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Notes -
I’ve already reviewed Submission once, back in 2024, but I found myself drawn back to Houellebecq, and Submission in particular earlier this year. Maybe it’s because he’s the equivalent of romantasy for dudes [1], and I remain unfortunately single at the time of writing this article. Maybe spring in Baltimore was too nice and I needed a dose of depressing nihilism. Or maybe I just needed to reread something that I’d already read in English in Spanish. Whatever the case, I was not planning on reviewing the book again when I started my reread: I felt like my last review covered all the bases of the book pretty nicely.
However, both when I suggested the book for a potential summer of fiction in philosophy book club, and when I posted a short positive review on instagram for my June book summary, the reaction from friends and family was overwhelmingly one of disgust and negativity. Why in the world was I reading a near-porno by a creepy old islamophobic misogynist about a fantasy scenario where 10% of the population somehow takes over the government of very secular France? I tried to respond as best as I could, but my on the fly defense of Houellebecq and my last essay didn’t seem to actually cut it.
What follows is my attempt to define why exactly I think this is a good book: that it’s witty and effective satire that holds up a dark mirror for the intellectual classes in the West, and also why you should maybe be more open to reading things written by people you disagree with [2].
Short Plot Summary (spoilers)
Like all Houellebecq novels, the main character, François, is a 40-something Frenchman with little going on in his life. His proudest moment was over 15 years ago when he defended his gargantuan thesis on Joris-Karl Huysmans, a pessimist novelist from the end of the 19th century. Because of this work, François was able to land a faculty position at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he halfheartedly teaches a class on 19th century literature and tries to seduce a couple of his students a semester. At the beginning of the novel, François is attempting to reignite a relationship with one of his former student lovers, Myriam, but after the surprise election of the charismatic Muslim Mohammed Ben-Abbas to presidency, Myriam flees to Israel and François is relieved of his faculty position at the Sorbonne because he is not Muslim. After a hectic few months in which his parents both die, and he very tepidly attempts to reconnect with Catholicism, François returns to Paris and is courted by the new minister of education, Robert Redinger, to convert to Islam and return to the faculty of the Sorbonne. François is bribed with the promise of a lot of money and multiple hot young wives, as polygamy is now legal in France. The novel ends with his choice being left up in the air (heavy use of the conditional tense, especially obvious in Spanish).
Islamophobia?
Numerous critics and friends have described this book as Islamophobic. I have to wonder if we read the same book. Islam is presented in no worse a light than the trad/RETVRN movement in Christianity that the left-wingers crying Islamophobia love to criticize themselves. Ben-Abbes’ party, which mainly has control of education as a result of the deal that his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, struck with the socialists to win the presidency and prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, merely reduces the educational opportunities afforded to women [3], and also heavily encourages them to leave the workplace and focus on caring for family instead. There are no crazy suicide bombings, unlike another of Houellebecq’s books, and the Islamic movement is basically portrayed in a completely nonviolent light.
As I’ll get to later, Houellebecq really doesn’t like Islam. So why does he pull so many punches and make Ben-Abbes’ government seem reasonable or even laudable in a certain sense? I’ll argue that critiquing Islam isn’t really the goal of this book. If it was, Houellebecq certainly wouldn’t have concocted this frankly ridiculous scenario where a group that makes up 10% of the population of France (and even less in other European countries) seizes the reins of not only political but also cultural power in the span of a few months. No, the purpose of Islam is to hold up a dark mirror to François and the other real-life intellectuals like him.
The treatment of women in mainstream and conservative Islam is something a lot of people, including me, have trouble with. François, and the narrative itself, are even worse. Women basically only appear in this book as “tetas y culo” or as house help in the background, and François only ever thinks of his students as potential sex objects, and his colleagues as washed-up and useless. Even the woman that François supposedly loves, Myriam, is conveniently thrown under the bus as soon as the political situation makes it so that he has to lift a finger to actually interact with her. Even in conservative households where women’s freedoms are severely restricted the men usually actually you know, love their wives and treat them with some measure of care and respect. That’s a little too much to ask apparently for mister François PhD.
Intellectually it’s perhaps even worse. In the novel, Robert Redinger, the new dean of education who converted to Islam many years before the book began, tells us that the word Islam literally means “submission”. I took this to imply that there would be some level of censorship of what François and other professors were producing. Yet censorship seems far preferable to inactivity, which is basically what our protagonist has been doing since he finished his dissertation. And it also doesn’t seem very necessary: François seems perfectly willing to self-censor and twist his interpretation of Huysmans to suit his new masters, and seems much more concerned with how many wives he’ll be getting rather than if he actually believes in the propositions that Islam makes about the world.
Of course François is a product of his atomized and rootless time: his parents are divorced and dead, he has no long-term relationships to speak of, and he’s never had to do a single hard day of work in his life, except for perhaps on his thesis. Yet that does not excuse the pathetic abdication of all moral and intellectual responsibility to the world in which he lives.
Death of the Author
Of course if you haven’t read the book (carefully), it’s very difficult to avoid the interpretation of this whole thing as bigotry when the author has said things like:
or
We live in times of impending great change. Just as Rome went from pagan to Christian within the span of a generation [4], we live in a time where the cultural and ideological makeup of our communities and nations is at a tipping point. The total fertility rate (TFR) of almost every country outside of Africa is less than 2. Western nations in particular are reliant on a pyramid demographic scheme that has already begun to collapse under its own weight in countries like Japan and Italy. Modernity, and its atomized striver culture, is making us lonely and miserable. Business as usual means a future almost certainly like the one that Houellebecq predicted here: cultures with the highest TFR don’t seem to care too much about the liberation of women. More than 50% of the United States and nearly 50% of France voted for Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen, whose views are just as challenging to the neoliberal consensus, if in a fundamentally different way to Ben Abbas. We must have the courage to engage with books like Submission that don’t paint the future in such a pleasant light, and the imagination and fortitude to create and fight for one that we do believe in.
1 Including the abundance of extremely uncomfortable sex scenes. No dragons unless it’s that tattoo on one of the Thai prostitutes in Platform.
2 Houellebecq actually is Islamophobic and misogynistic.
3 By denying them scholarships at public universities. Women who really want to can get an education at private universities.
4 Houellebecq draws many parallels to Rome in this book
Excuse me, what? Do you really believe this?
No I don't, clarified!
In fact, only about 20% of America voted for Donald Trump, and about 14% of France voted for Le Pen in 2017.
Most residents of a country do not vote.
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