Michel Houellebecq – a Bestselling Satirist

Since the early 1990s, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq has challenged the boundaries of political and ethical debate and reconfigured contemporary discourses on European societies and their future. By creating captivating stories on provocative subjects such as cloning, sex tourism and euthanasia, the author has revealed Western society’s ongoing identity crises and political malfunctions. Highly esteemed for his sociological intuition and satirical wit, Houellebecq belongs to the small minority of authors who are both bestsellers and prize-winners. That said, it is also evident that his works are often perceived as provocative: Houellebecq’s novels have been subjected to contention and debate on many occasions, and the author has been accused of racism, sexism and Islamophobia. His novel Submission, released in early 2015 and depicting a future France with a Muslim president, was no exception.Reference Houellebecq¹ In this European Review Focus section, three scholars analyse this novel and its reception with the aim of bringing out what it can be understood to say about contemporary Europe, Islam and migration, and what the debates that followed its release can tell us about contemporary values and social transformations.

Michel Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas on Réunion, a French island east of Madagascar. The year of his birth was either 1956 or 1958. Both his mother and his unauthorized biographer, Denis Demonpion, claim it was 1956, but Houellebecq, suspecting that the mother lied about his age so that he could start school earlier, asserts that he was in fact born two years later. ^{Reference Demonpion2,3} The author took the name Houellebecq from his grandmother, who took care of him when his parents failed to do so. His mother was a doctor and his father a mountain guide.Reference Demonpion² After finishing agronomy school and working in the IT sector, partly as a technician employed at the National Assembly, Houellebecq debuted in 1994 with Extension du domaine de la lutte (English translation: Whatever).Reference Houellebecq⁴ This rather short novel on loneliness and depression in a society of economic liberalism reflects the author’s professional experience as a technical consultant: the novel is one of the first to depict the emerging IT industry. Houellebecq’s big breakthrough came in 1998 with Les particules élémentaires (English translations: The Elementary Particles, US; Atomised, UK) depicting two brothers who grew up separately and whose mother was an absent hippie-type.Reference Houellebecq⁵ The novel won him both the French Prix Novembre and the International Dublin Literary Award.^6,7 In 2001, his next novel, Plateforme (English: Platform), depicts sex tourism from the perspective of a market economy.Reference Houellebecq⁸ Some of the novel’s characters make pejorative statements about Islam, and the main character’s girlfriend dies in a terrorist attack conducted by Muslims. In the process of promoting the novel, Houellebecq told the French literary magazine Lire that Islam is the stupidest religion of all, after which several mosques and human rights organizations accused him for offending Islam, but when charges were brought to trial he was acquitted.^{Reference Aïssaoui9,Reference Robert-Diard10} Houellebecq’s fourth novel, La possibilité d’une île, published in 2005 (English translation: Refuge) turns to human cloning as a solution to today’s societal problems.Reference Houellebecq¹¹ After being shortlisted several times, Houellebecq was finally awarded the most prestigious literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt, for his fifth novel, La carte et le territoire, published in 2010 (English translation: The Map and the Territory).Reference Houellebecq¹² However, if The Map and the Territory was Houellebecq’s greatest success among literary critics and prize juries, it is Soumission (English translation: Submission) that has become his most debated, and best-selling, novel so far.Reference Houellebecq¹ Submission, published on 7 January 2015, the day of the terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, depicts a future France where a Muslim president takes power, manipulatively introduces Sharia law and favours patriarchal structures. The novel generated strong emotions and was wildly criticized in both the political and literary arenas. For example, as Philip Lançon of the French newspaper Libération has stressed, the novel can be read as both Islamophobic and Islamophile, a fact that reveals the ideological ambiguity of fiction in general and of Submission in particular.Reference Lancon¹³ As several contributors to this Focus section emphasize, Houellebecq’s moral ambiguity leaves him open to interpretation, something that generates strong emotions and moralizing responses.

Many opinion formers and critics, including then Prime Minister Manuel Valls (b. 1962; in office between 2014 and 2016), were afraid of extreme right or populist retaliation against Muslims in France, and Houellebecq’s work was sometimes used as a symbol of xenophobic discourses that threatened peace and democracy.¹⁴ In the fall of 2014, conservative essayist Eric Zemmour, in a book entitled Le suicide français, regretted the ideological turn of French culture and politics after 1968 and the loss of traditional values.Reference Zemmour¹⁵ Before him, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, in L’identité malheureuse, criticized multiculturalist politics and lamented the disintegration of French culture.Reference Finkielkraut¹⁶ Whether this neo-conservative turn in French criticism can be seen as a moderate implementation of Eurabia theory (i.e. the conspiracy theory that argues that Europe is being infiltrated by Muslims and that the politicians and the leftist intellectuals have sold Europe out to foreign interests) and as identitarianism is a matter of dispute.Reference Carr¹⁷ In any case it is evident that questions of French identity, Islam and migration had been debated in the French media long before the publication of Submission in early January 2015.

However, as time passed after the Charlie Hebdo murders and the hostage-taking in a kosher store in January 2015, the political tension concerning Houellebecq eased. Two members of the French Academy even expressed support for the future induction of Michel Houellebecq into the academy,Reference Clermont¹⁸ and excellent reviews and sales reports on his works started coming in from both Italy and Germany.Reference Versieux¹⁹ According to Houellebecq’s publishing house, Flammarion, Submission sold around 200,000 copies in Germany, 100,000 in Italy and 50,000 in Spain.²⁰ By mid-February 2015, Submission had topped the best-seller lists simultaneously in France, Italy and Germany.²¹ Houellebecq had already gained a large audience with The Elementary Particles, but Submission took him to a new level of popularity both in France and internationally. According to Google Trends, internet searches for ‘Michel Houellebecq’ nearly quadrupled when Submission came out, as compared to when his two previous novels were published. The breakdown by country shows that the interest was primarily concentrated in western Europe, Poland and North America.²² Moreover, the German magazine Der Spiegel ranked Submission and two more of Houellebecq’s novels among the 50 best books of our times,Reference Scappaticci²³ while The New York Times settled for naming Submission one of the top 100 books of 2015.Reference Pagesy²⁴ The New Yorker was also positive about the novel and took a stand against accusations of xenophobia against it, saying that Houellebecq is not Islamophobic, but Francophobic.Reference Pagesy²⁴ In Sweden, both the French edition and the translated novel were well received, with the exception of one negative review.Reference Ekis Ekman²⁵ Houellebecq’s popularity was also fuelled by the fact that both Le Figaro and Le Monde published a series of articles on him and on Submission in the summer of 2015. This publicity kept the author at the centre of public attention well into the autumn, when he sued Le Monde for publishing private emails, a lawsuit that paid off in the form of additional headlines. Furthermore, Submission qualified as the most frequently borrowed book of 2015 from French libraries.Reference Halioua²⁶ By the end of 2016, the French edition had sold 670,000 copies in large format, together with an uncounted number of small-format paperback editions.²⁰ As of March 2017, Submission had been translated into 40 languages and been sold in 38 countries.²⁷

Outline of the Focus Section

In October 2016, we organized a workshop on Houellebecq and his novel Submission at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The aim was to assemble a group of Swedish scholars who had paid attention to Houellebecq as an author and had studied his work from as many perspectives as possible. Here we include three texts from the workshop that address Houellebecq’s novel from the perspectives of literary studies, religious studies, political science, and post-colonial and gender theories.

In her contribution, ‘Converted by un confit de canard: Political Thinking in the Novel Soumission by Michel Houellebecq’, political scientist Marie Demker explores the perception of religion in the book and analyses Houellebecq’s criticism of French society and Europe’s development, as well as his perception of democracy and politics.

Sociologist of religion, Per-Erik Nilsson, argues that the novel uses neo-orientalist modes of identification, of which abjection is an elementary component. In his article ‘Fuck Autonomy: Neo-Orientalism and Abjection in Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission’, Nilsson develops the concept of neo-orientalism with reference to the production of knowledge about Muslims as an abject Other. Nilsson studies how various forms of differentiation are articulated using conceptions of race, religion and gender. This practice can be understood, according to Nilsson, in light of the process of Western de-masculinization instigated by social democracy, liberalism, globalization and feminism.

Finally, literary scholar Karl Ågerup analyses the reception of the novel, focusing on ideological argumentation and political debate. In his contribution, ‘The Political Reception of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission’, Ågerup identifies two opposite camps, the arguments of which resemble the arguments of the prosecutor and defence lawyer in the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary. While liberal critics praise the ambiguities of Submission and are prepared to trust the reader’s ethical faculties, left-wing critics condemn the novel and accuse the writer of expressing dubious values. Studying journalist media and parliamentary records, Ågerup concludes that, in the anxious political climate of 2015, Houellebecq’s novel functioned as a political tool for both migration-friendly and neo-nationalist opinion formers.

Before the contributors’ texts, it is important to clarify that the aim of our workshop was not to decide whether Houellebecq’s novel Submission is racist, Islamophobic or sexist; obviously different audiences and readers will come to different conclusions in these respects. The aim of the workshop was rather to address the question of how and to what extent novels can stimulate political debates and have effects on real-world Europe. When it comes to migration, neo-nationalism, Islam and terrorism, all of which are recurrent themes in Houellebecq’s works, the debate is particularly polarized. Therefore, we think it vital to conduct critical studies of publicly debated oeuvres that represent and discuss contemporary social conflicts in Europe. Instead of avoiding literature that could seem disturbing and provocative to some readers, we believe it is of the greatest importance that the academy engage critically with this kind of literature and strive to understand why and under what circumstances such works create animosities or support.