Review: Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’ Imagines France as a Muslim State
Published in France on Jan. 7, the day of the terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq’s new book, “Submission” — a novel set in 2022 in which an Islamic party sweeps into power in France and Islamic law is embraced — became an instant best seller there and the center of a heated debate over the lines between satire and Islamophobia, free-expression and hate-mongering.
Toward the end of that ugly new novel (now available in an English translation), Mr. Houellebecq has his narrator, François, make a barbed observation of another French writer, the 19th-century Decadent novelist J. K. Huysmans. It was “a mistake to give too much importance” to his “glib talk about ‘debauches’ and ‘dissipation,’ ” François thinks — that was just “part of the need to scandalize, to shock the bourgeoisie” and, in the end, “a career move.”
Certainly, in Mr. Houellebecq’s own case, controversy has proved to be a very rewarding career move. His deliberately provocative novels have been best sellers in France and, according to The Guardian, he is “the first French novelist since Albert Camus to find a wide readership outside France.” It is success or notoriety stoked by his bigoted remarks — in 2001, he described Islam, to a French literary magazine, as “the dumbest religion” — and willfully offensive novels like “The Elementary Particles,” filled with misogynist put-downs, putrid sex scenes and nihilistic pronouncements on the depravity of the human species. In an interview about “Submission,” he acknowledged using “scare tactics” that play upon the politics of fear.
The reception of these books has often been as perverse as their contents. Mr. Houellebecq has won not only international visibility, but also the Goncourt Prize, and a startling amount of critical acclaim — for being a “grand, scabrous renunciator,” for being arguably “the most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier,” and for hunting “big game while others settle for shooting rabbits,” as though he were another Louis-Ferdinand Céline, endowed not only with Céline’s bigotry and pessimism but also with his talent.
Mr. Houellebecq’s writing tends to be highly derivative of earlier writers, including Céline and Camus. His novels are hobbled by clumsy speechifying from supporting characters who exist only to give voice to political or philosophical points of view or to serve as objects of the hero’s contempt. His protagonists are simply variations on one odious type — self-pitying, self-absorbed and misanthropic men who have a hard time feeling any emotion other than lust, and who regard humanity as a “vile, unhappy race, barely different from the apes.”
“Submission” is no exception. Its hero, François, a middle-aged academic who has a habit of seducing his students, is another of Mr. Houellebecq’s repellent narcissists: uninterested in history or politics, and disgusted by humanity. He dislikes teaching, dislikes his students, thinks most women are disposable and is so bored with his existence that he can’t think of any reason to live. In some ways, he is a nightmare variation on Camus’s Meursault in “The Stranger.”
The novel’s plot twist is that it takes place in France in the near future, when extremists have increasingly come to dominate the political scene. To thwart a victory by the right-wing National Front, a coalition is formed that brings to power the head of an Islamic party, a fictional character named Mohammed Ben Abbes, who proposes to ban coeducation and have Muslim-only teachers, and the country soon undergoes a radical transformation.
Government subsidies to families discourage women from working and unemployment rates fall. The education budget is slashed with mandatory schooling ending around age 12 (Muslim schools step up to provide privatized secondary and higher education), and non-Muslim professors from the Sorbonne and other schools are forced out. Women stop wearing skirts and dresses and other revealing clothing, and polygamy becomes acceptable.
These changes are submissively accepted by France (hence, the novel’s title), as though the country were too weary or too lethargic to resist. Although Mr. Houellebecq portrays Ben Abbes as the face of an Islam that imposes its will not by the sword like ISIS, but by shrewd politicking, his novel plays on French fears of terrorism, immigration and changing demographics. It appeals, in many respects, to the same audience that propelled to the best-seller list Éric Zemmour’s “The French Suicide,” which blames the policies of a liberal elite and successive waves of Muslim immigration for the country’s decline and loss of identity.
Marine Le Pen, the real-life leader of France’s right-wing National Front (who appears in “Submission” as a political leader defeated by the fictional Ben Abbes), has said of Mr. Houellebecq’s novel: It’s “a fiction that could one day become a reality.”
Mr. Houellebecq’s mockery of French academics — as craven self-promoters — and an arthritic political system can be amusing at times, but in the end, it’s all done with an extremely heavy hand. In one interview, Mr. Houellebecq has said that he does not see “Submission” as a satirical novel and in another, he acknowledges that he probably is “Islamophobic,” though he adds that the “word phobia means fear rather than hatred.”
His hero, François — who has been on a vague spiritual quest after the death of his parents and departure of a girlfriend — sees himself converting to Islam in the end. But he would do so not out of belief but out of self-interest: If he converts, he’d get a high-paying job at the now Saudi-run Sorbonne and three young wives. It’s an ending thoroughly in keeping with its author’s cynical view of the world: Islam triumphs, in his telling, because of the cheap blandishments it can offer a potential convert, and its hero gets a new start in life by remaining true to his egocentric, opportunistic self.
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