Houellebecq’s ‘Submission’ Comes to America By Tobias Grey
http://www.wsj.com/articles/houellebecqs-submission-comes-to-america-1442942797
Publication day is a proud moment for most authors but it turned into a nightmare for Michel Houellebecq. The French writer’s sixth novel, “Submission,” which will be published in the U.S. next month, had been heralded as his most topical. The book imagines France in 2022 under the rule of an Islamic political party headed by a Muslim president.
On Jan. 7, the day “Submission” came out in France, the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo ran a caricature of the author on its cover. Bleary-eyed and sporting a wizard’s hat, the novelist was portrayed as a lugubrious prophet spouting asides like “In 2015 I’ll lose my teeth” or, more pointedly, “In 2022 I’ll observe Ramadan.”
On the same day two gunmen of the Islamic faith attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. Mr. Houellebecq, who lost a friend—the economist Bernard Maris—in the attack, has been under round-the-clock police protection since.
The 59-year-old author, who declined to be interviewed for this article, first ran afoul of Islam in 2001 when he described it to the French magazine Lire as “the dumbest religion.” After saying this he was taken to court by four Muslim associations “for insulting a group of people due to their religious beliefs.” The charges were dismissed.
His third novel “Platform,” which was published in 2001, foreshadows today’s headlines. The book features an Islamophobic anti-hero, Michel, who becomes a sex tourist in Thailand. “I had a vision of migratory flows crisscrossing Europe like blood vessels,” the protagonist says. “Muslims appeared as clots which were only slowly reabsorbed.”
English novelist Julian Barnes praised Mr. Houellebecq’s second novel, “The Elementary Particles,” about two half-brothers chafing against the loose morals of post-1960s France, as “a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits.”
“Submission” also has lofty ambitions. It isn’t so much an attack on Islam as an indictment of a two-party French political system which, in his view, has become tired and irrelevant. “I’d known for years that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable,” Mr. Houellebecq’s narrator says.
The Jan. 07, 2015, edition of Charlie Hebdo ENLARGE
The Jan. 07, 2015, edition of Charlie Hebdo Photo: Associated Press
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The novel imagines a political scene dominated by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. To foil Ms. Le Pen’s presidential bid the mainstream parties join a coalition headed by a charismatic—and fictional—Muslim presidential candidate, Mohammed Ben Abbes.
When Ben Abbes, who heads the fictional Muslim Brotherhood party, wins the presidential election he gradually introduces measures in line with Islamic law, particularly in schools. Co-education is stamped out, teachers have to convert to Islam to keep their jobs and instruction in Islam is added to the French curriculum.
The novel’s antihero and narrator, François, is a bored middle-age professor who is passionate about the decadent symbolist French writer J.K. Huysmans. François allows that he is “about as political as a bath towel” but soon comes around to Ben Abbes upon learning that polygamy will be allowed.
In France, “Submission” has sold over 350,000 copies—a high figure even for a popular author like Mr. Houellebecq. It is a best seller in Germany and Italy and this month came out in the U.K. to largely positive reviews.
In France and elsewhere debates have broken out about whether the events in Mr. Houellebecq’s novel could happen. In an interview with a French radio station Ms. Le Pen called it “a fiction which could one day become a reality.” That opinion is shared by Denis Demonpion, an investigative journalist and the author of “Houellebecq non autorisé,” a 2005 biography of the writer.
“We’ve seen in the past that when a religion or a totalitarian entity takes over a country there are always people who are ready to join up,” said Mr. Demonpion. “A lot of people have described ‘Submission’ as an Islamophobic novel but I don’t think that’s true at all.”
Others such as Carole Sweeney, a senior lecturer in modern literature at Goldsmiths University of London, aren’t convinced. “I think the scenario in “Submission” is ludicrous,” said Dr. Sweeney, who wrote a 2013 study “Michel Houellebecq and the literature of despair.” “Of course I see a lot of multiculturalism and Muslims in France but I don’t recognize the picture he’s painting at all. All it does is feed into a far-right agenda.”
Dr. Sweeney, who lived in France as a student in the late-1980s and witnessed the initial rise of the National Front, likened Mr. Houellebecq to the anti-Semitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline for his pessimism and the way he plays on people’s fears. “That sort of caricatured idea of polygamous Islamic law is something that everybody fears, whereas actually as we know there’s a whole spectrum of different kinds of behavior under Islamic law,” she said.
In the U.S. Mr. Houellebecq is principally known for his 1998 novel “The Elementary Particles” which mixed philosophy, science and a social critique of liberalization and the collapse of the nuclear family in France following the mini-revolution of 1968. In America, “Submission” touched off a bidding war between Mr. Houellebecq’s regular publisher, Knopf, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which prevailed. The book, translated by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, will be published on Oct. 20. “Submission” has an initial print run of 50,000—ambitious for a literary novel in translation.
“I found “Submission” the most interesting of all of Houellebecq’s novels that I’ve read,” said Aaron Kerner, editorial director of the Boston press David R. Godine, which publishes translations of other French authors. “I have to say there’s a feeling of danger around Houellebecq that seems to be missing from other contemporary literary figures.”
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