose field of expertise is the work of Huysmans. Francois is unmarried, but engages in a series of increasingly half-hearted affairs with his students; unusually for one of Houellebecq’s creations, he doesn’t have a dog, or an interest in everlasting life. He feels that his intellectual life is near its end, and is increasingly removed from society, a passive observer of France’s tumult. When his employers want him to leave, he accepts the pension they offer; when they want him to return, and offer a new contract, he accepts that too. 

When Huysmans was at the same age, he found God and converted to Catholicism, the passion which informed his classic novels; Francois toys with the idea, but can find no institution worthy of placing his faith in. He idly contemplates suicide, without being able to summon up the necessary strength of will to go through with it ('should I just die? The decision struck me as premature'). Instead, he resigns himself to trying to adapt to the new political situation with as little disruption to his existence as possible. His gradual adaptation to the new situation is the process around which the novel is organised.

There is a moment when Submission threatens to turn into a Fredrick Forsyth type military thriller; Houellebecq throws some secret service officers and cocksure right-wing ideologues with ‘back channels’ to paramilitary groups into the mix, and we see the bodies of men who have been gunned down outside petrol stations. Unsurprisingly, though, the mood soon turns back toward the meditative. This is not the hand-chopping Islamofascism of right-wing propaganda, but a moderate process which primarily focusses on education and the family. After the initial shocks of Islamic rule, Francois’s contemporaries are easily bought with generous salaries and the promise of trophy wives. They have long fantasised of the return of the patriarchy, but not from a desire to rule for themselves. Instead, they dream of a system which will ensure their comfort with a minimum of effort on their part. The new social structure promoted by the Islamic government will provide this for them. For Houellebecq, the desire to submit to a new leader has an almost mystical quality, analogous to man’s submission before the might of God, or even the erotic worship of a woman for her lover as depicted in The Story of O.

Houellebecq’s exclusive focus on the world of academia creates problems, however. At one point, he states that 'it may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay’. Indeed, this may well be true, but it is true of the author as well, who follows it up by arguing that young people can’t see ‘any alternative to the free market’. While he is correct in his analysis of pre-millennials, his view of the future relies on the assumption that the coming generation will show no greater desire to shape its destiny.

Adding another layer to the novel is the self-lacerating quality of Houellebecq’s writing. Throughout Submission, Francois purposefully compares his own life and work to that of Huysmans. Early on, he observes that 'only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettiness, its obsessions, its beliefs, with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave'. He feels that he himself is incapable of the same depth of feeling which Huysmans experienced, and is unable to take any genuine pride in his work. He and his colleagues exist at the fag end of French literature, fiddling with the legacies of the great writers who came before them; the only one who makes any genuine connection with the public is Robert Redigar, whose middlebrow introduction to Islam sells three million copies. It is hard not to interpret this as Houellebecq's self-criticism.

It is impossible to read Submission without reference to the present situation in France; days after the novel’s release, the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris were attacked, and the English release comes shortly after another attack was foiled. Houellebecq’s novels have contained splenetic racist messages in the past; in this case, however, the author is relatively constrained in his discussion of Islam. The focus is not on gun-wielding terrorists, but moderate Muslims who are portrayed in flattering contrast to the directionless and jaded Western middle classes. The tone of the novel is meditative, in the vein of The Map and the Territory rather than Atomised or Platform, and the chief object of his satire is the complacent French bourgeoisie. References to the relative birth-rates of Europeans and Arabs play up to right-wing fears, and he certainly gives a voice to far-right beliefs through the words of certain characters, but on the whole the feeling is that any ideology is better than no ideology at all.

Houellebecq’s vision of the future is both paranoid and (just about) plausible, but his reasoning is flawed. For all that he presents himself as a modern Cassandra (whose myth, he is at pains to explain, is misunderstood in the modern world), he is unable or unwilling to look beyond his own milieu in his analysis. Submission is a successful satire, but less effective as speculation. Indeed, the controversial elements of the book, particularly the aspects which deal with Islam, are something of a red herring, a narrative tool enabling the author to achieve his main goal of critiquing the European establishment.

If Houellebecq’s fiction can be divided into the iconoclastic early polemics (Atomised and Platform) and his more considered later books (The Possibility of an Island, The Map and the Territory and now Submission), this is probably the most accomplished of his mature novels to date. It is beautifully readable, balancing the melancholic air of defeatism which has come to characterise his writing with pointed satire. Increasingly, Houellebecq reads like a man coming to terms with the failure of his generation, and deciding to fade away peacefully rather than rage against the dying light. Whether we choose to go along with his pessimistic view or predict a brighter future is a question for the reader.