Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  I could certainly sign my name at the bottom of the pages of Against Nature about the Church, for they seem indeed to have been written by a Catholic.

  Yet I thought myself so far from religion! I did not imagine that it was only a short step from Schopenhauer, whom I admired beyond reason, to Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job. The premises about Pessimism are the same, only when the time comes to reach a conclusion, the philosopher disappears. I liked his ideas about the horror of life, the stupidity of the world, the mercilessness of destiny; I like them also in the Holy Scriptures; but Schopenhauer’s observations lead nowhere; he leaves you, so to speak, in the lurch; in the end, his aphorisms are only a herbarium of dry plaints; whereas the Church explains the origins and the causes, indicates the conclusions, offers remedies. She does not limit herself to giving you a spiritual consultation, but treats and cures you, whereas the German quack, once he has proved the incurability of your condition, simply sneers and turns his back on you.

  His Pessimism is nothing other than that of Scriptures from which he has borrowed it. He has said no more than Solomon, no more than Job, no more even than the Imitation, which long before him summed up his philosophy in a single sentence: ‘In truth it is a wretched thing to live on this earth.’

  From a distance these similarities and differences are clearly pronounced, but in those days if I noticed them I hardly lingered over them; the urge to conclude did not tempt me; the route marked out by Schopenhauer was smooth and scenic, I drove calmly along it with no desire to learn where it led. In those days I had no clear grasp of when debts would need to be repaid, no apprehension of when the end would come; the mysteries of the catechism seemed to me childish; besides, like all Catholics, I was completely ignorant about my religion; I did not grasp that all is mystery, that we live only in mystery, that if such a thing as chance existed it would be even more mysterious than Providence. I did not accept the idea of suffering inflicted by a God, I imagined that Pessimism could console elevated souls. What stupidity! It was precisely this that lacked evidence, that, to use a term beloved of Naturalism, had no ‘human document’ to support it. Never has Pessimism been of any comfort to those sick in body or in soul!

  After all these years, when I reread these pages where such resolutely false theories are presented as true, I smile.

  But what strikes most as I read is this: all the novels I have written since Against Nature are there in embryo in this book. The chapters are, in fact, only the starting-points for the volumes that followed them.

  The chapter on the Latin literature of the Decadent period was, if not developed, at least more searchingly explored when I wrote about liturgy in En Route and L’Oblat. I would republish it today without any changes, except in the case of Saint Ambrose, whose thin prose and turgid rhetoric I still dislike. He still seems to me as I described him then – a ‘tedious Christian Cicero’ – but, by contrast, as a poet he is charming; and his hymns and those of his followers contained in the Breviary are among the most beautiful that the Church has preserved. I should add that the admittedly rather unusual literature of the hymnal could have found a place in the reserved compartment of this chapter.

  I have no more taste for the classical Latin of Maro [Virgil] and of Chick-Pea [Cicero] now than I did in 1884; as in the days of Against Nature, I prefer the language of the Vulgate to the language of the Augustan age, even to that of the Decadent period, stranger though it may be, with its gamey stink and its marbled streaks of mould. After disinfecting and rejuvenating the language, in order to address a category of so far unexpressed ideas, the Church created a range of high-sounding expressions and exquisitely tender diminutives, and seems to me to have fashioned for herself a language far superior to that of Paganism, and Durtal still has the same views as Des Esseintes on this subject.

  The chapter on precious stones I took up again in La Cathédrale, but from the perspective of the symbolism of gems. I gave life to the lifeless stones of Against Nature. I do not for a moment deny that a beautiful emerald may be admired for the sparks that glitter in the fire of its green water, but if one is unaware of the language of symbols, is it not a silent stranger with whom one cannot converse and who is herself silent because we cannot understand her speech? But she is more and better than that.

  Without going so far as to say, like the old sixteenth-century writer Estienne de Clave, that precious stones, like human beings, propagate by means of a scattering of seeds in the womb of the earth, one can certainly say that they are meaningful minerals, substances that speak; that they are, in a word, symbols. They have been seen in this way since earliest antiquity, and the figurative language of gems is one of the branches of a Christian symbolism completely forgotten by priests and laymen of our own day and which I have tried to reconstitute in outline in my books on the basilica of Chartres.

  The chapter in Against Nature is thus only superficial and skimming the surface. It is not what it should be, an array of jewels from another world. It is made up of gems more less well described and more or less well displayed. That is all, and it is not enough.

  The paintings of Gustave Moreau, the engravings by Luyken, the lithographs by Bresdin and Redon are as I still see them. I have no modifications to make to the arrangement of that little museum.

  As for the terrible chapter VI, whose number corresponds, without any preconceived plan, to that of the commandment it transgresses, and for certain parts of chapter IX which may be classed with it, I would obviously not write them again in the same way. It would at least have been necessary to explain them more thoroughly in terms of that diabolical perversity that, in the shape of sexual depravity, takes over people’s exhausted minds. It seems indeed as if nervous disorders opened fissures in the soul through which the spirit of Evil enters. There is an enigma in this that remains unexplained; the word ‘hysteria’ resolves nothing; it may be enough to define a physical condition, to denote the uncontrollable turbulence of the senses, but it does not get at the spiritual consequences that fasten upon it, or especially, the sins of duplicity and falsehood which nearly always take root in it. What are the ins and outs of sin-laden malady? The sick one, his soul as it were possessed by a sort of domination entrenched in the disorder of his wretched body – how much is his responsibility lessened? Nobody knows: on this subject, medicine talks nonsense and theology remains silent.

  In the absence of a solution which he could obviously not offer, Des Esseintes should have considered the question from the point of view of transgression and at least expressed some regret; he refrained from self-blame, and he was wrong. But although he was brought up by Jesuits whose praises – more than Durtal – he sings, he later grew so defiant of divine constraints, so brutishly determined to wallow in the mud of his carnality!

  In any case, these chapters seem like staging-posts unconsciously planted to show the way to Là-Bas. It should also be noted that des Esseintes’ library contained a certain number of books of magic and that the ideas on sacrilege put forward in chapter VII of Against Nature are a hook on which to hang a future volume which will treat the subject in a more sustained way.

  As for Là-Bas, which terrified so many people, I would not write the book in the same way now that I have returned to the Church. Certainly the wicked and sensual side of the book is reprehensible, yet I affirm that I skipped a great deal. I hardly said anything; the evidence found in that book is, by comparison with what I omitted and what I still have in my files, insipid and flavourless confections!

  But I believe that despite its cerebral dementia and its alvine madness, this book, by virtue of its very subject, rendered a service. It refocused attention on the machinations of the Evil One who had succeeded in making people disbelieve his existence; it was the starting-point for all the renewed studies of the eternal advance of Satanism. By revealing the hateful practices of necromancy it has helped to annihilate them; in short, the book took the side of the Church and fought against the Devil.

  To return
to Against Nature, for which Là-Bas is a substitute, I can only say about the chapter on flowers what I have already said about the chapter on precious stones.

  Against Nature considers them only from the point of view of their shapes and shades, not from the meanings they might divulge; Des Esseintes only chose bizarre orchids, but silent ones. I should add that in this book it would have been difficult to make voiceless flora speak, for the symbolic language of flowers died with the Middle Ages, and the vigorous pidgins cherished by Des Esseintes were unknown to the allegorists of that period.

  The companion-piece to this botanical chapter I have since written in La Cathédrale on the subject of the horticultural liturgy which is the source of such strange pages by Saint Hildegaard, Saint Meliton and Saint Eucher.

  Quite different is the question of scents, whose mystical symbols I revealed in the same book.

  Des Esseintes was interested only in secular perfumes, essences or extracts, and worldly perfumes, composites or bouquets.

  He might also have tried out the aromas of the Church, incense, myrrh, and that strange Thymiama cited in the Bible which is still required in ritual to be burned with incense beneath the mouths of church bells when they are baptized, after the Bishop has washed them with holy water and made the sign of the cross over them with the Holy Chrism and the oil of extreme unction; but this fragrance seems to have been forgotten by the Church itself and I suspect that it would astonish a priest if he were asked for Thymiama.

  The recipe is none the less recorded in Exodus. Thymiama was made of storax, galbanum, incense and onycha, and this last substance is nothing other than the operculum of a certain kind of shell which is dredged up from the marshes of the Indies and yields purple dye.

  Given how little is known about this shellfish and where it comes from, it is difficult, not to say impossible, to prepare authentic Thymiama. This is a pity, for had it been otherwise this lost perfume would surely have aroused in Des Esseintes lavish imaginings of ceremonial festivals and liturgical rites of the Orient.

  As for the chapters on contemporary secular and religious literature, these have, to my mind, like those on Latin literature, remained true. The chapter devoted to secular writing helped throw into relief poets who were then not widely known among the public: Corbière, Mallarmé, Verlaine. I retract nothing of what I wrote nineteen years ago: my admiration for these writers remains; indeed the admiration I professed for Verlaine has even grown. Arthur Rimbaud and Jules Laforgue would have deserved a place in Des Esseintes’ anthology, but they had at the time published nothing and it was only much later that their works appeared.

  I do not imagine, on the other hand, that I shall ever come to enjoy the modern religious authors that Against Nature laid waste to. No one will change my opinion that the critical works of the late Nettement are imbecilic and that Mrs Augustus Craven and Miss Eugènie de Guèrin are flabby bluestockings and sterile bigots. To me their concoctions are flavourless; Des Esseintes passed on his taste for spices to Durtal, and I believe that they would still understand one another well enough to create, in place of these insipid emulsions a spicey essence of art.

  I have not changed my mind about the literature produced by the Poujoulat and Genoude fraternity either, but I would be less harsh today on Father Chocarne, mentioned among a bunch of pious cacographers, who at least composed a few pithy pages on mysticism in his introduction to the works of Saint John of the Cross, and I would likewise be gentler on de Montalbert who, though lacking in talent, provided us with an incoherent and incomplete but in the end moving work on monks. Above all, I would no longer write that the visions of Angela de Foligno are silly and shapeless; it is the opposite that is true, but I must say in my defence that I had only read Hello’s translation. And the latter was possessed by a mania for pruning, sweetening and tidying up the mystics, for fear of offending the pretended modesty of the Catholics. He squeezed dry a work of passion, full of sap, and extracted from it only a cold and colourless juice, tepid in the feeble flame of his style.

  That said, if as a translator Hello revealed himself to be a pious old fuss-pot, it is only fair to declare that he was, when he wrote for himself, a wielder of original ideas, a perspicacious exegete and a most impressive analyst. He was even, among the writers of his ilk, the only thinker. I came to d’Aurevilly’s aid in promoting the work of such an uneven but fascinating man, and Against Nature has I believe contributed towards the success that his best book, L’Homme, has had since his death.

  The conclusion of this chapter on modern Church literature was that among the geldings of religious art there was only one stallion, Barbey d’Aurevilly; and this estimation remains unshakeably correct. This man was the only artist, in the pure sense of the word, produced by the Catholicism of the period; he was a great prose writer, an admirable novelist whose audacity made all the prudes bray in exasperation at the explosive vehemence of his expressions.

  Finally, if ever a chapter may be considered the starting-point of other books, it is the chapter on plain-song on which I have subsequently elaborated in all of my books, in En Route and especially in L’Oblat.

  After this brief examination of each of the specialities displayed in the windows of Against Nature, the only conclusion is this: the book was the beginning of all of my Catholic work, which may be found there entire in its embryonic form.

  And the incomprehension and stupidity of a few dumb-witted and over-excited priests yet again appears unfathomable to me. For years they called for the destruction of this work which, incidentally, is not my property, without even realizing that the mystical books which followed it are incomprehensible without it, because it is, I repeat, the source from which they spring. Besides, how can one appreciate the work of a writer as a whole if one does not take it from its beginning and trace it step by step; most importantly, how can one follow the progress of Grace in a soul if one suppresses the traces of its passage, if one wipes out its first prints?

  What is in any case true is that Against Nature broke with what preceded it, with Les Soeurs Vatard, En Ménage, A Vau-l’Eau, and that the book put me on a road whose destination I had no idea of.

  Zola, shrewder than the Catholics, sensed this. I remember going to spend a few days in Mèdan after the publication of Against Nature. One afternoon as the two of us were walking in the countryside he suddenly stopped, his brow darkened and he reproached me for having written the book, saying that I had dealt a terrible blow to Naturalism, that I was leading the school astray, that I was in fact burning my boats with such a novel, for no literature could come from a genre exhausted in a single volume, and he urged me – in a friendly way, for he was a very kind man – to return to the beaten track, to harness myself to a study of manners.

  I listened, thinking that he was both right and wrong, – right to accuse me of undermining Naturalism and barring any future path, – wrong in the sense that the novel as he conceived it seemed to me moribund, worn out with repetition, and, whether he liked it or not, of no interest to me.

  There were many things that Zola could not understand; first of all, my need to open windows, to escape from an atmosphere which was stifling; then, the urge which possessed me to shake prejudices, break the limits of the novel, to bring art, science, history into it; in short, no longer to use the novel form except as a frame in which to set more serious work. For me, that was what struck me most at the time, the need to suppress the traditional plot, to abolish even love, womankind, to concentrate the spotlight on a single character – at all costs to do something new.

  Zola did not reply to these arguments with which I was trying to persuade him, but went on repeating the same declaration: ‘I cannot accept that people cast aside their style and their beliefs; I cannot accept that people reject what they once adored.’

  But see here! Did he himself not once play the part of the good Sicambrian? If he did not indeed modify his technique of composition and writing, he at least varied his way of conceiving hum
anity and explaining life. After the dark pessimism of his first books, have we not been given, under the guise of Socialism, the smug optimism of his last works?

  It has to be admitted that no one understood the human soul less than the Naturalists who took it upon themselves to observe it. They saw existence only as a single entity; they only accepted it as conditioned by what is believable, and I have since learned by experience that the unbelievable is not always the exception in this world, that the adventures of Rocambole are sometimes as truthful as those of Gervaise and Coupeau.

  But the idea that Des Esseintes could be as true to life as one of his own characters threw Zola off balance, it almost angered him.

  In these few pages I have so far discussed Against Nature mostly from the point of view of literature and art. I must now discuss it from the point of view of Grace, and show how much of the unknown, what projections of a soul which does not know itself, can often be found in this book.

  I must admit that the clear and obvious Catholic direction Against Nature takes remains a mystery to me.

  I did not go to a religious school but to a lycée; I was never pious in my youth, and the element of childhood memory, of first communion, of religious education, which so often plays a prominent part in religious conversion, played none in mine. And what further complicates the problem and confuses my analysis is that, while I was writing Against Nature, I did not set foot in a church, I knew no practising Catholics, and no priests; I sensed no Divine influence guiding me towards the Church, I lived quietly in my trough; it seemed perfectly natural to satisfy the whims of my senses, and the thought that such self-indulgence were prohibited never occurred to me.

  Against Nature appeared in 1884 and I entered a Trappist monastery to be converted in 1892; nearly eight years passed before the seeds sown in this book germinated; let us say two years, three even, for the muffled, obstinate, sometimes palpable work of Grace to go forward. That would still leave five years during which I cannot remember having the slightest inclination towards Catholicism, any remorse for the life I was leading or any desire to change it. Why and how was I switched on to a track that was at the time lost to me in the night? I absolutely cannot say: apart from the influence of the convent and the cloister and the prayers of a Dutch family of fervent believers, which I hardly knew anyway, nothing will explain the complete unconsciousness of that last cry, the religious call, on the last page of Against Nature.