Excerpt from Submission by Michel Houellebecq, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As he turned his attention to his hookah, which had gotten stopped up, I stole a glance at my watch. It was only ten thirty, I could hardly pretend to be late for my next class. Then a topic of conversation occurred to me: lately there had been more talk about a project, first proposed four or five years ago, to create a replica of the Sorbonne in Dubai (or was it Bahrain? Qatar? I always got them mixed up). Oxford had a similar plan in the works. Clearly the antiquity of our two universities had caught some petromonarch's eye. If the project went through, there'd be real financial opportunities for a young lecturer like Steve. Had he considered throwing his hat into the ring with a little anti-Zionist agitation? And did he think there might be anything in it for me?

I shot Steve a probing glance. The kid wasn't very bright, he was easy to rattle, and this had the desired effect. "As a Bloy scholar," he stammered, "you must know a lot about this nativist, anti-Semitic, um…" I sighed, exhausted. Bloy wasn't an anti-Semite, and I wasn't a Bloy scholar. Bloy had come up, naturally, in the course of my research on Huysmans, and I'd compared their use of language in my one published work, Vertigos of Coining—no doubt the summit of my intellectual achievements. At any rate, it had gotten good notices inPoetics and Romanticism, and probably accounted for my being made a professor. In fact, many of the strange words used by Huysmans were not coinages but rare borrowings, specific to certain trades or regional dialects. My thesis was that Huysmans never stopped being a Naturalist, that he took pains to incorporate the real speech of ordinary people into his work, and that, in a sense, he remained the same socialist who had attended Zola's soirées in Medan as a young man. Even as he grew to despise the left, he maintained his old aversion to capitalism, money, and anything having to do with bourgeois values. He was the very epitome of a Christian Naturalist, whereas Bloy, desperate for commercial and social success, used his incessant neologisms to call attention to himself, to set himself up as a persecuted spiritual luminary misunderstood by the common run of men. Having assumed the role of mystico-elitist in the literary world of his day, Bloy never stopped marveling at his own failure, or at the indifference with which society, quite reasonably, greeted his imprecations. He was, Huysmans wrote, "an unfortunate man, whose pride is truly diabolical and whose hatred knows no bounds." From the beginning Bloy struck me as the prototype of the bad Catholic, who never actually exalts in his faith and zeal unless he's convinced that the people around him are going to hell. And yet when I wrote my dissertation I'd been in touch with various left-wing Catholic-royalist circles who worshipped Bloy and Bernanos, and who were always trying to interest me in some manuscript letter or other, until I realized they had nothing to offer, absolutely nothing—no document that I couldn't easily find for myself in the normal collections.

"You're definitely onto something … Reread Drumont," I told Steve, just to make him happy, and he gazed at me with the obedient, naïve eyes of an opportunistic child. When I reached my classroom—today I planned to discuss Jean Lorrain—there were three guys in their twenties, two of them Arab, one of them black, standing in the doorway. They weren't armed, at the moment. They stood there calmly. Nothing about them was overtly menacing. All the same, they were blocking the entrance. I needed to say something. I stopped and faced them. They had to be under orders to avoid provocation and to treat the teachers with respect. At least I hoped so.

"I'm a professor here. My class is about to start," I said in a firm tone, addressing the group. It was the black guy who answered, with a broad smile: "No problem, monsieur, we're just here to visit our sisters…," and he tilted his head reassuringly toward the classroom. The only sisters he could mean were two North African girls seated together in the back left row, both in black burkas, their eyes protected by mesh. They looked pretty irreproachable to me. "Well, there you have them," I said, with bonhomie. Then I insisted: "Now you can go." "No problem, monsieur," he said, with an even broader smile, then he turned on his heel, followed by the other two, neither of whom had said a word. He took three steps, then turned again. "Peace be with you, monsieur," he said with a small bow. "That went well," I told myself, closing the classroom door. "This time, anyway." I don't know just what I'd expected. Supposedly, teachers had been attacked in Mulhouse, Strasbourg, Aix-Marseille, and Saint-Denis, but I had never met a colleague who'd been attacked, and I didn't believe the rumors. According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighborhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organizations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumor, but the fact was that, as of last fall, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.

Copyright © 2015 by Michel Houellebecq and Flammarion

Translation copyright © 2015 by Lorin Stein