Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission : Adventures in Space, Time, Possibilities and French Studies

Abstract

Redefining French Studies has proven a fertile (and necessary) exercise over the last few decades, as scholars have sought to position, and reposition, theoretical enquiry, pedagogy and the fields of literary, cultural and social critique associated with the term, within debates about globalisation, the transnational and the interdisciplinary.1 More generally, concepts associated with national identities have been revisited2 in the light of contemporary reconfigurations and deterritorialisations of the postcolonial, revealing the extent to which literature in particular engages cosmopolitics (and cosmopoetics) that entail a critical, rather than an instrumental, nationalism as an important pole in how cultural belonging is produced and disseminated, experienced and located. Within these dynamics, considerations of a contemporary novel that situates the national, specifically France, as its focus, requires readings that bring to bear the country's inherent (self-)difference, otherness, trans-ience, all the more so given that the novel in question, Michel Houellebecq's Soumission,3 due to the nature of its plot and its relevance to current events, became implicated in national searches for meaning that ensued.To say 2015 was a difficult year for Paris, and for France, would be an understatement. The nation, and indeed the world, is still trying to understand the terrorist atrocities experienced in January and November 2015, and the questions they raise are far-reaching, for the country, its citizens and its values. These include questions about why and how the events took place, about what responses are appropriate, but also more fundamental interrogations about the nation's engagement with issues such as multiculturalism, integration, communities, the social sphere, gender, poverty and religion. In a social-media-dominated, immediacy-articulated, contemporary experience-scape, also interrogate participation, affective responses, curation of a collective mourning, as French, scholars, Francophiles, or others. Importantly, there emerge concerns about whom the we behind these questions might designate. Are (and in what senses) Charlie? Jews? Muslims? Not Charlie? The/a tricolore France? At peace with the Tour Eiffel and its symbolic role as a unifier? At war (as President Hollande would later have it, establishing a trope that would only become more apposite as further atrocities occurred in 2016), but if so with whom, with what? Images and symbols associated with the national, just as much as academic disciplines, are, rightly, increasingly scrutinised and contested just as they are increasingly and differentially mobilised and deployed.Je coupai le son, mais continuai un moment a regarder l'image. Une immense banderole barrait toute la largeur de l'avenue, portant l'inscription : « Nous sommes le peuple de France ». Sur de nombreux petits panneaux dissemines dans la foule etait ecrit, plus simplement : « Nous sommes chez nous » .. .4This account of silent spectatorship, combining televisual witnessing with rhetoric and slogans, the focus on solidarity, national belonging and security, articulates some of the experience we evidenced in 2015, in response to January's shootings or November's indiscriminate attacks. Indeed, turning on the news to see mass occupations of the Place de la Republique, vigils, rallies or gatherings became part of collective consumption (I use all three terms advisedly) of Paris's annus horribilis, one way that shock, grief, outrage and disbelief have been anchored and worked through. In this case, however, the words do not describe our own viewing of the events of 2015. Instead, they refer to a demonstration by supporters of the (a fictional) Front national, led by (a fictional) Marine Le Pen, during the projected presidential elections of May 2022, and the viewer is equally a fictional character, Francois, the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel, Soumission. …