Michel Houellebecq - Submission

‘No, don’t apologise, I’m really interested,’ I said, sincerely. It’s true that I was starting to feel a little bit fucked up. When I glanced over at the table, I saw that the bottle of Meursault was empty.

‘You’re right,’ I went on, ‘that I don’t have any very solid grounds for my atheism. It would be presumptous to claim that I did.’

‘ Presumptous — that’s the word. At the end of the day, there’s something incredibly proud and arrogant about atheist humanism. Even the Christian idea of incarnation is laughably pretentious. God turned Himself into a man … Why man and not an inhabitant of Sirius, or the Andromeda galaxy? Wouldn’t that be more likely?’

‘You believe in extraterrestrial life?’ I interrupted. I was surprised.

‘I don’t know, I haven’t given it much thought, but as a question of arithmetic, if you take all the myriad stars in the universe, each with its multiple planets, it would be shocking if life occurred only on earth. But that’s not important. All I’m saying is that the universe obviously bears the hallmarks of intelligent design, that it’s clearly the manifestation of some gigantic mind. Sooner or later, that simple idea is going to come back round. I’ve always known this, ever since I was young. All intellectual debate of the twentieth century can be summed up as a battle between communism — that is, “hard” humanism — and liberal democracy, the soft version. But what a reductive debate. Since I was fifteen, I’ve known that what they now call the return of religion was unavoidable. My family was Catholic — or rather, they were lapsed; really it was my grandparents who were Catholic — so naturally I started off turning towards the Church. Then, in my first year at university, I joined the nativist movement.’

My surprise must have shown, because he stopped and looked at me, a smile playing on his lips. Just then there was a knock at the door and Malika reappeared carrying a new tray with a cafetière, two cups, and a plate of pistachio baklava and briouats . She also brought in a bottle of boukha , with two small glasses.

Rediger poured us coffee. It was bitter and very strong, and it did me good. My head was instantly clear.

‘I’ve never hidden my youthful activities,’ he went on. ‘And my new Muslim friends never held them against me. To them it seemed natural that, when I started looking for a way out of atheist humanism, I should have gone back to my roots. Besides, we weren’t racists or fascists — though, to be completely honest, some of us were pretty close. But not me. Fascism always struck me as a ghastly, nightmarish, false attempt to breathe life into dead nations. Without Christianity, the European nations had become bodies without souls — zombies. The question was, Could Christianity be revived? I thought so. I thought so for several years — with growing doubts. As time went on, I subscribed more and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilisations die not by murder but by suicide. And then one day everything changed for me. It was 30 March, 2013, I’ll never forget — Easter weekend. At the time I was living in Brussels, and every once in a while I’d go and have a drink at the bar of the Métropole. I’d always loved art nouveau. There are magnificent examples in Prague and Vienna, and there are interesting buildings in Paris and London, too, but for me — right or wrong — the high point of art nouveau decor was the Hotel Métropole de Bruxelles, in particular the bar. The morning of 30 March, I happened to walk by and saw a sign that said the bar of the Métropole was closing for good, that very night. I was stunned. I went in and spoke to the waiters. They confirmed it; they didn’t know the exact reasons. To think that, until then, one could order sandwiches and beer, Viennese chocolates, and cakes with cream in that absolute masterpiece of decorative art, that one could live one’s daily life surrounded by beauty, and that the whole thing was about to disappear, in one stroke, in one of the capitals of Europe! … Yes, that was the moment I understood: Europe had already committed suicide. As a reader of Huysmans, you must sometimes get tired of his relentless pessimism, his endless railing against the mediocrity of his times. I know I do. But he was living at a time when the European nations were at their apogee, when they commanded vast colonial empires, and dominated the world! … It was an extraordinary moment, technologically — railways, electric lighting, the telephone, the phonograph, Eiffel’s steel constructions — and also artistically, but here there are too many names to mention, whether you look at literature, painting, or music …’

He was right, of course. In the ‘art of living’ alone, there had been a serious falling-off. As Rediger offered me a baklava, which I accepted, I thought of a book I had read some years before, on the history of brothels. The frontispiece featured a brochure from a Parisian brothel of the belle époque. It came as a profound shock when I realised that some of the sexual specialities offered by ‘Mademoiselle Hortense’ were completely unknown to me. I had no idea what a ‘voyage through the yellow land’ or a ‘Russian imperial soap’ could possibly mean. Certain sexual practices had vanished from human memory, in one century — not unlike certain forms of skilled labour, such as cobbling or bell-ringing. How could anyone argue that Europe wasn’t in decline?

‘That Europe, which was the summit of human civilisation, committed suicide in a matter of decades.’ Rediger’s voice was sad. He’d left all the overhead lights off, the only illumination came from the lamp on his desk. ‘Throughout Europe there were anarchist and nihilist movements, calls for violence, the denial of moral law. And then a few years later it all came to an end with the unjustifiable madness of the First World War. Freud was not wrong, and neither was Thomas Mann: if France and Germany, the two most advanced, civilised nations in the world, could unleash this senseless slaughter, then Europe was dead. I spent that last night at the Métropole, until it closed. I walked all the way home, halfway across the city, past the EU compound, that gloomy fortress in the slums. The next day I went to see an imam in Zaventem. And the day after that — Easter Monday — in front of a handful witnesses, I spoke the ritual words and converted to Islam.’

I wasn’t sure I agreed about the crucial importance of the First World War; it had been an inexcusable slaughter, but the War of 1870 had been fairly absurd, too, at least according to Huysmans’ description, and had already seriously eroded patriotic feeling of all kinds. Nations were a murderous absurdity, and after 1870 anyone paying attention had probably figured this out. That’s when nihilism, anarchism and all that crap started. As for older civilisations, I wasn’t really up to speed. Night had fallen on the square; the last tourists had already left; here and there a lone street light shed its feeble beams on the steps of the arena. No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilisation, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too? Rome had been a brutal civilisation and very competent militarily — a cruel civilisation, too, where men fought to the death, or fought animals to the death, just to keep the mob entertained. Did the Romans wish they could disappear? Was that their secret flaw? Rediger had certainly read Gibbon, and other writers like that who were just names to me. I didn’t really feel able to keep up my end of the conversation.

‘I really do talk too much,’ he said, with a dismissive wave. He poured me a glass of boukha and held out the pastries again. They were excellent, and the contrast with the bitterness of the fig brandy was delicious. ‘It’s late. I should really go,’ I said uncertainly. The truth was I didn’t really want to leave.