However improbably, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission returns continually to the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans for inspiration, if one can call it inspiration, this exercise in disillusionment seeking its literary echo. All the more surprising is Houellebecq’s insistence on a view of Huysmans that scarcely anyone, even those who have read his best work, will recognize, despite its being scrupulously accurate in its biographical and literary detail. When Huysmans is read today, it is almost invariably as the quintessential Decadent of À rebours, which Houellebecq touches upon only lightly when he declares it a masterpiece and then declines to discuss it in any meaningful way except to ask where one goes, where Huysmans went, where Houellebecq’s protagonist François might go, when his best work, his greatest inspirations, and his greatest dissipations are behind him. “In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans,” the protagonist worries, “the obvious problem was what to do with À rebours. Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivaled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?” Houellebecq even seems to be inviting us to contemplate his own midlife crisis as a novelist and wonder if, after writing the great novel of cynicism in our time, after exploring in painful detail better than anyone else all the great whatevers of modern anomie, he has simply run out of fresh disillusionments to anatomize in prose. His answer to his own question is quite simply Durtal, Huysmans’ other great literary accomplishment, the autobiographical alter ego around whom he focalized a series of somewhat mystical, somewhat Naturalistic, somewhat Decadent novels of Catholic conversion that occupied him for much of the two decades that followed the success of À rebours.
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Reading the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, I remembered an essay by Maurice Blanchot that appeared in 1964, entitled “L’Apocalypse déçoit,” roughly translatable as “The Apocalypse Disappoints.” Originally devoted to the intellectual failure on the part of the French intelligentsia to deal with the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the title of that essay seems the perfect commentary to a plot that would sound nothing less than apocalyptic to a very sizable part of contemporary French society: the election of a Muslim president of the French Republic and the Islamization of its civil code. This disastrous occurrence, currently treated in the Western media as nothing less than a catastrophic finis Europae, is narrated by Houellebecq in his increasingly understated voice, now mostly situated halfway between deadpan satire, melancholic brooding, and a touch of occasional melodrama. Gone are the violent Islamic terrorists of Plateforme, the 2001 novel that ended with terrorist attack on European sexual tourists in Thailand. No more spectacular explosions of the 9/11 kind: if the Western way of life will go, it won’t be with a bang, but with a merely audible whimper. A miasma of exhaustion and obsolescence pervades Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. It is occasionally punctured by explicit expressions of a pornographic libidinality, but these, in the end, serve only as desperate manifestations of increasingly temporary respites. The end is nigh, if it didn’t already happen. Houellebecq’s universe remains what it has been repeatedly—a universe of male libidinal desire, its intensifying frustrations and anxieties monumentally projected onto the background of the specters of the civilizational decline of the West. Houellebecq is at the tired end of the secular liberal dream of possessive individualism and sexual freedom, or, as the narrator puts it rather succinctly: “In the end, my cock was all I had” (81). For scholars of religion and literature, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission glimmers like a shiny lure. The storyline contains the sorts of details that appeal to an easy and seductive journalistic gloss. The year is 2022. A charismatic Muslim prime minister is elected in France, and an almost caricatured series of events follows: men and women are separated; the university president converts to Islam and weds a young wife; professors are coerced to convert or retire early; and so on. Add to the plot Houellebecq’s professed Islamophobia and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, and you have the ingredients of a newsworthy book to be addressed by critics, journalists, and readers across the world. Like a number of reviewers, I initially found myself lured to consider religion, secularism, and contemporary French politics against the backdrop of the newly published English translation. But as I began reading, I was confronted with a challenge of a different sort. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission raises important questions about the cultural crises of modernity. It reflects on the dialectics of post-secularism and post-democracy in ways that have become particularly salient in light of the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernadino. Beginning with Vincent Lloyd’s post today, TELOSscope presents a series of discussions of the novel that will appear over the next several days. The violence of November 13, 2015, in Paris was met with an avalanche of grief and sympathy from around the world. Similar feelings followed the attack on Charlie Hebdo several months earlier. Paris is an iconic and beloved city; to see blood and bullet holes on the streets of Paris caused pain. Or rather, it causes professions of emotion. In an age of personal mediation, when we are expected to advertise our feelings about world events nearly in real time through tweets and Facebook posts, it is an open question how much feelings are felt—though they are most certainly performed. Affect circulates with ever increasing velocity, but such affect is increasingly shallow, more like a shared way of talking than anything having to do with inwardness. This does not mean mediated emotions are insignificant. As leftist critics of such public mourning charge, shared ways of talking about the world lead to shared ways of seeing the world and can ultimately legitimate violent ways of acting in the world. |
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