Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Yes, I am aware that there are determined characters who draw up plans, who plot in advance the course of their existence and who follow it; it is even accepted, if I am not mistaken, that with will power one can achieve anything. I am prepared to believe it, but I must confess that for my part I have never been a determined man or a crafty writer. My life and my writing have a strong element of passivity, of unawareness, and of forces outside myself.

  Providence showed me pity and the Virgin Mary was kind. I limited myself to not thwarting them when they revealed their intentions; I simply obeyed; I was led by what are known as ‘mysterious ways’; if there is anyone who can be certain of the emptiness he would be without God’s help, then it is I.

  Those without Faith will object that with ideas like these one is not far from fatalism and the denial of all psychology.

  Not so, for Faith in our Lord is not fatalism. Free will remains unaffected. If I so wished I could continue to yield to lustful excitements and remain in Paris and not go and suffer in a Trappist monastery. I am sure God would not have insisted; but despite insisting that free will remains intact, it has to be admitted that the Lord is heavily involved, that he harasses you, tracks you down, that he ‘grills’ you, to use a colourful term from rough policemen; but the fact remains that one can, if one wishes and at one’s own risk, tell Him to mind his own business.

  As for psychology, that is another matter. If we see it, as I do, from the perspective of conversion, then in its initial stages it is impossible to disentangle; certain areas of it might be clear, but others not; the subterranean workings of the soul remain out of our sight. There was undoubtedly, as I was writing Against Nature, a land-shift, the earth was being mined to lay foundations of which I was unaware. God was digging to set his fuses and he worked only in the darkness of the soul, in the night. Nothing could be seen; it was only years later that the sparks began to run along the wires. I felt my soul moving to these shocks; it was at the time neither especially painful nor especially clear: the liturgy, mysticism, art were its vehicles or its means; this generally happened in churches, in Saint-Séverin especially, which I would visit out of curiosity, out of boredom, when I had nothing to do. During the ceremonies I felt nothing more than an inner trepidation, a trembling that one feels when one sees or hears or reads a beautiful work of art, but there was no precise warning to get me ready to make up my mind.

  I was simply emerging, little by little, from the shell of my moral impurity; I was beginning to be disgusted with myself, but still I balked at the articles of faith. The objections I placed in my path seemed irresistible to me; and one morning, when I awoke, they were resolved, how I have never known. I prayed for the first time and the explosion happened.1

  To people who do not believe in God, all this seems mad. For those who have felt his work, no surprise is possible; and, if there were surprise, it would only be during the incubation period, when one sees and perceives nothing, the time of clearing the way for the foundations which we had no idea of were being laid.

  To sum up, I can understand up to a point what happened in the years 1891 – 5, between Là-Bas and En Route, but I understand nothing about the years 1884 – 91, between Against Nature and Là-Bas.

  If I myself did not understand, it was no wonder that others could not understand what drove Des Esseintes. Thus, Against Nature fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground and there was astonishment and fury; the press was thrown into confusion; never had it raved and roared in so many articles; after having called me an impressionistic misanthrope and called Des Esseintes a complicated imbecile and maniac products of the Ecole normale supérieure like M. Lemaître were indignant that I had not eulogized Virgil, and declared in a peremptory tone that the Latin writers of the Decadence were no more than ‘drivellers and cretins’. Other critical entrepreneurs took it upon themselves to advise me to take cold showers in a thermal prison; then it was the turn of the academics to get involved. In the Salle des Capucines, that arbiter of taste Sarcey, stunned, cried out: ‘I’ll be hanged if I can understand a single word of this novel.’ Eventually, to cap it all, serious reviews such as in the Revue des deux mondes dispatched their leader M. Brunetière to compare the book with the vaudeville farces of Waflard and Fulgence.

  In all this hubbub, only one writer saw clearly, Barbey d’Aurevilly, who moreover did not know me. In an article in the Constitutionnel dated 28 July 1884, which has since been published in his book, Le Roman contemporain, he wrote: ‘After such a book, the only choice left open to the author is between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross.’

  The choice is made.

  J.-K. Huysmans

  (1903)

  NOTE

  1. In En Route, a similar metaphor is used for the mystery of conversion of Durtal: ‘Yes, but this operation is like what happens to a mine which explodes only after having been dug…; I could have followed it, followed the movement of the spark as it burned along the fuse, but in this case I could not. I exploded without warning’ (En Route, Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1996), p. 76.

  Appendix II

  Reviews of and Responses to Against Nature

  A. Meunier (J.-K. Huysmans), Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no. 263 (1885)

  …I watched the man as he talked to me. He was like a courteous cat, very polite, almost likeable, but edgy, ready to show his claws at the least word. Dry, thin, greying, with an expressive face and a look of boredom – this was my first impression.

  – So, I said, getting to the heart of the matter, you must be pleased with the literary success of Against Nature?

  – Yes, the book exploded into the midst of literary youth like a grenade. I thought I had been writing for ten people, crafting a kind of hermetic book, locked to idiots. To my great surprise, it happened that a few thousand people scattered around the globe were in a state of mind analogous to mine, sickened by the ignominious roguishness of this century, hungry also for works of art that had been more or less well executed, but which had at least been honestly put together, and without that despicable rush to get into print that runs so rife in France at present…

  – And if I asked you about Naturalism, since after all you are taken to be one of its most out-and-out adherents?

  – I would simply answer that I write what I see, what I live, what I feel, and that I write the least badly I can. If that is Naturalism, so much the better. When it comes down to it, there are writers with talent and writers without talent, regardless of whether they are Naturalists, Romantics, Decadents, take your pick, I don’t care! To my mind, it’s a matter of having talent, and that’s all there is to it!…

  All in all, my first impression was borne out: Huysmans is definitely the sour misanthrope, the anaemic nerve-bundle of his books, which I shall briefly consider here.

  *

  He began with a mediocre collection of prose poems entitled Le Drageoir à épices; then he wrote a novel, his first, about prostitutes, Marthe, which was published in Brussels in 1876, and which, despite its chaste approach, was banned in France as an affront to morality. L’Assommoir had not yet made the remarkable impact we all now know. Marthe has since been republished in Paris and has met with a degree of success. The book contains, here and there, valuable insights, already betraying a certain feverishness of style, but for me its language is too redolent of the Goncourt brothers. It is the work of a beginner, curious and vibrant but too short and without enough personality.

  It is not until Les Soeurs Vatard that we discover the bizarre temperament of this writer, a puzzling mix of refined Parisian and Dutch painter. It is from this fusion, to which one could add a pinch of black humour and rough English comedy, that gives these books their distinctive imprint.

  Les Soeurs Vatard has some fine pages; it appeared in 1879, and introduces for the first time into modern literature remarkably painstaking descriptions of railways and locomotives. It is a slice of life, of the lives of the women who bind books, earthy and lewd and t
rue to life, straight from the brush of old Steen, but wielded by an alert and supple Parisian hand, but I personally prefer En Ménage, which remains my favourite among the books we owe to this author.

  This is because the book gives insights into melancholy and explores particular stricken and feeble souls. It is the anthem of Nihilism! An anthem made even darker by outbursts of ominous light-heartedness and the language of a ferocious mind… But in Against Nature furious rage emerges, the apathetic mask cracks, denunciations of life blaze in every line; we are far from the quiescent and disappointed philosophy of the two books that precede it. It is madness, foaming at the mouth; I do not think that hatred and contempt for a century has ever been so passionately expressed as in this strange novel, which falls so far outside all contemporary literature.

  One of the great faults of M. Huysmans’ books is, in my opinion, that it is the same character who pulls the strings in each of his works. Cyprien Tibaille and André Folantin are, after all, no more than one and the same person, transported into different settings. And this person is quite obviously M. Huysmans, one can feel it; we are a long way from the flawless artistry of Flaubert, who concealed himself behind his work and created such marvellously diverse characters. M. Huysmans is quite incapable of such self-restraint. His sardonic face appears, lying in wait, on every page, and the constant intrusion of a personality, however interesting it may be, in my opinion diminishes the quality of a work, and eventually wearies with its predictability.

  I will not deal here with his style. It has all been said in a judicious article by M. Hennequin. Certain of his pages are of unequalled splendour, especially in Against Nature, in which a chapter on Gustave Moreau, to mention but one, is and will rightly remain famous. But there is another element which critics have generally pretended not to notice. I mean the psychological analysis of his characters – or rather his character, for as I have said, there is only one: a weak-willed character, troubled, self-tormenting, rational, and far-sighted enough to explain himself the direction in which his illness was taking him and to describe it in fluent and precise language. One of the original features of this author lies in his analysis of character, an originality equal, in my view, to that of his style. Read La Crise juponnière, in En Ménage, and reflect that none of this tiny corner of the soul had ever been glimpsed before him. How authentic is this examination of the crisis, and with what skilful clarity the author reveals it to us! Or read the splendid chapter in Against Nature, the chapter devoted to childhood memories and to artfully narrated theological convolutions, and decide if these explorations of the deep vaults of the spirit are not wholly profound and wholly new!

  Over and above his works, M. Huysmans has published a volume of Croquis parisiens, where, following Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire, he tried to fashion prose poetry. To some extent he renewed and reinvigorated the genre, using strange conceits, blank verse as refrains, and beginning and ending his poems with strange, repeated rhythmic lines, even adding a kind of separate ritournelle or ‘envoi’, as in the ballads of Villon and Deschamps. There are also writings on art, collected in his book L’Art moderne, the first book seriously to explain the work of the Impressionists and to give Degas the high position he will occupy in the future. M. Huysmans was also the first to champion Raffaëlli, at the time when no one paid any attention to the painter; and he was the first to interpret and launch the work of Odilon Redon. What modern art critic has such gifts of unerring taste and understanding of art in all its most diverse forms?

  In short, if there is any justice, M. Huysmans, once so despised by vulgar folk, will receive his share of acclaim. At the moment I must admit that, as far as I am concerned, I share very few of his beliefs. Personally, I believe in a healthier literature, in a less showy style perhaps, but also less complicated. I also believe in a more expansive and general and less rarefied psychological analysis. From this point of view, Balzac seems to me the master – he so carefully dissected the great and universal passions of human beings, fatherly love, greed. However high I place M. Huysmans among the true writers of a century that has so few of them, I cannot help considering him an exception, a bizarre and morbid writer, jerky and showy, an artist to his fingertips. In the words of another strange writer of contorted and luxuriant epithets, with disconcerting and remote ideas, Léon Bloy, ‘dragging the image by the hair or by the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified syntax’. But all that, however much we may admire him, does not seem to me to add up to the beautiful healthiness of conception and style of which undoubted and absolute masterpieces are made.

  Paul Ginisty, Gil Blas (21 May 1884)

  M. Huysmans, a strange character with a bizarre and alembicated talent, is the type of man to have pulled off this immense mystification, a prodigious artistic hoax… The task, if task there was, was not an easy one. It required an exceptional breadth of reading, for M. Huysmans’s neurotic, like some new kind of Bouvard and Pécuchet, goes through the repertoire of human knowledge. Above all, it required, so as to stay bearable throughout its three hundred pages, the surprise value of a violent, intense, irritating style, but a style where brilliance might flash amid the shocks…

  Léo Trézenik, Lutéce (1 – 8 June 1884)

  Decadence of what?

  This is pure and simple collapse.

  Moral society, like the intellectual world, is founded on a framework of prejudices, conventions and reciprocal back-scratching, etc., which only stays upright by some miracle of balance. The social wheels only keep turning because of the speed and because no one has, until now, dared put a stick into the spokes and blow up the whole machine. Some, like M. Huysmans, sap the foundations, attack the base directly, show you that these great blocks, seemingly so solid, are just pale cardboard boxes, perfect imitations of stone but in reality full of wind.

  That is why a book like Against Nature is a book to put in a corner of one’s library, within reach, because it is a formidable pickaxe-blow to the pale cardboard of social and literary conventions, and comes from a wholehearted atheist, a robust pessimist – complete, absolute, and at peace with himself.

  It’s as if we barely hear the blow of the pickaxe as it demolishes the edifice, so seduced are we by the stunning erudition that overflows from these pages, so blinded by the silkiness of this precious language, so refined and yet so nervous and muscular and full-blooded.

  Emile Goudeau, L’Echo de Paris (10 June 1884)

  […] M. Huysmans, with a remarkable talent and stupefying erudition, has put together in his book Against Nature all the elements of human despair. He has solidly spat on every pleasure, and kept for himself the terrible joy of abolishing human joy. An unhealthy book, but artistically very beautiful, perfectly crafted and skilfully wrought.

  His despairing conclusion nonetheless leaves a faint hope, since his hero Des Esseintes, instead of taking refuge in suicide, agrees on doctor’s orders to return to the world he so despised…

  Read this majestically hopeless book, then bury your impossible illusions, drink fresh water, and start loving – anything, even a dog.

  Barbey d’Aurevilly, Le Pays (29 July 1884)

  …Des Esseintes is not a human being created like Obermann, Renè or Adolphe, these passionate and guilty heroes from human novels. He is a machine that has gone haywire. Nothing more.

  …When [Des Esseintes] is not a scoundrel he is a coward… He has ridiculous and idiotic inventions. Remember the story of the tortoise whose shell he has gold-plated and in which he has jewels incrusted! Remember the books in his library whose spirit the bindings are meant to translate! Remember those flowers which are supposed to kill natural flowers! remember the alchemy of his scents, madly sought in combinations of well-known perfumes! and tell me if these fantasies are not absurd! I can quite understand that the vulgarities of life offend a proud and elevated spirit, but in order to escape and to replace them one must not stoop to these piffling trifles… And M. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes, who plays the Titan face
to face with life, shows himself to be a stupid Tom Thumb when it comes to changing it.

  …This is the punishment of such a book, one of the most decadent we can number among the decadent books of this century of decadence… Undertaken in despair, the book ends with a despair that is greater than that with which it began. At the end of all the unbelievable follies he has dared, this author has felt the shattering sorrow of disappointment. A mortal anguish pervades his book. The miserable little castle of cards – his little cardboard Babel – built against God and the world, collapses on top of him […] The Revolutionary has felt his own nothingness…

  ‘After Les Fleurs du mal’, I once told Baudelaire, ‘you have only to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross.’ Baudelaire chose the foot of the cross.

  Will the author of Against Nature choose it also?

  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), chapter 10

  His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it? he wondered. He went towards the little pearl-coloured octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair, and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicatesound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.