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From my column in Taki’s Magazine:
Reactionary author Michel Houellebecq’s novel about an Islamic takeover of France, Submission, was published the day of the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo. In fact, the satirical publication’s cover that bloody morning was a cartoon of the notoriously decrepit-looking Houellebecq prophesying, “In 2015, I lose my teeth. In 2022, I observe Ramadan!”
Perhaps continental Europe’s most talked-about novelist this century, Houellebecq (a complicated-looking name pronounced, simply enough, “WELL-beck”) is representative of the rise of the right as a cultural force. The editor of the leftist Liberation newspaper complained that Submission “will mark the date in the history of ideas on which the ideas of the extreme right made their entrance in high literature.” Houellebecq has described himself in his usual half-joking style as “Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist: to lump me in with the rather unsavory family of ‘right-wing anarchists’ would be to give me too much credit; basically, I’m just a redneck.”
In reality, Houellebecq is an autodidact with an immense love of French literature. But he missed out on the usual educational and career path of French intellectuals, instead studying agronomy in college and going to work with computers, which he hated. In his 1990s novels, Whatever and The Elementary Particles, he more or less introduced to literature the now familiar character of the sexually frustrated computer programmer. Houellebecq has been a major influence on the sexual realist wing of the American blogosphere, such as Heartiste.
Read the whole thing there.
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This might be Houellebecq’s laziest book (what exactly happens to the National Front after the election?) but it packs a heck of a punch.
The more things change, the more they remind me of one thing or another from Chesterton:
He really should have gone to Cornell, where the state ag school is planted in the middle of all that pretentious Ivy.
My stepdad’s brother got his ag degree from Big Red, and eventually became VP of a major condiment corporation, with yards of shelf space in your local supermarket.
Behódolás? Who sent you the cover, Viktor Orbán?
Steve's review is a masterpiece. I'm not totally sure about Houllebecq's book, but it, too, could be a masterpiece.
Enjoyed the review. Driven to near-murderous rage by auto-play. How tacky, Taki.
This is just ignorant. Schengen is not a free-migration zone, it’s a free travel zone (i.e. no visas between zone countries).
There is a genre called ‘post-colonial literature’.
SUBMISSION, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and DISGRACE are like ‘reverse colonial literature’ or ‘neo-colonial lit’ with non-whites colonizing whites.
Submission or sub-mission(secretive mission to forestall submission)?
By the way, whatever happened to Chateau Heartise? Can someone fill me in? I know the original “Roissy” is long gone (except for maybe the odd post?) but it seems like we’ve been going through different successors. Or if it’s now a group blog, the composition of the group has seemingly changed in the past 2-3 years. The “game” posts seem more and more like parodies of the original Roissy, and the political (i.e. white nationalist) posts are essentially meta-commentary on various My Posting Career threads.
How does Heartiste make money off of the page views ?
Like I always tell my right-on female friends, I’m no Islamophobe. I think that it is a well thought out religion.
It gives you four wives, which is good, but problematic. The key problem is that having four women telling you to take out the bin in shrill unison would be excruciating. Yet Islam has an easy solution, you just beat them up a bit and they’ll soon stop.
When François visits the new university president, a teenager wearing low-cut jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt comes into the salon. She screams and runs away when she notices the visitor. The host apologizes for his newest wife: she is still getting used to the protocol, and forgot to check whether there was company before she walked through without her veil. Later a middle-aged wife comes in, properly veiled, with a tray of delicious food that she has been preparing in the kitchen.
Meantime there are servants to take out the bin. If you can't afford them, you won't be marrying any wives at all.Replies: @This Is Our Home
Actually it is the abandonment of any border controls between the participating countries and the subsequent adoption of a common border around those countries.
I just wanted to ask. I think it appeared earlier in Hungarian than in English. Like several months earlier.
Steve’s review is a masterpiece. I’m not totally sure about Houllebecq’s book, but it, too, could be a masterpiece.
OT – It looks like someone is ‘noticing’ things in the Sailer kind of way…
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/10/27/meet-the-she-e-os-why-do-so-many-female-tech-ceos-turn-out-to-be-disappointments-or-frauds/
They did the next best thing and converted to Islam.
Although the author does clearly outline a plan for how nativist elements might initiate a military coup but then he doesn’t run with it. I suppose it is intended as a helpful suggestion rather than a warning.
Original roissy was a jewish businessman/lawyer who pioneered dickhead game in the dc area with his friendgroup of roosh v and virgle kent starting a new wave of holistic pickup and game. Their blogging coincided with the rise of third wave feminism and they were all sloppy in hiding their details, so naturally they were all exposed by e-detectives. roissy was the most inflammatory but also had the most to lose, so he went underground and passed the site onto some friends throughout the country(one of the main heartise writers lives in minnesota, thats all i now). As long as the new site runs some game and doesnt insult the tribe too much, the site lives in the legacy of the viewpoint of the original roissy, who was pretty hbd/white nationalist himself, except for the fact that hes a jew.
Couldn’t wait for the translation, so I read it in French. Does the translation include the author’s note in which he acknowledges that he is unacquainted with university life and thanks somebody by name for being his informant? That informant had better not be up for tenure review. “I had finally contrived to schedule all my contact hours on a single day of the week,” explains François as he narrates the really busy Wednesday on which he still has time for a couple of long conversations over coffee and lunch.
Don’t forget the most important line in the novel:
“There is no Israel for me.”
The left, paralyzed by his multicultural background, had never been able to fight him, or so much as mention his name.
Ouch.
Submission presents Islam as a more streamlined religion for modern misogynists than French Catholicism, which is centered upon the Virgin Mary. Indeed, a look at the list of converts suggests that Islam mostly appeals to men of the right, such as black jocks, eccentric military men, and mystics.
Like the infamous French mercenary Bob Denard, who deserves to be a Houellebecq character.
Heartiste does not make money off the site — its hosted on WordPress and unless you pay there are no ads. I have not seen any ads on the site.
Advertising itself on the internet is a loser’s game. There was an article on how the NYT made, pre-internet, $100 a month in revenue from advertising on circulation of 1.1 million newspapers. It now makes $15 million a month in revenue on web viewership of something like 50 million unique visitors a month. I’m probably wrong on the details, too lazy to look it up, but the scale I think is roughly correct.
As for Islam, its a bad deal for native men. Muslim invaders will hog all the women and kill or enslave (or both) the native men. They did every other time they invaded non-Muslims and its folly to expect otherwise. This whole thing is Strongbow all over again, a Norman warlord invited in to help one Irish King crush another, who ends up being the stalking horse John Lackland (i.e. King John) who then invades the country and takes it all over. Since he, lacked Land.
Women of course do fairly well, post menopausal, post-carousel women like Cherie Blair’s sister, convert and get to give moral lectures on the infidels, something post-menopausal women take to like ducks to water. Pre menopausal women overestimate their chances of landing the next Sultan and don’t quite understand that losers in the succession struggle get strangled and thrown into the Bosphorus. At any rate they find sharing a dominant man exciting. A small minority of European women fear what they will get; sales of rifles and shotguns to Austrians are mostly to women who fear they have no other protection and the state will not save them (correctly I might add). But most women figure Muslim invaders are just browner versions of Christian Grey without money or killer abs.
Even converting to Islam won’t save European men. They’ll just be serfs. The invaders, all cousins and countrymen, won’t share anything with them. So most European men will fight, sooner or later. Fight in desperation, approximately like Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto for the same reasons.
This future scenario for the first time makes me wonder at the possibility of various Western Europeans eventually retreating to a fallback position and forming a new tribe, much like the way several Southern tribes retreated into the Florida swamps as Europeans encroached and formed a new tribe called the Seminoles. Where that would happen, the language that would come out of it, and when is interesting speculation.
I’ve read several of Houllebecq’s books. They are oddly compelling. On the one hand, they read like disturbing (i.e. nonerotic, tawdry) porn, with unattractive characters (both protagonists and antagonists), utterly boring events (attending an annual swinger convention, a science fiction story about sexual weirdos trying to, as I recall, clone women and eliminate males), and a real desire to not be reading them. His characterization of the European middle class is just sad (I don’t know whether its accurate), a complete lack of affection between people and generations, and a kind of a ’70’s key party swinger culture, but even more miserable.
On the other hand, there is a real desire to find out what is going to happen (and I can’t figure out why). A strange combination of boring events and unattractive characters that you somehow want to keep reading about.
In the past, he really wasn’t a political commentator: it was all about culture, and the loneliness and vapidness of modern man. His characters were too sad to even care about politics or culture-just utterly lost beings.
Looking forward to Submission.
joeyjoejoe
Original Roissy was neither Jewish nor a businessman. … His net nemesis Lady Raine made up the part about Roissy being Jewish and admitted it in the comments of her blog when a commenter questioned her.
It gives you four wives, which is good, but problematic. The key problem is that having four women telling you to take out the bin in shrill unison would be excruciating. Yet Islam has an easy solution, you just beat them up a bit and they'll soon stop.Replies: @Romanian, @Weltanschauung
You just gave me a good idea! Conversions all around!
Ouch.
Submission presents Islam as a more streamlined religion for modern misogynists than French Catholicism, which is centered upon the Virgin Mary. Indeed, a look at the list of converts suggests that Islam mostly appeals to men of the right, such as black jocks, eccentric military men, and mystics.
Like the infamous French mercenary Bob Denard, who deserves to be a Houellebecq character.Replies: @Romanian
Or the many British imperial types who almost went native – Pasha Gordon, T.E. Lawrence, The White Raja of Sarawak etc. They loved the dress, the power, the freedom compared to cloistered old Blighty. They were too firmly grounded in their identity to change names or religions, but that gave them the strength to enjoy themselves while not losing themselves.
Sailer’s review is entertaining. I struggle to see why someone would want to read a full length novel on this topic. The premise of demographic replacement of Europe is horrible, I can see people wanting to take action on that. But read a long form fictionalized story about it? What is the point of that?
The funny thing is France’s greatest writers were all reactionaries: Balzac, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Céline, etc.
Instead of "all", how about "often"?Replies: @Luke Lea
Roissy was exposed by Lady **** as **** guy working for the **** sector in ****. She dubbed him “**** the Jew” as a kind of schoolyard insult (while denying anti-semitic intent, natch). I don’t think the blog has changed hands. Roissy’s distinctive voice is recognizable as the same that has been there from the beginning. The blog has gotten more political and white nationalist though, especially in the comment section.
"There is no Israel for me."Replies: @Anonymous
Israel is located in a very bad neighborhood and is always in danger of being destroyed. Many of my fellow American Jews and I aren’t so sure it would be around for us if we needed it.
Kim Philby’s dad St. John Philby and Glubb Pasha.
As were history’s greatest satirists: Aristophanes, Juvenal, Swift, Waugh, the second T Wolfe, even Orwell would have drifted towards a populist rightism had he been given time.
Advertising itself on the internet is a loser's game. There was an article on how the NYT made, pre-internet, $100 a month in revenue from advertising on circulation of 1.1 million newspapers. It now makes $15 million a month in revenue on web viewership of something like 50 million unique visitors a month. I'm probably wrong on the details, too lazy to look it up, but the scale I think is roughly correct.
As for Islam, its a bad deal for native men. Muslim invaders will hog all the women and kill or enslave (or both) the native men. They did every other time they invaded non-Muslims and its folly to expect otherwise. This whole thing is Strongbow all over again, a Norman warlord invited in to help one Irish King crush another, who ends up being the stalking horse John Lackland (i.e. King John) who then invades the country and takes it all over. Since he, lacked Land.
Women of course do fairly well, post menopausal, post-carousel women like Cherie Blair's sister, convert and get to give moral lectures on the infidels, something post-menopausal women take to like ducks to water. Pre menopausal women overestimate their chances of landing the next Sultan and don't quite understand that losers in the succession struggle get strangled and thrown into the Bosphorus. At any rate they find sharing a dominant man exciting. A small minority of European women fear what they will get; sales of rifles and shotguns to Austrians are mostly to women who fear they have no other protection and the state will not save them (correctly I might add). But most women figure Muslim invaders are just browner versions of Christian Grey without money or killer abs.
Even converting to Islam won't save European men. They'll just be serfs. The invaders, all cousins and countrymen, won't share anything with them. So most European men will fight, sooner or later. Fight in desperation, approximately like Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto for the same reasons.Replies: @This Is Our Home
So women figure that these guys are poor, brown, fat schmoes? Finally you are making sense and this why these guys are the objects of pity rather than lust.
I hope you realise that Muslim is not a country.
Houellebecq’s French is pretty easy.
One surprise: his narrator François refers to his penis as “ma bite”. What surprised me wasn’t that a Houellebecq protagonist would mention his penis, or that he would use a slang term I hadn’t been aware of, but that the word is of the feminine gender. It is as though you called your dick your Jane.
One surprise: his narrator François refers to his penis as "ma bite". What surprised me wasn't that a Houellebecq protagonist would mention his penis, or that he would use a slang term I hadn't been aware of, but that the word is of the feminine gender. It is as though you called your dick your Jane.Replies: @Steve Sailer
See, gender is socially constructed!
Voltaire? Hugo? Sartre?
Instead of “all”, how about “often”?
Instead of "all", how about "often"?Replies: @Luke Lea
Also Rousseau, Zola.
It gives you four wives, which is good, but problematic. The key problem is that having four women telling you to take out the bin in shrill unison would be excruciating. Yet Islam has an easy solution, you just beat them up a bit and they'll soon stop.Replies: @Romanian, @Weltanschauung
Why would your wives be speaking in unison? Each will have her own sphere of operations.
When François visits the new university president, a teenager wearing low-cut jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt comes into the salon. She screams and runs away when she notices the visitor. The host apologizes for his newest wife: she is still getting used to the protocol, and forgot to check whether there was company before she walked through without her veil. Later a middle-aged wife comes in, properly veiled, with a tray of delicious food that she has been preparing in the kitchen.
Meantime there are servants to take out the bin. If you can’t afford them, you won’t be marrying any wives at all.
On that note, I know all about my own household set-up. I've told my youngest wife to be more careful many times.Replies: @Weltanschauung
When François visits the new university president, a teenager wearing low-cut jeans and a Hello Kitty T-shirt comes into the salon. She screams and runs away when she notices the visitor. The host apologizes for his newest wife: she is still getting used to the protocol, and forgot to check whether there was company before she walked through without her veil. Later a middle-aged wife comes in, properly veiled, with a tray of delicious food that she has been preparing in the kitchen.
Meantime there are servants to take out the bin. If you can't afford them, you won't be marrying any wives at all.Replies: @This Is Our Home
Everything you say is correct in and of itself but you also miss the point of my post! I was being purposefully flippant for rhetorical effect, essentially I was playing a part.
On that note, I know all about my own household set-up. I’ve told my youngest wife to be more careful many times.
Do you agree with François that for the large numbers of men out there who aren't getting any, the new standards of dress are a kindness? Most of them weren't getting any before, anyway, and now that women no longer show their legs in public, François asserts that it has become easier not to think of, as he puts it, leurs chattes.Replies: @This Is Our Home
On that note, I know all about my own household set-up. I've told my youngest wife to be more careful many times.Replies: @Weltanschauung
Oh, c’est vous! I _thought_ your name rang a bell!
Do you agree with François that for the large numbers of men out there who aren’t getting any, the new standards of dress are a kindness? Most of them weren’t getting any before, anyway, and now that women no longer show their legs in public, François asserts that it has become easier not to think of, as he puts it, leurs chattes.
Do you agree with François that for the large numbers of men out there who aren't getting any, the new standards of dress are a kindness? Most of them weren't getting any before, anyway, and now that women no longer show their legs in public, François asserts that it has become easier not to think of, as he puts it, leurs chattes.Replies: @This Is Our Home
I agree sort of. But then I was brought up among all the no-clothes-girls and am still young enough to not know sexual famine so I don’t really notice it.
I am more desensitised even than poor dissolute François.