Submission

The big surprise about Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel, which hit French stores shortly before the attack on Charlie Hebdo and earned him the magazine's cover,  is that it isn't Islamophobic at all. In fact, his speculative fiction about an Islamic takeover of France is hardly about Islam at all. In the novel, a Muslim Brotherhood party wins a run-off presidential election a few years from now because the mainstream political parties can't stomach the only other option, the xenophobic National Front of the Le Pen family. The new Muslim president makes the necessary deals with the other parties -- there's no indication that France ceases to be a republic -- but insists unconditionally that his party must have the ministry of education. You can imagine what results from that, but Submission only goes a short time past the initial victory. By that point there have already been profound changes in French culture, but the French seem to take it in stride -- or at least the French men do. The main story of the novel is the protagonist's gradual acquiescence in the new regime. He's a typical Houellebecq protagonist, maybe more intellectual than others -- he's a professor of literature and an expert on the 19th century novelist J. K. Huysmans -- but above all he's a sexual loser who blames age and the culture for his dissatisfaction. The consistent argument in Houellebecq's fiction is that modern secular capitalist culture is mercilessly competitive at every level, but particularly at the level of sex and love, leaving hardly anyone feeling satisfied with his or her life. What he perceives to be missing is a culture of unconditional acceptance, which his unreliable male narrators -- unreliable less because that they might be lying than that their biases are obvious --  tend to identify with unconditional sex. The protagonist of Submission finally converts to Islam, partly to secure a prestigious academic appointment, but also because he likes the idea of having multiple wives who'll be subservient to him. At the same time, he recognizes that, whether or not Islam can fill the spiritual or emotional void he's long felt, French culture had long since failed to fill it, and the country's secular republican heritage arguably created that void. It never gave French people that sense of loving belonging, for want of any better term, that their ancestors presumably enjoyed back in the Middle Ages. Modern culture's nihilistic tendencies on both the political and economic front have left the French with little sense that they have anything to defend against an Islamic takeover, as compared to the Paris Chinatown the narrator observes favorably at several points. He's confident that that neighborhood will never be Islamified because even expatriate Chinese identify so strongly with their culture, feel such a strong sense of belonging to it, that they can't imagine giving it up. You may have thought that French people have had a strong sense of having a culture for the last 225 years or so, but Submission's message is that, at least as practiced in the 21st century, a culture founded on "humanity" or "reason" wasn't cutting it.

Houellebecq is a pessimist about human nature. It's never been clear to me how much he agrees with his characters' self-pitying diatribes against modernity or their longing for the carnal comfort of women as sex objects. In Submission the men submit voluntarily, at least as far as we see, though we may question how voluntarily the women submit to new rules limiting their participation and self-expression in public. The most I can say is that, not having read all his novels -- Submission is the fourth I've finished -- I don't recall anyone representing or articulating more radical alternatives to the hypercompetitive modernity decried by so many of his characters. In passing this time, his characters dismiss the left as nihilistic. Leftism is a hopeless cause at a time when people seem to be longing for a haven in a heartless world, as Marx might have said. In this environment, Islam has two advantages. First, Muslims have as supposedly unbreakable a cultural solidarity as the Chinese. Second, and crucially for French converts, it promises happiness through submission, a concept readers of that popular French novel Story of O can appreciate. Here's a French convert making a pitch to our narrator.

...for me, there's a connection between woman's submission to man, as it's described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man's submission to God. You see, Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such, Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha - unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn't Satan called 'the prince of the world?' For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it's an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to his laws.

Again, you can guess that Houellebecq (as opposed to his character) sees a point to this without agreeing with much else in the argument. The author, after all, once called Islam the stupidest of religions and was tried for it in a French court. He more recently conceded that he could fairly be called an Islamophobe, while emphasizing that, for him, that really meant fear rather than hatred. My hunch is that Houellebecq feels the temptation to submit -- to surrender autonomy or responsibility in return for assurance and comfort -- but resists it by writing about it with often pornographic honesty and ugliness, while applying the same satiric touch to the culture that provokes the temptation. In his own way Houellebecq is as much a prophet as Muhammad was, if not more so. I don't mean that he claims clairvoyance for his novel, but that like many a prophet, if not like Muhammad, he comes to warn and denounce. In Submission the warning is only indirectly about Islam; the real target is a culture that was destroying itself long before Muslims joined in.