Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

because they’re hypnotized by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, by the desire for consumer goods

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 grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak so openly as when we face a blank page and address an unknown reader.

The beauty of an author’s style, the music of his sentences, have their importance in literature, of course; the depth of an author’s reflections, the originality

of his thought, certainly can’t 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—as long as he get...

In the same way, to love a book is, above all, to love its author: we wish to meet him again, we wish to spend our days with him.

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—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

Being young implied, it seemed to me, a certain enthusiasm for life, or else a certain defiance, accompanied in either case by a vague sense of superiority toward the generation that one had been called on to replace. I’d never had those sorts of feelings.

For men, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure,

The coherence between subject and treatment makes an aesthetic whole.

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 center-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 center-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of democratic change, and the voters would install a candidate of the center-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.

It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.

Basically, they argue that belief in a transcendent being conveys a genetic advantage: that couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically.

people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any ‘pluralist society’—is doomed.

if there’s going to be a general uprising anytime soon in Europe, look to Norway or Denmark, though Belgium and Holland are also zones of potential instability.”

It only confirmed what I’d always thought—that, for all their education, university professors can’t even imagine political developments having any effect on their careers: they consider themselves untouchable.

whichever segment of the population has the highest birthrate, and does the best job of transmitting its values, wins. If you control the children, you control the future. So the one area in which they absolutely insist on having their way is the education of children.”

Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and

shapeless.

But his real stroke of genius was to grasp that elections would no longer be about the economy but about values,

Ben Abbes restored its reassuring, traditional value—with a perfume of exoticism that made it all the more attractive.

It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.

distributism was an English economic theory espoused at the turn of the last century by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. It was meant as a “third way,” neither capitalism nor communism—a sort of state capitalism, if you like. Its central idea was to do away with the separation between capital and labor. For distributists, the basic economic unit was the family business; when in certain sectors consolidation became necessary, the government had to ensure that the workers remained the owners and managers of their own enterprise.

Apparently, this distributism of the new president’s wasn’t as harmless as everyone had thought. One pillar of Chesterton and Belloc’s philosophy was the principle of subsidiarity: that no entity (social, financial, or political) could take charge of any function if it could be handled by a smaller entity.

because he was one of those people, and you don’t see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow

men—

that he was, in other words, ...

I may not have had, like Huysmans, “a heart hardened and smoked dry by dissipation,” but lungs hardened and smoked dry by tobacco—those I had.

like Bakunin: ‘Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.’ They were atheists like Kirilov in The Possessed. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place.

Einstein wasn’t an atheist, either. The exact nature of his belief is harder to define, but when he told Bohr, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’

‘watchmaker God,’

the universe obviously bears the hallmarks of intelligent design, that it’s clearly the manifestation of

some gigantic mind.

I subscribed more and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.

Freud was not wrong, and neither was Thomas Mann: if France and Germany, the two most advanced, civilized nations in the world, could unleash this senseless slaughter, then Europe was dead.

Christianity has serious reservations of its own. Isn’t Satan called ‘the prince of the world’?

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion).

communism could triumph only if it was global, and the same held true for Islam: either it would become universal, or it would cease to exist.

Muslim societies, have matchmakers. It’s a very important profession, reserved for women of great experience and wisdom. As women, obviously, they are allowed to see girls naked, and so they conduct a sort of evaluation, and correlate the girls’ physical appearance with the social status of their future husbands. In your case, I can promise, you’d have nothing to complain about…”