Michel Houellebecq - Submission

My heart sank: my tagine was already getting cold. ‘Won’t they wait for the elections?’ I asked, after I’d had a bite. This struck me as a sensible question.

‘The elections? The elections ? What have the elections got to do with it?’ Not so sensible after all, I guessed.

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just, in three weeks we might have a new president …’

‘Please, that’s all settled. It will be just like 2017, the National Front will make it into the run-offs and the left will be voted back in. I don’t see why the council should fart around waiting for the elections.’

‘But there’s the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re an unknown quantity. If they got twenty per cent, it would be a symbolic benchmark, and could change the balance of power …’ I was talking utter bullshit, of course. Ninety-nine per cent of the Muslim Brotherhood would throw their votes to the Socialists. In any case, it wouldn’t affect the results at all, but that phrase the balance of power always sounds impressive in conversation, as if you’d been reading Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. I was also rather pleased with symbolic benchmark . In any case, Marie-Françoise nodded as if I’d just expressed an idea, and she launched into a long disquisition on the possible consequences, for the university leadership, if the Muslim Brotherhood was voted in. Her combinatory intelligence was fully engaged, but I wasn’t really listening any more. I watched the hypotheses flicker across her sharp old features. You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.

My afternoon seminar was exhausting. Doctoral students tended to be exhausting. For them it was all just starting to mean something, and for me nothing mattered except which Indian dinner I’d microwave (Chicken Biryani? Chicken Tikka Masala? Chicken Rogan Josh?) while I watched the political talk shows on France 2.

That night the National Front candidate was on. She proclaimed her love of France (‘But which France?’ asked a centre-left pundit, lamely), and I wondered whether my love life was really and truly over. I couldn’t make up my mind. I spent much of the evening trying to decide whether to call Myriam. I had a feeling she wasn’t seeing anyone new. I’d run into her a few times at the university and she had given me a look that one might describe as intense, but the truth was she always looked intense, even when she was choosing a conditioner. I couldn’t get my hopes up. Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was, inarguably withering away.

‘Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.’ So begins the article Maupassant published in Gil Blas on À rebours . In general, literary history has been hard on Naturalism. Huysmans was celebrated for having thrown off its yoke, and yet Maupassant’s article is much deeper and more sensitive than the article by Bloy that appeared at the same time in Le chat noir . Even Zola’s objections make sense, on rereading: it is true that, psychologically, Jean des Esseintes remains unchanged from the first page to the last; that nothing happens, or can happen, in the book; that it has, in a sense, no plot. It is also true that there was no way for Huysmans to take À rebours any further than he did. His masterpiece was a dead end — but isn’t that true of any masterpiece? After a book like that, Huysmans had no choice but to part ways with Naturalism. This is all that Zola notices. Maupassant, the greater artist, grasped that it was a masterpiece. I laid out these ideas in a short article for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies , which, for the several days it took me to write it, was much more engaging than the electoral campaign, but did nothing to keep me from thinking about Myriam.

She must have made a ravishing little goth as a teenager, not so long ago, and she had grown into a very classy young woman, with her bobbed black hair, her very white skin and her dark eyes. Classy, but quietly sexy. And she more than lived up to her promise of discreet sexuality. For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure, and no one had ever given me more pleasure than Myriam. She could contract her pussy at will (sometimes softly, with a slow, irresistible pressure; sometimes in sharp, rebellious little tugs); when she gave me her little arse, she swivelled it around with infinite grace. As for her blow jobs, I’d never encountered anything like them. She approached each one as if it were her first, and would be her last. Any single one of them would have been enough to justify a man’s existence.

I ended up calling her, once I’d spent a few more days wondering whether I should. We agreed to meet that very evening.

We continue to use tu with our ex-girlfriends, that’s the custom, but we kiss them on the cheeks and not the lips. Myriam wore a short black skirt and black tights. I’d invited her to my place. I didn’t really want to go to a restaurant. She had an inquisitive look around the room and sat back on the sofa. Her skirt really was extremely short and she’d put on make-up. I offered her a drink. Whisky, she said, if you have it.

‘Something’s different …’ She took a sip. ‘But I can’t tell what.’

‘The curtains.’ I had installed double curtains, orange and ochre with a vaguely ethnic motif. I’d also bought a throw.

She turned round, kneeling on the sofa to examine the curtains. ‘Pretty,’ she decided. ‘Very pretty, actually. But then, you always did have good taste — for such a macho man.’ She turned to face me. ‘You don’t mind me calling you macho, do you?’

‘I don’t know, I guess I must be kind of macho. I’ve never really been convinced that it was a good idea for women to get the vote, study the same things as men, go into the same professions, et cetera. I mean, we’re used to it now — but was it really a good idea?’

Her eyes narrowed in surprise. For a few seconds she actually seemed to be thinking it over, and suddenly I was too, for a moment. Then I realised I had no answer, to this question or any other.

‘So you’re for a return to patriarchy?’

‘You know I’m not for anything, but at least patriarchy existed. I mean, as a social system it was able to perpetuate itself. There were families with children, and most of them had children. In other words, it worked, whereas now there aren’t enough children, so we’re finished.’

‘Yes, in theory you’re definitely macho. But then you have such refined tastes in writers: Mallarmé, Huysmans. They don’t exactly play to the macho base. Plus you have a weirdly feminine eye for household textiles. On the other hand, you dress like a loser. I could see you cultivating a grungy macho thing, but you don’t like ZZ Top, you’ve always preferred Nick Drake. In other words, you’re a walking enigma.’

I poured myself another whisky before responding. Aggression often masks a desire to seduce — I’d read that in Boris Cyrulnik, and Boris Cyrulnik isn’t fucking around. When it comes to psychology, no one’s got anything on him. He’s like a Konrad Lorenz of human beings. Plus, her thighs had parted slightly as she waited for me to answer. This was body language, and the body doesn’t lie.

‘There’s nothing enigmatic about it, unless you psychologise like a women’s magazine, where everyone’s reduced to some kind of consumer demographic: the eco-responsible urban professional, the brand-conscious bourgeoise, the LGBT-friendly club girl, the satanic geek, the techno-Buddhist. They invent a new one every week. I don’t match up with some preconceived consumer profile, that’s all.’