On the day he defends his doctoral thesis on the work of the French
19th century novelist Joris
-
Karl Huymans, François comes to the conclusion that the best part of his life is now over.
This is how Soumission, the last novel by Michel Houellebecq (2015b), starts off. Such a beginning makes one recognise the work as quintessentially Houellebecqian: where others may feel joy or even a sense of pride when hitting milestones, his protagonists, always anti-heroes, experience a sense of loss, knowing that
from here, all is downhill. However, apart from drawing us right into his
depressingly realist universe (Jefferey, 2011), this remark also forms a straight arrow to core Soumission's subject matter. Not the science fiction of France's conversion to islam, but the near collapse of our current socio-economic regime is the issue. In response to the remark that recent political events make it difficult to appreciate Soumission for the satirical fiction that it is (Lilla, 2015), the exercise here is to detach the book from its association to the unfortunate events with which its appearance coincided, as well as the current rise of islamophobia in various parts of the western world, and treat it as a piece of fiction that speaks about social relations, about living together, and about the role of the market and consumption in it, which is very much the focus of all of Michel Houellebecq's
novels. In this essay, I will try to show how Soumission may be read as a
commentary on contemporary consumerist societies. To do so, I will reveal
the tactics Houellebecq employs in his prose in order to challenge the idea
that anything is a worthwhile endeavour in its own. I will argue these tactics revolve around a meticulous entanglement of the following ingredients:
sexual relations, pre-fabricated food, and professional status. I will show
how these elements intertwine to prove Houellebecq's point: that all we
think worth living for is essentially subject to market forces, and that the
best we can do is surrender and give up on desire entirely