Submission

by Michel Houellebecq

behind me. So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotised by the desire for money or, if they’re 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 ‘tireless Proteus’, money itself). Above all they’re 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.

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

And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first reaction was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend.

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 per cent of the time. Still, it’s harmless, and can even have a certain marginal value. A young woman applying for a sales job at Céline or Hermès should naturally attend to her appearance above all; but a degree in literature can constitute a secondary asset, since it guarantees the employer, in the absence of any useful skills, a certain intellectual agility that could lead to professional development – besides which, literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

What little private tutoring I’d done, to raise my standard of living, soon convinced me that the transmission of knowledge was generally impossible, the variance of intelligence extreme, and that nothing could undo or even mitigate this basic inequality.

Aggression often masks a desire to seduce

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.

You can let people talk for a long time, they’re always interested in what they have to say, but every now and then you’re supposed to contribute. I looked over at Alice, but without much hope: as

I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.

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 multicoloured 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 favour of clothes that were loose and shapeless.

Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple. In the old days, people lived as families, that is to say, they reproduced, slogged through a few more years, long enough to see their children reach adulthood, then went to meet their Maker. The reasonable thing nowadays was for people to wait until they were closer to fifty or sixty and then move in together, when the one thing their ageing, aching bodies craved was a familiar touch, reassuring and chaste, and when the delights of regional cuisine, as celebrated every Sunday on Les Escapades de Petitrenaud, took precedence over all other pleasures. For a while I sat there toying with the idea of writing an

‘It’s submission,’ Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.

The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.

‘Incidentally,’ Rediger went on, ‘if the human species has any ability to adapt, this is due entirely to the intellectual plasticity of women. Man is completely ineducable. I don’t care if he’s a language philosopher, a mathematician or a twelve-tone composer, he will always, inexorably, base his reproductive choices on purely physical criteria, criteria that have gone unchanged for thousands of years. Originally, of course, women were attracted by physical advantages, just like men; but with the right education, they can be convinced that looks aren’t what matters. They already find rich men attractive – and after all, getting rich tends to require above-average intelligence and cunning. To a certain degree, women can even learn to find a high erotic value in academics …’ He gave me his most beautiful smile. For a second I thought maybe he was being ironic, but no, I don’t think he was. ‘On the other hand, we can always just pay teachers more, which simplifies things.’