by Louis Betty
5
Liberalism Is God and the West Is Its Prophet
It’s probably impossible for people who have lived and prospered in a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who, never having had anything to expect from that system, imagine its destruction without any particular alarm.
—Houellebecq 2015a (my translation)
The publication on January 7, 2015, of Houellebecq’s sixth novel, Submission,1 was part of one of the most bizarre and horrific coincidences in the history of contemporary literature. Houellebecq’s face appeared on the cover of that morning’s edition of Charlie Hebdo, a quintessentially haggard image of the author smoking a cigarette, and he declared that in 2022 he would participate in Ramadan; later that morning, Houellebecq lost his friend Bernard Maris, a contributor to Charlie Hebdo and the author of a 2014 book on Houellebecq, in the deadly attacks on the newspaper’s office.
Houellebecq had written what seemed on all accounts to be an Islamophobic book—a paranoid tome recounting the horror of France’s Islamicization after a Muslim is elected president in 2022, ahead of the National Front’s Marine Le Pen. Houellebecq had already been taken to court and then acquitted on charges of inciting racial hatred against Muslims after claiming in an interview more than a dozen years ago that Islam was the “stupidest” religion. Certain of his novels’ minor Muslim characters had denounced their religion in terms so categorical that Houellebecq, had he been Muslim, would have likely earned a fatwa similar to that pronounced on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. That Submission would continue in the same vein seemed the most logical thing in the world. French president François Hollande, interviewed a few days before the appearance of the novel, promised to read the book but warned that in literature there had always been “forces of regression” (Bonnefous 2015, n.p.), and he urged the French not to let themselves be “devoured by fear” (Vertaldi 2015, n.p.).
The coincidence of the attacks, the novel’s publication, and Charlie Hebdo’s coverage of it thus spawned a tantalizing, unspoken suspicion: that the perceived Islamophobia of Houellebecq’s latest effort had played a role, however figurative, in the massacre. Such a question appropriately took second place to the debates over religion and free speech that arose in the wake of the tragedy, as well as to national mourning. Indeed, no explicit statement, as far as I have been able to discover, was ever made connecting Houellebecq to the attackers’ motives, the knowledge of which died with them. However, what did seem clear initially—and not only to the French president—was that Houellebecq’s novel played into cultural paranoia about Islam, terrorism, and national and civilizational decline;2 it would provide a symbol and a weapon for European nativist groups, such as Germany’s Pegida, worried about the loss of national, racial, and religious identity; and it certainly did not affirm the kind of constructive discourse about tolerance and diversity that would, it seems, be likely to prevent a repetition of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in the future.
Submission quickly became a best seller throughout Europe, climbing to the top of the sales lists in France, Italy, and Germany (Hofmann 2015). But as critics began to digest the novel, it became apparent that Houellebecq’s latest work could only very dubiously be judged Islamophobic in any strict sense. Strangely enough, the novel at places seems to extol Islam as the only possible cultural, religious, and economic replacement for a Europe, and specifically a France, that had long ago abandoned Christianity and now wallowed in an incoherent liberalism. Submission, as Adam Gopnik (2015) points out in the New Yorker, is not Islamophobic but rather is Francophobic. Like previous Houellebecqian works, the novel takes great pains to point out the disasters produced by the culture of “freedom” and “human rights” inherited from the Enlightenment: the decline of religion and the family, the anxiety of individualism, the confusion of gender roles, the proliferation of a sexual marketplace that replaces a culture in which adultery is prohibited, and so on. The novels Whatever, The Elementary Particles, and The Possibility of an Island had already dealt with these in detail; the difference in Submission is that the solution Houellebecq imagines to the woes of modernity is an extant faith tradition rather than an extraterrestrial religion or a cloning cult (see Houellebecq 2015b). Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books offers perhaps the most enlightened summary of Submission’s target:
Houellebecq’s critics see the novel as anti-Muslim because they assume that individual freedom is the highest human value—and have convinced themselves that the Islamic tradition agrees with them. It does not, and neither does Houellebecq. Islam is not the target of Soumission [ . . . ]. It serves as a device to express a very persistent European worry that the single-minded pursuit of freedom—freedom from tradition and authority, freedom to pursue one’s own ends—must inevitably lead to disaster. (2015, n.p.)
Submission is a continuation of Houellebecq’s unflagging attack on liberalism and the boasts of freedom in all forms. In this case, however, the warning is all the more urgent and apparent: different from the utopian phantasms that Houellebecq imagines in previous novels, Islam represents, at least in some of its iterations, a real and tempting solution to Westerners who have lost their spiritual way. That Submission paints Islam in the most flattering possible light thus stands as a kind of challenge to Houellebecq’s readers. It is as if the novel asks, “Read and tell me if you do not, somewhere in your heart, feel tempted by this vision of a Europe in which family life has been restored, men and women have their assigned roles, the economy has been stabilized, and eternal life is reaffirmed.” Like Houellebecq’s other novels, Submission wonders whether the anxieties of modernity and of individual freedom are worth the benefits they (allegedly) produce. This is a question that the modern West has always faced in one form or another, and it is through the prism of Islam that it asks the question today.
The Modern Western Woman: A Two-Hundred-Year Disaster in the Making
Of all the social groups in Houellebecq’s novels that have suffered the anxieties of freedom, women stand out as a particularly egregious example of liberation gone over to the dark side. One of the advantages of Submission is that its engagement with a living religion allows it to draw a sharp contrast between liberated women and traditional women—that is, between modern Western women and women living “in submission,” that is, under Islam.
François, the novel’s forty-four-year-old protagonist and narrator, describes the erotic life of an ex-girlfriend named Aurélie, with whom he briefly (and unromantically) reunites early in the novel: “As for the present, it was obvious that Aurélie had in no way managed to embark upon a conjugal relationship, that her occasional adventures caused her a growing sense of disgust, and that, to sum it up, her sentimental life was heading toward total and irremediable disaster” (2015a, 21). Another former girlfriend, Sandra, who according to François “leaves a less profound impression of dereliction” (22), is nonetheless prey to a “not perfectly extinguished sensuality” (24) that “would push her to seek the company of young people,” in turn leading her to become what François “in his youth” referred to as a “cougar” (24). Even so, the best Sandra can hope for is perhaps a dozen years of erotic adventure before the “crippling decline of her flesh led her to permanent solitude” (24). The notion that either of these women, after experiencing “ten or twenty” “amorous relationships of variable duration,” should “as a pinnacle of achievement” get married and have children strikes François as perfectly inane (21). Where Aurélie is irreparably bitter after the failure of a relationship (21), the description of Sandra’s cougarish predilections takes on a most pathetic quality in the mind of the reader. Left to their choices to pursue sexual freedom, to multiply their erotic adventures, while at the same time devoting their days to a demanding career—in other words, goaded on by women’s liberation to imitate the customs of men—these women have met with sentimental and sensual disasters. In a society that insisted that women marry early and raise children and that severely p
unished infidelity, such catastrophes would be avoided; this, at any rate, is François’s implicit conclusion.
This is not to say that François is any kind of engaged chauvinist. A depressive, lonely, alcoholic university professor who only dates his former students, François describes himself to his sometimes girlfriend, Myriam, as a “sort [of] vague chauvinist” who has “never been persuaded that it’s a good idea that women should be able to vote, take the same classes as men, or have access to the same professions” (41) but who has no will to stand in the way of women’s “progress.” “I’m not for anything at all,” he tells Myriam during an evening together in his apartment, “but patriarchy at least had the merit of existing, that is to say as a social system it persevered. [ . . . ] there were families with children, who more or less produced the same pattern” (41). Myriam’s patience is extreme in dealing with François, though she protests: “Let’s say that you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable option. All the same, I’ve studied, gotten used to thinking of myself as an individual person, endowed with a capacity for thinking and decision making equal to that of men, so what’s to be done with me, then? Am I good for nothing?” (43). Wanting to spare Myriam’s feelings, François says only to himself, “The right answer was probably ‘Yes’” (44). Myriam is in her early twenties and has the whole of her life in front of her; it will be many years before she begins to experience the disappointment, bitterness, and, of course, physical decline of Aurélie and Sandra. In many ways, female bodies serve as a kind of proxy for Houellebecq’s rendering of modern French history. Just as the youthful Myriam is able to enjoy all the pleasures of liberation while Aurélie and Sandra must suffer all its deceits, so the early revolutionary society of Robespierre, Fourier, and Comte could revel in the emancipation from tradition, while the France of François’s time is left in postmodern dereliction.
Submission’s most striking example of modern female affliction comes in the person of Annelise, the wife of Bruno,3 François’s fellow graduate student who leaves academia to become a tax inspector after defending his dissertation. Annelise works long hours as a marketing executive for a mobile telephone company. It is worth quoting François’s description of her in its entirety:
I thought about Annelise’s life, and about that of all western women. In the morning she probably did her hair and then dressed carefully, as her professional status called for, and I think that in her case she was more elegant than sexy [ . . . ]. She must have spent a lot of time on it before taking the children to day care, then the day was spent dealing with emails, on the telephone, and in various meetings. When she returned home exhausted around nine o’clock, she would collapse, put on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, and this was how she presented herself to her lord and master, and he must have had, he must necessarily have had the feeling of having gotten screwed somewhere, and she herself had the feeling of having gotten screwed somewhere, and that the passing of years would bring no resolution, nor would the children’s growing up or the mechanical increase in professional responsibilities, and this without even taking into account the drooping of the flesh. (93–94)
Annelise is the cliché of the modern superwoman, balancing work, children, and a marriage; in other words, she is totally miserable. But she is not the only one. Bruno, no doubt forced to share domestic duties with his wife while pursuing his career, is equally conscious of “having gotten screwed” somewhere. Women’s liberation and marriage are incompatible; the blurring of gender roles leads only to confusion and exhaustion; and the incoherent family life that results is a source of anxiety and disappointment.
These criticisms of modern marriage are in no way new. A brief survey of literature on the “end of men” reveals a growing complaint on the part of both men and women in the West that unhinged feminism has emasculated men and transformed marriage from a partnership with well-defined roles to a zero-sum game in which husband and wife compete for dominance.4 Submission plays cleverly and provocatively on these issues, but the novel’s true contribution to the debate lies in how Houellebecq is able to contrast the disorder plaguing gender relations in the contemporary West with the harmonization of male and female roles that an Islamic society promises. Unsurprisingly, Houellebecq’s first target is the female body. On the one hand, Western women like Annelise are obliged by their social status to be “classy and sensual during the day,” but upon returning home they “exhaustedly [renounce] any possibility of seduction, throwing on loose and formless clothing” (91). Muslim women, on the other hand, compelled by their religion to don “impenetrable black burkas during the day” (91), nonetheless metamorphose in the evening into “birds of paradise, adorning themselves in corsets, openwork bras, thongs decorated with colorful lace and precious stones” (91). They are, in other words, the “exact opposite of western women” (91). While strolling through the Place d’Italie, François predicts (and later his prediction is confirmed) that stores catering to Western women’s sartorial tastes, such as Jennyfer, will disappear under an Islamic regime, while Secret Stories, a boutique selling off-label lingerie, will flourish (90–91). The only effect he notes in the wake of sexuality’s flight from public space once the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power is that “the contemplation of women’s buttocks, a minimal, dreamy consolation, had also become impossible” (177).
Women’s economic autonomy also comes in for stern critique in Submission. Having taken firm control of the French educational system, the newly elected president, Mohammed Ben Abbes, and his administration quickly establish policies that point women in the direction of homemaking schools once they have completed their primary education and that encourage them to marry as quickly as possible (82). Only a small minority, as François’s acquaintance Alain Tanneur, a former member of the French intelligence service, explains, will be allowed to “study art or literature before marrying” (82). The immediate consequence of women’s departure from the economic sphere and return to homemaking is a drastic reduction in the rate of men’s unemployment—that is, an end to one of the principal economic afflictions of modern France and much of the rest of Western Europe (199). Submission makes no attempt to paint these changes in women’s autonomy in a negative light. In fact, it is the very notion of autonomy as a key Western value that the novel calls into question. While riding a train back to Paris, François notes the giddy, innocent happiness of two adolescent girls, who are married to a visibly anxious and overworked Arab businessman:
In an Islamic regime, women—well, those who were pretty enough to arouse the desire of a wealthy husband—had [ . . . ] the possibility of remaining children practically their whole lives. Shortly after the end of childhood, they themselves became mothers and were again immersed in a child’s universe. Their children grew up, then they became grandmothers, and their lives went on in this way. There were only a few years where they bought sexy underwear, trading children’s games for sexual ones—which amounted to about the same thing. Obviously they lost their autonomy, but fuck autonomy.5 (227)
François, removed from his university position after refusing to convert to Islam, is “obliged to agree” that he has “easily renounced, and even with true relief” any sort of professional or intellectual responsibility, and he in no way envies the life of the Arab businessman whose face becomes “almost gray with anguish” (227) as he speaks on the telephone with a colleague. “At least,” François observes as he watches the threesome from the other side of the train car, “he would have the compensation of two gracious and charming wives to distract him from the concerns of an exhausted businessman” (227). Women’s return to puerility under the Muslim Brotherhood is a boon for both sexes: women are relieved of the burden of individualism and self-determination, while men have the comfort of companions who in no way remind the men of their professional responsibilities, but rather permit them to escape, if only for a short time, into a world of innocent sexuality and domestic harmony where they can lay down the burden of their labor
s. Submission is not a chauvinistic fantasy about male control of female sexuality. If anything, it is women, having suffered more than men from the anxieties of freedom, who benefit most under the new regime, while men are still compelled to live the larger portion of their lives within the domain of economic struggle.
At its most essential, Submission is a rebuke of two forms of liberalism that Houellebecq has consistently portrayed as inimical to human happiness: the first, sexual liberalism, has ruined marriage and compromised the basic unit of social life, the family; and the second, epistemological liberalism, frees man from divine command and thus subjects the “truth” to competition and the corroding and secularizing forces of relativism. Submission’s Muslim Brotherhood, while leaving economic freedom untouched (153), recognizes the mischief that these other two forms of liberation have wrought in the West—and the group responds accordingly. And it is François, embodying the anxiety of these freedoms, though acutely incapable of reaction against them, who represents at once the Islamic regime’s foil and its raison d’être.
As Goes France, So Goes François
Submission is in large part a conversion narrative, though of a sort manifestly different from those told by the French intellectual converts of a century or more past (see chapter 3). Houellebecq had originally intended to title his novel La Conversion rather than Soumission, with the main character converting to Catholicism by the book’s end. The goal, as he explains in the Paris Review, was to have his protagonist follow in the footsteps of fellow novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who abandoned naturalism for the Catholic Church late in his career. Much of this interest in conversion is due to Houellebecq’s newfound ambivalence toward atheism, which, he confesses, “hasn’t quite survived all the deaths I’ve had to deal with.” He explains, “Part of it may be that, contrary to what I thought, I never was quite an atheist. I was an agnostic. Usually that word serves as a screen for atheism but not, I think, in my case. When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer” (2015b, n.p.).