When I say “dystopian,” the casual reader may infer — as many people did when the book first appeared, literally at the same moment as the “Charlie Hebdo” massacre — that the dystopia is the Islamicized France, that Houellebecq is trying to do for Islamism or “Eurabia” what Orwell once did for Stalinism. But if you’ve read the keener reviews (or Houellebecq’s previous novels) you probably understand that no, actually, the dystopia is the contemporary West, and the Islamified future that Houellebecq’s story ushers in is portrayed as a kind of civilizational step forward, or if you prefer a necessary regression back to health.
I sort of knew this going in but even so it was remarkable how — well, I think neo-reactionary is really the only term to use to describe what Houellebecq seems to be doing in his portrait of contemporary France and his mischievous prophecy about its potential trajectory. And I do mean neo-reactionary in the internet-movement, Mencius Moldbug sense of the term (if you aren’t familiar with this particular rabbit hole, good luck): The overt political teaching of “Submission” is that Europe is dying from the disease called liberalism, that it can be saved only by a return of hierarchy and patriarchy and patriotism and religion and probably some kind of monarchy as well, but that religion itself is primarily an instrumental good and so the point is to find a faith that actually convinces and inspires and works (and that’s, well, a little manly), and on that front European Christianity and particularly Roman Catholicism is basically a dead letter so the future might as well belong to Islam instead.
Indeed one of the clever touches in the book involves the way the new Islamic Charlemagne of Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood leader turned French president Mohammed Ben Abbes, builds a power base that includes both France’s remaining conservative Christians, for whom his traditional-values pitch has some appeal, and (in a prominent cabinet position) a former Nietzsche scholar who presumably found in Islam a partial answer to some of old Friedrich’s sallies against Christianity’s weak-kneed femininity.
Now as this cleverness suggests, Houellebecq is considerably slyer than your average neoreactionary (or newspaper columnist, for that matter). And everything that happens in “Submission” is filtered through his frankly repellent, self-resembling narrator, so the actual message of the novel is necessarily somewhat more complex than the straightforward, un-Straussian reading I’ve just offered.
At the very least it’s safe to assume that the novelist is satirizing almost everybody, up to and including the neoreactionaries whose message he seems to adopt.
I was not expecting that it the New York Times.