Submission (19 page)

‘I do have tea, if you like,’ he said, inviting me to sit. ‘Or perhaps a drink? I have whisky, port – well, I have everything. And an excellent Meursault.’

‘The Meursault, then,’ I said, but I was a little bit confused. I had some idea that Islam prohibited drinking alcohol, at least that’s what I’d heard. To be honest, it wasn’t a religion I knew much about.

He left the room, presumably to see about the wine. My armchair faced a high, old, lead-mullioned window overlooking the Roman arena. The view was really something, I think it was the first time I’d had such a complete view of the terraces. And yet after a few minutes I found myself perusing the bookshelves. They were impressive, too.

The two bottom shelves were full of bound photocopies. These were dissertations from various European universities. As I browsed the titles, my eye was drawn to a philosophy dissertation, presented at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, entitled ‘René Guénon: Reader of Nietszche’, by Robert Rediger. I was just pulling it from the shelf when Rediger came back into the room. I jumped, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong, and tried to slip it back in place. He walked over to me, smiling. ‘Don’t worry, there are no secrets here. And besides, why shouldn’t you be curious about the contents of a bookshelf? For a man like you, that’s almost a professional duty.’

Coming closer, he saw the title. ‘Ah, you’ve found my dissertation.’ He shook his head. ‘They gave me my doctorate, but it wasn’t much of a thesis. Nothing like yours, anyway. My reading was, as they say, selective. In retrospect, I don’t think Guénon was all that influenced by Nietszche. His rejection of the modern world was just as vehement as Nietzsche’s, but it had radically different sources. In any case, I’d write the thing very differently today. I have yours, too …’ he said, pulling another bound copy from the shelf. ‘As you know, we keep five copies in the university archives. So, considering how few researchers actually consult them in a given year, I thought I might as well keep one for myself.’

I could barely hear what he was saying – I was on the verge of collapse. It was almost twenty years since I’d been in the presence of ‘Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel’. It was extraordinary how thick it was, almost embarrassing – it was, I suddenly remembered, 788 pages long. To be fair, it also contained seven years of my life.

Still holding my dissertation, he led us over to the armchairs. ‘It really is a remarkable piece of work …’ he insisted. ‘It reminded me very much of the young Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of
The Birth of Tragedy
.’

‘Please, you’re exaggerating.’

‘I don’t think I am.
The Birth of Tragedy
was, after all, a sort of dissertation. And in both you find the same incredible profligacy, the same profusion of ideas, all simply flung onto the page, without the slightest preparation so that, really, the text is almost impossible to read – the astonishing thing is that you managed to keep it up for almost eight hundred pages. By the time he wrote the
Untimely Meditations
, Nietzsche had calmed down. He realised that you can’t overwhelm the reader with too many concepts at once, that you have to structure your argument and give him time to breathe. The same thing happened to you in
Vertigos of Coining
, which made it a more accessible book. The difference between you and Nietzsche is that Nietzsche kept going.’

‘I’m not Nietzsche.’

‘No, you’re not. But you’re you – and you’re interesting. And if you’ll forgive me for being blunt, I want you on my team. I might as well put my cards on the table, since you already know why you’re here: I want to convince you to come back and teach at the Sorbonne. I want you to work for me.’

At that moment the door opened, just in time to save me from having to answer. It was a plump woman, perhaps forty years old, with a kind face, carrying a tray of warm canapés arranged around an ice bucket. This held the promised bottle of Meursault.

‘That’s my first wife, Malika,’ he said once she’d left. ‘You seem to be meeting all my wives today. I married her when I was still living in Belgium … Yes, my family’s Belgian. So am I, for that matter. I was never naturalised, though I’ve lived here for twenty years.’

The canapés were delicious, spicy but not too; I tasted coriander. And the wine was sublime. ‘I don’t think people talk enough about Meursault!’ I said, with gusto. ‘Meursault is a synthesis. It’s like a lot of wines in one, don’t you think?’ I wanted to talk about anything besides my future as an academic, but I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew he’d return to the subject at hand.

After a decent interval of silence, he returned to the subject at hand. ‘I’m so glad it worked out with the Pléiade edition. It’s the obvious thing, the right thing – well, it’s a good thing all round. When Lacoue mentioned it to me, what could I tell him? I said you’d be the natural choice, the right choice, and that you happened to be the best choice, too. Now, I’ll be perfectly frank with you: apart from Gignac, I haven’t managed to enlist any faculty who are truly respected, who have real international reputations. It’s hardly a disaster, the university just opened. But the fact is, I want something from you and I haven’t got much to offer you in return. That is, I can offer you plenty of money, as you know, and money isn’t nothing. But from an intellectual standpoint, a teaching position at the Sorbonne is much less prestigious than editing a Pléiade. I know that. What I can promise is that nothing would be allowed to interfere with your real work. That’s a personal promise. No hard classes, just a couple of first- and second-year lectures. No dissertations to advise – I know what those are like, I’ve done enough of them myself. I’d arrange everything with the department.’

He stopped there. I got the distinct feeling that he’d used up his first round of arguments. He tasted the Meursault, I poured myself a second glass. It occurred to me that I had never felt so
desirable
. Glory had been a long time coming. Maybe my dissertation really had been as brilliant as he claimed, the truth was I remembered almost nothing about it; the intellectual leaps I made when I was young were a distant memory to me, and now I was surrounded by a kind of
aura
, when really my only goal in life was to do a little reading and get into bed at four in the afternoon with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky; and yet, at the same time, I had to admit, I was going to die if I kept that up – I was going to die fast, unhappy and alone. And did I really want to die fast, unhappy and alone? In the end, only kind of.

I finished my wine and poured myself a third glass. Through the bay window, I watched the sun setting over the arena. The silence became a little bit embarrassing. Well, if he wanted to
put his cards on the table
, two could play at that game.

‘There’s a condition, though …’ I said, cautiously. ‘And it isn’t trivial …’

He gave a slow nod of the head.

‘You think … You think I’m someone who could actually convert to Islam?’

He gazed at the floor, as if lost in intense personal reflections, then he looked me in the eye. ‘I do.’

The smile he gave me was luminous, innocent. It was the second time he’d graced me with it, so it came as slightly less of a shock. But still, his smile was awfully effective. At least now it was his turn to talk. I swallowed two lukewarm canapés in quick succession. The sun vanished behind the terraced steps; night washed over the arena. It was amazing to think that fights between gladiators and wild beasts had actually taken place here, two thousand years before.

‘You aren’t Catholic, are you? That could be a problem.’

No, in fact; I couldn’t say that I was.

‘And I don’t think you’re really an atheist, either. True atheists are rare.’

‘Really? On the contrary, I’d have said that most people in the Western world are atheists.’

‘Only on the surface, it seems to me. The only true atheists I’ve ever met were people in
revolt
. It wasn’t enough for them to coldly deny the existence of God – they had to refuse it, like Bakunin: “Even if God existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.” They were atheists like Kirilov in
The Possessed
. They rejected God because they wanted to put man in his place. They were humanists, with lofty ideas about human liberty, human dignity. I don’t suppose you recognise yourself in this description.’

No, in fact, I didn’t; even the word
humanism
made me want to vomit, but that might have been the canapés. I’d overdone it on the canapés. I took another glass of the Meursault to settle my stomach.

‘The fact is, most people live their lives without worrying too much about these supposedly philosophical questions. They think about them only when they’re facing some kind of tragedy – a serious illness, the death of a loved one. At least, that’s how it is in the West; in the rest of the world people die and kill in the name of these very questions, they wage bloody wars over them, and they have since the dawn of time. These metaphysical questions are exactly what men fight over, not market shares or who gets to hunt where. Even in the West, atheism has no solid basis. When I talk to people about God, I always start by lending them a book on astronomy …’

‘Your photos really are very beautiful.’

‘Yes, the beauty of the universe is striking, but the sheer size of it is what staggers the mind. You have hundreds of billions of galaxies, each made up of hundreds of billions of stars, some of them billions of light years – hundreds of billions of billions of kilometres – apart. And if you pull back far enough, to a scale of a billion light years, an order begins to emerge. The galaxy clusters are distributed according to a vast cosmic graph. If you go up to a hundred people in the street and lay out these scientific facts, how many will have the nerve to argue that the whole thing was created
by chance
? Besides, the universe is relatively young – fifteen billion years old at the most. It’s like the famous monkey and the typewriter: How long would it take a chimpanzee, typing at random, to rewrite Shakespeare’s plays? Well, how long would it take blind chance to reconstruct the universe? A lot more than fifteen billion years … And I’m not just speaking for the man in the street. The greatest scientists have thought so, too. In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton’s – just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies
and
the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God. He was such a firm believer that he spent the last years of his life writing an exegesis of the Bible – the one sacred text that was really available to him. Einstein wasn’t an atheist, either. The exact nature of his belief is harder to define, but when he told Bohr, “God does not play dice with the universe,” he didn’t mean it as a joke. To him it was inconceivable that the universe should be ruled by chance. The argument of the “watchmaker God”, which Voltaire considered irrefutable, is just as strong today as it was in the eighteenth century. If anything, it’s become even more pertinent as science has drawn closer and closer connections between astrophysics and the motion of particles. At the end of the day, isn’t there something ridiculous about some puny creature, living on an anonymous planet, in a remote spur of an ordinary galaxy, standing up on his hind legs and announcing, “God does not exist”? But forgive me, I’m rambling on …’

‘No, don’t apologise, I’m really interested,’ I said, sincerely. It’s true that I was starting to feel a little bit fucked up. When I glanced over at the table, I saw that the bottle of Meursault was empty.

‘You’re right,’ I went on, ‘that I don’t have any very solid grounds for my atheism. It would be presumptous to claim that I did.’

‘
Presumptous
– that’s the word. At the end of the day, there’s something incredibly proud and arrogant about atheist humanism. Even the Christian idea of incarnation is laughably pretentious. God turned Himself into a man … Why man and not an inhabitant of Sirius, or the Andromeda galaxy? Wouldn’t that be more likely?’

‘You believe in extraterrestrial life?’ I interrupted. I was surprised.

‘I don’t know, I haven’t given it much thought, but as a question of arithmetic, if you take all the myriad stars in the universe, each with its multiple planets, it would be shocking if life occurred only on earth. But that’s not important. All I’m saying is that the universe obviously bears the hallmarks of intelligent design, that it’s clearly the manifestation of some gigantic mind. Sooner or later, that simple idea is going to come back round. I’ve always known this, ever since I was young. All intellectual debate of the twentieth century can be summed up as a battle between communism – that is, “hard” humanism – and liberal democracy, the soft version. But what a reductive debate. Since I was fifteen, I’ve known that what they now call the return of religion was unavoidable. My family was Catholic – or rather, they were lapsed; really it was my grandparents who were Catholic – so naturally I started off turning towards the Church. Then, in my first year at university, I joined the nativist movement.’

My surprise must have shown, because he stopped and looked at me, a smile playing on his lips. Just then there was a knock at the door and Malika reappeared carrying a new tray with a cafetière, two cups, and a plate of pistachio baklava and
briouats
. She also brought in a bottle of
boukha
, with two small glasses.

Rediger poured us coffee. It was bitter and very strong, and it did me good. My head was instantly clear.

‘I’ve never hidden my youthful activities,’ he went on. ‘And my new Muslim friends never held them against me. To them it seemed natural that, when I started looking for a way out of atheist humanism, I should have gone back to my roots. Besides, we weren’t racists or fascists – though, to be completely honest, some of us were pretty close. But not me. Fascism always struck me as a ghastly, nightmarish, false attempt to breathe life into dead nations. Without Christianity, the European nations had become bodies without souls – zombies. The question was, Could Christianity be revived? I thought so. I thought so for several years – with growing doubts. As time went on, I subscribed more and more to Toynbee’s idea that civilisations die not by murder but by suicide. And then one day everything changed for me. It was 30 March, 2013, I’ll never forget – Easter weekend. At the time I was living in Brussels, and every once in a while I’d go and have a drink at the bar of the Métropole. I’d always loved art nouveau. There are magnificent examples in Prague and Vienna, and there are interesting buildings in Paris and London, too, but for me – right or wrong – the high point of art nouveau decor was the Hotel Métropole de Bruxelles, in particular the bar. The morning of 30 March, I happened to walk by and saw a sign that said the bar of the Métropole was closing for good, that very night. I was stunned. I went in and spoke to the waiters. They confirmed it; they didn’t know the exact reasons. To think that, until then, one could order sandwiches and beer, Viennese chocolates, and cakes with cream in that absolute masterpiece of decorative art, that one could live one’s daily life surrounded by beauty, and that the whole thing was about to disappear, in one stroke, in one of the capitals of Europe! … Yes, that was the moment I understood: Europe had already committed suicide. As a reader of Huysmans, you must sometimes get tired of his relentless pessimism, his endless railing against the mediocrity of his times. I know I do. But he was living at a time when the European nations were at their apogee, when they commanded vast colonial empires, and dominated the world! … It was an extraordinary moment, technologically – railways, electric lighting, the telephone, the phonograph, Eiffel’s steel constructions – and also artistically, but here there are too many names to mention, whether you look at literature, painting, or music …’