Read part 1 here.
The crypto-religious texture of Submission arises partly from the first-person narrator’s academic specialization: he is a Huysmans scholar. For if books are, as Jean Paul once remarked, thicker letters to friends, then Huysmans is François’s companion in life. “Throughout all the years of my unhappy youth Huysmans was my companion, my faithful friend”, he confesses at the beginning of the novel.
The life of the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) is for Submission something like what the Homeric Odyssey was for James Joyce’s Ulysses: a template against which correspondences and contrasts are made visible. The novel opens with a long quotation from En Route (1895), the second volume of Huysmans’s strongly autobiographical spiritual tetralogy centered on the fictional writer Durtal. This excerpt revolves around a spiritual conflict that will also prove formative for Houellebecq’s hero François: the conflict between deep emotional absorption in the Catholic rite and the impossibility of belief.
The life of the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) is for Submission something like what the Homeric Odyssey was for James Joyce’s Ulysses.
In the church of Saint-Sulpice, Durtal reflects:
“Catholicism would not leave me in peace; stupefied by its clouds of incense and the perfume of its candles, I prowled round it, moved to tears by its prayers, shaken to the depths by its psalmody and its chants”.
Yet this shattering immersion in ritual by no means flows organically into Christian faith. Whatever the Marxist Louis Althusser may have had in mind with his well-known creative twisting of a Pascal quotation, the formula fails in Durtal’s case. Althusser was thinking of the functioning of advanced ideology when he rendered Fragment 250 of Pascal’s Pensées as:
“Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”.
That is, one reaches content through form; seeming is sooner or later followed by becoming. This is exactly what does not work in Durtal’s case.
He is certainly full of disgust with life and weary of it—yet “to lead a new life for that reason alone is a great step!” The leap of faith does not fail because Durtal knows too much to perform a sacrificium intellectus (sacrifice of the intellect). Rather, immediately upon leaving the sacred space he becomes “once again indifferent and numb”. The intellect is not the problem. The heart is: it has been “hardened and dried up by a loose life”.
That loose life—of sexual libertinage, intellectual excess, aestheticist extravagance with its concupiscentia oculorum (lust of the eyes), and Black Masses—is responsible for his incapacity for faith. For Durtal begins in Down There (Là-Bas, 1891), the first part of the tetralogy, as a world-weary fin de siècle man of letters whose dissatisfaction with the materialism of the naturalist literature of his time, with its deficiency in transcendent representation, leads him to the poetological vision of a “spiritual naturalism”, and, over the course of the novel, to occultist, alchemical, sexual-magical and Satanist explorations.
One must recall here that Huysmans himself debuted as a naturalist in Émile Zola’s circle, before publishing in 1884 Against Nature (À rebours), the work regarded as the Bible of Decadence. Its hero, Floressas Des Esseintes, embodies everything the Decadent movement stood for: he is the sickly, nervously exhausted last scion of an ancient aristocratic family whose former vitality has decayed through a mixture of vice, incest and a gradual “effeminization of men”. Des Esseintes hosts a celebration to mark the onset of his own impotence, cerebralizes pleasure, and uses the world as a machine of excitation meant to wrest sensory stimuli from physiological slackening. He loathes everything natural just as much as he detests Americanization and democracy. Only immersion in the exquisite counter-worlds of the aesthetic—literature, painting, perfumes and music—offers solace to the permanently exhausted solitary.
Huysmans’s hero loathes everything natural just as much as he detests Americanization and democracy.
However these artificial paradises are not sustainable. In the end, Des Esseintes depends on enemas for nourishment and, utterly depleted, calls upon a God in whom he cannot believe:
“Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who longs to believe”.
This De Profundis marks the true point of departure for the subsequent spiritual journey of Huysmans’s autofictional double, Durtal. Religious crises led Huysmans in 1892 to a stay at the Trappist monastery of Notre-Dame d’Igny, before he was clothed as a lay brother in 1901 at the abbey of Saint-Martin in Ligugé.
It was precisely in this abbey that Houellebecq’s François had once conducted research for his dissertation on Huysmans. After his university suspends teaching indefinitely —owing to France’s liminal state between the two rounds of the presidential election and to the imponderables surrounding the political consequences for the university’s internal hierarchy—François sets out on a journey that he still hesitates to call a flight from civil war. It takes him via various stops through a country whose emptiness, reminiscent of a zombie apocalypse, is punctuated only by fresh signs of isolated acts of looting and murder, to Rocamadour.
At this famous pilgrimage site of the Roman Catholic Church, he spends his days in the chapel of Notre-Dame, contemplatively absorbed in the meditation on the Black Madonna, to feel how “my individuality dissolved”.
Islamolethargy in the Academic Middle Ranks
In the days leading up to this, François had registered a hard-to-pin-down atmosphere at his faculty. From the burkas of female students now moving through the corridors in rows of three there flashes the calm self-confidence of those who know that the territory they are traversing will soon belong to them, while the literature students – ordinarily apathetic and unpolitical – nervously scroll on their devices in search of the latest information.
What shocks him most, however, is “the limpness of my colleagues. They apparently had no problem with it, felt not affected at all … Anyone who had once become a university professor could no longer imagine in the slightest that a political development might have an impact on his career”.
What shocks him most, however, is “the limpness of my colleagues … Anyone who had once become a university professor could no longer imagine in the slightest that a political development might have an impact on his career”.
François may possess a little more imagination than his colleagues, but he shares their passivity. After a conversation with a right-wing intellectual specialist on Léon Bloy, who lectures him on the inevitability of a civil war between Europe’s Muslim population and its autochthonous inhabitants, it dawns on him that his posture of heroic “after me, the deluge” nihilism might contain a flaw in reasoning: “What if the deluge were to come before my own death?”.
This realization nevertheless has no immediate consequences. Instead, he flees into the arms of his former lover Myriam, whose exceptional abilities in the fields of fellatio and vaginal contraction the reader had already been briefed on earlier. However crypto-religious François’s descriptions of his sexual climaxes may be—repeatedly drawing as they do on the imagery of medieval Christian mysticism with its ecstasis in divine union—he remains far from redemption. A renewed stay at the monastery in Ligugé, to which he repairs after nocturnal bouts of wine-soaked weeping, is cut short; his atheism is incurable.
However cryptoreligious François’s descriptions of his sexual climaxes may be, he remains far from redemption.
While his intellectual companion Huysmans finds a—certainly arduous—way out of decadence by learning to doubt his own doubt and thus arriving at faith, François is left with a decadence that is no longer aesthetically sublimated, but merely physiologically tangible. Even as an adolescent, he says, he never liked youth: he never shared its enthusiasm for life or its sense of superiority over the older generation; his erections, lamentably, are becoming increasingly unpredictable—a fact that sits somewhat askew with the alleged reliability displayed in the numerous fucking anecdotes—and forming resolutions of any kind has become almost impossible. Where his alter ego Huysmans wrestles his way into the arms of the Church, François fails. He does not pass his trials, whether religious, amorous or political.
His failure in relation to the young Jew Myriam is, first of all, an emotional one. He does not even offer her—twenty-two years old and still living with her parents, who, in view of the anti-Jewish atmosphere, are planning to emigrate to Israel—the possibility of moving in with him. This briefly dawns on him, but as so often emotions are immediately sociologized away: the spatial confinement of two rooms, however large, “would certainly soon have led to the loss of our sexual desire”. Well then. When it comes to the possibility of attachment and love, one can always rely on the Houellebecq hero’s failure. And on the lamentation that follows, too.
Identitarian Mirror-Fencers
It is also a political failure. If Jews leave Europe due to the flourishing “Islamo-gauchisme”, the fight against the anti-modernist enemies of open society will be hard to win. The militant right-wing identitarians, who skirmish with jihadist Salafists during the interregnum between election rounds, are no allies, since they merely aim to replace a Muslim monoculture with a national one, and are united with their opponents in their rejection of a liberal modernity. Their combative, armored subjectivities are only the mirror of the aggressive Oriental masculinity they still admire in their rejection of it.
If Jews leave Europe due to the flourishing “Islamo-gauchisme”, the fight against the anti-modernist enemies of open society will be hard to win.
François fails to recognize that antisemitism is not a prejudice against a religion or ethnicity, but the regressive guiding ideology in the anti-Enlightenment struggle against what is interpreted as the decay of modernity, and against the abstraction processes that arise in that struggle’s formation, processes which find their biologizing concretion in the image of the Jew. When, after their final kiss, and steeped in self-pity, he announces “For me there is no Israel”, this act is hardly surpassable in infamy. What amounts to a failure of personal assistance escalates, on the politically symbolic level, into a kind of assisted suicide of Europe itself.
What amounts to a failure of personal assistance escalates, on the politically symbolic level, into a kind of assisted suicide of Europe itself.
François, already by his very name the quintessential Frenchman, represents the weary opportunism of his social class in the face of Islamization. The radicalisms of the right, as well as of the alliance of left-wing extremists and Islamists, conceal the fact that neither the Front National nor the Brotherhood of Muslims seeks revolutionary seizure of power; both rely on democratic means to take over.
In the novel, as in contemporary Europe, Islamism diverts attention from Islamization. Unlike in Soumission, this process does not unfold politically through parties, but rather through infiltration, “civilizational Jihad,” and the attainment of cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense.
Unlike in Soumission, Islamization process does not unfold politically through parties, but rather through infiltration, “civilizational Jihad”, and the attainment of cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense.
Islamization does not cause women, as in Soumission, to suddenly don the burqa overnight. Rather, short skirts are increasingly replaced by wide-legged trousers. And isn’t that much more comfortable anyway?
Freedom or Happiness
François’s colleagues convert en bloc to Islam, in order not to lose their teaching privileges and to partake in the perks offered by Saudi Arabian money. Several months after the election of the Muslim candidate as president, what impresses François most is neither the declining crime rate nor the drop in unemployment resulting from the new role of women at the heart of the family, but the fact that even the least attractive proselytes among his former campus colleagues now have several devoted wives of various age cohorts at their disposal.
When the charismatic new university president—whose life journey marks a philosophical odyssey from Catholicism through right-wing identitarianism to Islam—courts François with charm and insinuation as the devil courts a particularly pure soul, urging him to resume his teaching career (for which, naturally, the minor formality of reciting the Islamic profession of faith is required), François has little resistance to offer. Not only does the president make clear how presumptuous it is for a tiny creature such as a human being, on an average planet in a backwater of a mediocre galaxy in the midst of an infinite cosmos, to pompously declare that there is no God—he also shares with François a fondness for Dominique Aury’s S&M classic The Story of O (1954), and cites as its guiding principle, “that the pinnacle of human happiness lies in submission”.
The new university president also shares with François a fondness for Dominique Aury’s S&M classic The Story of O (1954), and cites as its guiding principle, “that the pinnacle of human happiness lies in submission”.
Here once again is the signature of a utopia distorted to its true dystopian proportions, one already encountered at the end of The Elementary Particles, with its precursors in Nietzsche’s Last Man from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). If happiness is merely another word for unfreedom, perhaps one would have been better off skipping the first cell division altogether.
Houellebecq had originally intended for his hero François, following in Huysmans’s footsteps, to convert to Catholicism. His novel was even to be titled Conversion. Yet, it must have become clear to him—he does not plan detailed plots—during the course of writing that his protagonist lacked the strength for this. He had only enough vitality left for the religion that carries surrender (aslama) and submission (islām) in its very name. “I have nothing to regret,” reads the final sentence of the novel before capitulation. It hardly sounds like a spiritual triumph.
