Against Nature (2 page)
Authors: Joris-Karl Huysmans
1896
Oct. Sojourn at the Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes.
1898
Jan.
La Cathédrale
(tr.
The Cathedral
, 1898), the third volume in the Durtal cycle, is published.
1898
16 Feb. Huysmans retires from the Civil Service after thirty-two years' service.
1899
June Leaves Paris to take up residence in his purpose-built house at Ligugé.
Publication of
La Magie en Poitou
(
Magic in Poitou
).
1900
18 Mar. Huysmans undergoes the ceremony of taking the robes of an oblate novice.
1900
April First meeting of the Académie Goncourt, of which Huysmans is president.
1901
Jan. Three studies by Huysmans of the old quarters of Paris â
La Bièvre; Les Gobelins, St-Séverin
â are reissued in a de luxe edition.
1901
21 March Huysmans takes his final vows as an oblate.
1901
8 June Publication of
Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam
(tr. 1923), the harrowing story of the Dutch martyr.
1901
Nov. Publication of
De Tout
(
This and That
), a collection of articles.
1901
Oct. Government laws on religious communities oblige Huysmans to leave the abbey at Ligugé.
1903
April Publication of
L'Oblat
(tr.
The Oblate
, 1924), the last volume in the Durtal cycle, recounting his stay at Ligugé.
1906
Sept.
Les Foules de Lourdes
(tr.
The Crowds of Lourdes
, 1926) published.
1906
8 Nov. Huysmans, realizing the gravity of his condition, drafts his will.
1907
Jan. Promoted to Officier de la Légion d'Honneur.
1907
12 May Death of Huysmans half an hour after the departure of Lucien Descaves, his literary executor.
1907
15 May Huysmans is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in the family grave.
1908
Posthumous publication of
Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs
(
Three Churches and Three Primitives
).
Thus when the universal sun has set does the moth seek the lamplight of privacy.
Karl Marx
â
Against Nature
fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground,' Joris-Karl Huysmans remembered in the preface to the 1903 de luxe edition of this notorious book.
1
The image of the meteorite â spectacular, explosive, otherworldly â to convey literary strangeness had been used by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in his enigmatic poem âLe Tombeau d'Edgar Poe' (âThe Tomb of Edgar Poe', 1877). âCalm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster', Mallarmé had written, and it is perhaps this line that Huysmans had in mind when he recalled the bemusement, the outrage and the marvel
Against Nature
provoked when it appeared in May 1884. In France and across Europe the book was read as the most flamboyant expression of what came to be known as âthe Decadence'. It was held up by some as a cautionary tale and by others as a manual of modern living; it was read as a moral fable and as a chilling case study of crisis and debauchery. Many felt that it marked the end of the novel, while a few saw it as the beginning of a new way of writing. For many critics, including Huysmans' former mentor and friend Emile Zola,
Against Nature
was an eccentric and unhealthy book, passionless, introspective, and above all glorying in its removal from the world. For others, like the critic and novelist Remy de Gourmont, it was formally and thematically liberating. It was a novel that seemed not to want to
be
a novel; nothing happened, and yet the writing was
dense, crowded and allusive. It was obscene, garish, depraved; but it was also a curiously ascetic and inward book. It dwelt fascinatedly on bodily functions, messy ailments and lurid sexual adventures, but it appeared also to strive for serenity and peace. In at least one respect
Against Nature
can be called a classic: it portrayed its time but also intervened in it. There are poems and stories inspired by or indebted to
Against Nature
in almost every European language, and Huysmans' creation even found its way into fiction as every wit, dandy or
femme fatale
had a copy ready to hand. The novel's hero, Duke Jean Floressas Des Esseintes â hoarder of literary treasures, lover of artifice and liver of the artistically mediated life â had joined Edgar Allan Poe, Schopenhauer and Baudelaire on the
fin de siècle
bookshelf.
Against Nature
is a brazen enough title in English, but in fact
Against the Grain
would better have captured the suggestive range of its French original,
A Rebours
, a far more open-ended title. To do something
à rebours
is to run countercurrent, to go against the flow, to do things the wrong way around; but it also suggests stubbornness, perversity, wilful difficulty â qualities and tendencies which Huysmans' hero, Des Esseintes, shares with the novel that tells his story. By contrast,
Against Nature
is too reductive and unsubtle a title, and reflects the climate of its English reception rather than the range and complexity of the novel Huysmans wrote.
2
By comparison with some of the more outlandish titles that appeared in 1884 â such as Péladan's
Le Vice suprême
(
The Supreme Vice
), Rachilde's
Monsieur Vénus
or Elémir Bourges'
Crépuscule des Dieux (Twilight of the Gods) â A Rebours
seemed mysterious and understated. The novel has proved critically inexhaustible, but it is also exhaustively written and perhaps exhausting to read. It is also
about
exhaustion: racial, social, moral, historical and aesthetic. It is a book of endings; yet for its author in his âPreface Written Twenty Years after the Novel' (Appendix I), it is also a compendium of beginnings. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic who interpreted European Symbolism for modernists such as Yeats and Eliot, called it the âbreviary of the Decadence',
3
while its most famous fictional reader, Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, found
it âpoisonous' and âthe strangest book that he had ever read'.
4
The novel has retained its cultish hold, as Marianne Faithfull recalls in her autobiography: âYou would ask your date, “Do you know Genet? Have you read
A Rebours
?'' and if he said yes you'd fuck.'
5
It is a fine irony that a novel about an impotent, reclusive and prematurely aged reactionary should become a must-read in the vigorous counter-culture of the 1960s. Today's readers may or may not feel the same as Dorian Gray or Marianne Faithfull; what is certain is that they will find it unlike any work of fiction they have encountered.
AGAINST NATURE
[I]t is the difference between the raw, white and direct light of a midday sun beating down on all things equally, and the horizontal light of evening, firing the strange clouds with reflections⦠Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?
Théophile Gautier,
Histoire du romantisme (History of Romanticism
)
For Gautier, discussing his friend Charles Baudelaire, âDecadence' is the dying sun as it projects its intricate and complex fires across the sky. It is twilight; not the Yeatsian âCeltic Twilight' prior to daybreak and revival, but the twilight of a sun setting for the last time on a tired globe and its tired inhabitants. For the artists and writers who proclaimed themselves âDecadent', it was a compelling metaphor: âwe are dying of civilization', wrote Edmond de Goncourt, a writer Huysmans admired and learned from. Many artists of the period invoked the decline and fall of the hyper-civilized Roman Empire as the most resonant âculture rhyme' for modern France. Certainly there were grounds for such views: a sense of historical decline symbolized by a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who
marched on the French capital in 1870, followed by the Commune and the siege of Paris in 1871, a bloody and divisive episode in French history whose memory endured until the Second World War. This they called âthe débâcle', and the symbolism was powerful: invaded and humiliated by the âbarbarian' Germans, then ruinously tearing itself apart, French civilization, guardian of âLatin' values, appeared to have peaked and begun a slow collapse. Huysmans, a (non-combatant) soldier during the Franco-Prussian war and a civil servant during the siege of Paris, witnessed the French defeat, the Commune and its brutal repression, and the national soul-searching that came in their aftermath.
But there was also a
malaise
more difficult to pin down: a sense that everything had been done, said, written, felt. As Des Esseintes muses reading Baudelaire, the late nineteenth century's was a âmind that ha[d] reached the October of its sensations'. Yet there was something wilfully self-dramatizing about all these decadent attitudes â after all, the nineteenth century had known extraordinary technological, political and scientific advances, and all of these had happened at breathtaking pace. While many embraced these changes, others saw them in unambiguously negative terms: âwe have spent the nineteenth century splitting hairs; how shall we spend the twentieth? Splitting them into four?' asked one of Huysmans' contemporaries.
Against Nature
is full of references to the century's end, the end of art, the end of creativity, and it was to what Mallarmé called the âmodern muse of Impotence' that the new generation looked: all writing seemed a rewriting, every reading a rereading. But there was another story, equally compelling: in art, literature, social and political theory and in science, the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented innovation. With poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and the Symbolists, novelists such as Zola and Maupassant, artists such as Manet and Rodin, composers such as Debussy or Erik Satie, we might object that, on the contrary, this was no decadence but a period of astonishing artistic richness and diversity. Perhaps the belief that there was nothing new was itself a necessary prelude to creating the new. This is one of the great paradoxes of the
late nineteenth century: that these contradictory views â of decadence and renewal, beginnings and ends, exhaustion and innovation â could be held simultaneously and often by the same people.
One of the great formative novels of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand's
René
(1802), had helped define what came to be called the âsickness of the century' (
mal du siècle
) felt by the rootless, aimless, self-indulgent aristocrats in a world which seemed not to need them. âAlone in the great desert of men' was how René, âlast of his race', put it: it was a historical, sexual and cultural dispossession, but it gave the Romantic writer opportunity to explore the mysteries of the infinitely desiring but finite self. As late as 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson mocked the persistence of âRené's malady' among the young of his own period: âYoung gentlemen with three or four hundred a year⦠look down from their pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life.'
6
When Huysmans loosed Des Esseintes upon the reading public, people interpreted his character, for all his disturbing newness, as part of an unfolding tradition: an orphan perhaps, but an orphan with a pedigree.
The end of the nineteenth century seemed to mirror its beginning, but whereas the Romantics had their illusions shattered, the Decadents merely had their disillusionment reinforced. Osip Mandelstam uses a 1913 review of a Russian translation of Huysmans'
Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches
, 1881) to distinguish between the Romantics and their Decadent successors, between the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century:
This book is almost intentionally physiological. Its primary theme is the clash between the defenceless but refined external organs of perception and insulted reality. Paris is hell⦠Huysmans's boldness and innovation stem from the fact that he managed to remain a confirmed hedonist under the worst possible conditions⦠The decadents did not like reality, but they did know reality, and that is what distinguishes them from the romantics.
7
âLive? Our servants will do that for us': the defiant words of the heroic and princely recluse of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's
Axël
(1890) became a supreme idealist battle-cry, uttered in heroic defiance of materialist society and its stultifying cult of bourgeois âcommon sense'. This was the epoch of the superman and of the individualist, but it was also the epoch of his less fortunate twin: the sickly, the consumptive, the neurotic. In Huysmans' novels, the self is not a goal but a refuge, no longer an aspiration but a point of final fallback; the heritage of individualism remained, but wounded, humiliated and in retreat.
The Romantic heroes had travelled to exotic places in search of themselves, only to discover that it was themselves they were trying to escape. They had, like René, posed on seashores, mountain tops and volcanoes. Their Decadent successors were mired in the filth of the crawling cityscape, compulsively drawn to its alternating tedium and exhilaration; but they were drawn also to interiors, the ornate, meticulously furnished, airless rooms that symbolize their retreat. Huysmans' characters, as Mandelstam notes, are among the most physiologically sensitive in literature, and their quest for peace or fulfilment takes its toll not just on their spirits but on their bodies. In Des Esseintes's case, the quest terminates indoors, the final bastion of the privacy that feeds on itself until there is nothing left. Des Esseintes thus became the exemplary Decadent figure: the last, sickly scion of a once great family, his mind addled by fantastical luxury and his body wracked by abuse, he retires from the nineteenth century â the âAmerican century' as both Des Esseintes and Huysmans call it â to build his own dream fortress.
Against Nature
is the tale of this obsession.