If you want a prediction for this afternoon, check out your daily horoscope. But if you need a forecast for thousands of years from now, you have no place to turn except science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy and Frank Herbert’s Dune take us more than 20,000 years into the future. H.G. Wells advances 800,000 years ahead for The Time Machine . And Olaf Stapledon, the king of future-tripping, will peer ahead a sweet five trillion years, and give you a first-hand account of the death of our sun.
But what if you need a mid-range forecast? Let’s say you want to look just seven years into the future, who you gonna call? Michel Houellebecq, winner of the Prix Goncourt, comes to your rescue. In his novel Submission , published in 2015 amidst controversy and bloodshed—the book came out the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, and Houellebecq was featured on its cover—he anticipates the cultural landscape in France and its neighbors in the year 2022.
You’re disappointed, I know. Not much can change in seven years, huh? Even fashions don’t change so fast, let alone institutions and social mores. Guess again! See all those women in Paris with their facial features hidden from view? Have you noticed those miniskirts on the Champs- Élysées? Or, rather, have you noticed out the complete disappearance of miniskirts. Welcome to the new France, which is very different from the old France.
Has a Taliban-like dictatorship taken over France? No, not at all. In Houellebecq’s novel, a democratically-elected government has embraced Islamic principles, and is now seeking to bring them to Europe at large. That may seem a stretch, but in the world of Submission , a whole host of new countries are likely to enter the European Union—Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and perhaps even Egypt. Under the leadership of its new president, the genial and inspiring Muhammed Ben Abbes, France aims to take the lead in creating a unified Europe with a scope even the Roman emperors never envisioned.
This turn-of-events could hardly have happened without a political splintering resulting in a run-off French presidential election between the far-right National Front and the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood. The two parties that have long dominated French political life, with the center-right and socialists trading off control of the government, now face marginalization, and their supporters up for grabs. Ben Abbes, in a brilliant display of political maneuvering, convinces many of them that his leadership is less dangerous than handing the reins of power to the National Front.
Could this really happen in 2022? Don’t place any wagers on it, despite Houellebecq’s vividly-imagined prognostications. He is a satirist, not a futurist. He willingly embraces the paradoxical and the absurd, and sacrifices plausibility if it allows him to highlight some garish or grotesque clash of values.
But he is a first-rate satirist. Houellebecq capture just the right tone as he describes the reactions of career academics to the in-the-streets deconstruction, unlike any they’ve read about in Derrida, when thugs of different political persuasions engage in hand-to-hand combat. “I love France,” declares one in a near panic, “I love…I don’t know…I love the cheese.” When someone gives a book about converting to Islam to our narrator François, a literary scholar specializing in the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans—a writer who made a similar shift from bohemianism to religious devoted at the end of the nineteenth century—our protagonist skips over the chapters on moral teachings, and immediately checks out the section on polygamy.
François has noticed that some of his elite male colleagues, new adherents to the ascendant creed, have been rewarded with multiple spouses—a nubile lass to adorn the bedchamber, a culinary expert to take charge of the kitchen, perhaps a third to handle the other responsibilities of household management. The person who is recruiting François to join the faculty of the newly-purified Sorbonne explains: “There is nothing unnatural about classifying academics among the dominant males….In your case, I think you could have three wives without much trouble—not that anyone would force you to, of course.” Courtship is simplified under the new regime: matchmakers are available to “conduct a sort of evaluation, and correlate the girls’ physical appearance with the social status of their future husbands.”
As even this short summary indicates, Houellebecq deliberately seeks to provoke and outrage. Even the most ordinary circumstances are described in flamboyant terms. Women see conversations between men, in his words, as an “oddity, not quite buggery, or duel, but something in-between.” The academic study of literature, he explains, “a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.” Our author finds many targets for his satire, and spares none of them.
Go ahead and be shocked; maybe even denounce the author. This is precisely the effect Houellebecq seeks, and which turned his novel into a runaway bestseller. A more measured response might be to evaluate the likelihood of the circumstances outlined in this firebrand of a book. Will his predictions come true in 2022…or even in 2032 or 2052? Will immigrants actually transform France or—just possibly—will France transform its immigrants?
No, I don’t look to Houellebecq for intimations of the future. On the other hand, much of what he satirizes is all too plausible. In fact, much of it is familiar to us already, and not just in France. We already see widespread complacency, especially among the ‘intellectual class’ to institutionalized violations of civil liberties and human rights on the grandest scale, even in the most advanced Western democracies. We already see journalists and news organizations determining what gets ‘covered’ in the press on the basis of ideology, scurrying to bury stories that don’t jive with their pre-defined biases. We find bizarre discrepancies in the manipulated public reaction to events—a Kafkaesque situation in which a dentist shooting a lion on a hunting expedition is a lightning rod for over-the-top outrage, while CIA torture, mass surveillance and drone executions of innocent people are accepted as daily events. We see how patriarchy and repression on the largest scale are tolerated when practiced by entire nations and cultures, but denounced if they appear in a novel written centuries ago. As the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up—and, indeed, you don’t need to. Just read a daily summary of the news.
Houellebecq is empowered by the bêtise of his contemporaries. Their folly is his path to fame. In that way, he isn’t much different than the political players in his novel, who are able to secure a dominant position because everyone else is so confused and paralyzed. Or, on many of the pages of Submission , they are so focused on the subtleties of the palette, savoring the food and wine offerings of French civilization—now supplemented by a growing number of North African and Middle Eastern options—that they forget the other planks that support a society over the long haul. You can’t build democracy on good cheese and fine wine. And in a conflict between cultural values, the most complacent side gives way, no matter how rich its historic legacy.
This should be the real takeaway of Submission. When a book spurs hatred or violence or widens the divide between cultures, count me out. But if a novel highlights the blind spots that incite this violence, and reminds us of the ways prudent people bridge the gap dividing ideologies without sacrificing the core values of their own, it can have a positive impact. Perhaps Submission will prove to be a book of this second type, reducing the polarization of our current sociopolitical environment through the time-honored ways of pluralism and tolerance that thriving nations (France not the least of them) have exemplified. If that happens, it may find its success as novel comes at the price of its failure as a prognostication.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.