by Louis Betty
And so François converts. Or, at the very least, the reader encounters a kind of hypothetical conversion scenario in which all the action is conveyed not in the narrative past but rather in the conditional tense (which I have indicated in italics):
Images of constellations, supernovas, and nebulas would cross my mind; images of springs as well, of inviolate mineral deserts, of great, nearly virgin forests; little by little, I would be penetrated by the grandeur of the cosmic order. Then, in a calm voice, I would utter the following formula [ . . . :] “I testify that there is no other God than God, and that Mohammed is his prophet.” And then it would be over; I would be, from then on, a Muslim. (298)
What is the meaning of this seemingly conditional conversion? Is it intended simply to convey a kind of mystical dreaminess—the happy expectations of a man who has been won over to Allah and contemplates with eager anticipation a new and happier life? Or is Houellebecq instead leaving the question of whether François converts in doubt, in a kind of hypothetical or liminal suspension? And if so, why?
Reaction, Romanticism, or Something Else?
Before attempting an answer to the question in the heading, I consider, and in some respects anticipate, two possible—indeed, probable—readings of Houellebecq’s Submission. The first is that this novel is a reactionary text championing as much the renewal of European Christianity as the evisceration of Islam’s influence in the West. The second potential reading is that such championing represents not so much a reaction against Islam but a kind of romantic evocation of a lost era of medieval existential unity. The second reading is somewhat more plausible than the first, but both strike me as insufficient to give a full account of the novel. Ultimately, Submission is posing a question to Europe, and particularly to France, about its own soul, an interrogation of the limits and costs of revolution and unfettered liberalism in the context of a growing imperialistic Islam, which each reader is called upon to answer according to his or her own conscience. The novel is the most powerful sort of provocation, intended not to agitate readers out of some kind of authorial perversity but rather to push them toward what is perhaps the overwhelming question of late European modernity: how much longer can the current dispensation endure? How much longer can the ubiquitous ethos of multiculturalism, tolerance, inclusion, and secularism persist? And, most important, should they?
The charge of being reactionary has plagued Houellebecq from the beginning of his career, with both scholars and critics accusing the author of calling for a return to “traditional values” in an effort to staunch the bleeding provoked by excessive liberalism (e.g., Lindenberg 2002; van Wesemael 2005). Submission seems easily susceptible to such accusations, for the novel goes to great lengths to lament the moral degradation of Westerners, and specifically of Western women, in the absence of tradition, and moreover it explicitly suggests that an Islamic society would put a quick end to such turpitude. However, to interpret Submission’s treatment of women, for example, as reactionary in anything but the most general sense would be a mistake. The Islamic regime of polygamy, for example, is largely alien to the West; its inauguration as a popular cultural practice would constitute something quite new, as would the novel’s standards for women’s dress and education, as well as expectations for religious practice. In “returning” to traditional gender roles writ large, the West would certainly not be returning to its own premodern Christian (or prefeminist) past, but rather would be assuming the values of a competing civilization whose affinities with the West’s heritage, if not incidental, are at least the product of very different historical developments. Indeed, characters such as Rediger, who imagine a revitalization of Christianity as a socially-structuring institution, are quickly overcome by a sense of futility. For example, Robert explains in Ten Questions About Islam:
The Catholic Church had become incapable of opposing moral decadence, of clearly rejecting, and with vigor, homosexual marriage, abortion rights and women’s labor. The truth was indisputable: having reached a degree of repugnant decomposition, western Europe was no longer capable of saving itself on its own—no more than was ancient Rome in the fifth century of our era [ . . . ]. Medieval Christianity had been a great civilization, whose artistic accomplishments would live eternally in human memory; but little by little it had lost ground, it had had to come to terms with rationalism, renounce the subjugation of temporal power, as such it had gradually condemned itself, and why? All things considered, it was a mystery; God had made it so. (276)
Islam represents a spiritual order able to dispel the moral darkness that the brief interim of revolutionary civilization has spread across the West and much of the rest of the globe. In an echo of Comtean positivism, Islam is called on to “create a new organic phase of civilization” founded on “the rejection of atheism and humanism, on the necessary submission of women, on the return of patriarchy” (275). This is not a reaction but rather a return to normal; the true reactionary player has all along been Enlightenment culture, which insists on an unsustainable assortment of freedoms largely inimical to human happiness. Islam stands for bringing humanity back to its senses. To call Submission reactionary would thus be to assume that liberal civilization and atheistic humanism represent the most natural state of human social organization and that a return to a more religious order constitutes a kind of primitivism—a rather dubious historical conjecture. This is not an assumption Islam shares, and neither does Houellebecq.
Nor is Submission a romantic elegy sung for a post-Christian Europe whose best days and most noble accomplishments seem to have faded, much like the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, into a vague and distant past. Houellebecq is, admittedly, indulging in a kind of romanticism in his evocation of a lost age of medieval piety—a tactic that results, as I showed in chapter 1, in a wholesale embrace of secularization theory and in the “horror” of a society utterly bereft of metaphysical consolations. For example, as Tanneur explains to François early in the novel, “The French Revolution, the Republic, the fatherland . . . yes, that was able to give birth to something; something that lasted a little more than a century. Medieval Christianity, however, lasted more than a millennium” (162). Tanneur’s implication is that a civilization grounded in divine sanction will endure far longer than a civilization without such a foundation. Revolutionary culture was a brief and somewhat curious experiment in human self-determination, and the disasters of the twentieth century offer clear evidence that the experiment was a failure. This is not romanticism but, at least as far as Houellebecq is concerned, a historical and sociological platitude. Whatever view one may hold about the putative universal piousness of the Christian Middle Ages, Houellebecq’s intention, elaborated through his engagement with Comte, is not to romanticize a forsaken past but rather to insist on the irreducible necessity of a religiously grounded social order. Submission cannot be romantic for the same reason that it cannot be reactionary, because both interpretations of the novel would impute to Houellebecq an entertainment of the possibility of resurrecting a lost era of human harmony—a possibility that Houellebecq has consistently denied.
The key to understanding Submission lies instead in François’s conditional conversion at the close of the novel. Houellebecq could have justifiably, and without any violation of the text’s formal unity, chosen to situate the conversion scene in the narrative past. François’s arc in the novel is unmistakable in its push toward some sort of conversion; indeed, that Submission’s conclusion is rendered as a hypothesis could reasonably strike attentive readers as something akin to an anticlimax. How to account for this narrative evasiveness, if evasiveness it truly is? The answer is that Houellebecq has left the matter of François’s conversion up to his reader, and the reader will elect to render the ending in the narrative past depending on how successfully Houellebecq has seduced him or her with a kind of fatalism.
Houellebecq has spent the entirety of his career highlighting the moral and existential inadequacies of Enlightenment culture, most specific
ally in its liberal instantiation. The only real difference, the only real evolution, in Submission is that the solution to these inadequacies—Islam—is readily available to those who want it. Any reader, Western or otherwise, who has assumed as a mantle the Houellebecquian critique of liberalism cannot help but want François to convert to Islam—not, to be sure, the medieval Islam of the Islamic State or even the Islam of much of the Muslim world, but rather the gentle, moderate Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, which soothes the spiritual wounds of modernity while avoiding the temptations of poisonous radicalism. Submission implicates the reader in its own finale, even as it embeds that finale in the resolution of many of France’s major social and economic ills (rampant unemployment, economic stagnation, etc.). The French language even stands to gain as a consequence of Islam’s ascendancy in France. Rediger explains: “Like Richelieu, Ben Abbes is getting ready to do an immense service to the French language. With the membership of the Arab countries, the European linguistic balance is going to swing in favor of France. Sooner or later, you’ll see, there will be a proposed directive imposing French, on an equal footing with English, as the working language of European institutions” (291).
What can the erstwhile secular regime hope to offer in place of such an auspicious development? An endless concatenation of worsening debt crises? The slow and painful dissolution of the European Union and the renewal of all the old European rivalries? A return to the premodern Christian dispensation will not be possible, and modern Europe is doomed both spiritually and economically, and in short order. To label Submission as Islamophobic—that is, as anything other than Houellebecq’s latest and perhaps most provocative attack on liberal Enlightenment culture—is to give evidence of not having read the novel at all. Rather, Submission challenges thoughtful readers to elaborate a wholly new response to the West’s inadequacies, based neither in the Enlightenment and its most historically significant ideological offspring (socialism and liberalism) nor in the world’s enduring religions, but rather in the invention of some totally new and as yet unheard-of economic, political, and metaphysical synthesis. The West seems today to be in desperate need of this, but, in an echo of Houellebecq’s impotent protagonists, it appears sadly incapable of producing it.
In his review of Submission in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik (2015) suggests that the evils plaguing France in Houellebecq’s novel could be remedied by a few years of economic growth. If I have accomplished anything in this book, I hope to have persuaded the reader that this sort of economic reductionism is incapable of confronting the metaphysical anxieties that haunt modernity in Houellebecq’s fiction. Perhaps more than any other modern Western country, France since the revolution has been afflicted by the anguish of its own precipitous departure from tradition, giving rise to an antimodern literary and philosophical canon that began with the likes of Maistre and Baudelaire (see Compagnon 2005), passed through the Catholic revivalist writers of the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth, and finds its latest instantiation in Michel Houellebecq. The anxieties of freedom are not quelled by an uptick in economic growth; this is as obvious to the anti-immigrant factions gathering steam in Europe as it is to the radicalized Islamic movements to which they are a reaction. The modern West is today mired in the squalor of an exhausted prosperity; Houellebecq has understood this and explored its inevitable result. Only time will tell if the novelist attains the status of a prophet.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Writes Sweeney, “His novels can be read, on the one hand, as a reactionary response to the progressive socio-cultural movements of the twentieth century such as feminism and multiculturalism while on the other, they seem to offer a compelling critique of the totalizing mechanism of the ‘market’ with its hitherto unparalleled influence on human life” (2013, x). See Viard 2008, 38, for a similar analysis.
2. The two citations of Bellanger that follow are also my translations.
3. In other words, he blames himself.
4. Les Éditions de Minuit is a French publishing house famous for publishing the works of the nouveau roman authors, whose writing tends to be highly formalized.
5. I also do not want to imply that Houellebecq lacks style, as was somewhat inanely claimed by critics of his earlier novels. See Noguez 2003 for a discussion of Houellebecq’s stylistic distinctiveness.
6. In the novella Lanzarote, the Belgian Rudi’s marriage is destroyed after he and his wife spend several months going to swingers clubs in Brussels (2000b, 62–63).
7. The term “materialist horror” is suggested by Houellebecq in his epistolary exchange with Lévy. He writes, “Maybe, like Lovecraft, all I have ever written are materialist horror stories [contes matérialistes d’épouvante in the original French]; and given them a dangerous credibility into the bargain” (2011, 275).
8. I note here that I am using the term “religion” in a colloquial or perhaps traditionally Christian sense, referring to belief in God or gods, the soul and the afterlife, and the supernatural. From a scholarly point of view, the definition of “religion” is, of course, quite a bit more complicated; I take up this issue in my second chapter. Houellebecq, however, also understands “religion” in the more informal way, so it seems appropriate to engage him on his own terms.
9. For a detailed discussion of this sect, whose practices largely resemble those of the Elohimites, see Palmer 2004.
Chapter 1
1. Literary realism was a nineteenth-century movement concerned primarily with giving matter-of-fact descriptions of social and psychological reality. Naturalism, which adopted the basic approach of the realist tradition but added its own unique posits, presented a view of human nature according to which the actions of characters are determined by genetic and social conditions over which they have little control. In this respect, the term “naturalism” conveys not only a style of writing but also a philosophical commitment to a deterministic view of human nature, whereas the broad aim of the realist approach was to depict social and psychological reality with the greatest possible specificity and attention to detail. The Elementary Particles drew immediate comparison with Zola and naturalism. See Badré 1998.
2. Descartes famously proposed that mind and body were composed of two intrinsically different substances, one material and the other immaterial. The first, res extensa, occupied the world of physical, “extended” space, while the other, res cogitans, belonged to an internal, immaterial world of thought that existed outside of the physical realm (though still interacted with it).
3. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics holds that no clear dividing line exists between the observer and what is being observed. See Wolf 1989, 128–29.
4. According to the principle of nonseparability, two particles can, under certain conditions, exercise a nonlocal effect on each other. That is, the action of each particle will affect the other regardless of the distance between them.
5. See Berger 1997; Demerath 2007; Hadden 1987; Hervieu-Léger 1990; Lechner 1991; Martin 1991; Stark 1999; Stark and Iannaccone 1994; Wilson 1985; and Yamane 1997 for a broad-ranging, representative discussion of debates over secularization that have taken place since the 1980s.
6. Sociologist of religion Karel Dobbelaere (1987, 117) proposes a three-level analysis of secularization as a phenomenon occurring in the institutional, societal, and individual realms.
7. This passage may very well owe a debt to Arthur Schopenhauer, one of Houellebecq’s avowed influences. In his essay “On Suicide” (2006), Schopenhauer argues that suicide, while not criminal or even explicitly prohibited in the Bible, nonetheless constitutes a mistake. To kill oneself thwarts what Schopenhauer contends is the highest moral aim of life—the suppression of the will to live. We are all driven forward to greater forms of becoming by the universal will that inhabits all of nature, and it is the will’s frustration with its own limitations, its desire to escape the fetters of a finite form, that pushes the human being to suicide. The person who
has overcome the will—who has overcome the instinct for becoming—will therefore have no need of suicide, for hopelessness has become impossible. Even so, Schopenhauer strongly condemns the criminalization of suicide, arguing that there is nothing to which we have a greater right than our life and person. Though not explicitly stated, such reasoning surely informs Jean-Pierre’s decision—just as it does those European governments that have legalized euthanasia.
8. It is also worth mentioning that Houellebecq’s portrayal of struggling, isolated priests was nothing new in twentieth-century French literature. Georges Bernanos, for example, is well known for his novel The Diary of a Country Priest, which depicts the wretched material and moral conditions in which a young priest in 1930s northern France is forced to live: “It is hard to be alone, and harder still to share your solitude with indifferent or ungrateful people” (35). François Mauriac offers a similar image of the lonely priest in this passage from his 1927 novel, Thérèse Desqueyroux: “Based on some things Jean Azevedo had said, Thérèse began to pay more attention to this still-young priest who didn’t communicate much with his parishioners. They thought he was arrogant: ‘He’s not the type we want around here.’ During his rare visits to the de la Traves, Thérèse observed his whitening temples, his high forehead. No friends. How did he spend his evenings? Why had he chosen this life?” (2005, 81).