A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments

On this day ten years ago Islamist terrorists entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and massacred its staff. The killers were two brothers who claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda. Their stated reason for the slaughter was the offense they took at the satirical magazine’s publication of images of the prophet Muhammad. They murdered twelve innocents and injured eleven. Two days later, after a brief manhunt, the killers were themselves killed by French authorities.

On the same day as the massacre, a new novel was published in France. Titled Submission, it conjures a very near future in which the Muslim Brotherhood secures a parliamentary majority, forms a governing coalition, and declares France an Islamic republic. The author, Michel Houellebecq, was already a literary celebrity and lightning rod for controversy. The plot and timing of the novel’s publication ensured its immediate success and speedy translation into English and other languages.

Submission came to function as a sort of cultural Rorschach test not just for France but for all of Europe: Is Houellebecq being hysterical, or is the growth of Islam a hostile takeover? Is criticism of Muslims “Islamophobic,” or could there be true irreconcilable differences between liberalism and Islam? Is alarm about birthrates, demographics, and immigration inevitably racist, or are these dynamics right to warrant voters and politicians’ concern?

Subsequent history did its best to keep Houellebecq in the limelight. The next year Brexit narrowly won the national referendum in the United Kingdom, followed by Donald Trump narrowly winning the election to the American presidency. Both were marked by heated campaigns centered on immigration, race, and culture. In France, Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and then head of National Front (now National Rally), went on to win one-third of the second-round voting for the presidency in 2017 and more than two-fifths in 2022. She actually appears by name in Houellebecq’s novel, which intermixes fictional politicians with real ones.

These are only the most obvious examples. It’s undeniable, then, that Houellebecq was prophetic in the sense of foretelling the future. But was he prophetic in the more interesting sense, namely, speaking a vital word to a stiff-necked people who needed, but refused, to hear it? Was he speaking truth to power? Or was he merely rabble-rousing—using a bit of reactionary fearmongering as an ornament to dress up one more prurient exploration of his by now exhausted libidinous brand of nihilism?

Treated as a totem of the times, the novel was, in the immediate aftermath of its publication, less interpreted than deployed, whether in obeisance or revulsion. On its own terms, though, it’s not much of a political tract. What makes the novel worth revisiting is different than what the initial controversy might have suggested. In fact, the most controversial aspect of the story—its treatment of an imminently Islamified France—is Houellebecq at his gentlest and least polemical. Islam, for him, is a cipher, a symbol for what Europe is not: virile, muscular, confident, assertive, spiritual, and unashamed—of its beliefs, its values, its aims, its men. In Houellebecq’s view, such a potent and unapologetic culture not only has a future wherever it elects to reside. In a contest with the secular consumerism of late capitalist societies, the latter don’t stand a chance. They were already busy committing collective suicide. The conflict with a viable opponent only hastens their inexorable fate.

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The narrative of Submission is underwritten by four fundamental appetites: the hunger for food, sex, power, and God.

Saint Augustine wrote that the deepest aim or highest good of an earthly polity is peace, and there are moments when a fifth appetite bubbles to the novel’s surface: the quiet happiness of the nuclear family, the domestic satisfactions of a bourgeois life. But these appear, for Houellebecq, to be epiphenomenal; they supervene or ride on the back of a peaceful, stable, just society grounded in truth, traditional in social relations, and ordered to the transcendent. It is just these, however, that are missing in “the remaining Western social democracies” (his phrase), which worship money and celebrity, consumption and status, having liberated their citizens to be pleasure-maximizing individuals free of God, free to work, free above all for the leisure of cable news, a modest pension, and a microwave dinner.

The novel’s narrator, François, is a middle-aged academic who studies the poet J. K. Huysmans. François reads his life into Huysmans’ and vice versa. One of the many questions that hangs over the narrative is whether François, like Huysmans, could ever convert to Catholicism.

The problem is that François can’t gin up the interest necessary to consider God as a serious option. He does so only once, late in the novel, and his “first reaction [is] uncomplicated, pure and simple fear.” François isn’t an intellectual atheist. He’s Adam in the Garden, shaking in anguish, hiding from the voice calling his name. His life has no room for a moral voyeur, snooping and judging. He likes his little pleasures. He’s grown accustomed to a certain way of life, be it however so humble. The religious enchantments of Huysmans the oblate have no appeal for him. He wants the ecstasies of sex, not of monastic prayer.

Submission is obsessed with François’s sex life: the women he sleeps with, his increasingly desperate and degrading escapades (for which he is willing to pay), the lengths to which he will go to feel anything at all. As he comments early on, “For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure.” He loves women in precisely this respect: as instruments for gratification. “A woman is human, obviously,” he is compelled to add at one point, “but she represents a slightly different kind of humanity. She gives life a certain perfume of exoticism.”

François is forced to make a choice, one rooted in the evanescence of his desires. He has no interest in politics. He finds a certain appeal in the vanished simplicity of domesticity, “but was it realistic? Was it a viable prospect today? Clearly, it was connected with the pleasures of the table.” Alone in his apartment, he orders ethnic takeout or microwaves his meal before emptying bottles of wine. And he can’t bring himself to Christian faith.

The only remaining options, then, are women or death, sex or suicide. His escalating sexual encounters amount to a pitiful experiment: man living not by bread but by orgasm alone. “In the end,” he concludes, “my d*** was all I had.” After all, his body consists of

no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life [approaching fifty] an unending torment, grim, joyless, and mean. When you got right down to it, my d*** was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only through pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully. Or, you could argue, I had served it—if so, its yoke had been easy. It never gave me orders. It sometimes encouraged me to get out more, but it encouraged me humbly, without bitterness or anger. … [It] has given me an enormous amount of pleasure. And sources of pleasure were hard to come by.

Yet even François can see the emptiness of such a life, applying as he does the language of Christ’s “easy yoke” to his genitals. The disjunction is absurd, and yet Houellebecq has his culture’s number: sex is its last remaining god, and like every other idol, it fails you in the end.

In any case, François finds that he loves no one and is loved by no one. He is utterly alone and his body, the source of his appetites and therefore what pleasures remain to him, is in irreversible decay. Suicide beckons. Sunk in despair, he “burst[s] into unexpected tears,” unable to stop crying. He resolves to travel to the abbey where Huysmans once took monastic vows.

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The politics of France and Islam lie in the background of Submission, entering the foreground only when they bear on François’s life. He has a young girlfriend with whom he is infatuated, but in the wake of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent, she emigrates to Israel with her family. Her Jewishness is not an option for François any more than is Huysmans’ Catholicism, albeit for different reasons. Before she leaves, he says to her, “There is no Israel for me.”

There is a reason why the superficially shocking premise of the book remains hazy throughout. The theme isn’t Islam but religion, and religion itself points to something else. That something is gender. Masculinity, for Houellebecq, is the res of which religious culture is the signum. His stand-in, François, names the problem: “Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.” In other words, the theological politics of the novel is not really invested in Jesus versus Allah, West versus the Middle East. Its true interest is men versus women.

Submission benefits, therefore, when read alongside other recent novels with a similar interest in gender, sex, and Western decadence. The most obvious is P. D. James’s Children of Men, to which I will return below. But consider a few others first.

M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, for example, features a Houellebecqian protagonist: David, a listless academic who sleeps with prostitutes and preys on female students, resulting in a “not quite” rape that costs him his post. Coetzee casts the social context through David’s gloss on his university students: “Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday.” Whatever his elevated aesthetic sensibility, David, like François, is no better for it. Art is inadequate to the void left by faith’s absence.

Two other novels, J. G. Ballard’s Crash and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, tie the separation of the sexes (and of sex from its natural and social ends) to the insertion of new technologies between them. In both societies the relation between the sex drive and the death drive becomes a perfect coincidence, an identity of pleasure and annihilation. Soma, the sedative Huxley’s characters take for a “perfect” and “continuous holiday,” is compared by a doctor at one point to “a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.” When challenged that administering so much to a patient would kill her—“But aren’t you shortening her life by giving her so much?”—he replies by saying, “In one sense, yes … But in another we’re actually lengthening it.” Less life is more life; have another pill.

In the words of Mustapha Mond: “If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn’t allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices.”

In short, each of these novels concerns the future of sex and thus the future of the male-female relationship, in light of the cultural loss of traditional religion. Which is to say, they are indirectly about marriage and children—or their absence—in the present, in the late-modern bureaucratic technopolies of the West that have simultaneously renounced their faith in God and lost their faith in themselves. In want of both, they find themselves in want of a future, too.

The metaphor for this cultural acedia varies by novelist: impotence, sterility, chemically or otherwise induced sexual pleasure. The so-called freedoms of advanced nations are set in contrast to traditional cultures, ancient or modern, and found seriously lacking. Death beckons when society puts asunder what God has joined together: man and woman, marriage and children, sex and procreation. Whatever their authors intended, these novels are quite conservative in their social critique, or at least susceptible to such a reading.

In the end, François submits. He gains an academic position and two wives: one for the kitchen and one for the bedroom. Whether he “believes” in what he professes is beside the point. His surrender is a public act and therefore a political one. He consents to his own dispossession, trading the honesty of his spiritual despair for the satisfaction of his carnal desires: culinary, sexual, and domestic. Religion is the price of admission, as is the political power he forfeits by simply not caring who’s in charge, so long as his appetites are sated.

The final pages are rendered in the subjunctive, describing the future to come either as fact or as anticipation: how the conversion ceremony would go, how his reception at the Sorbonne would fare with his colleagues. He foresees a kind of “second life, with very little connection to the old one.” Then comes the brutal final sentence: “I would have nothing to mourn.”

These words are the key to all that comes before. They are François’s, and thus Houellebecq’s, judgment on his life prior to conversion. They are a judgment as well on the culture that made his life possible—or, perhaps, unavoidable. They are a verdict on the abyss at the center of the post-Christian West. Up to this point the novel has displayed the sickness unto death, the nihilism of a civilization that has traded God and family and truth for trinkets, television, and pornography. On the occasion of losing all this, Houellebecq thinks there would be nothing whatever to mourn.

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Huxley, Ballard, and Coetzee conclude their novels with similarly pessimistic final notes (granting that each can be read any number of ways). The only one who definitively does not is James, and although Children of Men was published more than two decades before Submission, it already contains the only answer possible to the question Houellebecq poses.

Like him, she sees loss of faith as inseparable from loss of hope. Children are the sign of hope, but they have mysteriously ceased to be born. The novel opens with these words:

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

The pages that follow present, yes, a dystopian future, but an eminently recognizable one. Very quickly we learn that, for James, it is not just children who are the sign of hope, but unborn children. A woman with child embodies the fragile, imperfect, but altogether necessary resolve to face the uncontrollable unknown with courage, patience, and confidence. The Virgin Mary, therefore, is the icon of a culture that has not succumbed to the temptation to despair.

The novel is not pious. Much of it delineates with realism and dispassion what a society would do if babies truly ceased to be born. Its depiction of the “quietus” imposed on the elderly—drugged and sailed out to sea to be put to death out of sight, lest their infirmity and age remind the young what awaits them—is as poignant and prescient as anything in speculative fiction.

But Christianity haunts the narrative just as it does Houellebecq’s (and Huxley’s, for that matter). The question is not so much whether Theo, the protagonist, will convert, as whether the future waiting to be born with Julia’s child—she is the miracle who must be protected at all costs—will prove to be any different from the present. Whether, that is, it will be marked by faith.

The baby is born. The threat to him and his mother has passed, at least for the moment. Julian asks Theo: “Christen the baby for me.” He is named Luke, after his late father (and the author of the third Gospel, which narrates the Annunciation); and after his adoptive father, Theodore, whose name means “gift of God.” Here is how James portrays the scene, which is the final paragraph of the book:

The towel between her legs was heavily stained. He removed it without revulsion, almost without thought, and, folding another, put it in place. There was very little water left in the bottle, but he hardly needed it. His tears were falling now over the child’s forehead. From some far childhood memory he recalled the rite. The water had to flow, there were words which has to be said. It was with a thumb wet with his own tears and stained with her blood that he made on the child’s forehead the sign of the cross.

James possesses what Houellebecq lacks: not just faith but imagination to see beyond the limits and shortcomings of the moment, to look past them to a future worth bearing children into. True, that future must not be godless, and Houellebecq is right to realize just how weak secularism is in the face of true faith, for it cannot, in the long run, reproduce itself. It is bound to die and thus to death. Few are better than Houellebecq at this diagnosis, and none as unsparing. But we must turn elsewhere for the cure. Suicide is not inevitable; neither is colonization, literal or metaphorical, from without. Renewal is possible from within. Yet even renewal from within, if it be true renewal, must also come from without: that’s just the nature of a sacrament.

Natalism goes only so far. Renaissance comes from above.