Abstract
In French literary circles and public opinion, few recent novels have caused the same critical firestorm as Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015). The novel depicts a French nation overtaken by Islam through the election of a new president representing a hypothetical Muslim party. Described as a candid statement of many French citizens’ secret fear and, as one critic stated, a gratuitous attack on Islam that “sullies those who read it,” Submission asks its reader to evaluate the plausibility of the end of French democracy as we know it. The interpretative schemes applied to the novel range from a fictional application of David Engels’ Decline, which compares the fall of European nations and that of the Roman Republic, to the prefiguration of E. Macron’s unexpected emergence. While acknowledging ideological contributions to Houellebecq’s novel, this paper focuses on another narrative model, the trope of the betrayal of France by its cultural elites akin to the fall of the Third Republic. Three years after its publication, the book resonates more with the continued French resistance to Islam, emblematized by reactions to terrorist attacks, rather than a potential, newfangled Collaboration. This presentation contends that the danger to French democracy is still on the right (with 20% of the French electorate choosing Marine le Pen) rather than on the side of some Muslim conspiracy. Submission is, therefore, closer to the dystopic genre of the cult British TV series Black Mirror, than to Julien Benda’s cogently proleptic The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (1927).
Presenters
Laurent DitmannAssistant Professor of French, Humanities Department, Georgia State University, Perimeter College, Clarkston Campus, Georgia, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Houellebecq Islam Fiction
Digital Media
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