In The New Yorker, Michel Houellebecq gets the Adam Gopnik treatment. (Gopnik is that all too familiar sociological phenomenon — the NYC liberal Jew — but is a helluva writer.)
The French writer Michel Houellebecq has become a literary “case” to be reprimanded as much as an author to be read, and his new novel, “Soumission,” or “Submission,” shows why. The book, which will be published in English by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is shaped by a simple idea. In France in the very near future, the respectable republican parties fragment the vote in a multiparty election, and the two top vote-getters are Marine Le Pen, of the extreme right, and one Mohammed Ben Abbes, the fictive leader of a French Muslim Brotherhood. In the runoff, the French left backs the Muslim, preferring the devil it doesn’t know to the one it does. Ben Abbes’s government soon imposes a kind of relaxed Sharia law throughout France and—this is the book’s central joke and point—the French élite are cravenly eager to collaborate with the new regime, delighted not only to convert but to submit to a bracing and self-assured authoritarianism. Like the oversophisticated Hellenists in Cavafy’s poem, they have been secretly waiting for the barbarians all their lives…
Houellebecq is, simply, a satirist. He likes to take what’s happening now and imagine what would happen if it kept on happening. That’s what satirists do. Jonathan Swift saw that the English were treating the Irish as animals; what if they took the next natural step and ate their babies? Orwell, with less humor, imagined what would happen if life in Britain remained, for forty years, at the depressed level of the BBC cafeteria as it was in 1948, and added some Stalinist accessories. Huxley, in “Brave New World,” took the logic of a hedonistic and scientific society to its farthest outcome, a place where pleasure would be all and passion unknown. This kind of satire impresses us most when the imaginative extrapolation intersects an unexpected example—when it suddenly comes close enough to fit…
Like most satirists worth reading, Houellebecq is a conservative. “I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values,” he has said. Satire depends on comparing the crazy place we’re going to with the implicitly sane place we left behind. That’s why satirists are often nostalgists, like Tom Wolfe, who longs for the wild and crazy American past, or Evelyn Waugh, with his ascendant American vulgarians and his idealized lost Catholic aristocracy. Houellebecq despises contemporary consumer society, and though he is not an enthusiast, merely a fatalist, about its possible Islamic replacement, he thinks that this is the apocalypse we’ve been asking for. What he truly hates is Enlightenment ideas and practices, and here his satire intersects with a fast-moving current of French reactionary thought, exemplified by “The Suicide of France,” a surprise best-seller by the television journalist Éric Zemmour…
But the two writers do converge, inasmuch as their real sympathies lie outside contemporary political choices, in a revival of the old ideology of the far right, back before it disgraced itself—the ideology of conservative anti-capitalism in the form it took a century ago, more or less benignly in Chesterton and Belloc, and decidedly less benignly in the likes of Charles Maurras, the theorist of the monarchical (and ultimately pro-Vichy) Action Française movement. The tenets of the faith are simple: liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and international finance are the source of all evil. Liberal capitalism is a conspiracy against folk authenticity on behalf of the “internationalists,” the rootless cosmopolitans. The nation is everything, and internationalism is its nemesis. The bankers cosset us with narcotics of their civilization even as they strip us of our culture…
The spectre of an Islamic re-reconquest is therefore mixed with admiration for its discipline and purpose. The Muslim warriors are taken to be antimaterialists inspired by an austere ideal—the very idea of submission to authority that we have lost. In the back-and-forth of fantasies of conquest and submission between panicked Catholics and renascent Muslims, Islam plays an ambiguous role, as both the feared besieger and the admirable Other. Charles Maurras feared Islam, and prophesied, in the twenties, that a mosque built in Paris would be an opening for the infidel. His brand of religious nationalism helped inspire the Turkish poet Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, who studied in Paris, to shape his dreams of a reborn authoritarian Islamic-nationalist state at home—a mirror image of Maurras’s idealized France, and both, naturally, hostile to Jews. For where the Jews in the European reactionary imagination are insidious termites, eating silently away at the foundations, the Muslims are outsized conquerors, arriving to take over when you’re weakened. Chesterton, suspicious of Jews, was terrified of Muslims: “A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again.” The Jews are the poison of modernity, but Islam is the zombie state at its end.
