Submission by Houellebecq - with Henry Oliver

In this episode, Rasheed and Henry discuss Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as a novel not simply about Islam in France, but about civilizational exhaustion, spiritual emptiness, male desire, and the ease with which modern societies may submit to new orders. A deep dive into literature, faith, decadence, and the suicide of the West.

Transcript

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Rasheed: Hi Henry and welcome back to the podcast.

Henry: Always a pleasure.

Rasheed: So today we're going to be doing a single book dive, and I was looking forward to this for quite some time. This is a long time coming and I think there might be some spoilers for people who haven't read the book.

So I would say this is a post-reading episode, probably even read twice before you come to the episode, I would say. And we're going to discuss literature, philosophy, and sociology of the book ' Submission' by Michel Houellebecq.

Henry: It's one of those books. I hate plot spoilers. I hate plot summaries.

I think it's just a disease of literary criticism, but we can't discuss it without talking about the ending, at all. 

Rasheed: That is the problem.

Henry: Look away now kids!

Rasheed: So here we go. So again, I'm going to assume you've read the book at least twice, a priori. Now Henry, the first thing we need, I think, to get to terms with is the surface reading of the book.

Which is, this is a book about Islam in France or broadly in Europe, and that is a "bad thing". I'm using air quotes here for listeners. That is generally how most people perceive.

And of course that is the completely wrong way to see the book. But what's your view on that one?

Henry: I don't know if it's completely the wrong way to see the book. What happens is that an Islamic government is elected and France becomes governed by Shia islam. Men have multiple wives. Women wear the burka. Educational institutions are reordered according to religious ideas. And the main character that we follow is a professor of French literature, and has been under the western system alienated, dissatisfied, typical Houellebecq. He's dead on the inside, everything is miserable.

And eventually he submits to the governing order, but also to the idea of Islam. He's no longer a Western individual. He decides to become a member of that order, temperamentally or ideologically, however you want to say it. So I don't think it can be right to say that the idea of an Islamic, quote unquote takeover of France is the wrong reading, even though I agree it's not the whole reading. But there is an extent to which Houellebecq is, I think, genuinely concerned with that question.

Rasheed: Okay. I think that's fair.

I guess when I want to say it is not about, or I stress about Islam, it's usually how it's perceived. It's like the point of the book is to discuss Islam. From non-Islam to Islam is the arc of the book.

Of course, yes, that's clearly too surface.

So that's why I try to push hard against that interpretation. But yes, the Islam idea features as a core tenant of what, I guess you will come to, the underlying raison d'être of the book essentially speaking.

Henry: If it's not about that, what is it about?

Rasheed: That's what we'll get to!

Henry: I do think Houellebecq is writing about this, what he calls in this book and in "The Elementary Particles" and elsewhere, the "suicide of the suicide of the West". And there is an extent to which, what happens in this book is that France gives up on itself and Islam, the French version of Islam does not give up on itself.

The replacement, as some people would say, happens. It is left open, I think, important to say this, that there will be future elections. And so it may be that in the future this government is removed from office. But it seems pretty clear that culturally there's a sort of great acceptance of what happens in the novel. Houellebecq sometimes makes the point that this is for economic reasons, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for, frankly sexual reasons.

Maybe it's not about from not-Islam to Islam and it's more about what he calls the suicide of a culture. But are the two not entailed within each other?

Rasheed: Yes, the Islam feature of the book is relevant to the suicide feature of the book, but I think the Islam feature is more or less almost superficial to the underlying suicide part.

And I take that reading from the beginning, which is the preface or the epigraph to the book from "En route" by Huysmans. Of course, the book starts off the first line itself with a reference to how he is a scholar of Huysmans, and this was his most important time, when he was finishing his dissertation on Huysmans, but the page prior.

The first thing you read when you open the book is a quote from Huysmans, of course, "En route". The character that Huysmans is writing about is complaining about the effort or the absence that he is feeling and that where he wants to potentially get to is Catholicism. And to me that opens the core irony of the book. We are talking about something which we are not talking about, which is obviously the suicide part. So Islam is a good counterweight to thinking about the real core features that make us think, "Hey, what is that absence that we are missing in our own societies?"

So Islam just holds a mirror up to it. I think that is why I try to push the idea that you have to talk more about the absence more than the actual thing itself.

Henry: Yes. And it's certainly true that this is a feature of other Houellebecq novels that do not feature Islam or do feature it in this kind of structural way.

And his criticism of individualism, I think entails both that it is secular and therefore that it does not offer a suitable foundation for human progress because it leaves people without any kind of meaning, belief system, purpose. So I accept all of that, but I think the point of this book is that the suicide of the West is endogenous as some of our colleagues from Mercatus colleagues might say.

It's so inherent to western liberalism that rather than going back to Catholicism, which is the foundation on which the culture was built, the foundation of the liberal idea, they will submit to Islam, which is a fundamental break. I think Houellebecq would say it wasn't a fundamental break, it was the sort of long evolution out of something that ended up killing itself.

Islam represents a fundamental break. And I think this book is actually pretty clear that it is a break that allows people to act on some of the desires that they had not previously been allowed to act on. And that's one reason why the break is so accepted.

Rasheed: I'm not sure if I agree that it is such a clear example of Houellebecq putting up a clear example of Islam being a fundamental break from what has come, what's currently here, or what's currently being exhausted. So I made that point in reference to some of the flourishes that come through the book.

One quick example is how the Paris Mosque was introduced to us in the book, and it was introduced via the two colleagues. François and the younger one…

He says, "Hey you wanna get some coffee? Let's go to the Paris Mosque.” Now, people who are not very familiar with France might think this is a complete fiction. It is a real place. The Grand Paris Mosque is there in Paris. It's a typical place to drink tea. Here they went to drink tea and have some baklava, and you can go right now to the Paris Mosque in go to the touristy area and have some tea and baklava. It is such a central part of Paris.

I do wonder why that was the initial choice made. Of course I could be reading too much into this, but when the Paris Mosque was constructed, it was not commissioned by invasion forces. It was built by the government of France to give reverence to the Muslims that fought for the country in World War I.

And they paid for it. The city of Paris gave the land. It's one of the very few times where the government of France broke its secular rules to build a “religious institution”. But they called it a Muslim institute. It’s got study rooms, a tea house and things to make it seem much more secular than it really is.

And now it's just seen as a normal feature of the Paris skyline. It's the same Moorish-Hispanic culture, architecture as Andalucía in Spain. So when I see that I wonder if he is trying to hint at a sort of continuity? To me that's why it's a bit darker in the sense that the Islam isn't the break, it is the haunting that you can actually just move towards quite easily. It's not a jump, it's a slip.

Henry: I agree with that. I think that's absolutely right. I found this on this reading, it affected me more emotionally.

And I think part of it is because of what you're saying. The suicide of the West evolves out of what the west is in this novel. What I mean by a break is, for example from monogamy to polygamy, things like that. Whereas liberalism and Christianity actually are apart from secularism in many ways quite similar, by the time the France of the novel has become Islamic, all sorts of things are changing overnight. Basic norms are being fundamentally changed. And I think part of his point is it evolves out and it's a normal part of French life. But that's exactly the problem because at that point, you're prepared to step into this new order, this new system. And to begin with, he doesn't want to do it. He's offered a job. No, he's not offered the job. He takes the retirement money and he finds out he could have a job if he signs up and converts to Islam. And he thinks that's crazy, he's not gonna do that.

And as you say, he just accommodates himself to it quite naturally, it's just already within him. But that doesn't mean it's not a fundamental break to become. Houellebecq goes to some length to show this. He goes to the boss's house. The head of the president of the university who then becomes secretary of this and a cabinet member.

And he meets in the hallway, a young woman or I think she's a teenager, 15. And she is just wearing ordinary clothes, or what secular French liberals would consider ordinary. And she shrieks and runs away and the president of the university comes down and says, "Oh, she's appalled that you've seen her without the burka". And we learn that she's one of his new wives. So that's a very clear example of those scenes in previous Houellebecq novels. It would've been on the beach. It would've been highly sexualized. It would've been maybe a bit perverted, there'd be something like that.

The girl is now in a fundamentally different position, morally, socially, economically. Her life will never be what it would otherwise have been. She'll never be seen in the same way. I think those sorts of breaks are fundamental.

Rasheed: Yes. We will come to more of that too. I want-

Henry: Where is, just to make the point, doubly clear, if they'd reverted to Catholicism, there would've been much more continuity for her.

Not as much, but as much but more.

Rasheed: That was on page 218 in the English version of the book. This is the polygamy point, "And look at how he lived…” This is the boss we're talking about. “A 40-year-old wife to do the cooking. A 15-year-old wife for whatever else ... no doubt he had one or two wives in between, but I couldn't think of how to ask." So this is an interesting point. This sexualization of Islam is a key feature of how he thinks about why he wants to potentially convert to Islam, and we'll see some hints of that in other places in the book as well.

But before we get there, I wanna pull back a bit more to a recurring feature of the book that runs through every page, every hint, every thesis, every comment: that Huysmans is the mirror to everything we're doing here. And people haven't really taken much time to think about why of all the potential people in French or world literature, did Houellebecq choose Huysmans to be the core anchor of the literature professor's work. How about you? I have some views on this of course, but why do you think that Houellebecq, or Huysmans is so relevant to understand, to really think about the themes here in Submission?

Henry: It is an interesting point and it is reinforced to us when the narrator is offered the chance to do the Pléiade.

That's Houellebecq reaching out and saying, "Please realize that Huysmans is underappreciated and he's so important."

It's a very good moment. And it's dealt with so wonderfully because Huysmans is a sort of nihilist and there is a wonderful moment. Obviously it's upsetting, but there is this wonderfully done moment when François is working on his preface to this edition and its stimulating, rewarding work, and it's the pinnacle of his career.

And he's spent his whole life becoming capable of doing this. And he's finally getting this guy into this edition and people will pay attention. And he's so dead on the inside. It's such a dramatic letdown and leaves some other kind of emptiness, which is a very Huysman-esque response. And I think that there are obviously varieties of nihilism in the European novel, but Houellebecq is not a nihilist in the sense that Bazárov in "Fathers and Sons" is a nihilist. Actually Houellebecq is opposed to that. He's not a blunt materialist. He doesn't think everything can be explained with a chemistry textbook or whatever it is   Bazárov carries around preaching to people about. “The Elementary Particles” is an earlier statement of that view.

And Huysmans gives him a source or a fount of not quite nihilism, but what it means for a man or a person to just become inert, to just lose all feeling, to stop being, to become idle, in the real sense. And that is the strain of European culture that he thinks is leading to the suicide.

He's not a   Bazárov and he's trying to position himself in that line. And it's not a line of thinking actually, that gets as much airtime. The question of whether  Houellebecq is a nihilist is a live question. And it shouldn't be because he's gone to great pains to show that he's the opposite of a nihilist.

And one of the things that's so moving about his work is that he understands the hedonism of ordinary life. I think in this book, François talks about the undeniable will to live. And Huysmans is the place he goes to get the material for what it means to lose that.

Rasheed: So going back again to the epigraph. Coming into the book and you read the epigraph, you don't think that much about it, but then you get to the end.

And then if you go and read Huysmans for the first time, you have to wonder why of all the Huysmans texts he chose En route as the epigraph. Because when you really think about this book (Submission), you would think it would be something from "Against Nature".

I actually don't like the title in English of that.

It's "À rebours" in French and "A contrapelo" in Spanish, which means "Against the grain", another ugly translation. That's also sometimes the English translation too. That seems like the logical choice, but En route was in the Catholic cycle of tetralogy for Huysmans.

Is he mocking me with this particular epigraph?

It feels somehow even more haunting to see that En route epigraph from Huysmans to open this particular book of all books. This is not a fun story. This is the end in the place that we think is gonna end. That alone to me is very odd.

Henry: I think you've read more Huysmans than I have, so I can't give you as good an answer, but I think you're talking about the right thing. And François does talk about the conversion of Huysmans and the change in his work and his plan for the work to be in two volumes reflects that break in Huysmans.

I took that as further evidence of what I was saying earlier, that the West because it is committing suicide, will not be going back to its “own religion”. And I think that's why that opening epigraph is mocking you as it were because the provocation of the book is becoming desiccated in the way that Huysmans describes, and there are some wonderful descriptions of human desiccation and submission. François's problem is not that he comes to accept life or that he becomes revivified with the idea of having restraint and structure and all the things that Houellebecq thinks are necessary for meaning that liberalism can't provide.

It's that he's prepared to just submit because there are indulgences available or pleasures available. The restraints that Catholicism would put upon him are one way of thinking about this, restraints on him. Whereas submission puts restraints on the women. Islam puts restraints on women.

And I think that is part of the desiccation of François.

Rasheed: And you just let the big correlation slip.

Henry: I know!

Rasheed: It's that Islam means "submission". The title of the book is doing a lot of work.

Henry: Indeed.

Rasheed: There’s another thing I want to point out, which is to me in terms of this Huysmans nexus here. So I have a personal view. I like to read François as Dorian Gray.

Henry: Okay.

Rasheed: Not Dorian Gray in the world, the picture of Dorian Gray. So literally the picture of Dorian Gray leaves the house and is walking about.

Henry: François is the painting.

Rasheed: François is the painting.

Henry: And modern France is the real Dorian.

Rasheed: And I say this in the sense that in Dorian Gray, the painting is what absorbs the decay.

It absorbs the atrophy, it absorbs the moral degradation, absorbs the decadence in many ways. But then that is hidden away, and you Dorian, the real Dorian is allowed to go into the world and be looked at as unmaimed. However, François to me is the trapped, real Dorian and the painting in the world is where you see all the decay and moral atrophy as it is.

And we are forced to look at the painting. And I have that view because of how the literal book, the Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde is pretty well established. The book that corrupts Dorian, along with Lord Henry, the yellow book referenced is Huysman. It even came out on the trial of Oscar Wilde where he's asked, "Is the book you've mentioned... Was it Huysmans? It's actually very decadent." So we know that Oscar Wilde loved Huysmans. And even when you look at Wilde's "Salomé", it's not Salomé from the Bible, it's Salomé from Huysmans.

Henry: Yes.

Rasheed: It's very clear.

Henry: Yeah.

Rasheed: So Huysmans is a very big feature of Dorian Gray. So it feels to me like mocking again when he's saying this is actually something different from what we are thinking about on the surface.

Henry: I think this is all very apt and I think, the Wildean interest in Huysmans, as you say is clearly at least a parallel to Submission if not some sort of direct influence. But do you think that if we take François to be the painting that he is mocking you because he's saying you'd sooner give in. The Wildean system can't hold. It's fundamentally unstable and you would rather submit.

Rasheed: This is why it's very uncomfortable to read this book, because I think that's the case. I do think most people, I'm not sure personally, as more introspection has to happen. But I think more people would rather submit to this new world that offers you all these other things.

Henry: I suppose Houellebecq's point is that most men would rather submit.

Rasheed: And it's weird, this is the first time anyone's using the sexual drive of men to talk about this. What's the term we use now? The promise of incels is actually quite a good example of why Islam could be taking root in our Western culture. Not something you hear about enough. You don't think of Islam as sexualization. Granted, given how well that pushes it here, this is actually a pretty substantial drive.

Henry: Yeah. And he talks about that in the conversation between the President and François. And François is interested in how polygamy works, and the President says it means the high status men can be married. What I find so interesting about Submission, is that some of the things he's concerned about in a way have already happened in the West, which is that high status men are much more likely to be married now than incels and so on. And François says, "Oh I'm not a high status, I'm just some desiccated old professor of French literature." And the professor says, "No, we could get you some young wives. You are probably a three wife kind of guy. We can pay you some money." And at this point  François goes "Oh, maybe is system sounds good to me." And there are other books that deal with this topic like the "Handmaid's Tale". It's got something in common with 1984. And the dystopia that has often been imagined, like by P.D. James, is in response to some kind of internal crisis to the society, an authoritarian government taking over from within.

And I think Houellebecq is not talked about as dystopian in a genre way. It's not compared to Atwood and Orwell so much. But it is interesting that the dystopia could come from without. Obviously it's not without exactly, but from a different tradition. As you say, with the incels and many other aspects of contemporary society, the emphasis that's put on status in in marriage and in partnerships and so forth, assortative mating, just the way those things are discussed, I think it has a lot more in common with Submission than with the Handmaid's Tale. And maybe the liberal West does need a warning from Houellebecq more than it does from the Handmaid's Tale.

Maybe not, but it's an interesting topic.

Rasheed: It definitely is. Let's focus on the sex part a bit. Because this is a very substantial theme in the book that I think some reviewers... well that's the only thing they talk about, the misogyny aspect. One of the curious things about the sex discussion, it is very frequently extraordinarily, not in a bad way, vulgar. There was frequent vulgarity in this book.

Henry: Do you think this book's vulgar?

Rasheed: Vulgar in the prime basis of that term. Not vulgar like, "Oh my gosh, clutching my pearls" vulgar.

It takes the way men think about women, seriously.

Henry: I find "Serotonin" vulgar in the straightforward sense. Okay. I think The Elementary Particles is at times very good at representing vulgarity. And there's a voyeur in that book.

It's really quite unfortunately, unforgettable. One thing I like about Submission is that he handles the vulgarity quite, very sensitively, much better, much more subtly. The sort of symbolic meaning of all the sex acts is much more apparent.

Rasheed: I agree.

I think we had mentioned this in a previous conversation. The last time he had sex with Miriam, a student, he woke up at 4:00 AM.

Anytime in western literature it's suddenly 4:00 AM, we know what that signifies. But the way he approached that sex scene it's hard to read that and think, "I hate women".

Henry: I think what's happening in Submission, like in The Elementary Particles, there's a lot of sadness and a lot of the difficulties of love. But there's also, as I say, the hedonism of ordinary life.

And it's really affected me. It's a sad book. People find it so hard to just be in love, just have a normal relationship just to live with sexual pleasure without it becoming complicated or deadening or whatever.

And the characters in that book have managed that and then they don't. And in this book, he manages it much less and much more fleetingly. And that scene stands out as really almost the only happy moment in the book. Certainly the only happy sexual moment. Not the only moment of gratification, but the only happy, joyful moment. And this is part of the desiccation or the suicide of the West. That it has lost the ability in Houellebecq's mind to do what should come naturally which has been building in his work for some time, but comes out, very poignantly here. And so I don't think of it as vulgar.

I think it's more tragic. I think he thinks it's tragic. I think he presents it as a tragic thing that they can reach that point and then they go their separate ways and they just don't have the will to stay together or make it work.

Rasheed: And it is actually curious how right after that scene, there was a completely separate scene, where they basically say, “We forgot about that. Let's move on.”

Henry: And that's what happens to Miriam. She moves on, she forgets about it. He gets that sort of email later. Now I do think that's because François, as part of his being so decadent and degraded, is sleeping with his students.

So part of the suicide of the West is that he's conducting his romantic life in a purposefully ephemeral and detached manner. But it is more tragic because of that. Yes. Yeah. 'cause they did in, out, out of that ridiculous situation they did find something happy. And again, in The Elementary Particles, there's a lot of talk of 40-year-old men finding 18-year-old girls attractive.

And in that book, the unworkability, because of the as I say, vividly  Houellebecqian voyeurism. But in this book it's really just sad.

I sound sentimental, but I think sentimentality is actually a big part of  Houellebecq. I don't hear it discussed very much, but he's got a broken heart.

Rasheed: Yeah, I never read him as particularly angry or nihilistic. I'm gonna get back to that point. But before that another literary figure that was mentioned, not super often, but mentioned at particular strategic points: René Guénon. Again this is part of the "Houellebecq is toying with me” arc.

Henry: The cat and the mouse.

Rasheed: Yes.

Henry: Yes.

Rasheed: One major issue we have today is that people don't read anymore. And even in France, people don't read either, unfortunately.  René was a French metaphysics philosopher in the 1900s. He was a well-known French meta-physician. He was well read and he converted to Islam.

He converted to Islam for the reasons that  Houellebecq is toying with here in Submission. He even wrote a book called "The Crisis of the Modern World", where he expressed the opinion that we are exhausted. We are running on fumes. We are not dynamic. We've lost our way. Essentially, the suicide of the West arc yet again. But unlike Huysmans, who did the Catholic transition, René Guénon already believed that Catholicism was also exhausted. I wonder why Houellebecq didn't put more emphasis on Guénon in the book, but rather Huysmans. Again, I feel like he's, again, toying with me here again. What is trying to tell me by not really centralizing Guénon more and just sprinkling him here via other main characters.

Henry: What do you think he is trying to tell you?

Rasheed:  I feel like for all of the tragedy that the book is bringing, I think there’s some kind of hopefulness still in a sense.

Maybe we don't actually have to succumb to the determinism of the west. 

But I still feel he's at least until the very end within the book, pushing back on his own argument. Maybe there’s actually still potentially a way forward. Maybe we don't have to succumb to suicide. We still have hope. So perhaps there is a kind of optimism layered in with the tragedy and it still feels like he's toying with the idea.

Henry: You don't think Submission is a deterministic novel?

Rasheed: I do not.

Henry: Why?

Rasheed: So Houellebecq wrote a book about Schopenhauer.

Henry: We should say to anyone listening, bloody miserable book, don't read it before bed.

Rasheed: It was published around 2005. I read the Spanish version. One thing of note, the Spanish version was translated by Joan Riambau. He's actually from Barcelona, that’s a  Catalan name. He's the same person that translated the book Submission into Spanish.

That's why I think that the Spanish version has a bit more oomph to the feeling of Houellebecq compared to the English version. So sometimes I'll have to go between the French, Spanish and English versions and I’m left to wonder “What is Lorin Stein doing?” We'll get back to that. So the book on Schopenhauer, you read it and you get the impression that Houellebecq is arguing. 

It’s not as simple as me thinking Schopenhauer is correct, this is simply not enough.

Henry: And that's why you think submission isn't deterministic?

Rasheed: I think so.

Henry: I think that submission may not be a Schopenhauer-ean book whatever. I don't think Submission necessarily expresses the Schopenhauer philosophy. But I do think that Huysmans is one influence on this. I do think that François is guided by the circumstances around him into his conclusion.

He's not guided by himself. And that is the most pessimistic thing about the book. And I think that's pretty deterministic. Because he tries to opt out and he doesn't believe it, and it gets him anyway, and much more subtly compared to other dystopias.

It happens much more slippingly or slidingly, there's no sort of dramatic moment. I know there's that joke about having these wives but he comes to it gradually and he doesn't quite realize. Maybe we won't quote the last line since we've given spoilers and that would be too much.

But the last line is really upsetting and powerful.

Rasheed: We have to quote it. And we've already warned you. We've warned you. It is the key line of the book. It can’t be avoided.

Henry: So having submitted, converted to Islam, taken-

Rasheed: But we don't know if he's converted to Islam.

Henry: Because he has to get the job at university, doesn't he?

Rasheed: Yeah, but we don't know.

Henry: How else will he get his job at the university if he doesn't convert?

Rasheed: I agree with that. I agree with that, but we still don't know if that happens. And the reason why I am pushing the last line is because in English the last line says, “I would have nothing to mourn.”

Henry: Yes, but it should be as you told me, “regret.” I haven't looked at the French copy.

Rasheed: Correct.

Henry: It's ‘regret’ in the French version.

Rasheed: “Je ne regrette rien.” The Spanish one is not ‘regret’, but it's a similar vibe. However, and this might be a leap on my part but it is an important connection of note. In France, this line has a very unique connotation as well.

There’s a very famous song in France by Edith Piaf, that you might know.

Henry: Of course,

Rasheed: It's the same name. For anyone who hasn’t heard, go check it out on Youtube (it was also the introduction song at the start of this episode).

Henry: And it's a sort of song of resistance.

Rasheed: It's not just about resistance, it’s deeply interwoven with French political history. The song that she dedicated to the troopers in the Algier’s war, and it was a whole thing.

The troopers adopted the song for themselves and used it when they had parades and were marching. It’s not just about mere resistance to anything. It's tied into French culture. 

Henry: It’s the French equivalent of “My eyes have seen the glory.”

Rasheed: Yes, exactly!

I don’t think you would use that line, in a singular paragraph, at the end of a book.

Henry: As soon as you told me that it should be ‘regret’ instead of ‘mourn’, I thought, “Oh, so it's a reference to Edith Piaf. It has far more weight and resonance that the use of ‘mourn’ completely kills. 

But to me, that only reinforces determinism. Let me go two pages back. I'm going to read you a passage. Because I'm a literary person, we have to resort to going back to the text.

This is François narrating. He says at the beginning of this page, "The conversion ceremony itself would be very simple and it would take place at the Paris Mosque”, as you referenced earlier. “The idea was that I should bear witness in front of my new Muslim brothers. My equals in the sight of God.”

So whether or not he has converted at the end of the novel, which I agree with you, is not said outright. He narrates what will happen in his conversion. So I think we can assume that the novel ends before the conversion. But it ends with, what is perhaps more important to Houellebecq, an internal conversion.

He has decided to submit. He has converted already, in the eyes of God, as it were. He's made this decision. He's changed, and he says, “That morning I would be specially allowed inside the Hammamy, which was ordinarily closed to men. Wrapped in a bathrobe, I would walk the long corridors with their arch topped colonnades, their walls covered in the finest mosaics. 

Then in a smaller room, also covered in mosaics of greater refinement, bathed in a bluish light, I would let the warm water wash over my body for a long, a very long time until my body was purified. Then I'd get dressed in the new clothes I'd brought with me and I would enter into the great hall of worship.

Silence would rain all around me. Images of constellations, supernovas, spiral nebulas would pass through my mind. And also images of springs of untouched mineral deserts of vast, nearly virgin forests. Little by little, I would penetrate the grandeur of the cosmic order. Then in a calm voice, I would pronounce the following words, which I had learned phonetically.”

And I'm not gonna say those words 'cause I will get it wrong. It would be offensive. But he says, “I testify that there is no God, but God that Mohammed is the messenger of God. And then it would be over from then on, I'd be a Muslim.”

That is unarguable.

And then you read the last paragraph, in the light of that.

“I've been given another chance. It would be the chance at a second life with very little connection to the old one. I would have nothing to regret.”

It's straightforward enough. Don't you think? ThoughI know that you never think it's straightforward enough.

Rasheed: My issue Henry, is that these last few pages here feel so estranged from the François that we've met.

It's just all just paragraph on paragraph on paragraph of conditionality. And I do wonder if it really is that straightforward. It just feels so foreign to the  François that was in the Church of the Black Madonna, and felt nothing.

And now he's now talking about being bathed and purified. It does feel like he's discussing something in such an abstract, literary way that is so foreign from his own life. 

And I feel like that last line goes to the end because it's such a strongly sounding conditionality. It could go either way. We could just forget what has happened and strive for something else.

Henry: I'm gonna read you another paragraph.

“The reception was winding down and the night was surprisingly balmy. I walked home without really thinking in a sort of reverie. Yes, my intellectual life was finished, though I could still participate in vague, colloquial and live on my savings and my pension.

But I started to realize, and this was a real novelty, that life might actually have more to offer.”

François has changed. That's what makes the book so upsetting.

Rasheed: I'm not saying that he definitely has or has not changed. I'm saying that the playfulness of this part of the book is to me could be leaning towards a hypothetical. 

Henry: What is it in the text that brings you to this view? I'm not against, I'm not against what you say.

Rasheed: To me, it's primarily the way he described his experience in the Church of the Black Madonna, when he was praying to get some light in the same route as Huysmans one, to feel something spiritual with God. It was such a banal discussion about how he felt nothing,

I don't think you go from that quickly. From that to this kind of waxing poetically about the purity of your body. It’s not like it has happened or will happen. This is all prefaced by preface. It’s just so strange to place these comments within a conditional at the very end. It feels like we’re being toyed with again, especially given where we started out with Huysmans. There's no mention of Huysmans in this part of the book, which is peculiar in many ways too, given where the book starts off from the epigraph to the end. When you read the other books of  Houellebecq you don't really get a character.

Of course people change their writing style. But you don't usually get a character that has such epiphanies.

Henry: But isn't that the whole point of the idea of Submission? The internal change may not be authentic. But it is a huge internal change. He's decided that since he's desiccated, he may as well submit.

Not that he's necessarily found true meaning, but Sure. But he has fundamentally converted. That's the whole point of the conditional writing.

Rasheed: It is possible that one could read it that way. What  I’m trying to say is that the path from En route all the way to where we are, leads me to contest the deterministic view of the submission. That is what I have some pains with.

Henry: The conditionality of it at the end, and the fact that it's a submission rather than an explicitly genuine conversion, I think makes it more deterministic.

He has been left without a choice other than to submit. All the talk about the building of a new Roman empire, the expansion into the exact territories that Rome used to occupy, this being, this sort of explicit policy of the university president, who by the end is the third most senior man in the government, only reinforces that, doesn't it?

This is a movement of history. And François's mistake was to think that he would be an authentic individual or could get back to being an authentic individual during the movement of history, but no. And the bigger determinism is the revival of Rome. It was Rome then it was Catholic.

The revival of that will not be either of those two things. It will be this break and this new thing. And he's caught up in the, in that great wave and there's nothing he can

I think Houellebecq goes to quite a bit of trouble to place the determinism, not just at the level of his immediate circumstances. He pulls back quite quickly and shows you that this is happening on a very big scale.

Rasheed: That's fair. I’ve noted that point you mentioned about Ben Abbes and Robert Rediger, who became a very senior person in the government of Ben Abbes, who was the Muslim Brotherhood leader, who became president of France.

I love how this was just inside politics, a bit of world building because it wasn’t all that necessary in the grand conversation.

I also like it because it is realistic for France in this sense.

We tend to forget that Napoleon III had a big vision for France as an Arab kingdom.

It was his entire preference towards being more Mediterranean. Even Charles de Gaulle had a large third wave view after the Cold War, where he wanted France to have a bigger roland be a key ally to Muslim nations. It continued with Jacques Chirac who had his large idea of declaring Arab policy as being key to the future of France.

And even the Mediterranean Union idea mentioned by Ben Abbes in the book, it's a direct statement from Nicolas Sarkozy because he had an entire view of the union of the Mediterranean, where France was at the center. So this was not some random thing that Houellebecq plucked out of the air. This was and is the French polity at its top.

Henry: And it's an explicit alternative to the secular liberal individualism of the EU.

This is an interesting part of French history. I'm not by any means well-read in French culture, but I was just at the National Gallery looking at Delacroix and his painting of I think it's literally called “Arabs fighting (skirmishing) in the mountains.”

And Delacroix had a view that these were real men living in a sort of natural, strong, energetic way. This was proper manhood compared to the decadence of modern Paris. I'm not sure Houellebecq's so far away from that point of view.

So I think that goes along with the Roman thing. As you say, it's deep in French culture and French history, or a certain strand of it. And Houellebecq is giving up a fully deterministic alternative. And François comes to feel as a smaller part of that. And that's why he goes into that second chamber.

He goes all the way in. He's completely rebirthed, he's passed through the valley of the shadow, all that stuff.

Rasheed: Yes. I think you're right in that sense, if you look at it as the grand movement of history.

Henry: I'm here to depress you.

Rasheed: No I think this is true as a grand movement of history, especially when Houellebecq goes out of his way to actually make these large political rants, in French politics, of course. When you think of this not as some fiction, but grounded in France, as we know it today. It's also peculiar in many ways that he chose Marine Le Pen as a real character in this book.

It shows you that this is not a foreign France that he wants to portray. It is close, it is possible.

Henry: Yes. Exactly. She's the obvious foil. And I think they make a point of her ignorance. His point is that what French nationalism thinks of itself is ironically wrong, and it is part of the French national character for this dystopia to happen.

I think he makes his point quite forcefully, but with a sort of subtlety that's often missing from dystopias. 

Rasheed: I think he's very good at dystopia. I don’t think you’ve read “The Possibility on the Island”

Henry: No, I haven't read that one.

Rasheed: But that's also dystopia. Debatable. But the dystopia there, it wasn't like your typical blockbuster where there’s a boom or some disaster and then there’s and after. This dystopia was more of a thinning away. And the dystopia was built on isolation where you just don't know people around you.

This isolation after the end was the real dystopia. There is no massive disruption per se. In a realistic dystopia, there’s ignorance, movement, complicity. 

I was just thinking that if you were to put this all in a movie… Mayor Mamdani of New York would be a great stand-in for Ben Abbes. He’s got that twinkle in his eye, he’s charming, flirty and has charisma and is very non-confrontational. This is Ben’s description in the book. This is from 2015, you fast forward and there’s Mamdani, running NYC. I thought I was being punked!

Henry: That's what I said earlier.

I do think it's remarkable that some of these things are real now, not in the sense that France will become Islamic Nation or whatever, but he clearly has a reasonably good sense of some of these internal dynamics in the culture.

Rasheed: Tyler Cowen made a point where he pondered if this is a very Swiftian novel?

Henry: I don't know what Jonathan Swift would think about being compared to a French author. He obviously was a great admirer of many French authors and he liked the regularity with which they attempted to treat their language. But yes, the preoccupation with personal immorality under a regime which allows for too much religious diversity and opposition and therefore brings in the hypothetical absolutism, is very Swiftian. This could be a book of the travels. If Gulliver turned up and experienced all this, we wouldn't be so surprised, would we?

Rasheed: How then do you think we should talk about this book in terms of ongoing real world effects? And particularly, most people who read this book don't get into this conversation we're having now. Even the reviewers, your favourite group, don't seem to get to this part of the conversation either.

I believe the only review I found that was particularly good, at least in English, was by Knausgaard.

And gets there very quickly.

Henry: He's read Huysmans.

Rasheed: I want to read a couple quotes from his review. 

He says, “At least as I read it, in the Norwegian rendering, which I think is perhaps closer in style to Houellebecq's original than Lorin Stein's graceful English translation.” Very tongue in cheek as I’m sure he doesn’t really find it graceful at all. 

But the quote I really want to bring attention to is this. He says, “This lack of attachment, this indifference is, as I see it, the novel's fundamental theme and issue much more so than the Islamicization of France, which is the logic of the book is merely a consequence. What does it mean to be a human being without faith? This is in many ways the question posed by the novel.”

Henry: I hate to say it because I am the same as him, but I do think now Knausgaard is being a hopeless liberal in that statement, the idea that you can separate the consequence from the real substance of the book.

This book makes me uncomfortable, and I'm sure it makes most liberals uncomfortable. But I think we have to accept that the book is about the islamification of the French state and therefore a French culture and the willingness of François and the others to merely submit to that. Yes, because of the loss of meaning, the loss of faith, the desiccation of the individual.

I think both in this book and in The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq makes it very clear that he thinks that this is the natural evolution of the liberal order. But I think the power of the book is not incidental to the choice of Islam. If it had been some other religion, if it was in fact a reversion to Catholicism and that the French government became non-secular, reinstated, some rule of the Pope or whatever, that would not be the same sort of book at all. And the consequence changes how we think about all those other elements that he identified. So I don't want to fully disagree with him, but I do think that's a sort of weaseling out and one reason why Houellebecq is controversial, but also undeniable and fascinating.

And he's constantly getting press coverage and people always want to know what he thinks and everything because he has chosen the right conclusion to make the book scary.

Henry: And let me just add this disclaimer so people don’t think I'm saying anything nasty. That is not an anti-Islam statement. The idea that the west might give up on itself in these, as I say, fundamental ways, is obviously scary and living through a period of disastrously low fertility, inertia, and political indifference to some of these issues. I think his warning is real, or at least to be taken seriously.

Rasheed: I think it's taken even more seriously when you read ‘Platform’ and his comments on Islam in Platform. Not a core comment, not a core feature of that book, but it was just violence.

His view of Islam in Platform was, it was a terrorist attack in Thailand.

And then you come to Submission. I don't think anyone can step away from this to claim that Houellebecq is writing a Islamophobic book. It is, especially with one of the most compelling characters, president Robert Rediger.

It feels extremely welcoming and the presentation of Islam is framed as “this could be good.”

Hence why it’s also seductive to François. 

Henry: It could be good for François who is a hopeless, semi suicidal alcoholic who is depressed, has given up on his work, has no love life, and is hardly an advert for the Islamic takeover as a generally good thing.

Rasheed: Rediger is a parallel person in the book. His conversion to Islam, to me it was very strange, whimsical.

Henry: Yeah, exactly.

Rasheed: That's a whimsical conversion. “Oh I was walking in Brussels and the cafe was closed and my God, Europe is dead!”

That was what actually happened in the book.

Henry: Isn't it a bit like French cooperation with the Nazis? Just the sheer willingness to go with whoever because of the lack of meaning. When Houellebecq said he was a bit of an Islamophobe, I took him at his word.

I think it's often a mistake to think that writers are trying to be clever with you.

Rasheed: I don't think you can read the book and easily come away with Islamophobia because people don't mean it. And when people say that they don't usually mean it as some philosophical way of anti-Islam, they just mean that they hate the people.

Henry: Oh, I see.

Rasheed: You can't get that quickly from the book. 

Henry: No, you are absolutely right. None of them, none of the Muslims in the book is presented as being personally obnoxious or repellent. They're all presented quite nicely.

Rasheed: Especially Robert.

Henry: But that is part of what's sinister.

Half the faculty just signed on the next day. The whole thing is insane.

Rasheed: I was recently listening to a podcast, a Spaniard muslim convert viewing Submission. He read it as a utopia. He read it as something that could show people that this concept isn’t necessarily foreign.

Henry: What is it in the book that suggests that? I think Houellebecq is going to great pains to show you that it's very different and that the secular Paris mosque is one thing…

Rasheed: I think it's more of how the character of Robert brings someone into the Islam conversation without trying to break them so far away from their own past. For example, when Robert was discussing how his Muslim brothers thought of him when he was a hardcore Christian. To them this is normal and what they would expect as someone in this natural society. So they don't see it. This is just a different version of that thing you were discussing before and that Christian view, we aren’t so far apart, me and you.

Henry: But that is what makes it dystopian. That's a lie.

Rasheed: I agree with that. That's a lot. I agree with you on that.

Henry: Sure, I can see why someone who was converted in the way that the character was converted would emphasize that point. And as I say, I want to be careful not to say anything that makes me sound Islamophobic, but I do think the book gives you plenty of evidence to work out for yourself that's a lie.

And I think it's hugely important that the single point of continuity in François's life is that he is studying. He's still going to be studying and teaching and professing a writer who prophesied the inner death of the Western individual and the need to submit. What an extraordinary point of continuity to emphasize when the West quote unquote falls and the whole Roman Empire becomes the Islamic Empire.

I think Houellebecq’s too obvious in a way.

Rasheed: When I first read this book, I was extraordinarily skeptical about any realistic ways that Western society, Western Europe, could actually become more Islamic.

How could people that grew up in a very Catholic and apart society, actually take it on like François. I was so abrasive to the idea. And then I started visiting Abu Dhabi and I started to think about things a lot, and I tried also to visit other parts of the UAE.

And if you go to the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, just open the Louvre Dhabi. You walk in and you're immediately struck by what's happening in front of you. Think about François. 

What they do in the Louvre in Abu Dhabi is they have this central exhibit that juxtaposes Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the same exhibit to, and they call it, “This is our universal civilization.” And the Louvre Abu Dhabi isn't just a private institution. This is the government of the UAE signalling what they want to present to the world. And then you go to the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, the Grand Mosque. You walk in the tunnel and on exit is this hard hitting view. There are two giant photos at the entrance of the mosque. The Pope and the Queen of England. They are saying, “Dear tourist, this is not foreign to you, this is us”. They are trying to make the thing that we call Islam a central part of this universal civilization. This is quite serious.

To a weak-minded person, this could be a very seductive and acceptable premise.

Further, on my visit to Sharjah, another emirate of the UAE, I visited the Museum of islamic Civilization. Here there is a massive exhibit that features Andalucía in Spain as a part of the historic islamic world. This was indeed true at one point. 

Andalucía was part of the Islamic civilization, and they hold it, they talk about it as part of Islamic and you see that and you're like, who's right? Who's wrong here? Are they right? Those things aren't that simple. 

There was a dating TV show here in Spain called Blind Dates, where you come together and meet people of different ages, sexes and so on.

There was an episode that really struck a chord in Spanish social media.

It was a young couple, a 19 year old girl and a 20 year old guy. The guy was Muslim. Very good looking guy. After the guy said she wasn’t muslim so it would work. But the girl said she would simply convert, and she was serious.

Rasheed: When you encounter things like that you come back to Houellebecq.It doesn't really seem like it takes that much.

Henry: No. I think of Houellebecq as very much like V.S Naipaul in this respect. And interested in similar issues. He doesn’t present in similar ways, literally, but otherwise and in some ways that attract controversy. But he's very much working from the material of the news and of developments in the world. And this is what makes him resented, but also unavoidable. He's not making it all up.

And Naipaul obviously, was in some ways terrible. But he had seen something real in the world. 

Rasheed: The final thing I want to mention here is how  surprising it is to me how poorly analyzed this book is by people who do this for a living.

Henry: Why?

Rasheed: I don't usually read reviews of books.

Henry: Oh, I see.

Rasheed: Now that I'm actually reading reviews I'm wondering how is it that these people are so blind?

Henry: One, one answer is that a lot of the people reading book reviews will not have read the book already.

And so they require a book review that is contextualizing, explanatory, expository, whatever, and therefore doesn't have time to come to these issues. Another answer is that book reviewing is not always done by people who are primarily book reviewers. So they have other preoccupations, which may be quite legitimate in the broader context of the newspaper and what it's offering its readers.

And the third thing is that Michelle Houellebecq is a genius at attracting this sort of controversy. He was trolling people long before Twitter was invented. And it may be in his best interests to have lots of reviews that don't come to this point. A fourth point would be to say that books like this are not easy to understand straight away either for the individual or at the sort of population level because they're so closely bound up with what is going on in the world, particularly when it was published.

It was very provocative about what was in the news and what was happening in France. And it's a natural human thing to be startled by that. But I agree with you. The quality of book reviewing is not. Superb. But to read 19th century book reviews of books that are classics is instructive in this manner.

It is not only a modern problem. It's a sort of slightly blighted genre. And I don't think it's so unusual. I think you're right to pay more attention to Knausgaard than to others. 'Cause he's going about things very differently and he understands the European novel.

It may be that there aren't enough people writing in English who understand the European novel. One feature of modern literary culture is that there are these breakout international books. Houellebecq is no longer a French novelist in that sense. He's a global novelist, and so he becomes part of a reading list of those types of books.

But that doesn't necessarily mean he's being read by people who are thinking about, quote unquote, the French novel or the European novel or, European history. So he's being pulled out of his context in that way as well. And I should say I'm not as deeply read in some of those aspects as I should be before I start telling everyone else.

They're no good. I'm also no good.

Rasheed: It may not be the best question to close this kind of conversation on…

But it's hard not to be pessimistic about liberal, pluralist thought in modern times if you really take Submission seriously. I think that of course more people should not just run away and hide behind the curtains if you read Submission. But it does really bring the call for more thought on people who discuss classical liberalism, like us here at Mercatus Center.

I do feel like sometimes these people don't try to really bargain with what is gripping liberal society as it is today.

And sometimes I wonder who's supposed to do that?

Henry: The other way I think about this is aliens, which is obviously a slight change of tech from what we've been talking about. But there's so much information coming out that makes it impossible to any longer be the sort of person who says, “Oh UFOs poo. This is all very nonsense.” And yet everyone is just going about their lives as if nothing is and it's quite extraordinary. I was at a party a few months ago. Everyone is milling around, having a nice time. There's beautiful weather, and we have those funny little cakes that we like.

And meanwhile, Congress is getting testimony about aliens and watching these videos that senior members of the military cannot explain, and it's all very extraordinary. And to me it was like a scene from a novel, yeah. The party’s going on and they're all talking and 

“Oh my God, did you hear about this?”

“Oh, she didn't say that.”

“The aliens guys, they’re right here!”

I think actually Houellebecq is very good at showing us that. I don't know that no one's thinking about it or talking about it. I'm not sure.

Rasheed: I can't think of anyone right now.

Henry: I can agree with you that there's a deep complacency in the West and in the liberal West, and I think a lot of people are aware of that complacency. But Houellebecq's point is that it's very hard to break. And I don't think we know how to do that

Rasheed: Henry, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Henry: As I'm English, I love to end on that disappointing note. Thank you so much for having me.