IN SEARCH OF THE LOST TRADITION

PAST UTOPIA IN MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ’S SOUMISSION

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the dystopian novel Soumission (2015), written by the French author Michel Houellebecq, from a political perspective, considering the trajectory of the protagonist François, who witnesses a profound transformation of France – from secular to religious – with the election of its first Muslim president, in an imagined election in 2022. The article argues that the novel, which engages with contemporary dystopian literature, reveals a sense of exhaustion in the face of secular liberalism and highlights a feeling of nostalgia for so-called traditional values, selected from the long trajectory of Western European culture, related to religion and patriarchy, which ironically align with the power project represented in the book by the Muslim government, according to the narrator’s view. In this text, we interpret the novel according to the concept of “retrotopia” by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2017), who posits that there is, nowadays, a diffuse sense of returning to the past as a defense mechanism against a world in constant transformation and conflict. The article is divided into three segments: firstly, we provide a brief context of the current political tensions in France; secondly, we offer an overview of Houellebecq’s works that engage with these tensions; finally, in the last part, we analyze the novel Soumission by using Bauman’s concept of retrotopia.