Subvert & convert
Soumission By Michel Houellebecq Flammarion 299 pp; $32.95 Reviewed from the French
Michel Houellebecq — the French novelist caricatured on the Jan. 7 cover of Charlie Hebdo as a drunken, smoking Nostradamus — wrote a novel doomed, both by its capsule summary and the author’s notorious reputation, to be viewed by those who haven’t read it as a racist, fearmongering text.
Soumission, released in the immediate wake of the attack on the Paris based magazine’s offices and now mysteriously held up in the press as some kind of equivalent to Charlie Hebdo — a satire that takes shots at all but perhaps most emphatically at Islam — is in fact something else entirely. It’s a novel, for one thing, and a novel is always more complex than its plot summary (even if the summary suggests a more intriguing work than what we are finally presented with).
So, the summary: It’s 2022, and, after two increasingly unsuccessful terms, the French socialist party is on its way out, to be replaced either by a far-right National Front party, or a Muslim party led by the charismatic, ambitious and insistently moderate Mohammed Ben Abbes. Ben Abbes takes the election and institutes a form of sharia, which relates, largely, to the control of education, and the removal of women from the workforce. Crime and unemployment statistics plunge, conversions rise, and any man who wants to continue teaching in a university must convert to Islam.
In capsule form, Soumission (which translates to “submission,” also one of the meanings of the word “Islam”) could certainly be taken as a piece of rightwing propaganda from a pot-stirring crank. But Houellebecq’s alliances have always been clear: he has none, brutalizing the right-wing for being devoid of ideas, and consistently skewering the post’60s French left.
In interviews spanning his long career, Houellebecq has referred to nationalists as “primates,” a sentiment that rings through the pages of Soumission: the “identitaires,” (nativist, France-for-French nationalists) are buffoons or aristocratically rich schemers, and when the Muslim brotherhood comes to power, there’s even a suggestion that the conservative and patriarchal values of the right will find a degree of satisfaction through the imposition of sharia law.
The book serves to point out the numerous social overlaps between the two forms of ideology, and the left is also drawn in: Ben Abbas is interested in clean energy, and is willing to cede many economic decisions to the socialist members of his coalition government, even if his actual intention is to prove that his “family-first” approach to education and professional life makes for a significant surplus in funding for social programs.
Soumission’s narrator, François, is a middle-aged academic, and the book begins as a slow reflection on his most significant relationship: that with the subject of his long-finished dissertation, J.K. Huysmans. This friendship, with the long-dead, decadent author of Against Nature and a whole series of novels detailing, among other things, the turn of their author toward Catholicism, suggest both the isolated, disengaged loneliness of François, and the narrative that will come to unfold for him: like Huysmans, his is a story of conversion.
It’s this conversion element that make it clear Houellebecq is not presenting Islam as the sinister counterpoint to Enlightenment ideals, which the author holds in little esteem. François has a life consisting of writing essays and microwaving meals, alone. The purest horror he faces upon Ben Abbes’s rise to power is that he, for the first time, is going to be personally affected by politics.
If French culture is dying, Houellebecq isn’t going to mourn it. But in Soumission, he pokes into a wound, the helpless paranoia of a dominant culture that is constantly fearful of a shift in power, of a loss of that dominance: the replacement of a corrupt, empty system with a different system, replete with new failings of its own, and perhaps promising a sense of meaning and purpose to converts who submit to it.
After the heights of The Map and the Territory, Houellebecq’s Prix Goncourt-winning 2010 masterpiece, Soumission is a bit of a disappointment, and Houellebecq himself seems aware of this: early in the book, Francois describes how Huysmans moved on from writing his masterpiece, Against Nature, by writing a disappointing novel that was about disappointment. While the subject of Soumission isn’t disappointment, it is largely about decay and ensuing change: Houellebecq may be pulling a similar stylistic trick here, emerging from his own shadow by writing a sort of obituary for a France he feels increasingly distanced from.
By the end of Soumission, the idea of the French right using this novel as a cautionary call-to-arms for conservative voters is laughable. The book, marinated in disdain and hatred as it is, is not actually racist. Racism, for Houellebecq, is part of the story — part of the fearful world his characters occupy, and of Houellebecq’s contemptuous vision of France, a declining Western culture, and the world. How it will be received in France — as a contribution to racist anxieties, or as a depiction of a society that has simply stopped working properly — is not up to Houellebecq; the audience will determine the novel’s reception, which is just as it should be. But here, as with so many dangerous books, one can only hope they actually read Soumission: the complexity of this particular novel makes it extremely difficult to use it as a political tool.