Unsettling

In 2001 Michel Houellebecq published Platform, about a Western-owned sex resort in Asia which is brutally attacked by a Muslim fundamentalist group. Timing is everything.  The book was written and published just before 9/11/2001, and it eerily anticipated some of the main themes and the brutality that was seared into our consciousness that month.

Now we have Submission, a 2015 Houellebecq novel about France in 2022, the fictional year in which France, in a political crisis engendered by large-scale Muslim immigration, adopts a limited version of Sharia law.  Yes, it seems entirely implausible.  But reading this book during the recent Paris attacks was very unsettling.  Some of the novel’s political figures are taken from real life, and to be reading about them in the book and hearing them on the news the same day is very strange. I’m not sure of much, but I am pretty sure that we really don’t know where all this is headed.  Fear mongering abounds, and it seems that just about anything can happen now, be it a swing far to the left or to the right.

Accidental oracle?

First, let’s acknowledge that Houellebecq is a French intellectual, and as such just about everything he produces is cloaked in abstraction and intellectual tradition.  The protagonist in the novel is a scholar specializing in Huysmans, hardly an everyday writer for American readers.  And much of the cleverness of the book relies on that conceptual underpinning.  The bored protagonist at the beginning of the novel struggles for sexual and existential fulfillment.  By submitting to Islam at the end, he ends up exactly where he wants to be, except without the struggle.  In certain ways this parallels Huysmans life, and that’s the intellectual conceit here.  It’s very clever, it’s contrived, it’s intricately planned, it’s annoyingly abstract.

But how does Houellebecq seemingly anticipate current events with uncanny accuracy?  I’m sure he’s not happy that Paris was attacked, but he can’t be discontent that sales of his book will undoubtedly skyrocket as a result.  The book has a ‘look at me!’ smugness about it that is not attractive.  A bit too clever, too abstract, and also perhaps unsettlingly plausible.