It is a truth if not universally then at least widely acknowledged that all fiction is inherently political. In fact, today, many writers would argue that all fiction should be political, and even explicitly ideological. Yet we’ve all read bad ideological novels, where the the setting and plot are so obviously tailored to suit the author’s beliefs that it makes it hard as a reader to get on board. So what then makes for a good ideological novel? Is it simply about agreeing with the author’s ideology? Or is there something more—something about how the ideology relates to the world? (Hint: it’s the second one.) To understand, let’s look at two novels that are unabashedly ideological, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, one of which works and the other of which doesn’t (you can probably guess which is which).
Houellebecq for me is a very difficult author to write about. Many friends and fellow writers whom I respect have enthusiastically recommended his books to me, and the literary establishment seems to have decided that he’s not only a good writer but in fact a great one. Vulture even recently included one of his novels in their list of canonical 21st century books. But as a Muslim-American, I can never see past Houellebecq’s Islamophobia. I knew what I was getting into when I began Submission, but even then I found the book emotionally trying (or “triggering,” to put it in modern parlance). It’s clear from Submission that Houellebecq sees Islam as inherently evil, so much so that it’s not even the primary target of his critique (that honor is reserved for France’s academic class, depicted in the novel as simpering and impotent). Islam to Houellebecq is simply the Big Other, the monolithic force that will one day swallow up poor Europe and all its culture.
Submission is set in the near future (2022, now much nearer than it was when the book was released in 2015), and in its bizarre vision of what France will look like then, a conservative and patriarchal Muslim political party ends up winning the presidential election after the Socialists give them their support—a completely ludicrous scenario that sounds more like right-wing fan-fiction than serious literature, given that there is no Islamic political party in France and that most of France’s Muslims vote for left-wing parties. The novel’s central character is François (oh how subtle) a middle-aged professor of literature who loves to sleep with his students. François agonizes for a few hundred pages over results of the election and its implications for his country. There are references to Joris-Karl Huysmans, the decadent nineteenth-century writer who eventually converted to Catholicism and whom I’ve written about on this blog before, as well as Charles Martel, who in 732 defeated the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours/Poitiers and kept them from conquering France and who is held up by the European (and American) right as a symbol of Christian resistance to the “Islamic hordes”. But eventually, despite all his agonizing, François decides to convert to Islam after being promised a steady academic job and multiple younger wives, just like all his academic colleagues.
Beyond its offensively reductive portrayal of Islam, Submission fails as an ideological novel because its vision of a dystopian future is completely at odds with reality. There is, after all, literally no chance that a conservative Muslim will become President of France in 2022, which make it clear that the political arguments advanced by the book are only meant to stoke xenophobia rather than depict a plausible reality. In fact, it’s far more likely that the Islamophobic and reactionary Marine Le Pen and her neo-fascist National Front (many of whose members probably loved Houellebecq’s novel) will win the next elections, plunging France and Europe into a twenty-first century version of 1930s Germany. An ideological novel about that grim future would be interesting, because it would feel possible. Submission, by contrast, is just the strange fantasy of a xenophobic reactionary who’s clearly upset that there are now Muslim people in France (ironic given that France spent most of the nineteenth and half the twentieth century colonizing the Muslim world). It’s nothing more than a twenty-first-century version of The Camp of the Saints, that racist 1973 novel that everyone googled back in 2016 after prominent white nationalist Steve Bannon mentioned it, in which another bigoted French author fear-mongered to a racist readership about non-white immigrants.
By contrast, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is an ideological novel that works, because its vision of a reactionary patriarchal future is one that, unfortunately, still feels like a real possibility. The Republic of Gilead, Atwood’s fictional future state, a theocracy in which women’s rights are completely stripped away, is clearly her response to the growing conservatism of the 1980s (the novel was published in 1985), in which the political and cultural victories of the feminist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s seemed in danger of disappearing. Unlike Houellebecq, whose dystopia is based on his own bigoted fantasy, Atwood bases her dystopia on actual political and social trends that continue to this day, which is why the novel continues to resonate and why the T.V. show has been such a resounding hit.
Ultimately then, the ideological novel needs to have the right relationship to power—The Handmaid’s Tale works because the critique goes upward, towards the group that is in power at the time Atwood is writing. Submission on the other hand critiques a historically and in some cases currently marginalized minority group. The American equivalent would be if someone wrote a novel in which women take over the U.S. government and force all men to become their sex slaves—not only would it be reactionary, it would also be utterly ludicrous, since it completely inverts the social and political realities of the present. Thankfully, Atwood is a better writer than Houellebecq and her novel serves as the perfect example of the ideal ideological novel—one that uses its imagined world to say something profound and necessary about the inequalities of our real one.