Michel Houellebecq's Submission, sex realism and Western spiritual decay
Curiously given the controversy surrounding its portrayal of Islam, Submission places Islam in dialogue with the values of the West and repeatedly finds the West lacking. If Islam has a kind of dynamism and vitality, a desire to reproduce itself, what does the West have? Even the study of literature, that ‘major art form’ of the West and its crowning jewel, is dismissed as ‘a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet still manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time.’
Submission’s protagonist and narrator crystallises this spiritual decay. The middle-aged professor of literature François lives in the shadow of the author Huysman, to whom he has dedicated his life’s work in a labour marked by a self-conscious spiritual malaise. “My articles were clear, incisive, brilliant… But was that enough to justify a life?” he muses; though good at his job, he admits early on that his work is pointless: ‘the academic study of literature leads basically nowhere’. This man is the logical end-point of the West: safe, cosseted, free to roam his arcane intellectual interests, individualistic and disconnected from family, having and indeed needing none of his own, barely satisfied by the string of meaningless relationships he keeps up with his students year after year. In this softened state he has had no need for knowledge of the outside world or of politics ‘I didn’t actually know much about France’ – lacking in agency, bereft of an essential life force, and originating no thoughts of his own, the events of the novel simply happen to him. In François there is nothing to envy.
The passage of time marks this novel: far from creating a sense of urgency, these consistent reminders instead emphasise François’ ineffectuality, his impotence, especially against the rising tide of Islam. ‘My entire youth was over’; time passes and he does nothing. “There was an interval of, I suppose, several hours.” “While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies.” The oppressiveness of ageing permeates. Beginning early with its sex realism, the novel’s red pill-adjacent assessment of the impact of age on men and women’s sexual market value benefits the protagonist’s philandering with younger students. Descriptions of these relationships are repellent, male sexuality at its most base and honest. His idle reflections on the sex lives of women his own age instead feature references to the inevitability of loneliness and of death: ‘In one or two years she would give up any last matrimonial ambitions… before the sagging of her flesh became prohibitive, and condemned her to a lasting solitude.’ The modern liberal relationship dynamic of his contemporaries Bruno and Annelise, who buck the trend and manage to escape academia, get married and have children, offer nothing to envy for Western man or woman alike: Bruno is emasculated, earns less, does the childcare; Annelise works her fingers to the bone. Family life is not an idyll to strive for, it is instead a slow death sentence. ‘[T]hings wouldn’t get better over the years… not to mention the sagging of the flesh.’ François concludes cynically that they ‘must have divorced by now.’
The Islamification of France progresses, and removed from his job, having failed to find a wife and have children, François’ life descends into meaningless fornication and idle suicidality. It is not until his capitulation to Islam at the end of the novel, apparently mainly due to the polygynous sexual benefits, that François possesses any reason or drive to marry and have children. Throughout, it is the modern liberal conceptualisation of marriage and family life, with the desexing of man and woman, that stifles love and success. Islam is the more attractive prospect for its frank acceptance of male and female roles and hierarchies: status for the man, eternal girlishness for his wives. The starkest example of this is the comparison between the dress of Muslim and Western women:
‘Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise… They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home…’
It is not in the end François’ half-hearted attempts to reject his atheism and follow in Huysman’s path to Catholicism that leads him to religion. Remaining critical of Christianity throughout the novel (‘Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion’), it is instead the simple opportunity for polygynous marriage, the prospect of three wives and the return of some measure of status that draws him to Islam without any real consideration of the doctrinal aspects of the faith. François, for all his flaws, is always honest: weighing up “life of the mind… social life… life of my body”, he concludes: ‘“In the end, my cock was all I had.” And so it is that this self-consciously pathetic man lulls himself into belief in his own significance and deserving, and he converts to Islam.
‘The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man. I was incapable of living for myself, and who else did I have to live for? Humanity didn’t interest me – it disgusted me, actually.’
As we are reminded throughout, ‘belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage… atheist humanism – the basis of any “pluralist society” – is doomed.’ François sees the writing on the wall, and slides easily into his new role. The supremacy of Islam was inevitable.