Without God

by Louis Betty

  François’s conversion in Submission is not, however, to Catholicism or any kind of Christianity. An internationally respected scholar of Huysmans—François has written a dissertation and a book on the author and is tapped later in the novel to edit a Pléiade edition of Huysmans’s collected works—François’s attempts to allay his prototypically Houellebecquian malaise will fall short of the successes of his intellectual hero (who, as François and Houellebecq rightly note, converted to Catholicism for largely aesthetic reasons).6 Rather, and much more topically, François’s vector in Submission is toward an ascendant Islam. As becomes clear to François later on, Islam and Christianity, whatever their apparent differences, are both interested in the same thing, namely, an escape from the atheistic humanism that has dominated France and the West since the beginning of the revolutionary period. The Christian dispensation was at its apogee in the Middle Ages; its time has come and gone, and, as Houellebecq has insisted throughout his career whenever accused of being a reactionary, there can be no going back to a previous time. Huysmans’s choice subsequent to À rebours may have been between a crucifix and the business end of a pistol;7 for François, the decision will be between suicide and the Islamic crescent.

  With the exception of his academic achievements, François is a characteristic Houellebecquian loser: an amalgam of loneliness, depression, alcoholism, neurotic introversion, and misanthropy that, among other things, makes him an appropriate subject for satirizing contemporary academic life. Renowned in France for his work on Huysmans, François places little stock in his professional success, going so far as to insinuate that his “clear, decisive,” and “brilliant” articles are “generally respected” because he is “never late on deadlines” (47). François has little interest in his students; having arranged to teach all his classes on a single day of the week (27), he complains of “nasty” graduate students who pester him with “idle questions” about minor French poets (53–54). His love life is a series of erotic encounters with female students, none of them lasting more than a year, which, as the years pass, take on a “dimension of transgression” linked more to the “development of his university status” than his “real or even apparent aging” (23). Considering his scholarly accomplishments, François wonders, “was this enough to justify a life[?]” (47). At forty-four, his best years, both professionally and personally, seem to be behind him. “What would I become at age fifty, sixty, or more?” he asks himself. “By then I’d only be a slowly decomposing hodgepodge of organs, and my life would become an endless torture, grim, nasty, and without joy” (99). Having lost interest in his career and nearing an age where he can no longer count on the affections of his students, François charts a path not unlike Daniel of The Possibility of an Island or Bruno of The Elementary Particles. His only solace is his love for Huysmans, whom he rereads somewhat obsessively while alone in his apartment, all the while imbibing (and this is no surprise) large quantities of wine.

  François’s malaise is set against the backdrop of a political drama—the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in France—that will fundamentally alter the country’s political and social life. At the head of these developments is Mohammed Ben Abbes, the party’s candidate in the 2022 presidential race, who, after ousting the socialists in the first round of the election, goes on to defeat Marine Le Pen in a runoff to become France’s first Muslim president. Abbes has little interest in economic reform; indeed, the country’s fiscal woes are largely remedied by an influx of money from the Gulf petromonarchies, which appear willing to contribute any amount of money to swell the prosperity of their first true ally in the West. Rather, Ben Abbes’s concerns are social and, of course, religious in nature:

  Ben Abbes had [ . . . ] avoided compromising himself with the anti-capitalist left; the liberal right had won the “battle of ideas,” he had understood this perfectly, young people had become entrepreneurial, and the inimitable character of the market economy was at present unanimously accepted. But above all, the true stroke of genius of the Muslim leader had been to understand that elections would not play out on the economic field, but rather on that of values. (153)

  “Perfectly sincere when he proclaims his respect for the three religions of the Book,” Ben Abbes’s true objective in the domain of social values is not Islam’s supplanting of an already hobbled Catholicism, but rather the destabilization and dismantling of the cult of “secularism, laïcité,” and “atheist materialism” that, in the party’s view, goes further toward explaining the decline of European civilization than any economic considerations ever could (156). Modern Europeans are hungry for the return of religion, and education, as Ben Abbes and his party recognize early on, will be the key site for the revival of a neglected Western soul:

  More and more often, families—be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—would want schooling for their children that wasn’t limited to the transmission of knowledge, but that included spiritual education corresponding to their tradition. This return of the religious was a deep trend, and the national education system couldn’t not take it into account. All in all, it was a matter of broadening the scope of republican education, of making it capable of harmonious coexistence alongside the great spiritual traditions—Muslim, Christian, or Jewish—of our country. (108–9)

  As an accomplished academic, François stands directly in the path of the pedagogical bulldozer that the Muslim Brotherhood intends to drive over Parisian university culture.8 Once the party takes control of education, professors are given the choice of conversion to Islam or retirement with a handsome pension. Unsurprisingly, François chooses the latter option, but he is astounded to find that his colleagues who have agreed to stay on under the new terms (i.e., conversion) are paid a salary three times higher than the previous prevailing wage, are housed in elegant apartments on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and, most important, are promised wives from among their students.

  Like all of Houellebecq’s protagonists, François is a religious anemic. The idea that he might become a believer of any sort strikes him not so much as undesirable but as simply impossible. Not until the election of Ben Abbes does he give any serious consideration to religious matters: “For the first time in my life I had begun thinking about God, seriously envisioning the idea of a Creator of the Universe, who watched over each of my acts, and my first reaction was very definite: it was none other than fear” (263). The only religious sensibility he betrays is embedded in his love for Huysmans, who at age forty-four converted to Catholicism at a monastery in the Marne. François, in many ways a kind of secular monastic, seems to yearn for the piety and simplicity of monastery life: “In a monastery, one escaped the greater part of [life’s] concerns; one laid down the burden of individual existence” (99). “In a monastery,” he continues, “you’re assured food and shelter—along with, as a bonus, eternal life in the best of cases” (100). As France is roiled by political and social disorder not seen since the world wars, François, having fled Paris for southwestern France, visits the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, hoping the visit will inspire in him something of the pious sentiment that led Huysmans to the foot of the crucifix more than a century ago.

  The effort will, of course, be a failure. François’s initial impression of the imposing black virgin is a mixture of anachronism and holy terror:

  It was a strange statue, bearing witness to an altogether forgotten age. The Virgin was sitting very straight; her face, its eyes closed, so distant as to seem unearthly, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus [ . . . ] was also sitting very straight on her knees; his eyes were also closed, and his sharp, wise, powerful face was surmounted by a crown as well. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their attitudes. It was not the baby Jesus who was represented; he was, already, the king of the world. His serenity, the impression of spiritual power, of intangible might that he emitted was almost frightening. (166)

  This is not the friendly Jesus of contemporary catechism. Here is the representation of a true king of king
s, presiding over a medieval Christendom that endured for more than a millennium, compared to which the revolutionary society that Europe spawned after the Enlightenment appears as little more than a brief interim between millennial spiritual dispensations (162). As François contemplates the virgin, he feels a growing desire to lose himself, to abandon his ego and individuality to an ancient spiritual power, to be relieved of the autonomy and struggle of the modern Westerner—to submit, as it were, to this erstwhile lord of the Western world (169). The experience, however, is fleeting; François even wonders whether his apparent brush with the mystical may not have been a result of having forgotten to eat the night before at the hotel (169). The next morning, before leaving by car to return to Paris, François goes to see the statue a second time: “She possessed dominion, she possessed power, but little by little I felt I was losing contact, that she was drifting away, disappearing into the centuries, while I slumped in my pew [ . . . ]. At the end of fifteen minutes I got up, permanently abandoned by the Spirit, reduced to my run-down, perishable body, and I sadly descended the steps in the direction of the parking lot” (170).

  A return to the bosom of Europe’s native Christianity is not an option for François, any more than it is for France. Christendom, he realizes as the virgin fades into the mists of the past, no longer speaks to modern man; its power to command and to sanctify belongs to a forgotten age, and there can be no going back. It is an exceedingly sad vision: a spiritual order that organized human life for more than ten centuries, but that is no more able to save itself from the destructive forces of rationalism than was the Roman Empire able to save itself from collapse at the end of the fifth century (276).9

  Back in Paris and without work, François dreads the empty existence that he will now be obliged to traverse: “I felt nothing more than a muted, deadened pain. [ . . . ] all that I saw was that once again I was alone, with a desire to live that was dwindling, with numerous worries to look forward to” (196). François is a kind of carcass of revolutionary civilization. Everything that freedom from tradition, from God, and from the church promised has become for him a source of despair and meaninglessness, just as it has for his contemporaries. He is an embodiment of every anxiety of which one could reasonably accuse modernity, including atheism, meaninglessness, sexual immorality, and dereliction of parenthood; and it is precisely this spiritual and moral indisposition that Abbes and his party seek to treat. Knowing that he will die “rapidly, miserable and alone” (249) in his present state, Islam thus begins to loom large for François.

  A Conversion au conditionnel

  On his return to Paris, François is surprised to discover a letter in his mailbox from Bastien Lacoue, the chief editor at Éditions de la Pléiade,10 proposing that François edit the complete works of Joris-Karl Huysmans. Instantly aware that “this was not the kind of proposition one refuses” (229), François, treating himself to a heavy dose of Calvados to calm his nerves, takes a meeting with Lacoue two days later at the publisher’s Gallimard offices. Lacoue, who during the meeting somewhat cheekily opines that the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is in the business of working “for eternity” (231), quickly convinces François to accept his offer. More important, Lacoue persuades François to attend a reception in honor of the reopening of the Sorbonne (that is, the Université Islamique Paris–Sorbonne, now largely funded by Saudi oil dollars) in order to meet the university’s new president, Robert Rediger, who, François senses from Lacoue’s remarks, is eager to lure François back into the ranks of the Parisian intellectual elite.

  Rediger is a mixture of physical superman and expert proselytizer: tall, powerfully built, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket (238), his casual virility seems out of sync with his role as an intellectual leader (especially a French intellectual leader). His manners, and especially his smile, are nonetheless irresistible. At the conclusion of the reception—attended exclusively by men, many of whom are members of the delegation of a Saudi prince who has come to meet the minister of national education—Rediger, consciously brandishing his disarming smile, asks François to meet with him privately at his home several days later. François, somewhat star struck, agrees immediately.

  Luxuriously housed near the Arènes de Lutèce and recently married to a fifteen-year-old girl name Aïcha, Rediger offers what is surely the firmest repudiation of European modernity and Enlightenment civilization that Houellebecq has ever mustered in fiction. As he treats François to “an excellent Meursault” (244) in his vast library-salon, Rediger expounds at length on the personal journey that led him to Islam: his early discovery of the moral and spiritual emptiness of atheistic humanism, a youthful romance with Christian identity movements (mouvements identitaires), and finally a painful realization, much like François’s malaise before the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, that Christianity had no hope of revitalizing the soul of Western civilization, that its time had passed, and that Islam occupied the ascendant in the West’s spiritual future. “Without Christianity,” Rediger tells François, “the European nations were no more than bodies without souls—zombies” (255). He continues a couple of pages later:

  This Europe that was the summit of human civilization has well and truly committed suicide, in the space of several decades [ . . . ]. There were throughout Europe anarchist and nihilist movements, calls to violence, the negation of all moral law. And then, a few years later, everything ended in that inexcusable madness of the First World War [ . . . ]. If France and Germany, the two most advanced, civilized nations could abandon themselves to this senseless butchery, then that was because Europe was dead. (257)

  Having grasped some ten years ago the extent of the destruction, both spiritual and material, that atheistic humanism—that is, the collapse of Christianity—had wrought in the West, the next day Rediger went to visit an imam in Brussels and “in the presence of about ten witnesses [ . . . ] utter[ed] the ritual formula of conversion to Islam” (257).

  François, however, has an objection: is it really true, he asks, that contemporary Europeans are as hungry for God and religious revival as Rediger suggests? “I had the impression,” he tells Robert, “[ . . . ] that atheism was universally spread throughout the western world” (250), in other words that its foundation in the West is solid and that Islam poses no real threat as a “Great Replacement,” especially in the presence of an improving economy. Rediger sweeps François’s concerns aside: “It is for metaphysical questions that men fight, certainly not for an uptick in economic growth or for the division of hunting territory [ . . . ]. Even in the West, in reality, atheism has no solid base” (251). He continues, borrowing from the theory of intelligent design:

  The Universe evidently bears the mark of intelligent design. [ . . . ] it is obviously the realization of a project conceived by an immense intelligence. And sooner or later this idea was going to impose itself again, that was something I had understood when I was very young. The whole intellectual debate of the twentieth century had come down to an opposition between communism—let’s call it the hard version of humanism—and liberal democracy—its soft version; this was nonetheless terribly reductive. (253–54)

  Rediger’s attempt at proselytism (a digest version of Frankfurt School philosophy with Voltaire’s watchmaker argument thrown into the mix) fails to convince François in its immediate aftermath. Even so, having returned home with a copy of Robert’s Ten Questions About Islam under his arm, François spends an anxious night worrying that an angry God might be waiting to punish him for his sins—perhaps by smiting him with a cancer of the jaw much like that which afflicted Huysmans (263–64). The next morning, returning to Rediger’s maison particulière to pick up the backpack he left the night before, François walks through the Latin Quarter, stopping in front of the Grand Mosque of Paris and making a few general observations about the ugliness of contemporary architecture, before going home to read Rediger’s book.

  Apart from some extended remarks on European history and spiritual decadence (which he find
s rather dubious in their simplicity), François is most struck in his reading of Ten Questions About Islam by Rediger’s treatment of polygamy and the role of the “dominant male” in propagating the human species: “The inequality between males—if certain of them saw themselves accorded the pleasure of several females, others would necessarily have to be deprived—was [ . . . ] not supposed to be considered a perverse effect of polygamy, but well and truly its real objective. It was in this way that the species accomplished its destiny” (260). François naturally fears he will be among those left to suffer the “perverse effect” of polygamy. More akin to the narrator of Whatever than he is to the virile Robert, he suspects that a conversion to Islam will leave him no less lonely than he is at present.

  François quickly finishes the introduction to his Pléiade edition, noting that his “very long relationship with Joris-Karl Huysmans” (283) has come to an end, and takes his concerns about polygamy to Rediger, who is more than pleased to put François’s mind at ease on this delicate point: “Man is an animal, that’s clear; but he’s neither a prairie dog nor an antelope. It’s neither his claws, nor his teeth, nor how fast he runs that assures him a dominant place in nature; but rather his intelligence. So I’m telling you this very seriously: there’s nothing abnormal in the idea that university professors should be counted among the dominant males” (292). After a few encouraging comments from Rediger on the advantages of arranged marriage, François seems persuaded.11 Acknowledging that his professional career is over (or that he can now rest on his laurels while attending “vague colloquia”; 295) and desperately afraid of loneliness in old age, he suddenly has the sensation, extraordinary for a Houellebecquian protagonist, that “there would be [ . . . ] something else” (295) to live for.