An encounter with ‘Submission’ by Michel Houllebecq
“Funny old sausage, that,” said the man behind the counter at the bookshop, when I went to pay for Michel Houllebecq’s Submission. Along with my receipt, he handed me a flyer which read, ‘Be More Pirate.’
“Is it for adults or for children?” I asked, about the flyer.
“For adults, of course.” He gave me a dirty look.
This interaction has puzzled me ever since. I’m assuming the shopkeeper has read Submission, in which case he must know it is a deeply Islamophobic book. Was ‘the funny old sausage’ meant to be a warning? And when I asked about children, did he think I was talking about the novel? Do the staff of the local bookshop think I’m an Islamophobe trying to indoctrinate the next generation? Or am I just puzzled at the book itself, which feels like a portal into a value system that is entirely alien to me?
The protagonist is Francois, a university lecturer who’s specialism is Joris-Karl Huysmans, the nineteenth century novelist credited with chronicling the latent decadence of his age. Francois uses Huysmans as a model for his own life, retracing his steps to the monastery where he found religion, and desperately seeking meaning in the earlier man’s words.
I must admit to never having read Huysmans, just as I have never read Houllebecq before. I have heard of both writers, of course. They hover on the edge of my consciousness as part of a roll call of Things I Don’t Know that makes me think I have no valuable opinion. Well, I shall take my cue from Francois and Houllebecq (reviews tell me the anti-hero is a proxy for the author): two men so enthralled by their own thoughts, they never seem aware of their limits.
Realising his intellectual potential is spent after the completion of his PhD, Francois teaches at the Sorbonne, with no interest in his students and no respect for his colleagues. He is surely a clumsy metaphor for France itself — a country, Houllebecq suggests, that likes to remember its glorious past, but does not know how to translate it to the present day.
Meanwhile, a Muslim political party gains power in France, supported, for different reasons, by the remains of the fragmented political system. France’s traditional political parties are weak and greedy, but the Muslim party is strong. Its leader believes that populations with the largest birth rate deserve to succeed, and places the family at the centre of policy. Overnight, women are removed from work and education, and given to men as one of multiple wives. The new French government wants to take lead of the EU, and expand it into northern Africa and the Middle East.
Submission was published in 2015, and it’s interesting, reading it now, to remember this anxiety about EU expansionism before Brexit was a reality. By which I mean, the anxiety still exists but it has a different flavour in the light of Brexit, which is the absurd conclusion of racist narratives that lionise European national empires and demonise the globalisation they ushered in. In Houllebecq’s dystopia, Islam and the EU are indistinguishable attacks on the integrity of the Frenchman, Francois, and the French state he stands for. Francois’ life is centred on his personal desire, and even though his life is empty and unsatisfying, he never questions the veracity of its structuring principle. To be fair, he doesn’t question much, this apparent intellectual. Without analysing or, it appears, understanding either Islam or the EU, he knows that just by suggesting a purpose beyond himself, they pose an existential threat.
This, then, is the root of all anxiety in the novel: the fear of a man that he might be displaced from the centre of the world. Imagine a book that contains the words ‘it’s not fair’ written a thousand times in increasingly childish handwriting and you could not envisage a more graceless and unsubtle display of fragile masculinity.
As I was thinking about the book this morning, I half-heard a story on the radio news about dawn raids. I tuned my ear into the sound and realised it was audio footage from the Turkish police, who have recorded growing numbers of ‘foreign’ fighters returning to Turkey from Syria. ‘Even more chillingly,’ said the reporter as the feature ended, ‘one in five of the men they’re looking for is not here. We can only conclude that some are already on their way to Europe.’ I imagined a shadowy figure looming over Houllebecq/ Francois’ writing desk, perpetually foreign, faceless and, in some undefined way, threatening. Then I imagined someone else walking into the room and immediately seeing that Houllebecq/ Francois was making the shadow appear with his own fingers.
The foreign fighters from the radio are presumably European Muslims who went to fight in Syria — this is what makes them ‘foreign’ in Turkey, and ‘foreign’ in Europe as well. In Europe, Muslims are ‘foreign’ by default, and Turkey is full of ‘foreigners’ who want to be part of the EU. One of the cornerstones of the Vote Leave campaign in the run up to the UK’s Brexit referendum was the — entirely fabricated — spectre of Turkey joining the union. The suspicion is that Muslims are always faithful to another power, ergo they are always foreign. The reason the campaign, like Houllebecq, twinned Islam and the EU is because they see Islam as a metonym for all suspicious acts, all threats, all others. Inside this solipsistic logic, Muslims = foreigners = Muslims = foreigners = Muslims = foreigners, ad absurdum.
What I’m trying to say is that fragile masculinity may be stupid and obvious. But it has dangerous, real world effects.
Eventually, Francois is flattered into ‘submission’ to the new regime by being given a prestigious academic role, more money, and the promise of a fifteen year old wife. He regains a sense of the potential that has eluded him since his twenties, not through religion, but through the mechanism of a conservative, masculine fantasy of a religion that delivers him sexual pleasure and social status. Here, Islam is a grotesque and racist stereotype of strong and violent men, silent and compliant women. It succeeds because it satisfies the never-questioned importance of Francois/ France. Earlier, Francois tries to feel moved in front of a Christian statue, but it doesn’t work, presumably because it comes with no ancillary socio-economic domination. To be clear — none of this is about Islam; it is about whether or not a man feels important. If there is an attempt at satire, it seems to be a joke about the failure of contemporary French society to adequately stroke a man’s ego.
This, then, is a book about men feeling bad and how to make men feel better. In this way, it makes a similar point to Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger: a searing account of the failures of global capitalism. Mishra’s book is a history of the world’s losers — those men, he argues, who have been left behind by modernism. Educated to believe they can progress in life on their individual merits, these men are doomed to failure by the structural conditions of a system beyond their control. In this reading, cynical nineteenth century intellectuals like Huysmans, who felt they were outsiders in a rapidly modernising world, are a precursor to cynical twenty-first century jihadists, who dream of a Caliphate in place of unemployment in Bradford or Marseille. This anger, Mishra implies, is both an exported by-product of the European enlightenment, and a typically European condition.
As Malcolm Bull points out in an essay in the London Review of Books, the biggest losers in today’s globalised capitalism are the “lower and middle classes in Europe, the US and Japan.” (LRB 2nd August, 2018, p. 23) This type of losing is relative — the middle classes in the west are still wealthy in absolute terms, but their socio-economic status is declining. And that, Bull says, is why it’s important to differentiate between types of anger. If you are a person of colour or a woman, for example, your anger is likely to be appropriate but ineffective. In contrast, “if you have the ability to instrumentalise your anger successfully, then it is less likely to be apt, because you are more likely to have had the means to protect yourself from the kind of harm that would make you angry in the first place.” (p.24) Rich white men use the languages of the dispossessed to decry the fact that the world isn’t working for them All The Time And Especially Right Now. And because rich white men are disproportionately powerful and represented, this type of anger can change the world.
Ergo, Brexit. Ergo, too, the central question of Houllebecq’s novel: how will a man live a life of selfish power? When I wrote, earlier, that the book feels like a portal into an alien value system, this is what I meant: the idea that the world exists for the benefit of a single consciousness — a middle-class, western man.
It’s easy to dismiss this point of view as childish. Indeed, as Bull points out, it’s a position that parents routinely try to educate their children out of. (Not all children, of course). But it is based on real facts: a loss of relative power, as well as the real fear of real violence. This violence may stem from what Bull calls a more ‘apt’ kind of rage, but its sources are often incomprehensible to its victims. In any case, while you can argue for appropriate emotions, violence is always contemptible.
Submission was published, by coincidence, on the day of the murderous attacks on the Parisian political newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, which were claimed by ISIS as revenge for the paper’s depictions of Mohammed. Contemporary reviews all hint that this unfortunate convergence of events was good for the novel, which acted as a lightning rod for people’s fear of extremist violence. But I think it’s more complicated than that. The publication date had another effect: in an attempt to avoid the hyperbole that follows a shock, many people tried to argue that Submission is not, in fact, Islamophobic. “Is Houellebecq provoking violent acts or anticipating them?” wrote Gaby Woods in The Telegraph. “It’s hard to see how he could be blamed — perhaps he could even be praised for his prescience.” The NY Times reported the views of the Columbia professor Mark Lilla, that “because of all the polemics in France, ‘the French have not yet been able to see the book as work of literature.’”
These apologists are wrong, and their apologies are a function of the racism they have the liberty to debate. It is, of course, racist to blame all Muslims for the acts of murderers who claim an affiliation with their religion. And it is also racist to wonder, aloud and in all-white groups, whether or not racism really exists or is just a legitimate response to terrorism. Let’s be clear: Submission is an unequivocally racist book. Here, Muslims are presented as always and already in the wrong, their beliefs nothing more than a vague and unexplored shape of the Other. Submission is a novel permeated with hate. And while the hate that permeates a novel is not the same as the impulse that inspires terrorism, neither is it, as some critics have suggested, its corrective opposite.
But. There is another clue to the pernicious, destructive violence of Submission, a clue that has been lurking all along. And it’s a a clue that does in fact link the novel’s declarative crimes to the most degraded of material ones. The clue is misogyny.
The women in Submission are less human and less real than the Muslims in the novel, which is saying something. Each woman is assessed according to her attractiveness to Francois, including his own boss who, he is surprised to learn, is married. Despite her being a professor at the Sorbonne, it is only this woman’s husband who’s opinions matter to Francois; after being forced to give up work for being a woman, she happily and silently spends the rest of her life preparing dinner parties for men. Later, Francois has (graphically depicted) sex with a couple of prostitutes, who are eager to please him, but leave him unsatisfied. He briefly laments the burqa for robbing him of the pleasure of women’s bodies, but at least it means he can have sex with a teenager who, it is promised, will be a docile and willing wife. All in all, the overnight change in women’s status from members of civic society to uneducated sex slaves lies entirely unchallenged. Indeed, the implication is that women are happier for it, because now they get to live like children.
Here, finally, is proof of the world view of the western, white male — a desperate longing for the imaginary life of a spoilt, powerful toddler. And here, too, is the depressingly familiar correlation between hatred of women and other types of hate. Here are some real world examples. Omar Mateen, who carried out a mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando in 2016, was earlier convicted of beating up his wife. Robert Lewis Dear, who carried out a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Oklahoma in 2016, had been arrested for rape and violence, and accused of violence by two of his ex-wives. Rachid Redouanne, one of the terrorists who attacked the public in London in 2017, beat up his wife. In the last four years alone, Wikipedia lists four mass murders carried out in North America by self-declared ‘incels’, men so enraged by the fact that women won’t have sex with them, they commit outrageous violence in revenge.
For the incels, as for Francois, women are either what men deserve, or what has been unfairly denied to them. And women truly are mysterious. Apparently simple-minded tools for man’s sexual pleasure, they are also entirely to blame for the complex depths of his unhappiness.
According to TIME magazine, 33% of the perpetrators of mass violence in America since 2009, have a recorded history of violence against women. But what is violence against women? I have just finished lunch with a colleague, where we shared stories of men who had mistaken friendliness for sexual come-ons. “I have to learn from my mistakes,” I said. No, she said. We have to keep trying to be human. As I write the final paragraphs of this essay in a local cafe, another work-friend pops in to say hi. I tell her that I’m looking for proof of the link between domestic violence and terrorism. “You can’t evidence things you can’t experience,” she says. In other words, not all violence against women is recorded, partly because the institutions and methods of collecting evidence are already weighted against women. This is a double violence: the denial of the original act, and the self-policing of women’s behaviour enforced by the silence.
At least as depressing as the number of think pieces debating whether or not Submission is racist is the dearth of pieces noticing — let alone dissecting — its misogyny. But the misogyny is obvious and extreme right from the start. Somehow, this makes me think back to the bookshop. Is ‘funny old sausage’ an appropriate way to describe this book, as if it is just about ideas, and not about the kind of violence and violent threats that people (not all people) swim through every day? And what about the pirate flyer (it was for adults after all — a self help book about how to be more entrepreneurial)? What does it mean to be ‘more pirate’ — more cut-throat? More single-minded? More like a lone wolf? Why are pirates role models for little boys, and why are little boys’ fantasies role models for adult men?
In a way, all of this is alien to me: alien to how I think, but not to what I live with. My colleague says we have to be human, but who decides what that can mean? Is the alien the one who suppresses the violence of men, or the one who calls it out? Is the alien the one who structures the world around himself, or the one who internalises the world into her experience?
Submission is the angry insistence that the world must be made for a particular type of angry man. And Submission’s reception as the work of a literary enfant terrible — a funny old sausage, if you will — is part of the problem. Both Houllebecq’s hate and the literary world’s celebration of him are misplaced and abstracted by people who (to paraphrase Bull) get angry precisely because they have the means to protect themselves from harm. It just so happens that the writer calls the object of his anger ‘Islam’, and that a certain class of people call their impotent sense of danger ‘Houllebecq,’ or ‘pirate’ or ‘funny.’
But at the same time, this book is a pillow to the face of people whose very presence always suggests an alternate worldview — women. In 100 years, when another naughty novelist writes a paean to Houllebecq instead of Huysmans, Islam will be replaced by something else to fear. I have a funny old feeling that the misogyny will be just the same.
