Michel Houellebecq: Submission

‘You know … the one night we see each other again, don’t you think we could try to be nice?’ Hearing the catch in her voice, I was abashed. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked to smooth things over. No, she wasn’t hungry, but we always ended up eating. ‘Would you like sushi?’ She said yes, of course. Everyone always says yes to sushi. From the most discerning gourmets to the strictest calorie counters, there’s a sort of universal consensus regarding this shapeless juxtaposition of raw fish and white rice. I had a delivery menu, and she was already poring over the wasabi and the maki and the salmon rolls — I didn’t understand a word of it, and didn’t care to. I chose the B3 combination and called in the order. I should have taken her out to a restaurant after all. When I hung up, I put on Nick Drake. We sat there not saying anything for a long time, until I broke the silence by asking, idiotically enough, how university was going. She gave me a reproachful look and answered that it was going well, she was planning to get a master’s in publishing. Relieved, I managed to steer the conversation towards a more general topic, which happened to validate her career goals: how even though the French economy was falling apart, publishing was doing all right and had increasing profit margins. It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.

‘You don’t seem to be doing too great yourself. But then you always seemed that way, really,’ she said without animosity, almost sadly. What could I say? I couldn’t exactly argue.

‘Do I really seem that depressed?’ I asked after another silence.

‘No, not depressed. In a sense it’s worse. You’ve always had this weird kind of honesty, like an inability to make the compromises that everyone has to make, in the end, just to go about their lives. Let’s say you’re right about patriarchy, that it’s the only viable solution. Where does that leave me? I’m studying, I think of myself as an individual person, endowed with the same capacity for reflection and decision-making as a man. Do you really think I’m disposable?’

The right answer was probably yes, but I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I wasn’t as honest as all that. The sushi still hadn’t arrived. I poured myself another whisky, my third. Nick Drake went on evoking pure maidens, princesses of old. And I still didn’t want to give her a child, or help out around the house, or buy a Baby Björn. I didn’t even want to fuck her, or maybe I sort of wanted to fuck her but I also sort of wanted to die, I couldn’t really tell. I felt a slight wave of nausea. Where the fuck was Rapid Sushi, anyway? I should have asked her to suck me off, right then. Then we might have stood a chance, but I let the darkness settle and thicken, second by second.

‘Maybe I should go,’ she said after a silence of at least three minutes. Nick Drake had just ended his lamentations. We were about to hear the belchings of Nirvana. I turned it off and said, ‘If you like.’

‘I’m really, really sorry to see you like this, François,’ she said to me in the hallway. She already had her coat on. ‘I’d like to help, but I don’t know how. You won’t even give me a chance.’ We kissed cheeks again. I didn’t see what else we could do.

The sushi showed up a few minutes after she left. There was a lot of it.

After Myriam left, I kept to myself for more than a week. For the first time since I’d been made a professor, I didn’t even feel up to teaching my Wednesday classes. The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I’d felt justified . Since then I hadn’t produced anything except a few short articles for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies , plus a couple for The Literary Review , when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life? And why did a life need to be justified? Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it. If only as a Huysmanist, I felt obliged to do a little better.

When doctoral students are planning to write their dissertation on a certain author and ask me in what order they should approach his works, I always tell them to privilege chronology. Not because the life has any real importance, but because, taken in order, an author’s books make up a sort of intellectual biography with a logic of its own. In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the obvious problem was what to do with À rebours . Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivalled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?

The obvious answer is: with great difficulty. Indeed, En rade , which follows À rebours , is a disappointing book. How could it not be? And yet if its faults, its air of stagnation and slow decline, never quite overcome our pleasure in reading it, this is thanks to a stroke of genius on Huysmans’ part: to recount, in a book bound to be disappointing, the story of a disappointment. The coherence between subject and treatment makes an aesthetic whole. It gets pretty boring, yes, but you keep reading, because you can feel that the characters aren’t the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism — the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians — if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify.

In his next book Huysmans finally finds a way out, using a tried-and-true strategy: he adopts a main character, an authorial stand-in, whose development we follow over several books. These are all things I managed to explain clearly enough in my dissertation. The trouble was what came next, because the whole point of Durtal’s development (and of Huysmans’) — from the first pages of Là-bas , with its farewell to Naturalism, through En route and La cathédrale and ending with L’oblat — is his conversion to Catholicism.

Obviously, it’s not easy for an atheist to talk about a series of books whose main subject is religious conversion. In the same way, it’s hard to imagine someone who has never been in love, someone to whom love is completely alien, taking an interest in a novel all about that particular passion. In the absence of any real emotional identification, what an atheist slowly comes to feel when confronted with Durtal’s spiritual adventures — with the series of spiritual retreats, followed by eruptions of divine grace, that make up Huysmans’ last three books — is, unfortunately, boredom.

It was at this moment in my reflections (I’d just got up and was having my coffee, waiting for the sun to rise) that I had an extremely unpleasant thought: just as À rebours was the summit of Huysmans’ life as a writer, Myriam was undoubtedly the summit of my love life. How would I ever get over her? The only realistic answer was I wouldn’t.

While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies . Its next meeting was in less than a week. Also, election day was coming up. Many men take an interest in politics and war, but these diversions never appealed to me. I was about as political as a bath towel. No doubt it was my loss. To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change , and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system, though it amounted to little more than a power-sharing deal between two rival gangs, and they would even go to war to impose it on nations that failed to share their enthusiasm.