Reader JB, who lives in France, writes about Michel Houellebecq:

This is how I read Houellebecq: He is, above all, a novelist. An artist. One can only really judge him according to the criteria of art. As Kundera would’ve said, Houellebecq is to be judged against Rabelais & Cervantes. His work stands or falls according to the judgment of art. That’s where his provocation lies – he dares his French critics to judge his work according to rules other than those of art – and many do, namely the rules of Political Correctness. But they can only do so at the price of reneging themselves and the liberal progressive/ Enlightenment tradition for which they are nominally the stewards and that stretches back to Voltaire’s apocryphal “I may disagree with your opinion but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”.

Houellebecq sticks his pen in soft spot of the fraying social fabric that underlies and loosely holds French society together. In American terms, I’d say with his new novel, he jumps up and down on the third rail of French politics, picks it up and swings it around hitting anything in sight with it. The guardians of the temple of the State-sponsored cultural edifice are furious – by the way, how more Cultural Establishment can one get than a representative from France Culture and EHESS to interview Houellebecq? They’re furious because Houellebecq attacks one of the shibboleths of their ideology which is that the fracture line defining French society since World War 2 is between the Vichy Fascists and their associated descendants on one side and the Rest of Society on the other. To speak of any other fault line existing in France is heresy. Even blatantly obvious fault lines such as, oh just to take a wild guess, the one between Muslim/Arabs and the rest of French Society is heresy.

So Houellebecq takes a Far Right theme – the takeover of France by Muslims and writes of it glowing terms – terms that even a progressive/Tier-mondiste might approve if he/she didn’t suspect Houellebecq of insincerity.

But even if Houellebecq did believe a Muslim takeover of France might come to pass – so what? He’s a novelist. An artist. He gets to create and imagine stories. That’s his licence. That’s the only licence he’s ever seriously claimed.

His critics can’t judge Houellebecq’s work according to the criteria of art for he points out and speaks out loud about the weak foundations of their ideology. If Houellebecq does get a pass, and is judged only as a work of art, his novel risks going mainstream and circulating the things his critics don’t want put into question (ie, the Vichy Fascist faultline thingy). Of course its folly to think they can obstruct Houellebecq, but their over-reaction (now and in the past) only goes to show the way in which an ideology on the decline lashes out in defence of an orthodoxy fewer and fewer people are willing to believe in.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Another reader sent in a short Q&A Steve Sailer did with someone, presumably a French person, who has read an advance copy of the novel.

UPDATE: Would you say, JB, that Houellebecq’s contention is that the mainstream right-thinking parties and their supporters are so afraid of sounding like Vichy stooges that they would be willing to make an accommodation to living under Islamic rule rather than do anything that smacks of National Front-ism? And that his remarks in the Paris Review about finding a Strange New Respect for Islam are tongue-in-cheek, and actually a satire on the collaborationist mindset? That “Submission” is another word for “Collaboration”?