Jenai Engelhard Presents on Houellebecq’s Soumission
Jenai Engelhard Humphreys presented a paper, “Sous-mission and the Mission Civilisatrice: Houellebecq’s Parody of Empire and Decadence,” at the University of Oxford, Christchurch, at a conference titled Exoticism, Colonialism and Decadence around the fin de siècle. This conference, organized by Dr. Jennifer Yee of Oxford, explored the intersections between ideas of decadence and the experience and discourses of colonialism.
Engelhard’s paper situated Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission within the literary tradition of decadence, and historically in relation to the aftermath of France’s colonial past and subsequent loss of empire. Recalling Marx’s dictum that history enacts itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” she contends that Soumission can be read as a double farce: one political, one literary. The first parodies the mission civilisatrice in the “sous-mission” to the loss of France’s standing as empire, and its farcical conversion to Islam by means of a sham Napoleon. The second parodies literary decadence in the conversion of the decadent extremes of J. K. Huysmans’ À Rebours into the soumission of Houellebecq’s literature of banal neutrality.
One of the highlights of the conference was taking breakfast each morning in The Great Banquet Hall at Christ Church, where images of Henry VIII, Hogwarts’ Professor McGanagall of Gryffindor, and a fantastical window by Lewis Carroll haunt the imagination.