Slouching Toward Mecca Mark Lilla

Soumission Michel Houellebecq Socialists do. The party’s founder and by Michel Houellebecq. president, Mohammed Ben Abbes— Paris: Flammarion, a cross between Tariq Ramadan and 300 pp., g21.00 (paper) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan before he took (a translation from the French power—is a genial man who gets along by Lorin Stein will be published by well with Catholic and Jewish commu- Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October) nity leaders who share his conservative social views, and also with business The best-selling novel in Europe today, types who like his advocacy of eco- Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, is nomic growth. Foreign heads of state, about an Islamic political party com- beginning with the pope, have given ing peacefully to power in France. Its him their blessing. Given that Muslims publication was announced this past make up at most 6 to 8 percent of the fall in an atmosphere that was already French population, it strains credibility tense. In May a young French Muslim to imagine such a party carrying any committed a massacre at a Belgian weight in ten years’ time. But Houelle­ Jewish museum; in the summer Mus- becq’s thought experiment is based on lim protesters in Paris shouted “Death a genuine insight: since the far right to the Jews!” at rallies against the war wants to deport Muslims, conservative in Gaza; in the fall stories emerged politicians look down on them, and the about hundreds of French young peo- Socialists, who embrace them, want ple, many converts, fighting withISIS to force them to accept gay marriage, in Syria and Iraq; a French captive was no one party clearly represents their then beheaded in Algeria; and random interests.3 attacks by unstable men shouting “al- lahu akbar” took place in several cit- ies. Adding to the tension was a very François only slowly becomes aware public debate about another best seller, of the drama swirling around him. He Éric Zemmour’s Le Suicide français, hears rumors of armed clashes between that portrayed Muslims as an imminent radical right-wing nativist groups threat to the French way of life.1 (which exist in France) and armed Zemmour’s succès de scandale en- radical Islamists, but newspapers wor- sured that Soumission would be met ried about rocking the multicultural with hysteria. So was the fact that boat have ceased reporting such things. Houellebecq had gotten into trouble a At a cocktail party he hears gunfire in decade ago for telling an interviewer the distance, but people pretend not to that whoever created monotheistic re- notice and find excuses to leave, so he ligion was a “cretin” and that of all the does too. faiths Islam was “the dumbest.” The As expected, Le Pen wins the presi- normally measured editor of Libéra- dential primary but the Socialists tion, Laurent Joffrin, declared five and the conservative UMP don’t have days before Soumission appeared that enough votes between them to defeat Houellebecq was “keeping a place her. So they decide to back Ben Abbes warm for Marine Le Pen at the Café in the runoff, and by a small margin de Flore.” The reliably dogmatic Edwy France elects its first Muslim president. Plenel, a former Trotskyist who runs the Ben Abbes decides to let the other par- news site Mediapart, went on television tacks, felt obliged to say that “France is a modern apartment tower, teaches his ties divide up the ministries, reserv- to call on his colleagues, in the name not Michel Houelle­becq. It is not intol- courses but has no friends in the uni- ing for the Muslim Brotherhood only of democracy, to stop writing news ar- erance, hate, and fear.” It is hardly versity, and returns home to frozen din- the education portfolio. He, unlike his ticles on Houellebecq—France’s most likely that Valls had read his book. ners, television, and porn. Most years coalition partners, understands that a important contemporary novelist and Given all this, it will take a long time he manages to pick up a student and nation’s destiny depends on how well it winner of the Prix Goncourt—effec- for the French to read and appreciate start a relationship, which ends when teaches young people fundamental val- tively erasing him from the picture, So- Soumission for the strange and surpris- the girl breaks it off over summer va- ues and enriches their inner lives. He is viet style. Ordinary readers could not ing thing that it is. Michel Houellebecq cation with a letter that always begins, not a multiculturalist and admires the get their hands on the book until Janu- has created a new genre—the dystopian “I’ve met someone.” strict republican schools that he stud- ary 7, the official publication date. I was conversion tale. Soumission is not the François is shipwrecked in the pres- ied in, and that France abandoned. probably not the only one who bought story some expected of a coup d’état, ent. He doesn’t understand why his stu- Except in the schools, very little it that morning and was reading it when and no one in it expresses hatred or dents are so eager to get rich, or why seems to happen at first. But over the the news broke that two French-born even contempt of Muslims. It is about a journalists and politicians are so hol- next months François begins to no- Muslim terrorists had just killed twelve man and a country who through indif- low, or why everyone, like him, is so tice small things, beginning with how people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. ference and exhaustion find themselves alone. He believes that “only literature women dress. Though the government The irony was beyond anyone’s slouching toward Mecca. There is not can give you that sensation of contact has established no dress code, he sees imagination. And it was doubled by the even drama here—no clash of spiritual with another human spirit,” but no one fewer skirts and dresses on the street, fact that the cover of the Charlie pub- armies, no martyrdom, no final con- else cares about it. His sometime girl- more baggy pants and shirts that hide lished that day had a feature mocking flagration. Stuff just happens, as in all friend Myriam genuinely loves him but the body’s contours. It seems that Houellebecq as a masturbating drunk- Houellebecq’s fiction. All one hears at he can’t respond, and when she leaves non-Muslim women have spontane- ard. It was tripled when it was revealed the end is a bone-chilling sigh of col- to join her parents, who have emi- ously adopted the style to escape the that one of Houellebecq’s close friends, lective relief. The old has passed away; grated to Israel because they feel un- sexual marketplace that Houellebecq the left-wing economist and Charlie behold, the new has come. Whatever. safe in France, all he can think to say is: describes so chillingly in his other nov- contributor Bernard Maris, was among “There is no Israel for me.” Prostitutes, els. Youth crime declines, as does un- the victims. (Maris had just published a even when the sex is great, only deepen employment when women, grateful for book, Houellebecq économiste, calling François, the main character of Sou- the hole he is in. new family subsidies, begin to leave the his friend the deepest analyst of life under mission, is a mid-level literature pro- We are in 2022 and a presidential workforce to care for their children. contemporary capitalism.) Houellebecq fessor at the Sorbonne who specializes election is about to take place. All the François thinks he sees a new so- appeared on television, devastated, in the work of the Symbolist novelist smart money—then as now—is on the cial model developing before his eyes, then broke off his publicity tour and J. K. Huysmans. He is, like all Houelle­ National Front’s Marine Le Pen win- inspired by a religion he knows little disappeared into the countryside. A few becq’s protagonists, what the French ning the primary, forcing the other par- 2 hours earlier Prime Minister Manuel call un pauvre type. He lives alone in ties to form a coalition to stop her. The 3As if on cue, though, a small Muslim Valls, in his first interview after the at- wild card in all this is a new, moderate party, the Union des Démocrates Mu- 2On Houellebecq’s earlier work, see my Muslim party (the Muslim Brother- sulmans Français, has recently been 1See my review of Zemmour’s book in “Night Thoughts,” The New York Re- hood) that by now attracts about a fifth formed and will put up eight candidates these pages, March 19, 2015. view, November 30, 2000. of the electorate, about as many as the in the March departmental elections.

April 2, 2015 41 about, and which he imagines has the without reason, and can’t stop. Soon the Virgin was rising from her own. They, too, idealized the life of polygamous family at its center. Men after—ostensibly for research pur- base and growing larger in the simple, unquestioning piety and de- have different wives for sex, child- poses—he decides to spend some time sky. The baby Jesus seemed ready spised modern culture and the Enlight- bearing, and affection; the wives pass in the Benedictine abbey in southern to detach himself from her, and I enment that spawned it. They believed through all these stages as they age, but France where his hero J. K. Huysmans felt that all he had to do was raise in hierarchy within the family, with never have to worry about being aban- spent his last years after having aban- his right arm and the pagans and wives and children there to serve the doned. They are always surrounded doned his dissolute life in Paris and idolaters would be destroyed, and father. They, like he, hated diversity— by their children, who have lots of sib- converted to mystical Catholicism in the keys of the world restored to especially diversity of opinion—and lings and feel loved by their parents, middle age.4 him. saw homogeneity and high birthrates as who never divorce. François, who lives Houellebecq has said that originally vital signs of civilizational health. And alone and has lost contact with his par- the novel was to concern a man’s strug- But when it is over he chalks the they quivered with the eros of violence. ents, is impressed. His fantasy (and gle, loosely based on Huysmans’s own, experience up to hypoglycemia and All that separated him from them was perhaps Houellebecq’s) is not really to embrace Catholicism after exhaust- heads back to his hotel for confit de that they prayed on rugs and he prayed the colonial one of the erotic harem. It ing all the modern world had to offer. canard and a good night’s sleep. The at an altar. But the more Rediger re- is closer to what psychologists call the It was to be called La Conversion and next day he can’t repeat what hap- flected, the more he had to admit that “family romance.” Islam did not enter in. But he just could pened. After a half hour of sitting he in truth European and Islamic civiliza- The university is a different story. not make Catholicism work for him, gets cold and heads back to his car to tions were no longer comparable. By After the Muslim Brotherhood comes and François’s experience in the abbey drive home. When he arrives he finds all the measures that really mattered, to power, François, along with all other sounds like Houellebecq’s own as a a letter informing him that in his ab- post-Christian Europe was dying and non-Islamic teachers, is prematurely writer, in a comic register. He only lasts sence his estranged mother had died Islam was flourishing. If Europe was retired with a full pension. Satisfied two days there because he finds the alone and been buried in a pauper’s to have a future, it would have to be an with the money, indifferent, or afraid, sermons puerile, sex is taboo, and they grave. Islamic one. the faculty does not protest. A golden won’t let him smoke. And so he heads So Rediger changed to the winning crescent is placed atop the Sorbonne off to the town of Rocamadour in south- side. And the victory of the Muslim gate and pictures of the Kaaba line the west France, the impressive “citadel of It’s in this state that François hap- Brotherhood proved that he was right walls of the once-grim university of- faith” where medieval pilgrims once pens to run into the university presi- to. As a former Islam specialist for the fices, now restored with the money of came to worship before the basilica’s dent, Robert Rediger, and finally secret services also tells François, Ben Gulf sheikhs. The Sorbonne, François statue of the Black Madonna. François accepts an invitation to talk. Rediger Abbes is no radical Islamist dreaming muses, has reverted to its medieval is taken with the statue and keeps re- is Houelle­becq’s most imaginative fic- of restoring a backward caliphate in roots, back to the time of Abelard and turning, not sure quite why, until: tional creation so far—part Mephisto, the sands of the Levant. He is a mod- Heloïse. The new university president, part Grand Inquisitor, part shoe sales- ern European without the faults of one, who replaced the woman professor of I felt my individuality dissolve. . . . man (those look great on you!), his which is why he is successful. His am- gender studies who had presided over I was in a strange state. It seemed speeches are psychologically brilliant bition is equal to that of the Emperor the Sorbonne, tries to woo him back and yet wholly transparent. The name Augustus: to unify the great continent with a better job at triple the pay, if he is a macabre joke: it refers to Robert again and expand into North Africa, 4 is willing to go through a pro forma Huysmans was not alone in this. In the Redeker, a hapless French philosophy creating a formidable cultural and conversion. François is polite but has decades before and after World War I teacher who received credible death economic force. After Charlemagne there was an epidemic of conversions no intention of doing so. threats after publishing an article in and Napoleon (and Hitler), Ben Abbes and returns to Catholicism among His mind is elsewhere. Since Myr- French writers and intellectuals: Le Figaro in 2006 calling Islam a re- would be written into European his- iam’s departure he sinks to a level of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Charles ligion of hate, violence, and obscuran- tory as its first peaceful conqueror. despair unknown even to him. After Péguy, Max Jacob, Francis Jammes, tism—and who has been living ever The Roman Empire lasted centuries, passing yet another New Year’s alone Pierre Réverdy, and Gabriel Marcel, since under constant police protection. the Christian one a millennium and he starts sobbing one night, seemingly among others. (Needless to say, no journalists donned a half. In the distant future, histori- “Je suis Robert­ ” buttons to show sup- ans will see that European modernity port for him.) President Rediger is his was just an insignificant, two-­century- exact opposite: a smoothie who writes long deviation from the eternal ebb sophistical books defending Islamic and flow of religiously grounded doctrine, and has risen in the academic civilizations. ranks through flattery and influence- This Spenglerian prophecy leaves peddling. It is his cynicism that, in the François untouched; his concerns are end, makes it possible for François to all prosaic, like whether he can choose convert. his wives. Still, something keeps him To set the trap Regider begins with from submitting. As for Rediger, be- a confession. It turns out that as a stu- tween sips of a fine Meursault and dent he began on the radical Catholic while his “Hello Kitty”–clad fifteen- right, though he spent his time read- year-old wife (one of three) brings in ing Nietzsche rather than the Church snacks, he goes in for the kill. As for- Fathers. Secular humanistic Europe bidden music plays in the background, disgusted him. In the 1950s it had given he defends the Koran by appealing—in up its colonies out of weakness of will, a brilliant Houellebecqian touch—to and in the 1960s generated a decadent Dominique Aury’s sadomasochistic culture that told people to follow their novel The Story of O. bliss as free individuals, rather than The lesson of O, he tells François, do their duty, which is to have large, is exactly the same as that of the Holy churchgoing families. Unable to repro- Book: that “the summit of human duce, Europe then opened the gates to happiness is to be found in absolute large-scale immigration from Muslim submission,” of children to parents, countries, Arab and black, and now women to men, and men to God. And the streets of French provincial towns in return, one receives life back in all looked like souks. its splendor. Because Islam does not, Integrating such people was never like Christianity, see human beings in the cards; Islam does not dissolve in as pilgrims in an alien, fallen world, it water, let alone in atheistic republican does not see any need to escape it or schools. If Europe was ever to recover remake it. The Koran is an immense its place in the world, he thought, it mystical poem in praise of the God would have to drive out these infidels who created the perfect world we find and return to the true Catholic faith. ourselves in, and teaches us how to (The websites of French far-right iden- achieve happiness in it through obedi- titaire groups are full of this kind of ence. Freedom is just another word for reasoning, if it can be called that, and wretchedness. the parallels with radical Islamism, And so François converts, in a short, which Houellebecq highlights through- modest ceremony at the Grande Mos- out the book, leap out.) quée de Paris. He does so without joy or But Rediger took this kind of sadness. He feels relief, just as he imag- thinking a step further than Catho- ines his beloved Huysmans did when lic xenophobes do. At a certain point he converted to Catholicism. Things he couldn’t ignore how much the Is- would change. He would get his wives lamists’ message overlapped with his and no longer have to worry about sex

42 The New York Review or love; he would finally be mothered. cal experience while lost in the snow. that individual freedom is the highest becomes unbearable, and then to be Children would be an adjustment but Ulrich is a cynical observer of sclerotic human value—and have convinced refabricated as a clone with no recol- he would learn to love them, and they Hapsburg Vienna until his estranged themselves that the Islamic tradition lection of our earlier states. That, for would naturally love their father. Giv- sister reenters his life and he begins agrees with them. It does not, and nei- Houellebecq, would be the best of all ing up drinking would be more diffi- having intimations of an equally mys- ther does Houellebecq. Islam is not possible worlds: immortality without cult but at least he would get to smoke tical “other condition” for humanity. the target of Soumission, whatever memory. Europe in 2022 has to find and screw. So why not? His life is ex- Houellebecq blocks this vertical escape Houelle­becq thinks of it. It serves as a another way to escape the present, and hausted, and so is Europe’s. It’s time route for François, whose experience device to express a very persistent Eu- “Islam” just happens to be the name of for a new one—any one. at Rocamadour reads like a parody of ropean worry that the single-minded the next clone. Hans’s and Ulrich’s epiphanies, a tragi- pursuit of freedom—freedom from tra- Despite the extraordinary circum- comic failure to launch. All that’s left is dition and authority, freedom to pursue stances in which Soumission was pub- Cultural pessimism is as old as human submission to the blind force that his- one’s own ends—must inevitably lead lished, and the uses to which it will be culture and has a long history in Eu- tory is. to disaster. put on the French left (Islamophobia!) rope. Hesiod thought that he was liv- There is no doubt that Houellebecq His breakout novel, The Elementary and right (cultural suicide!), Michel ing in the age of iron; Cato the Elder wants us to see the collapse of mod- Particles, concerned two brothers who Houellebecq has nothing to say about blamed Greek philosophy for corrupt- ern Europe and the rise of a Muslim suffered unbearable psychic wounds how European nations should deal ing the young; Saint Augustine ex- one as a tragedy. “It means the end,” after being abandoned by narcissis- with its Muslim citizens or respond to posed the pagan decadence responsible he told an interviewer, “of what is, tic hippy parents who epitomized the fundamentalist terror. He is not angry, for Rome’s collapse; the Protestant quand même, an ancient civilization.” Sixties. But with each new novel it be- he does not have a program, and he is reformers felt themselves to be living But does that make Soumission an comes clearer that Houellebecq thinks not shaking his fist at the traitors re- in the Great Tribulation; French roy- Islamophobic novel? Does it portray that the crucial historical turning point sponsible for France’s suicide, as Éric alists blamed Rousseau and Voltaire Islam as an evil religion? That depends was much earlier, at the beginning of Zemmour is in his Le Suicide français. for the Revolution; and just about ev- on what one means by a good religion. the Enlightenment. The qualities that For all Houellebecq’s knowingness eryone blamed Nietzsche for the two The Muslim Brotherhood here has Houellebecq projects onto Islam are no about contemporary culture—the way world wars. Though a minor work, nothing to do with the Sufi mystics or different from those that the religious we love, the way we work, the way we Soumission is a classic novel of Euro- the Persian miniaturists or Rumi’s po- right ever since the French Revolution die—the focus in his novels is always pean cultural pessimism that belongs etry, which are often mentioned as ex- has attributed to premodern Christen- on the historical longue durée. He ap- in whatever category we put books like amples of the “real” Islam that radical dom—strong families, moral educa- pears genuinely to believe that France Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain Salafism isn’t. Nor is it the imaginary tion, social order, a sense of place, a has, regrettably and irretrievably, lost and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Islam of non-Muslim intellectuals who meaningful death, and, above all, the its sense of self, but not because of im- Qualities. think of it on analogy with the Catho- will to persist as a culture. And he migration or the European Union or The parallels are enlightening. The lic Church (as happens in France) or shows a real understanding of those— globalization. Those are just symptoms protagonists in all three novels wit- with the inward-looking faiths of Prot- from the radical nativist on the far right of a crisis that was set off two centuries ness the collapse of a civilization they estantism (as happens in northern Eu- to radical Islamists—who despise the ago when Europeans made a wager on are indifferent to, and whose degrada- rope and the US). Islam here is an alien present and dream of stepping back in history: that the more they extended tion leaves them unmoored. Trapped and inherently expansive social force, history to recover what they imagine human freedom, the happier they by history, Mann’s Hans Castorp and an empire in nuce. It is peaceful, but was lost. would be. For him, that wager has been Musil’s Ulrich have no means of escape it has no interest in compromise or in All Houellebecq’s characters seek lost. And so the continent is adrift and except through transcendence. After extending the realm of human liberty. escape, usually in sex, now in reli- susceptible to a much older temptation, listening to unresolvable debates over It wants to shape better human beings, gion. His fourth novel, The Possibility to submit to those claiming to speak for freedom and submission in his Swiss not freer ones. of an Island, was set in a very distant God. Who remains as remote and as si- sanatorium, Hans falls in love with a Houellebecq’s critics see the novel future when biotechnology has made lent as ever. tubercular Beatrice and has a mysti- as anti-Muslim because they assume it possible to commit suicide once life —This is the third of three articles.

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