Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  In this way the Fathers managed to gain a real hold upon their pupils, to mould to some extent the minds they cultivated, to guide them in certain specific directions, to inculcate particular notions and to ensure the desired development of their ideas by means of an insinuating, ingratiating technique which they continued to apply in after-years, doing their best to keep track of their charges in adult life, backing them up in their careers and writing them affectionate letters such as the Dominican Lacordaire wrote to his former pupils at Sorrèze.1

  Des Esseintes was well aware of the sort of conditioning to which he had been subjected, but he felt sure that in his case it had been without effect. In the first place, his captious and inquisitive character, his refractory and disputatious nature had saved him from being moulded by the good Fathers’ discipline or indoctrinated by their lessons. Then, once he had left school, his scepticism had grown more acute; his experience of the narrow-minded intolerance of Legitimist society, and his conversations with unintelligent churchwardens and uncouth priests whose blunders tore away the veil the Jesuits had so cunningly woven, had still further fortified his spirit of independence and increased his distrust of any and every form of religious belief.

  He considered, in fact, that he had shaken off all his old ties and fetters, and that he differed from the products of lycées and lay boarding-schools in only one respect, namely that he retained pleasant memories of his school and his schoolmasters. And yet, now that he examined his conscience, he began to wonder whether the seed which had fallen on apparently barren ground was not showing signs of germinating.

  As a matter of fact, for some days he had been in an indescribably peculiar state of mind. For a brief instant he would believe, and turn instinctively to religion; then, after a moment’s thought, his longing for faith would vanish, though he remained perplexed and uneasy.

  Yet he was well aware, on looking into his heart, that he could never feel the humility and contrition of a true Christian; he knew beyond all doubt that the moment of which Lacordaire speaks, that moment of grace ‘when the last ray of light enters the soul and draws together to a common centre all the truths that lie scattered therein’, would never come for him. He felt nothing of that hunger for mortification and prayer without which, if we are to believe the majority of priests, no conversion is possible; nor did he feel any desire to invoke a God whose mercy struck him as extremely problematical. At the same time the affection he still had for his old masters led him to take an interest in their works and doctrines; and the recollection of those inimitable accents of conviction, the passionate voices of those highly intelligent men, made him doubt the quality and strength of his own intellect. The lonely existence he was leading, with no fresh food for thought, no novel experiences, no replenishment of ideas, no exchange of impressions received from the outside world, from mixing with other people and sharing in their life, this unnatural isolation which he stubbornly maintained, encouraged the re-emergence in the form of irritating problems of all manner of questions he had disregarded when he was living in Paris.

  Reading the Latin works he loved, works almost all written by bishops and monks, had doubtless done something to bring on this crisis. Steeped in a monastic atmosphere and intoxicated by the fumes of incense, he had become over-excited, and by a natural association of ideas, these books had ended up by driving back the recollections of his life as a young man and bringing out his memories of the years he had spent as a boy with the Jesuit Fathers.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Des Esseintes said to himself, after a searching attempt to discover how the Jesuit element had worked its way to the surface at Fontenay; ‘ever since boyhood, and without my knowing it, I’ve had this leaven inside me, ready to ferment; the taste I’ve always had for religious objects may be proof of this.’

  However, he tried his hardest to persuade himself of the contrary, annoyed at finding that he was no longer master in his own house. Hunting for more acceptable explanations of his ecclesiastical predilections, he told himself he had been obliged to turn to the Church, in that the Church was the only body to have preserved the art of past centuries, the lost beauty of the ages. She had kept unchanged, even in shoddy modern reproductions, the goldsmiths’ traditional forms; preserved the charm of chalices as slender as petunias, of pyxes simply and exquisitely styled; retained, even in aluminium, in fake enamel, in coloured glass, the grace of the patterns of olden days. Indeed, most of the precious objects which were kept in the Cluny Museum, and which by some miracle had escaped the bestial savagery of the sansculottes, came from the old abbeys of France. Just as in the Middle Ages the Church saved philosophy, history and literature from barbarism, so she had safeguarded the plastic arts and brought down to modern times those marvellous examples of costume and jewellery which present-day ecclesiastical furnishers did their best to spoil, though they could never quite succeed in destroying the original qualities of form and style. There was therefore no cause for surprise in the fact that he had hunted eagerly for these antique curios, and that like many another collector he had bought relics of this sort from Paris antiquaries and country dealers.

  But however much he dwelt on these motives, he could not quite manage to convince himself. It was true that, after careful thought, he still regarded the Christian religion as a superb legend; a magnificent imposture; and yet, in spite of all his excuses and explanations, his scepticism was beginning to crack.

  Odd as it might seem, the fact remained that he was not as self-confident now as in his youth, when the Jesuits’ supervision had been direct and their teaching inescapable, when he had been entirely in their hands, belonging to them body and soul, without any family ties or outside influences to counteract their ascendancy. What is more, they had implanted in him a certain taste for things supernatural which had slowly and imperceptibly taken root in his soul, was now blossoming out in these secluded conditions, and was inevitably having an effect on his silent mind, tied to the treadmill of certain fixed ideas.

  By dint of examining his thought-processes, of trying to join together the threads of his ideas and trace them back to their sources, he came to the conclusion that his activities in the course of his social life had all originated in the education he had received. Thus his penchant for artificiality and his love of eccentricity could surely be explained as the results of sophistical studies, super-terrestrial subtleties, semi-theological speculations; fundamentally, they were ardent aspirations towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a distant beatitude, as utterly desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.

  He pulled himself up short, and broke this chain of reflections.

  ‘Come, now,’ he told himself angrily. ‘I’ve got it worse than I thought: here I am arguing with myself like a casuist.’

  He remained pensive, troubled by a nagging fear. Obviously, if Lacordaire’s theory was correct, he had nothing to worry about, seeing that the magic of conversion was not worked at a single stroke; to produce the explosion the ground had to be patiently and thoroughly mined. But if the novelists talked about love at first sight, there were also a number of theologians who spoke of conversion as of something equally sudden and overwhelming. Supposing that they were right, it followed that nobody could be sure he would never succumb. There was no longer any point in practising self-analysis, paying attention to presentiments or taking preventive measures: the psychology of mysticism was non-existent. Things happened because they happened, and that was the end of it.

  ‘Dammit, I’m going crazy,’ Des Esseintes said to himself. ‘My dread of the disease will bring on the disease itself if I keep this up.’

  He managed to shake off this fear to some extent, and his memories of boyhood faded away; but other morbid symptoms supervened. Now it was the subjects of theological disputations that haunted him to the exclusion of everything else. The school garden, the lessons, the Jesuits might never have been, his mind was so completely dominated by abstractions; in spite of himself,
he began pondering over some of the contradictory interpretations of dogma and the long-forgotten apostasies recorded in Father Labbe’s work on the Councils of the Church. Odd scraps of these schisms and heresies, which for centuries had divided the Western and Eastern Churches, came back to mind. Here, for instance, was Nestorius denying Mary’s right to the title of Mother of God because, in the mystery of the Incarnation, it was not the God but the man she had carried in her womb; and there was Eutyches maintaining that Christ could not have looked like other men, since the Godhead had elected domicile in his body and had thereby changed his nature utterly and completely. Then there were some other quibblers asserting that the Redeemer had had no body at all and that references to his body in the Holy Books should be understood figuratively; Tertullian could be heard positing his famous quasi-materialistic axiom: ‘Anything which lacks a body does not exist; everything which exists has a body of its own’; and finally that hoary old question debated year after year came up again: ‘Was Christ alone nailed to the cross, or did the Trinity, one in three persons, suffer in its triple hypostasis on the gibbet of Calvary?’ All these problems teased and tormented him; and automatically, as if he were repeating a lesson he had learnt by heart, he kept asking himself the questions and responding with the answers.

  For several days in succession, his brain was a seething mass of paradoxes and sophisms, a tangle of split hairs, a maze of rules as complicated as the clauses of a law, open to every conceivable interpretation and every kind of quibble, and leading up to a system of celestial jurisprudence of positively baroque subtlety. Then these abstract obsessions left him, and a whole series of plastic impressions took their place, under the influence of the Gustave Moreau pictures hanging on the walls.

  He saw a procession of prelates passing before his eyes, a line of archimandrites and patriarchs lifting their golden arms to bless the kneeling multitudes, or wagging their white beards as they read or prayed aloud; he saw silent penitents filing into crypts; he saw great cathedrals rising up with white-robed monks thundering from their pulpits. Just as De Quincey,2 after a dose of opium, had only to hear the words ‘Consul Romanus’ to conjure up whole pages of Livy, to see the consuls coming forward in solemn procession or witness the Roman legions moving off in pompous array, so Des Esseintes would be left gasping with amazement as some theological expression evoked visions of surging multitudes and episcopal figures silhouetted against the fiery windows of their basilicas. Apparitions like these kept him entranced, hurrying in imagination from age to age, and coming down at last to the religious ceremonies of modern times, to the accompaniment of endless waves of music, mournful and tender.

  Here there was no longer any room for argument or discussion; there was no denying that he had an indefinable feeling of veneration and fear, that his artistic sense was subjugated by the nicely calculated scenes of Catholic ceremonial. His nerves shuddered at these memories, and then, in a sudden mood of revolt, a swift volte-face, ideas of monstrous depravity came to him – thoughts of the profanities foreseen in the Confessors’ Manual, of the impure and ignominious ways in which holy water and consecrated oil could be abused.3 An omnipotent God was now confronted by the upright figure of a powerful adversary, the Devil; and it seemed to Des Esseintes that a frightful glory must result from any crime committed in open church by a believer filled with dreadful merriment and sadistic joy, bent on blasphemy, resolved to desecrate and befoul the objects of veneration. The mad rites of magical ceremonies, black masses and witches’ sabbaths, together with the horrors of demonic possession and exorcism, were enacted before his mind’s eye; and he began to wonder if he were not guilty of sacrilege in possessing articles which had once been solemnly consecrated, such as altar cards, chasubles and custodials. This idea, that he was possibly living in a state of sin, filled him with a certain pride and satisfaction, not unmixed with delight in these sacrilegious acts – which might not be sacrilegious at all, and in any case were not very serious offences, seeing that he really loved these articles and did not put them to any depraved uses. He beguiled himself in this way with prudent, cowardly thoughts, the uncertainty of his soul preventing him from perpetrating overt crimes, robbing him of the necessary courage to commit real sins of real iniquity with real intent.

  Eventually, little by little, this casuistic spirit left him. He then looked out, as it were, from the summit of his mind, over the panorama of the Church and her hereditary influence on humanity down the ages; he pictured her to himself in all her melancholy grandeur, proclaiming to mankind the horror of life, the inclemency of fate; preaching patience, contrition, the spirit of self-sacrifice; endeavouring to salve the sores of men by pointing to the bleeding wounds of Christ; guaranteeing divine privileges and promising the better part of paradise to the afflicted; exhorting the human creature to suffer, to offer to God as a holocaust his tribulations and his offences, his vicissitudes and his sorrows. He saw her become truly eloquent, speaking words full of sympathy for the poor, full of pity for the oppressed, full of menace for tyrants and oppressors.

  At this point, Des Esseintes found his footing again. It is true that this admission of social corruption had his entire approval, but on the other hand, his mind revolted against the vague remedy of hope in a future life. Schopenhauer, in his opinion, came nearer to the truth.4 His doctrine and the Church’s started from a common point of view; he too took his stand on the iniquity and rottenness of the world; he too cried out in anguish with the Imitation of Christ:5 ‘Verily it is a pitiful thing to live on earth!’ He too preached the nullity of existence, the advantages of solitude, and warned humanity that whatever it did, whichever way it turned, it would always remain unhappy – the poor because of the sufferings born of privation, the rich because of the unconquerable boredom engendered by abundance. The difference between them was that he offered you no panacea, beguiled you with no promises of a cure for your inevitable ills.

  He did not drum into your ears the revolting dogma of original sin; he did not try to convince you of the superlative goodness of a God who protects the wicked, helps the foolish, crushes the young, brutalizes the old and chastises the innocent; he did not extol the benefits of a Providence which has invented the useless, unjust, incomprehensible and inept abomination that is physical pain. Indeed, far from endeavouring, like the Church, to justify the necessity of trials and torments, he exclaimed in his compassionate indignation: ‘If a God has made this world, I should hate to be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.’

  Yes, it was undoubtedly Schopenhauer who was in the right. What, in fact, were all the evangelical pharmacopoeias compared with his treatises on spiritual hygiene? He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity.

  Setting off from the same starting-point as the Imitation, but without losing itself in mysterious mazes and unlikely by-paths, this theory reached the same conclusion, an attitude of resignation and drift.

  However, if this resignation, frankly based on the recognition of a deplorable state of affairs and the impossibility of effecting any change, was accessible to the rich in intellect, that made it all the more difficult of attainment for the poor, whose clamorous wrath was more easily appeased by the kindly voice of religion.

  These reflections took a load off Des Esseintes’s mind; the great German’s aphorisms calmed the tumult of his thoughts, while at the same time the points of contact between the two doctrines helped each to remind him of the other. Nor could he forget the poetic and poignant atmosphere of Catholicism in which he had been steeped as a boy, and whos
e essence he had absorbed through every pore.

  These recurrences of belief, these fearful intimations of faith had been troubling him more particularly since his health had begun to deteriorate; they coincided with certain nervous disorders that had recently arisen.

  Ever since his earliest childhood, he had been tormented by inexplicable revulsions, by shuddering fits which chilled him to the marrow and set his teeth on edge whenever, for instance, he saw a maid wringing out some wet linen. These instinctive reactions had continued down the years, and to this day it still caused him real suffering to hear a piece of stuff being torn in two, to rub his finger over a bit of chalk, to feel the surface of watered silk.

  The excesses of his bachelor days and the abnormal strains put on his brain had aggravated his neurosis to an astonishing degree and still further diluted the impoverished blood of his race. In Paris he had been obliged to have hydropathic treatment6 for trembling of the hands and for atrocious neuralgic pains that seemed to cut his face in two, hammered away at his temples, stabbed at his eyelids and brought on fits of nausea he could only overcome by lying flat on his back in the dark.

  These troubles had gradually disappeared, thanks to the steadier, quieter life he was leading; but now they were coming back in a different form and affecting every part of his body. The pains left his head to attack his stomach, which was hard and swollen, searing his innards with a red-hot iron and stimulating his bowels to no effect. Then a nervous cough, a dry, racking cough, always beginning at the same time and lasting precisely the same number of minutes, woke him as he lay in his bed, seizing him by the throat and nearly choking him. Finally he lost his appetite completely; the hot, gassy fires of heartburn flared up inside his body; he felt swollen and stifled, and could not bear the constriction of trouser-buttons or waistcoat-buckles after a meal.