Submission beyond Islam: Yielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels

Abstract

Submission beyond IslamYielding as Organizing Principle in Michel Houellebecq's novels Karl Ågerup introduction On 7 January 2015, the same day as the attack on the Parisian satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission was published in French. This novel, depicting a future France in which a Muslim president is elected, immediately became part of the ongoing debate on Islam and French identity. In an address to the country, then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls claimed that the attack on Charlie Hebdo should inspire the French to rise up against hatred, intolerance, and Michel Houellebecq: "La France ce n'est pas la soumission, ce n'est pas Michel Houellebecq" [France is not submission, it is not Michel Houellebecq] (all translations are mine unless otherwise stated) (Tronche). Thus, the Prime Minister associated Houellebecq and Soumission with intolerance and hatred. In this he was not alone. Former editor of Le Monde and founder of Mediapart Edwy Plenel called Houellebecq Islamophobic on national TV ("Houellebecq et islamophobie" 5:00–5:15), and socialist politician Alexis Corbière stated on national radio that Soumission adhered to xenophobic discourse ("Le grand directe" 01:30–01:40). Faithful to his habits, and to the operating manual for poets he had integrated in his 1991 essay Rester vivant (26), Houellebecq had found one of society's most sensitive wounds and rubbed salt in it. Only this time the debate was more extensive than before, and the audience too: by February 2015, the novel had simultaneously topped the sales charts in France, Italy, and Germany ("Houellebecq, superstar des ventes"). The German magazine Der Spiegel ranked Submission among the fifty best books of our times (Scappaticci), and The New York Times named it one of the top hundred books of 2015 (Pagesy). There are comprehensible arguments for reading Houellebecq's picture of a submissive France as neo-conservative discourse. Whether in the form of Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" theory, of Renaud Camus' vision of a coming "great replacement," or of more realistic prognostics of cultural transformations in Europe, the question of a rising Muslim community threatening French traditions was frequently raised during the decade preceding Houellebecq's novel. Professor Jérôme Meizoz solemnly declared that he felt Soumission fed on these ideas ("Lettre" 80). The fact that [End Page 196] Houellebecq had called Islam "la religion la plus con" [the stupidest religion] in the literary magazine Lire made it easy to classify Soumission as Islamophobic (Sénécal). Notably, "Islam" can be translated as "submission," but what did Houellebecq mean by giving his novel this title? The critics were intrigued. As Agathe Novak-Lechevalier has noted, the word "soumission" is highly polysemic and takes on meanings in various areas such as sex and politics (154). From the viewpoint of Soumission's narrator, Islam is not dangerous, but valuable: Houellebecq's hero benefits from the new patriarchal order and finds it ideologically reasonable. As Philippe Lançon has emphasized, the novel can be read as both Islamophobic and Islamophilic. The novel's reception has accordingly been mixed and confused (see Ågerup, "The Political Reception"). The debate is nowhere near consensus on what Houellebecq wants to say. Is he out to make the public afraid of Islam in general, or just of patriarchal politics? Or is he attracted by the conservative morals practiced by some Muslim societies? Given the novel's evident anchoring in contemporary French political debate, such questions impose themselves even on a reader who is conscious of the literary text's principal autonomy. A certain ideological tension appears during the realization of the text, and this disturbing ambiguity, as several critics have maintained, is also one of the novel's key assets (Dorais 29; Knausgaard; Novak-Lechevalier 154). In his classic work "Implied Truths in Literature," John Hospers remarked that the literary text's resistance to a single interpretation is "frustrating and at the same time fascinating" (45). It is precisely because fictional discourse lacks a stable, responsible, and identifiable speaker that it can be so intriguing. The present study is driven by the frustration-fascination that Hospers notes, and it approaches Soumission as fictional discourse with political implications. It takes into account...