The Sardonic Prophet: A Review of “Michel Houellebecq: The Cassandra of Freedom”

Michael S. Kochin and Alberto Spektorowski, eds. Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom Submission and Decline. Leiden: Brill, 2021.

The day the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked, and its editorial staff killed by Islamist terrorists, a sense of apocalypse fell upon Paris, city of light. It felt like a darkness was falling over the nation that helped bring the illumination of the so-called Enlightenment to Europe. In some sort of surreal synchronicity, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission was published the very same day as the black terror of ISIS landed on Europe’s streets in blood and fire.

Houellebecq’s novel portrayed an Islamist take-over of France through its political and educational institutions. Houellebecq, like increasing numbers of writers and thinkers, and whom Charlie Hebdo mercilessly satirised, was rushed into hiding under police protection. The book Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom: Submission and Decline, features ten essays on this, his most notorious novel, all of which are written with the sound of gunfire echoing in the background. This slim novel “reflected current and dramatic political developments in real time and, at the same, explored the philosophical, ideological, and psychological meaning of these events and wove them into the fabric of European art and literature.”[1]

The tragic and violent backdrop against which these essays are presented is a stark contrast with the academic tone of the essays and their arguments. This is both necessary to gain some perspective on a complex novel, and to gain some detachment from real-world events. The detached tone in this book matches that of Francois, the narrator in Submission. This does not detract from the substance and force of many of the arguments, however: impact is not always felt from polemic.

The essays approach this multilevel fictional comment on France and its crisis of self from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, political, religious and psychological. As in any book of this kind, some chapters are better than others. Several are truly exceptional and help the reader view both the novel in question and the world it portrays in new ways. Nearly all get to grips with the fact that “no other work of fiction published in the last fifty years has had the impact of Houellebecq’s Submission. While critics are divided about the literary value of the book, nobody doubts its effects at the political or ideological level.”[2]

The fact is that the theme of Islam in the West that Submission places at the centre of its narrative is an ever more importance subject. The reality of history is that the relationship between Islam and Europe is a conflictual one of invasion and counter-invasion, war and conquest in both directions. Now that Islam has a significant presence in Europe itself because of immigration, the question is how to navigate the differences and to maintain a semblance of the common life going forward, even while Islamism continues to strike at the culture that tells us who we are. Houellebecq portrays this general theme through the particular frame of France, the nation that British historian Tom Holland says is twice damned by Islamists for simultaneously being the prime force for Christianity (“Daughter of the Church”) and for secularism and even atheism (“Enlightenment” philosophy).

The central point of this collection is its attaching of ‘Cassandra’ to Houellebecq. Cassandra, tragic daughter of that good king of Troy, Priam, uttered the truths that no-one believed. Houellebecq is often depicted in the tradition of prophecy of decline and decadence, penning acidic fictional commentaries on the decomposition of European and wider late-modern Western society. He is that, but not only that. Cassandra in this case refers to the idea that perhaps – and it is only perhaps, given Houellebecq’s trickster uncertainties – freedom as economic and social autonomy is not liberation but ultimate enslavement: to base desires in an era of what he calls “sexual liberalism,”[3] inflamed by a dying culture and frustrated by a brutally Darwinian sexual marketplace. As the introduction argues, “Houellebecq obliges people to think not only about whether the liberal order and liberal modernity are reaching an end, but also inspires us to ask what type of new global order is emerging and what forms of freedom will be possible within it. There is nothing better than a prophetic literary work to drive our imagination into these dilemmas.”[4]

Houellebecq’s Cassandra cry is one that we cannot bear to believe: we have too much freedom, it is killing us spiritually and physically, and we need less freedom to gain true liberation. This is where – if indeed this is really his message, given what Claudia Franziska Brühwiler calls his “pride in the role of the jester”[5] – Houellebecq is truly reactionary, and not in any low-resolution criticism of him as Islamophobe, but as ultimate condemner of unbounded carnality, the progressive dissolution of all constraints and limits on human wants and desires in a world of the conquering few and loser many. For Houellebecq, as Carol Sweeny writes, when “love, compassion and the possibility of intimate communion” are consumed by neoliberalism, “then the affective human body is in danger of obliteration.”[6] As both Alexander Orwin[7] and John von Heyking argue,[8] polygamy is presented as the solution to the marketisation of love, except that polygamy is the epitome of the Pareto forces driving the commodified sexual marketplace.

Houellebecq charted the terrain of our new paradigm of social relations, particularly between the sexes, before any of the endless discussions about online communities, monetised relationality, Incel radicalisation and much else was even thought of. For Houellebecq, “Islam could become a political solution precisely because the West has lost its soul, its sense of love, and ultimately its cultural identity. In this sense, even the concept of love takes on a political meaning in Houellebecq’s novels.”[9]

Houellebecq sees Christianity as having provided the sense of existential solidity that consoled in sorrow and affirmed in joy, but this is no longer available to most of us in late-modernity, and we are so far from the embers of its warmth we struggle to even summon a sense of regret. As Francois finds when confronted with the Virgin at Rocamadeur, even a yearning for belief is not enough: Francois is torn between submission (“I felt my own individuality dissolving”) and repudiation (“Still, I had to get back to Paris”).[10] Houellebecq demonstrates that we cannot be forced to believe, while we cannot belong in our dislocated world of severed social bonds.

The negatives against this collection are mainly stylistic: some chapters are over-intellectualised and suffer from the academese that infects so much academic writing today. This is particularly the case for the chapter by Guillermo Graino, whose essay titled Western Decline and the Overcoming of the Metaphysical Stage in Houellebecq’s Fiction looks at Submission through the lens of Auguste Comte’s Positivist framework.[11] Firstly, I’m not familiar enough with Comte’s philosophy to judge the chapter on its philosophical merits, and what little I do know of Comte and his development of Positivism doesn’t leave me well disposed towards this view of the world. Secondly, this chapter is the densest in terms of style, making it even more of a challenge.

The other chapter I thought largely failed was The Mother of Invention: Theo van Gogh in Houellebecq’s Rearview Mirror by Sam Cherribi.[12] This compared the work of Houellebecq, Submission especially, with the approach to Islam in Europe of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali. There are legitimate criticisms of Hirsi-Ali to make, but Cherribi’s argument could be boiled down to ‘Hirsi-Ali is not a suitable Islamic feminist because she’s too anti-Islam and doesn’t really know what she’s talking about.’ He damns her film-work with Van Gogh as inaccurate and unhelpful, misrepresenting Islam in Holland, with her “work … a kind of radical pamphlet against Islam,” pushed by a Dutch media that “abandoned its ethics to push Hirsi Ali’s unfair portrayal of Islam at the expense of Dutch Muslims …. distract[ing] from feminist European Muslims and their efforts for gender equity,” serving to inflame right-wing anti-Islam sentiment. Cherribi subsequently argues there is a feminist current in global Islam that is breaking through, never mind the Taliban reconquest. Finally, the chapter relies too much on jargon words like “othering.” One doesn’t expect a collection of deep essays on a novel produced by a university press to be a simple read, but depth and substance doesn’t mean clarity needs to be sacrificed.

The rest of the essays are more interesting, and enjoyably thought-provoking to read. Yvon Grenier’s chapter, Submission and the Possibility of Low-Intensity Totalitarianism in France, considers Submission as a literary depiction of a growing soft-totalitarianism in Europe and especially France, which “is associated with a ‘hollowing out’ of liberal democratic society, evinced by low social capital, widespread disenchantment with dominant values and institutions, and weak pluralism. It is a weak postliberal political system, weakly connected to a weak civil society.”[13]

For Grenier, “LIT is characterized not by the mandatory mobilization of the citizenry but rather by its submission to what appears, for those citizens who bother to notice, as the least bad option available. It remains somewhat totalitarian because of its propensity to iron out agency, diversity, and plurality, but it is a totalitarianism of disenchantment and resignation rather than one of participation and ideological craving.”[14] Submission, with its detached tone describing mechanistic sexual decadence and social disintegration portrays this LIT in a haunting manner, all the more effective for its creeping understatement contrasted with our digitally mediated hyperreality. Restraint is an underemployed virtue in real and literary life.

Grenier’s take on LIT echoes the arguments and work of Rod Dreher, especially in his most recent book, Live Not by Lies, recounting stories from Soviet dissidents in service to illustrating the same forces at work in a privatised, managerial form in the West. The fact that Dreher focuses on wokeness and Houllebecq on Islamism demonstrates the post-liberal nature of our politics. It’s no longer liberalism or post-liberalism, it’s what kind of post-liberalism we’ll see gain ideological hegemony. Wokeness could be seen as the Americanised form of the social decay Houellebecq expresses through his characters dissolute existences in their mirror-image atomised, isolated, emotionally unfulfilled and powerless lives in his novels. Whereas Dreher seeks spiritual and maybe even political ways to counter LIT, Houellebecq seems to accept it, bathe in it, and submit to it.

In light of this, the chapters by Michael S. Kochin[15] and Henry F. Smith are illuminating of Houellebecq’s concurrent enabling of the very societal circumstance that he satirises and perhaps even condemns. For Kochin, Houellebecq’s writing, especially in Submission, shows that Western humanism is dying because the nation, its motive for pushing forward, is also dying. Meanwhile, Christianity is no longer a force to inspire belief and Judaism offers belonging to only a few. For Francois, and maybe Houellebecq, “the only way to go on is to submit to the most viable form of theism today – non-Western, globalizing Islam.”[16] In the meantime, Submission “demonstrates that a humanistic education provides at least this benefit: such an education guides and sophisticates the Western man’s palate for the pleasures of decay.”[17]

In this sense, Houellebecq is a therapist of decline, as Chad Pecknold puts it,[18] easing us in our sorrows, numbing away any grief at the loss of culture, community and faith. As “conservative hospice care”[19] prescribes ideological remedies that perpetuate the illnesses they claim to counter, Houellebecq’s literary technique, of dissociation and disavowal entrenches a sense of quiet despair that reflects the hopelessness felt by the powerless characters. Houellebecq’s use of juxtaposition between largescale political events and banal personal nothings reinforces this sense of lassitude born of confusion and is also his way of pointing the reader towards possible critiques and analyses before drawing back and leaving the reader with the weight of unanswered questions.

The question of “what next?” is only hinted at by Houellebecq, as even Francois’ recounting of his eventual submission to Islam, meant to be his spiritual destination, is given in the conditional. Even the resolution of his existential, and more importantly for him, sexual angst, is ambiguous. Perhaps this is only appropriate when considering the future. After all, the story to come is not yet written. This is driven home by the chapter by Alberto Spektorowski on the political situation in France.[20] Spektorowski argues that the radical right and the centre parties, contrary to some arguments, will in fact ally against a perceived Islamist threat, and that there will not be a Catholic-Islamic alliance against secularism.

Books will always be outcompeted in the race of time, and Spektorowski has been more than proven right by the rightward shift in French politics over the last few years, especially with Eric Zemmour’s entrance as a presidential candidate.[21] Over 60% of French citizens now affirm the Great Replacement theory in some way,[22] and even Macron apparently talks about it incessantly in private. Socialist Jean-Luc Melanchon meanwhile has said that Zemmour might have a point.[23] In this sense Houellebecq was completely wrong: it looks likely that some sort of right-wing narrative hostile to Islamism will win the 2022 election, whether pushed by Macron or whoever the right-wing candidate is.

Ultimately, the void explored in Submission cannot be filled by politics. Even Francois’ submission to Islam for the benefits of polygamy still leaves him dissatisfied, as any reader could guess would be the case. Neil Rogachevsky’s chapter[24] is, along with Grenier’s, one of the most satisfying in the collection. It’s clearly written, free of jargon, and makes good points. He argues that religion is still an important factor in sociological analysis and in our lives, but that sociological takes on religion conflate diverse religious traditions together under the umbrella of ‘religion,’ erasing the particularities and differences within each faith. Houellebecq, Rogachevsky argues, is actually a better guide in this regard because “Submission portrays what three great religions look like from the inside.”[25] This means we can more easily understand the appeals of Christianity, Judaism and Islam to their adherents and those looking in from outside.

Rogachevsky, in his analysis of Submission’s struggle with the sacred, writes that Francois “yearns to yearn for faith. This yearning does not come. Modern reconstructions in the facility, along with benign modern artifices like smoke detectors, mar his attempt at connection.” This echoes Roger Scruton in Modern Culture, who writes of the feeling that we live in the shadow of modernism, thrown up like wreckage on the far shore of the sea of faith by the storms of the twentieth century. One is no longer in tradition when one recognises it as a tradition, and the same is true of faith.

The predicament of our existence is that we cannot easily regain what we have undoubtedly lost, but neither can we truly do without it. These central questions of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going, are perennial, but now without answers. Houellebecq has spent his literary career exploring these questions with a sardonic smile and a sigh of exhausted laughter. This book is a worthy beginning to the discussion prompted by Houellebecq’s diagnosis of our current discontent.

NOTES:

[1] Michel Houellebecq, the Cassandra of Freedom: Submission and Decline, eds. Michael S. Kochin and Alberto Spektorowski.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “A French Novelist Imagined Sexual Dystopia. Now It’s Arrived,” New York Times, 7 December, 2018. <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/books/review/michael-houellebecqs-sexual-distopia.html>

[4] Michel Houellebecq, Introduction

[5] Michel Houellebecq, “Submission and Decline: Houellebecq as Cassandra and Jester,” Claudia Franziska Brühwiler.

[6] Carole Sweeney, Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair (Bloomsbury, 2013). <https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/michel-houellebecq-and-the-literature-of-despair-9780826422620/>

[7] Michel Houellebecq, “Submission to Peace, and Polygamy: Should the French Acquiesce to Houellebecq’s Dream of a New Islam?”

[8] Michel Houellebecq, “Polygamy and the Political Problem of Eros in Houellebecq’s Submission,” John von Heyking.

[9] Michel Houellebecq, Introduction.

[10] Submission, Michel Houellebecq.

[11] Michel Houellebecq, “Western Decline and the Overcoming of the Metaphysical Stage in Houellebecq’s Fiction,” Guillermo Graino.

[12] Michel Houellebecq, “The Mother of Invention: Theo van Gogh in Houellebecq’s Rearview Mirror,” Sam Cherribi.

[13] Michel Houellebecq, “Submission and the Possibility of Low-Intensity Totalitarianism in France,” Yvon Grenier.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Michel Houellebecq, “The Pleasures of Decay in Houellebecq’s Submission,” Michael S. Kochin; “Dissociation, Disavowal, and Despair in Houellebecq’s Submission,” Henry F. Smith.

[16] Michel Houellebecq, “The Pleasures of Decay.”

[17] Ibid.

[18] Chad Pecknold, “Therapists of Decline.” <https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/therapists-of-decline>

[19] Patrick Deneen, “Conservative Hospice Care.” <https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/conservative-hospice-care>

[20] Michel Houellebecq, Michel Houellebecq and the “Political Triangle”: The Republic, the Radical Right, and the “Ultimate Other,” Alberto Spektorowski.

[21] Francois Valentin, “France Is Living in Zemmour’s World,” Palladium, 2 February, 2022. <https://palladiummag.com/2022/02/02/france-is-living-in-zemmours-world/>

[22] https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/67-de-francais-inquiets-par-l-idee-d-un-grand-remplacement-selon-un-sondage-20211021

[23] Anthony Torres, “Accepting televised debate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon puts forward neo-fascist Eric Zemmour,” World Socialist Web Site, 12 October, 2021. <https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/13/fran-o13.html>

[24] Michel Houellebecq, “Michel Houellebecq’s Comparative Political Science of Religion,” Neil Rogachevsky.

[25] Ibid.

Print