The Plot against France

Abstract

The Plot against France Christian Moraru (bio) Submission Michel Houellebecq Lorin Stein, trans. Farrar, Straus, Giroux www.us.macmillan.com/books/9780374271572 256 Pages; Print, $25.00 Great literature has always played tag with history, and yet few writers have actually won. But then, do we really want them to win? “Tagging” history, catching up with it across the ontological divide of the famous Aristotelian distinction, is surely a dicey proposition, especially where fictional anticipations and prophecies are concerned. The modern dystopias (and a few utopias too) that have cut history off at the pass are a notorious case in point, from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) to Michel Houellebecq’s no less disturbing The Possibility of an Island (2005). The international bestselling Submission, Houellebecq’s latest and most controversial book to date, does have a dystopian strain to it. However, “political fiction,” a phrase the author himself has proposed in an interview with The Paris Review’s Sylvain Bourmeau, is more apt if, admittedly, somewhat vague. This darkly and, some might argue, eerily visionary novel draws polemically from contemporary political reality and extends it into a most unsettling future barely ahead of us. Unlike the world of the 2005 book or even of Houellebecq’s previous novel, the Goncourt Prize-winning The Map and the Territory (2010), the picture of that future—the French presidential elections of 2022—hews closer to our moment. This makes Submission more realistic and, by the same token, more plausible, a “what if” kind of fictional enterprise both like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), where Charles Lindbergh becomes US president in 1940, and unlike it, less “counterfactual” history-wise insofar as what the French writer describes can still occur because it takes place in the future. Once more, this temporal juncture, the yet-to-come but imminent France Houellebecq gloomily conjures up in Submission, is, unsettlingly enough, just around the corner, which makes it both more verisimilar and more recognizable. To be sure, compared to 2015, not much has changed in the sociocultural mechanics of the French everyday, and yet everything has, or will before long, for the elections have been won by Mohammed Ben Abbes, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, backed up by the Socialists and the UMP, unlikely fellow travelers as Nicolas Sarkozy’s followers might seem to us right now. In a nutshell, France has “submitted.” Or, at least, its political superstructure has. As the symbolically named protagonist François perceptively suggests, culture (“values”) rather than economy is what the 2022 elections were all about. This explains why, during the negotiations with his center-left allies, Ben Abbes was so adamant about gaining control over the national education system. And so, as a result of the deal the traditional parties cut with him, post-2022 France is renouncing its laïcité (secularism), giving in to the Brotherhood’s demands that French society in general and education system in particular be Islamized. Here, as much as in the book’s title, the redundancy is quite transparent: “submission” is one of the meanings of the word “Islam,” and caving in boils down, accordingly, to yielding to Islam in any number of ways. Sure, not everybody gets with the new program, reasonable and “innocuous as it is still perceived by a media that has all but lost its capacity for analysis. But neither the sticks nor the carrots are in short supply, what with obscene financial backing by Gulf states zillionaires who, again, are keen on taking over (and sometimes buying up) French schools and universities, including Université Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris III, where François, an authority on Joris-Karl Huysmans, teaches. Thus, while some professors, François included, have been fired, there are enticements for the not-so-true believers, as well as for unbelievers broadly, such as polygamist arrangements for lonely, scholarly, famous, and sexually frustrated university professors. Needless to say, the deal is unavailable to women academics in a France become quasi-officially hyper patriarchal overnight. But it is to François, who, like the rest, stumble, catatonically and resigned, toward the brink of complete, moral and political surrender. They are not quite there yet, and this matters...