That Submission, the sixth work of fiction by the French provocateur Michel Houellebecq, was published in France on the day of the Charlie Hedbo assassinations feels like something out of a publicist’s morbid daydream. It considers a near-future in which the French Muslim Brotherhood finds common cause with the socialists—and in a darkly comic twist, Sarkozy’s center-right UMP—and takes control of the government. What follows is at once outrageous and eerily plausible. Over the ineffectual protests of Marine Le Pen’s defeated National Front, the new regime moves quickly to Islamize the nation’s educational system, remove women from the workforce, and secure European Union membership for Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, with Lebanon and Egypt soon to follow. The left, paralyzed by multicultural orthodoxies, swiftly capitulates, unable to “fight . . . or so much as mention [the] name” of the charismatic president Mohammed Ben Abbes. Many convert. Others flee. France changes irrevocably.
All of this is trenchant satire, of course, and frightening enough. Yet Submission means to do more than merely terrify the nativists. Houellebecq, widely known in his homeland and lauded by the Guardian as “France’s most celebrated controversialist,” has woven into an otherwise national narrative the smaller (and ultimately more important) story of François, a bored university professor who lectures to empty halls, flits between prostitutes, and wishes for nothing more than to “do a little reading and get in bed at four in the afternoon.” Though his work, a lifelong study of the French novelist J. K. Huysmans, has been “marked by real intellectual achievements,” François nevertheless feels “close to suicide, not out of despair or even any special sadness” but because “the mere will to live [is] clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.”
It is as that Western man—faithless, morally exhausted, and shorn by the brutal 20th century of any functional heritage—that François begins to reveal the deeper work of the novel. Relieved of his duties by President Ben Abbes’s declaration that all teachers must be Muslims, François wanders the countryside in a state of detached dread, unable either to accept the end of his professional life or to follow his Jewish girlfriend out of the country. (“There’s no Israel for me,” he tells her in a biting scene.) Returning resignedly to Paris, he is offered a startling choice: accept a pension and permanent dismissal, or become a Muslim and enjoy the spoils of conversion—a wildly remunerative post at the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne, a gaggle of teenage brides, and a teaching assignment guaranteed not to “interfere with [his] real work,” as a senior administrator promises.
That Submission presents the decision that follows not as an occasion for suspense but as an inevitability is exactly the point. Bereft of any countervailing values, François has nothing to hold on to. He happily takes “the chance at a second life, with very little connection to the old one.” To put it another way, he submits.
The question posed by this novel, then, is whether or not we—not only France but the broader West—are François. The verdict, alas, is not good. Among Submission’s many indictments of the West is its utter demolition of the notion that liberal democracies, faced with existential threats to their identity, will ultimately shake off their torpor. In Houellebecq’s view, such a project is not only unlikely but impossible given the extent of the West’s self-loathing: its masochistic assurance, as François tells himself, that “nations [are] a murderous absurdity” and that “anyone paying attention [has] probably figured this out.”
In an irony as bleak as it is widely applicable, however, François clearly isn’t paying attention, despite his status as a member of the educated, cosmopolitan elite. As the novel progresses, François confesses, shamelessly and explicitly, his ignorance of history, of political life, of his own native France, and even of Islam itself. Unanchored to the past, adrift in the present, and lacking even a basic geopolitical awareness, François fears the death of his way of life—and believes himself, somehow, to deserve it. Overcome “by the feeling that everything could disappear”—not only the unveiled women whom he passes in the street but the vibrant, pluralistic society that protects
them—François nevertheless convinces himself that he “would have nothing to mourn” were it all to vanish.
Is all of this too much, too extreme, to be believed? And what of Christianity, whose residual power alone might provide the necessary counterweight? Here, too, Houellebecq is a pessimist: “Thanks to the simpering seductions and the lewd enticements of the progressives,” the same senior administrator tells François,
Europe, in other words, has “already committed suicide.” Without the guiding force of a muscular, orthodox Christianity, “the European nations [have] become bodies without souls—zombies.”
And so, as Submission ultimately makes clear, they relent, not because they lack the means to save themselves but for reasons that bring to mind a phenomenon known to the French as the call of the void—l’appel du vide—the self-annihilating urge to leap from tall buildings, to put one’s hands in the machinery, or, as some have described it, to swerve into oncoming traffic. It’s 2015, and the West is behind the wheel. The swerve
is coming.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
