Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  For the twentieth time this insoluble problem tormented him. He would have dearly loved to escape from the state of doubt and suspicion against which he had struggled in vain at Fontenay; now that he was forced to turn over a new leaf, he would have liked to force himself to possess the faith, to glue it down as soon as he had it, to fasten it with clamps to his soul, in short to protect it against all those reflections that tend to shake and dislodge it. But the more he longed for it, the less the void in his mind was filled and the longer the visitation of Christ was delayed. Indeed, in proportion as his hunger of religion increased and he passionately craved, as a ransom for the future and a help in his new life, this faith that now showed itself to him, though the distance separating him from it appalled him, doubts crowded into his fevered mind, upsetting his unsteady will, rejecting on grounds of common sense and by mathematical demonstration the mysteries and dogmas of the Church.

  ‘It ought to be possible to stop arguing with yourself,’ he told himself miserably; ‘it ought to be possible to shut your eyes, let yourself drift along with the stream and forget all those damnable discoveries that have blasted religion from top to bottom in the last two hundred years.

  ‘And yet,’ he sighed, ‘it isn’t really the physiologists or the sceptics who are demolishing Catholicism; it’s the priests themselves, whose clumsy writings would shake the firmest convictions.’

  Among the Dominicans, for instance, there was a Doctor of Theology, the Reverend Father Rouard de Card, a preaching friar who, in a booklet entitled The Adulteration of the Sacramental Substances, had proved beyond all doubt that the majority of Masses were null and void, simply because the materials used by the priest were sophisticated by certain dealers.2

  For years now, the holy oil had been adulterated with poultry-fat; the taper wax with burnt bones; the incense with common resin and old benzoin. But what was worse was that the two substances that were indispensable for the holy sacrifice, the two substances without which no oblation was possible, had also been adulterated: the wine by repeated diluting and the illicit addition of Pernambuco bark, elderberries, alcohol, alum, salicylate and litharge; the bread, that bread of the Eucharist which should be made from the finest of wheats, with bean-flour, potash and pipe-clay!

  And now they had gone even further; they had had the effrontery to leave out the wheat altogether, and most hosts were made by shameless dealers out of potato-flour!

  Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact. In the second volume of his Moral Theology, His Eminence Cardinal Gousset had also dealt at length with this question of fraud from the divine point of view; according to this unimpeachable authority it was quite impossible to consecrate bread made of oatmeal, buckwheat or barley, and if there was at least some doubt in the case of rye bread, there could be no doubt or argument about potato-flour, which, to use the ecclesiastic phrase, was in no sense a competent substance for the Blessed Sacrament.

  Because of the easy manipulation of this flour and the attractive appearance of the wafers made with it, this outrageous swindle had become so common that the mystery of transubstantiation scarcely existed any longer and both priests and faithful communicated, all unwittingly, with neutral species.

  Ah, the days were far distant when Radegonde, Queen of France, used to make the altar-bread with her own hands; the days when, according to the custom at Cluny, three fasting priests or deacons, clad in alb and amice, after washing face and fingers, sorted out the wheat grain by grain, crushed it under a millstone, kneaded the dough with pure, cold water and baked it themselves over a bright fire, singing psalms all the while.

  ‘Still, there’s no denying,’ Des Esseintes told himself, ‘that the prospect of being constantly hoodwinked at the communion table itself isn’t calculated to consolidate beliefs that are already far from steady. Besides, how can you accept the idea of an omnipotent deity balked by a pinch of potato-flour and a drop of alcohol?’

  These thoughts made his future look gloomier than ever, his horizon darker and more threatening.

  It was clear that no haven of refuge or sheltering shore was left to him. What was to become of him in this city of Paris where he had neither relatives nor friends? He no longer had any connexion with the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which was now quavering with old age, crumbling away into the dust of desuetude, lying in the midst of a new society like a rotten, empty husk. And what point of contact could there possibly be between him and that bourgeois class which had gradually climbed to the top, taking advantage of every disaster to fill its pockets, stirring up every sort of trouble to command respect for its countless crimes and thefts?

  After the aristocracy of birth, it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth, the caliphate of the counting-house, the despotism of the Rue du Sentier, the tyranny of commerce with its narrow-minded, venal ideas, its selfish, rascally instincts.

  More cunning and contemptible than the impoverished aristocracy and the discredited clergy, the bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous love of show and their old-world arrogance, which it cheapened through its own lack of taste, and stole their natural defects, which it turned into hypocritical vices. Overbearing and underhand in behaviour, base and cowardly in character, it ruthlessly shot down its perennial and essential dupe, the mob, which it had previously unmuzzled and sent flying at the throats of the old castes.

  Now it was all over. Once it had done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the contagiousness of his stupidity. The result of his rise to power had been the suppression of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty, the destruction of all art; in fact, artists and writers in their degradation had fallen on their knees and were covering with ardent kisses the stinking feet of the high-placed jobbers and low-bred satraps on whose charity they depended for a living.

  In painting, the result was a deluge of lifeless inanities; in literature, a torrent of hackneyed phrases and conventional ideas – honesty to flatter the shady speculator, integrity to please the swindler who hunted for a dowry for his son while refusing to pay his daughter’s, and chastity to satisfy the anti-clerical who accused the clergy of rape and lechery when he himself was forever haunting the local brothel, a stupid hypocrite without even the excuse of deliberate depravity, sniffing at the greasy water in the wash-basins and the hot, spicy smell of dirty petticoats.

  This was the vast bagnio of America transported to the continent of Europe; this was the limitless, unfathomable, immeasurable scurviness of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down like a shameful sun on the idolatrous city, which grovelled on its belly, chanting vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of the Bank.

  ‘Well, crumble then, society! perish, old world!’ cried Des Esseintes, roused to indignation by the ignominious spectacle he had conjured up – and the sound of his voice broke the oppressive spell the nightmare had laid on him.

  ‘Ah!’ he groaned, ‘To think that all this isn’t just a bad dream! To think that I’m about to rejoin the base and servile riff-raff of the age!’

  To soothe his wounded spirit he called upon the consoling maxims of Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself Pascal’s sorrowful maxim: ‘The soul sees nothing that does not distress it on reflection’; but the words echoed in his mind like meaningless noises, his weariness of spirit breaking them up, stripping them of all significance, all sedative virtue, all effective and soothing force.

  He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him, that only the impossible belief in a future life could bring him peace of mind.

  A fit of rage swept away like a hurricane all his would-be resignation, all his attempted indifference. He could no longer shut his eyes to the fact that there was nothing to be done, nothing whatever, that it was all over; the bourgeois were guzzling like picnickers from paper ba
gs among the imposing ruins of the Church – ruins which had become a place of assignation, a pile of debris defiled by unspeakable jokes and scandalous jests. Could it be that the terrible God of Genesis and the pale martyr of Golgotha would not prove their existence once for all by renewing the cataclysms of old, by rekindling the rain of fire that once consumed those accursed towns, the cities of the plain? Could it be that this slime would go on spreading until it covered with its pestilential filth this old world where now only seeds of iniquity sprang up and only harvests of shame were gathered?

  The door suddenly flew open. In the distance, framed in the opening, some men in cocked hats appeared with clean-shaven cheeks and tufts of hair on their chins, trundling packing-cases along and moving furniture; then the door closed again behind the man-servant, who disappeared carrying a bundle of books.

  Des Esseintes collapsed into a chair.

  ‘In two days’ time I shall be in Paris,’ he told himself.

  ‘Well, it is all over now. Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! – Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!’

  Appendix I

  Preface, Written Twenty Years After the Novel

  Huysmans’ preface was written for the 1903 publication of Against Nature, a luxury limited edition of the novel with engravings by Auguste Lepère. It is usually reprinted at the head of the standard French editions. Here translated by Patrick McGuinness.

  I believe that all literary people are like me, that they never reread their works once they have been published. Indeed, there is nothing more disillusioning or more painful than to look over one’s sentences after so many years. They have, as it were, been decanted, and settled to the bottom of the book; and generally books are not like wines, improving with age; once discoloured by time the chapters have gone flat and their bouquet faded.

  I had this feeling about certain of the bottles stored in the bin marked Against Nature when the time came for me to uncork them.

  And, with a certain melancholy, I am trying to recall, as I leaf through these pages, my possible state of mind when I wrote them.

  In those days Naturalism was at its height; but this school of writers, which was to fulfil the invaluable service of placing real characters in precise settings, was condemned to repeat itself over and over, and endlessly to go over the same ground.

  Naturalism had no room – in theory at least – for exceptions; it thus confined itself to the portrayal of ordinary experience, striving, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who came as close as possible to the average person. This ideal had been achieved, in its way, in a masterpiece which – far more than L’Assommoir – was the embodiment of Naturalism: Gustave Flaubert’s, L’Education sentimentale. For those of us who met at the ‘Soirées de Medan’, this novel was a bible; but little came of it. It was perfectly achieved, and even Flaubert himself could not write another book like it, so in those days we were all reduced to roaming around it and exploring more or less beaten tracks.

  It must be admitted that Virtue is an exception here on earth, and so it was excluded from the Naturalist framework. Not having the Catholic conception of the fall from grace and of temptation, we were unaware of the struggles and sufferings from which Virtue springs; the heroism of the soul, triumphing over life’s pitfalls, escaped us. It would not have occurred to us to describe this struggle, with its highs and lows, its wily attacks and feints, or the able allies standing at the ready deep in their cloisters and often far from those the Devil is assailing. Virtue seemed to us the attribute of individuals without curiosity or bereft of sense, and in any case of too little emotional interest to treat from an artistic point of view.

  This left the vices; but there was little left uncultivated in that field. It was limited to the terrain of the Seven Deadly Sins, and even then only one of these – the one that set itself against God’s sixth commandment – was more or less available to us.

  The others had been dreadfully over-harvested, and there were barely any grapes left to pick. Avarice, for example, had been pressed to its last drop by Balzac and Hello. Pride, Anger and Envy had been dragged through every Romantic publication, and these dramatic subjects had been so unrecognizably distorted by theatrical overuse that it would have taken real genius to reinvigorate them in a book. As for Gluttony and Sloth, they seemed more suited to being embodied in minor characters and to fit supporting roles rather than lead roles and prima donnas in novels of manners.

  The truth is that Pride would have been the most magnificent of sins to study, with its infernal ramifications of cruelty to others and false humility, or that Gluttony, dragging in its wake Luxury and Sloth and Covetousness, would have provided the material for surprising investigations, if these sins had been scrutinized by a Believer with the lamps and the torch of the Church; but none of us was ready for this task; so we had no alternative but to chew over the easiest offence of all to dissect, the sin of Luxury in all its forms. And God knows how we chewed over it, but this kind of roundabout ride was short-lived. Whatever we thought up, the novel could be summed up in these brief lines: knowing why Mr so-and-so committed or did not commit adultery with Mrs so-and-so. If one wanted to be distinguished and make one’s mark as an author of the most fashionable sort, one made this sexual transaction occur between a marquise and a count; if on the contrary one wanted to be a popular novelist, a writer with all the tricks of the trade, one set it up between a low-class suitor and a common working girl; only the setting was different. The distinguished tone seems to have prevailed with today’s reader, for I see that at present he favours not plebeian or bourgeois love-affairs but continues to relish the waverings of the marquise as she goes to join her seducer in some small apartment whose appearance changes according to the decorative fashions of the day. Will she? Won’t she? This is called a psychological study. Personally I have nothing against that.

  However, I admit that when I happen to open a book and find the inevitable seduction and the no less inevitable adultery, I hasten to close it, having absolutely no interest in finding out how the promised idyll will end. Books with no documentary value, books which teach me nothing, no longer interest me.

  When Against Nature appeared, that is, in 1884, this then was the situation: Naturalism was wearing itself out going over the same ground. The reservoir of insights that each writer had built up, drawing on himself and on others, was beginning to run out. Zola, who was a great designer of theatrical scenery, got along by painting bold and more or less accurate canvases. He was very good at suggesting the illusion of movement and life; his protagonists were bereft of soul, quite simply impelled by impulses and instincts, and this simplified the task of analysis. They moved about, accomplished a few summary acts, and their bold silhouettes peopled the settings that became the main characters of his dramas. In this way he celebrated the markets, department stores, railways, mines, and the human beings caught up in these settings played only secondary or walk-on roles. But Zola was Zola, that is to say a somewhat unwieldy artist, but with powerful lungs and heavy fists.

  The rest of us, less broad-shouldered and seeking a more subtle and more truthful art, must have wondered whether Naturalism was not coming to a dead end, and whether we might soon be running into a brick wall.

  To tell the truth, these reflections only came to me much later. I was vaguely searching for ways out of a dead end in which I was suffocating, but I had no fixed plan and Against Nature, which liberated me from a dead-end literature by letting me breathe again, is a perfectly unconscious work, put together without preconceived ideas, without plans for the future, without anything at all.

  It came
to me first as a brief fantasy, in the form of a bizarre short story; I imagined it partly as a counterpart to A Vau-l’Eau transferred to another world; I had pictured another Mr Folantin, better-read, more refined and richer, who had discovered in artifice a diversion from the disgust of life’s petty torments and the Americanized manners of his day. I envisaged him soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings.

  And, as I thought about it, the subject grew, requiring patient research: each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, flowers, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.

  The strange thing was that, without my realizing it at first, I was drawn by the nature of my work itself to study the Church from a number of angles. It was in fact impossible to trace one’s way back to the only unblemished times humanity has ever known, to the Middle Ages, without realizing that the Church was at the centre of everything, that art existed through her and by her. Not being a believer, I looked at her, a little defiant, taken aback by her greatness and her glory, wondering why a religion which seemed to me to have been created for children could have inspired such marvellous works of art.

  I prowled around her, groping my way, guessing more than I could see, piecing together a whole for myself from the odds and ends I found in museums and in books. Today, after surer and more extensive investigations, as I look over the pages of Against Nature which deal with Catholicism and religious art, I am aware that this minute panorama, painted on the pages of notepads, is accurate. What I was painting then was succinct; it lacked development but it was truthful. Since then I have simply expanded and elaborated my sketches.