{"id":198849,"date":"2026-07-26T05:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T13:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=198849"},"modified":"2026-07-26T05:32:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T13:32:51","slug":"i-finally-read-the-novel-submission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=198849","title":{"rendered":"I Finally Read The Novel ‘Submission’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second paragraph of Submission<\/em><\/a> is silly and cliche. <\/p>\n

So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don\u2019t notice right away because they\u2019re hypnotised by the desire for money or, if they\u2019re more primitive, the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product – addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that \u2018tireless Proteus\u2019, money itself). Above all they\u2019re hypnotised by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanised as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, film stars and models.
\nFor various psychological reasons that I have neither the skill nor the desire to analyse, I wasn\u2019t that way at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t believe the narrator. We are all status-seeking primates. We want to feel pride because pride feels good and it correlates with how much we contribute to others.
\nI’m less troubled by the unreliability of the narrator than that I don’t like him. He’s a freak.
\nMore silliness soon follows: “Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilisation now ending before our very eyes…” Literature is not ending, and a single overstatement like that destroys credibility in my eyes. Why would I want to read on about this silly deluded man?<\/p>\n

Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave \u2013 a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you\u2019d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. The beauty of an author\u2019s style, the music of his sentences have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author\u2019s reflections, the originality of his thought certainly can\u2019t be overlooked; but an author is above all a human being, present in his books, and whether he writes very well or very badly hardly matters \u2013 as long as he gets the books written and is, indeed, present in them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not just the books, bro. It’s the reader response. We respond to people like ourselves. We love people like ourselves. Read John J. Mearsheimer<\/a> and David Pinsof<\/a> and embrace reality and enjoy the feeling of pride<\/a> that comes from contributing to the lives of those around you.<\/p>\n

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature \u2013 it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As opposed to other jobs? How is the study of literature less full of meaning than normal work? Does work as an insurance adjuster lead somewhere?
\nThe primary purpose of work is to support yourself and those you love by making a lawful contribution to your community.
\nI don’t like the protagonist from the start which makes reading the novel a chore. <\/p>\n

The way things were supposed to work (and I have no reason to think much has changed), young people, after a brief period of sexual vagabondage in their very early teens, were expected to settle down in exclusive, strictly monogamous relationships involving activities (outings, weekends, holidays) that were not only sexual, but social. At the same time, there was nothing final about these relationships. Instead, they were thought of as apprenticeships \u2013 in a sense, as internships (a practice that was generally seen in the professional world as a step towards one\u2019s first job). Relationships of variable duration (a year being, according to my own observations, an acceptable amount of time) and of variable number (an average of ten to twenty might be considered a reasonable estimate) were supposed to succeed one another until they ended, like an apotheosis, with the last relationship, this one conjugal and final, which would lead, via the begetting of children, to the formation of a family.
\n The complete idiocy of this model…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sigh. Everyone’s an idiot.
\nGrow up, bro. There’s no one model of love and relationship that is globally superior to others. The problem is not in France but in you. You’re miserable and that distorts your perceptions. <\/p>\n

My own sex life, during my early years as a lecturer at Paris III, hadn\u2019t evolved in any notable way. Year after year, I kept sleeping with students, and the fact that we were now teacher and student didn\u2019t change things much at all. At the beginning, there was scarcely any age difference between us. Only gradually did an element of transgression enter in, and this had more to do with my rising academic status than with my age, real or apparent. In short, I benefitted from that basic inequality between men, whose erotic potential diminishes very slowly as they age, and women, for whom the collapse comes with shocking brutality from year to year, or even from month to month. The one real change, since my student years, was that now I was usually the one who broke it off when the academic year began. It wasn\u2019t that I was a Don Juan, or yearned for some kind of untrammelled sexual freedom. Unlike my colleague Steve, who also taught nineteenth – century literature to the first – and second – year students, I didn\u2019t spend the first days of university eagerly checking out the \u2018new talent\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does this still fly in France?<\/p>\n

\u2018You know, Fran\u00e7ois \u2026\u2019 she said, after she\u2019d taken a first sip, \u2018I\u2019m not a whore. I\u2019m not a nymphomaniac, either. When I go down on you, it\u2019s because I love you. I do love you, you know?\u2019
\n I did know. And I knew there was something else, something she hadn\u2019t yet told me. I looked deep into her eyes, but I didn\u2019t know how to ask what was the matter. She finished her champagne, sighed, poured another and said: \u2018My parents are leaving the country.\u2019
\n I was speechless. She drained her glass and poured herself a third.
\n \u2018They\u2019re emigrating to Israel. They fly to Tel Aviv on Friday. They\u2019re not even waiting for the run – offs. The crazy part is, they\u2019ve done it all behind our backs, completely in secret. They opened a bank account in Israel, they lined up a flat, my father cashed in his pension, they put the house up for sale, and they never said a word to any of us. My little sister and brother I could maybe understand, they\u2019re pretty young, but I\u2019m twenty – two years old and they didn\u2019t even consult me. They\u2019re not forcing me to go with them. If I insist, they\u2019ll rent me a room in Paris, but we do have the summer break coming up, and I don\u2019t see how I can leave them, not right now. They\u2019re too scared. I hadn\u2019t really noticed till now, but in the last few months they\u2019ve stopped going out. The only people they still see are other Jews. They stay in at night, working each other up \u2013 and they\u2019re not the only ones, they\u2019ve got at least five other friends who\u2019ve sold everything so they can move to Israel. I spent a whole night arguing with them, but they\u2019ve made up their minds. They\u2019re convinced that something really bad is going to happen to Jews in France. It\u2019s weird, it\u2019s like a delayed reaction fifty years after the war. I told them they\u2019re being idiots, the National Front stopped being anti – Semitic a long time ago \u2013 \u2019
\n \u2018It wasn\u2019t all that long ago. You\u2019re too young to remember, but the father, Jean – Marie Le Pen, he still had connections to the old French far right. He was a drunk and a total philistine, he certainly hadn\u2019t read Drumont or Maurras, but I\u2019m sure he heard people talk about them. They were part of his mental landscape. The daughter doesn\u2019t even know who they are, obviously. At any rate, even if the Muslim wins, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ve got much to worry about. He\u2019s still allied with the Socialists, he can\u2019t just do whatever he wants \u2026\u2019
\n \u2018Hmm \u2026\u2019 She shook her head, unconvinced. \u2018I guess I\u2019m less optimistic than you are. When a Muslim party comes to power, it\u2019s never good for the Jews. Can you think of a time it was?\u2019\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This lands.<\/p>\n

She stepped into her skirt. \u2018With everything that\u2019s going on now, it\u2019s obvious the National Front\u2019s going to win. That\u2019s all we\u2019ll talk about at lunch. \u201cWe told you so, sweetheart.\u201d Still, they\u2019re good people, they only want what\u2019s best for me.\u2019
\n \u2018Yes, they are good people. Truly good people.\u2019
\n \u2018But what about you? What will you do? What do you think\u2019s going to happen at the university?\u2019
\n We were standing at the door. I realised that I hadn\u2019t the slightest idea, and also that I didn\u2019t give a fuck. I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, \u2018There is no Israel for me.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This lands.<\/p>\n

I realised \u2013 I\u2019d known for years \u2013 that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something chaotic, violent and unpredictable…
\n\u2018What about the Jews?\u2019 The question slipped out \u2013 I hadn\u2019t planned on asking. The image of Myriam on my bed that last morning, in her T – shirt, with her little round bottom, flashed through my mind. I poured myself another large glass of Cahors.
\n \u2018Ah,\u2019 he smiled again. \u2018With the Jews, of course, things are somewhat more complicated. In theory, it\u2019s the same \u2013 Judaism is a religion of the Book, Abraham and Moses are recognised as prophets of Islam. In practice, though, relations with Jews in Muslim countries have often been more difficult than with Christians. And of course the Palestinian question has poisoned everything. Some small factions of the Muslim Brotherhood call for retaliation against the Jews, but I don\u2019t think they\u2019ll get anywhere. Ben Abbes has always maintained good relations with the Grand Rabbi of France. Every once in a while he may let the extremists act out, because even if he really hopes to convert Christians in massive numbers \u2013 and who says he won\u2019t? \u2013 he can\u2019t possibly have high hopes for the Jews. What would really make him happy, I think, is if they left France on their own and emigrated to Israel. In any case, I assure you, he\u2019d never compromise his vast personal ambitions out of love for the Palestinians…
\nThe change in the political regime had left no visible mark on the neighbourhood. Tight knots of Chinese men still gathered in front of the OTB, racing forms in hand. Others hurried along pushing handcarts full of rice noodles, soy sauce, mangos. Nothing, not even a Muslim government, could curb their incessant activity \u2013 Muslim proselytising would dissolve without a trace, like the Christian message before it, in the vast ocean of their civilisation…
\nIt was two weeks before I received the letter from Paris III. According to the new statutes of the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne, I was no longer permitted to teach. Robert Rediger, the new president of the university, had signed the letter himself. He expressed his profound regret and assured me that this was no reflection on the quality of my scholarship. I was, of course, welcome to pursue my career in a secular university. If, however, I preferred to retire, the Islamic University of Paris – Sorbonne could offer me a pension, effective immediately, at a starting monthly rate of 3,472 euros, to be adjusted for inflation. I was invited to schedule a meeting with HR in order to fill out the necessary paperwork…
\nFrom outside, nothing about the university looked different, except for the gilded star and crescent above the doors, next to the big inscription \u2018Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne Nouvelle \u2013 Paris III\u2019. Inside the administrative buildings, the transformations were more visible. In the waiting room, one was welcomed by a photograph of pilgrims making their way around the Kaaba, and the offices were decorated with posters bearing hand – lettered verses from the Koran. The secretaries had changed, I didn\u2019t recognise any of them, and they all wore veils. One of them gave me a pension application. Its simplicity was disconcerting. I filled it out right there, on the corner of a table, signed it and gave it back. As I walked out into the courtyard, I realised that my academic career had just ended in a matter of minutes…
\nI had no friends, that was true, but when did I ever? Besides, if you really thought about it, what was the point of having friends? Once you reach a certain stage of physical decline, the only relationship that really, clearly makes sense is marriage (the bodies blend together, to a degree, and produce a new organism, at least if you believe Plato)….
\nThis brief surge of hope came during the most optimistic moment that France had known since the Thirty Glorious Years half a century before. The first days of Ben Abbes\u2019s national unity coalition had been a unanimous success. All the pundits agreed that no newly elected president had ever enjoyed such a \u2018state of grace\u2019….
\nStory of O contained everything I didn\u2019t like in a novel: other people\u2019s fantasies disgusted me, and the whole thing was so ostentatiously kitschy \u2013 the apartment on the \u00cele Saint – Louis, the h\u00f4tel particulier in the Faubourg Saint – Germain, Sir Stephen , all that stuff was shit. All the same, the book had a passion, a vitality that swept everything before it.
\n \u2018It\u2019s submission,\u2019 Rediger murmured. \u2018The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission. I hesitate to discuss the idea with my fellow Muslims, who might consider it sacrilegious, but for me there\u2019s a connection between woman\u2019s submission to man, as it\u2019s described in Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man\u2019s submission to God. You see,\u2019 he went on, \u2018Islam accepts the world, and accepts it whole. It accepts the world as such , Nietzsche might say. For Buddhism, the world is dukkha \u2013 unsatisfactoriness, suffering. Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn\u2019t Satan called \u201cthe prince of the world\u201d? For Islam, though, the divine creation is perfect, it\u2019s an absolute masterpiece. What is the Koran, really, but one long mystical poem of praise? Of praise for the Creator, and of submission to His laws. In general, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a good idea to learn about Islam by reading the Koran, unless of course you take the trouble to learn Arabic and read the original text. What I tell people to do instead is listen to the suras read aloud, and repeat them, so you can feel their breath and their force. In any case, Islam is the only religion where it\u2019s forbidden to use any translations in the liturgy, because the Koran is made up entirely of rhythms, rhymes, refrains, assonance. It starts with the idea, the basic idea of all poetry, that sound and sense can be made one, and so can speak the world.\u2019
\n…Yes, my intellectual life was finished, though I could still participate in vague colloquia and live on my savings and my pension; but I started to realise \u2013 and this was a real novelty \u2013 that life might actually have more to offer.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you are in a fight you can’t win, submission and making the best of things seems like a good idea.
\nThis book deserves its fame. It’s not a fun read, there’s nobody to like, but for me it was a haunting and horrifying read. I don’t look at Islamic civilization right now and see anything the West lacks. I don’t look at Islam and think, “I wish we had more of that in America!” I am open to the argument that increased Islamic immigration blesses Western countries, but I’ve never heard anyone make a compelling case for that.
\nHere are objective criteria that might lead immigration restrictionists such as myself say, “I’m fine with more immigration from X group.”
\n1. Net lifetime fiscal contribution. The National Academies panel of 2016 found the 75-year net present value per immigrant swings from strongly positive to strongly negative depending on education level. Test: does the group’s median member, with dependents counted, pay more over a lifetime than he draws? Education distribution, earnings by age, and program participation give you this.
\n2. Program use compared to natives at the same income. This tests behavior rather than earnings, and it separates a group that is poor from a group that is oriented toward transfers.
\n3. Second-generation and third-generation trajectory rather than first. Immigrants are selected; their children reveal what the group brings. Test: does the education and earnings gap with natives close by the third generation or persist? George Borjas (b. 1950) documents Mexican third-generation stagnation. East and South Asian convergence runs the other direction, and fast.
\n4. Crime, adjusted for age and sex, measured in the second generation. First-generation rates flatter almost every group because migrants are self-selected for low time preference.
\n5. Political and civic attitudes. Support for free speech including blasphemy, legal equality for women, religious liberty for apostates, acceptance of election results. Pew Global Attitudes and the World Values Survey run these instruments. Test: diaspora attitudes sit inside the native distribution by the second generation.
\n6. Whether the origin state claims authority over its diaspora. Turkey funds and staffs mosques abroad. China runs United Front organs. Eritrea levies a tax on emigrants. A group whose home government organizes it politically on your soil imports a foreign state’s interest along with the people.
\n7. Naturalization rates and language. Do members seek citizenship, and does second-generation fluency approach universal?
\n8. Rate and volume, measured against both the receiving population and the co-ethnic population already present. The same group at different rates produces different results. Above a density threshold, enclaves form.
\n9. Selection control and chain multipliers. A nationality admitted through a points system is a different sample from the same nationality admitted through family reunification. Ask how many additional admissions each primary admission generates over twenty years.
\nThe biggest difference between this novel and the discussion about it is that there is not one negative sentiment about Islam or Muslims in it. Instead, the portrait is overwhelmingly positive.
\nI love the Acknowledgements at the end: “I did not attend university, and everything I know about academic life I learned from Agathe Novak – Lechevalier, ma\u00eetre de conf\u00e9rences at the University of Paris X – Nanterre. If the backdrop to these inventions of mine is at all credible, it is entirely thanks to her.”
\nI love Mark Lilla’s review<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Given all this, it will take a long time for the French to read and appreciate Soumission for the strange and surprising thing that it is. Michel Houellebecq has created a new genre\u2014the dystopian conversion tale. Soumission is not the story some expected of a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, and no one in it expresses hatred or even contempt of Muslims. It is about a man and a country who through indifference and exhaustion find themselves slouching toward Mecca. There is not even drama here\u2014no clash of spiritual armies, no martyrdom, no final conflagration. Stuff just happens, as in all Houellebecq\u2019s fiction. All one hears at the end is a bone-chilling sigh of collective relief. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Whatever…
\nFran\u00e7ois is shipwrecked in the present. He doesn\u2019t understand why his students are so eager to get rich, or why journalists and politicians are so hollow, or why everyone, like him, is so alone. He believes that \u201conly literature can give you that sensation of contact with another human spirit,\u201d but no one else cares about it. His sometime girlfriend Myriam genuinely loves him but he can\u2019t respond…
\nExcept in the schools, very little seems to happen at first. But over the next months Fran\u00e7ois begins to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. Though the government has established no dress code, he sees fewer skirts and dresses on the street, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body\u2019s contours. It seems that non-Muslim women have spontaneously adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq describes so chillingly in his other novels. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.
\nFran\u00e7ois thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, inspired by a religion he knows little about, and which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. Fran\u00e7ois, who lives alone and has lost contact with his parents, is impressed. His fantasy (and perhaps Houellebecq\u2019s) is not really the colonial one of the erotic harem. It is closer to what psychologists call the \u201cfamily romance.\u201d
\n…At a certain point he couldn\u2019t ignore how much the Islamists\u2019 message overlapped with his own. They, too, idealized the life of simple, unquestioning piety and despised modern culture and the Enlightenment that spawned it. They believed in hierarchy within the family, with wives and children there to serve the father. They, like he, hated diversity\u2014especially diversity of opinion\u2014and saw homogeneity and high birthrates as vital signs of civilizational health. And they quivered with the eros of violence. All that separated him from them was that they prayed on rugs and he prayed at an altar. But the more Rediger reflected, the more he had to admit that in truth European and Islamic civilizations were no longer comparable. By all the measures that really mattered, post-Christian Europe was dying and Islam was flourishing. If Europe was to have a future, it would have to be an Islamic one.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reader experience with Submission<\/em><\/a> is going to be very different from The Camp of the Saints<\/em><\/a>, which shocks and appalls and angers. Submission<\/em><\/a> moves slowly. There’s no hatred of out-groups. There are no heroes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second paragraph of Submission is silly and cliche. So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don\u2019t notice right away because they\u2019re hypnotised by the desire for money or, if … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france","category-immigration"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t