The Political Reception of Michel Houellebecq’sSubmission

Abstract

In 2015, French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which depicts a future France with a Muslim president, was repeatedly cited in political discourse about Islam, French identity, and terrorism. In the year of the novel’s publication, several Islamist terrorist attacks targeted France, and Houellebecq was often named in the debate on multiculturalism, immigration and the French secularist principle of laïcité. The reception of the novel is analysed in this article, focusing on ideological argumentation and political debate. Two opposite camps can be identified in this reception structure. Interestingly, the arguments of these camps are analogous to the arguments of the prosecutor and defence lawyer in the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert concerning his novel Madame Bovary. One and a half centuries after that trial, questions about the reader’s moral capacity and the author’s responsibility remain at the heart of the debate. While some liberal critics praise the ambiguities of the novel, trusting the reader’s ethical faculties, other critics condemn the novel and accuse the writer of expressing dubious values. As for the ideological homes of these critics, the liberal group represents left-wing, right-wing, and uncertain ideologies, whereas the gatekeeping group largely consists of left-leaning agents. The division into two reception groups and their respective discursive patterns and practices are analysed using the Bovary trial as a basis for comparison. It is concluded that in the anxious political climate of 2015 when terror, migration, and Islam were attracting considerable attention and when the populist right was on the rise, Houellebecq’s novel functioned as a political vehicle in government-sympathetic opinion making and as a practical tool for critics who positioned themselves as safeguarding generous migration and integration policies.

From Submission to Soumission: Populist Perspectives on Culture

“…While some of these contributions highlight Houellebecq's controversial persona and the way it influences the interpretation and readability of his work (Baroni & Estier, 2016;Korthals Altes, 2014), others focus on the nature of his texts, more precisely the author's use of rhetorical tools such as dark humor, paradox and irony (Berg-Sørensen, 2017;Carlson, 2011;Nilsson, 2019;Ungureanu, 2017). A third group of scholars consider Houellebecq's work in a broader societal context, analyzing the political reception and use of his novel Soumission (Ågerup, 2019;Jansma, 2018), or study the novel as an illustrative example of cultural pessimism (Lilla, 2016). As most scholars conclude, and as my analysis will show, these different factors lead to a highly polarized reception of Houellebecq's work, and the novel Soumission in particular.…”