Against Nature (Á Rebours)

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.

  Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892; English translation, 1895)

  We will now examine the ideal ‘decadent’ that Huysmans draws so complacently and in such detail for us, in Against Nature. First, a word on the author of this instructive book. Huysmans, the classical type of the hysterical mind without originality, who is the predestined victim of every suggestion, began his literary career as a fanatical imitator of Zola, and produced in his first period of development, romances and novels which… greatly surpassed his model in obscenity. Then he swerved from naturalism… and began to ape the Diabolists, particularly Baudelaire. A red thread unites both of these otherwise abruptly contrasted methods, viz., his lubricity… He is, as a languishing ‘Decadent’, quite as vulgarly obscene as when he was a bestial ‘Naturalist’.

  Against Nature can hardly be called a novel, and Huysmans, in fact, does not call it so… We have seen how slavishly M. Huysmans, in his drivel about tea, liqueurs and perfumes, follows to the letter the fundamental principle of the Parnassians – of ransacking technical dictionaries. He has evidently been forced to copy the catalogues of commercial travellers dealing in perfumes and soaps, teas and liqueurs, to scrape together his erudition in current prices…

  We have him now, then, the ‘super-man’ (surhomme) of whom Baudelaire and his disciples dream, and whom they wish to resemble: physically, ill and feeble; morally, an arrant scoundrel; intellectually, an unspeakable idiot who passes his whole time choosing the colours and stuffs which are to drape his room artistically, in observing the movements of mechanical fishes, in sniffing perfumes and sipping liqueurs… A parasite of the lowest grade of atavism, a sort of human sacculus, he would be condemned, if he were poor, to die miserably of hunger in so far as society, in misdirected charity, did not assure to him the necessities of life in an idiot asylum.

  Emile Zola, Letter to Huysmans, 20 May 1884

  …Now shall I tell you frankly what bothers me in the book? First, I repeat, confusion. Maybe this is the builder in me protesting, but I am not happy that Des Esseintes is as mad at the start as he is at the end, that there is no form of progression, that the different parts come about through painful authorial transitions, and that you show us a kind of magic lantern, changing arbitrarily. Is it the character’s neurosis that makes him lead such a life, or is it the life that makes him neurotic? There is a reciprocity is there not? But none of this is clearly set out. I think the work would have had a more shocking effect, especially in its dealings with ineffable things, if you had based it on something more logical, however crazy it might have been. Another thing: why is Des Esseintes so afraid of illness? He’s obviously not a Schopen-hauerean if he’s afraid of death? It would have been best for him to get carried off by his stomach illness, since the world doesn’t seem habitable to him. Your ending, his resignation to the stupidity of living, grates with me. It would have been good to see him mull death over more if you didn’t want to finish with the crude closure of his death.

  There you are my friend, those are all my reservations… All in all, I have spent three very happy evenings. This book will at least count as a curiosity among your works; be proud to have written it.

  Stéphane Mallarmé, Letter to Huysmans, 18 May 1884

  Here it is, this unique book, which had to be written – and it has, by you – and at no other moment in literature than now!

  …The great thing in all of this, and the strength of your work (which will be attacked as a work of demented imagination, etc.) is that there is not one atom of fantasy: you have managed, in your refined enjoyment of essences, to reveal yourself more documentary than any contemporary…

  …I cannot wait, not to thank you (for you have not spoken to please me), but to say how simply and deeply glad I am that my name circulates, quite at home, in this beautiful book (the back room of your mind), a guest dressed in proud clothes designed by the most exquisite artistic sympathy! I believe in only two kinds of glory, each almost as illusory as the other; one is to be found in the delirium of a people for whom one could artistically fashion a new idol; the other in seeing oneself, reading a much-loved book, appearing from the depths of its pages where one had been, without knowing it, all along and by the author’s will. You have made this latter glory known to me, truly, delightfully!

  Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’,

  Dramatis Personae (1923)

  [Huysmans’] work, like that of the Goncourts, is largely determined by the maladie fin de siècle – the diseased nerves that, in his case, have given a curious personal quality of pessimism to his outlook on the world, his view of life. Part of his work – Marthe, Les Soeurs Vatard, En Mènage, A Vau l’Eau – is a minute and searching study of the minor discomforts, the commonplace miseries of life, as seen by a peevishly disordered vision, delighting, for its own self-torture, in the insistent contemplation of human stupidity, of the sordid in existence. Yet these books do but lead to the unique masterpiece, the astonishing caprice of A Rebours, in which he has concentrated all that is delicately depraved, all that is beautifully, curiously poisonous, in modern art. A Rebours is the history of a typical Decadent – a study, indeed, after a real man, but a study which seizes upon the type rather than the personality…

  [H]e has expressed not merely himself, but an epoch. And he has done so in a style which carries the modern experiments upon language to their furthest development. Formed upon Goncourt and Flaubert, it has sought for novelty, l’image peinte, the exactitude of colour, the forcible precision of epithet, wherever words, images or epithets are to be found. Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendour, it is – especially in regard to things seen – extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter’s palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans’s work – so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial – comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature.

  Translations by Patrick McGuinness

  Notes

  These notes are designed to aid a reading of the novel rather than to furnish copious context and apparatus. Huysmans generally gives enough bio-bibliographical or historical information in Against Nature for the reader to follow and to get the gist of the references. For more detailed and specialized information, the reader is referred to the editions prepared by Marc Fumaroli and Rose Fortassier noted in Further Reading.

  EPIGRAPH

  1. I must rejoice… Jan Van Ruysbroeck: The epigraph is from Jan Van
Ruysbroeck, or Ruysbroeck the Admirable, the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic, as translated by Ernest Hello in 1869. Both Ruysbroeck and Hello are discussed in chapter 12 (see also note 7 to chapter 12)

  PROLOGUE

  1. Château de Lourps: Huysmans visited the Château de Lourps, near the village of Jutigny in Seine-et-Marne, in 1881, and subsequently returned there to spend parts of the summer with his companion Anna Meunier and her family in 1884 and in 1885. They were joined there in 1885 by Léon Bloy, a novelist and polemicist described as ‘a savage pamphleteer’ in chapter 12. Bloy, an early enthusiast of Huysmans’ work, was later to become one of his most vituperative detractors.

  2. The Duc d’Epernon and the Marquis d’O: Jean-Louis de Nogaret, Duke of Epernon (1554–1642) and the Marquis d’O (1535–94) were favourites of King Henri III.

  3. degeneration: Huysmans uses the word décadence for ‘degeneration’ here, but the two are not synonymous. Contemporary readers would have recognized the language of heredity and degeneration theory that Against Nature shares with Naturalism.

  4. Nicole: The hero of the novel Port-Royal, by the novelist and critic Sainte-Beuve (1804–69).

  5. Already he was getting pains… wineglass: Huysmans takes pride in the exactness and documentary truth of his descriptions. In a May 1884 letter to Zola, he claims to have followed ‘step by step’ Axenfeld’s Traité des névroses (Treatise on the Neuroses, 1883) and Bouchut’s Du névrosisme aigu et chronique et des maladies nerveuses (On Acute and Chronic Neurosis and Nervous Illness, 1860).

  6. Fontenay-aux-Roses… far from all neighbours: Huysmans was sent to Fontenay-aux-Roses to recuperate from illness in 1881. The description of a district just far enough from Paris to be isolated and just near enough for Paris not to seem alluringly distant echoes Huysmans’ description to Zola of Fontenay-aux-Roses as ‘pseudo-countryside’ (letter of June 1881).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. he had decorated and furnished… taken his fancy: Among the sources for Des Esseintes’ interior decoration are Mallarmé’s descriptions, in a letter to Huysmans, of the home of Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac. Other possible sources for the preoccupation with interior decoration and furnishing is Edmond de Goncourt’s aesthetic inventory La Maison d’un artiste (House of an Artist, 1881) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ (1840).

  2. dandyism: The notion of the Dandy was popularized by Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du dandysme (On Dandyism, 1844), and taken up by Baudelaire in Peintre de la vie moderne (Painter of Modern Life, 1863). For Baudelaire the Dandy was ‘half-priest, half-victim’, and represented ‘a hero in decadent times’. It should be noted that Barbey’s and Baudelaire’s notion of the Dandy is very different from the camper version taken up by Wilde and the writers and artists of the English 1890s. For Baudelaire it denoted a kind of spirituality and asceticism, rather than a luxuriously diplayed social persona.

  3. One of these meals… temporarily deceased: Huysmans’ idea for the wake for Des Esseintes’ virility is based on a description by Grimod de la Reynière (1758–1838), who at the age of twenty-five hosted a dinner in 1783 to help launch his book Réflexions philosophiques sur le plaisir par un célibataire (Philosophical Reflections on Pleasure by a Bachelor).

  4. What he wanted was colours… artificial light: The following section takes as its starting-point Baudelaire’s art criticism essay, the ‘Salon of 1846’. As Huysmans says in his 1903 preface to Against Nature, these ideas about colour symbolism culminate in the research done for his 1898 novel La Cathédrale (The Cathedral).

  5. Du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinatis: Charles du Fresne Du Cange (1610–88) was a historian and philologist, whose Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinatis (1878) is mentioned again in chapter 14, as Des Esseintes muses on the need for a glossary to capture ‘the last paroxysms’ of a decaying French language.

  6. three pieces by Baudelaire… World: The two poems by Baudelaire ‘The Death of the Lovers’ and ‘The Enemy’ are from Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), while ‘Anywhere out of the world’ (a title taken from Thomas Hood) is from Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose (Short Poems in Prose, 1869).

  CHAPTER 2

  1. such as the beguines still wear to this day at Ghent: The Béguinage convent in Ghent was founded in the seventeenth century, and like many Flanders cityscapes it provided suggestive images for Symbolist writers and painters. Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892), a Symbolist novel indebted to Against Nature, takes the cityscape of Bruges as both a location and an active force.

  2. a large aquarium… porthole: The image of the aquarium evoked in this and other episodes in the novel is – like the hothouse – a key decadent theme, reflected in Symbolist writers such as Laforgue, Rodenbach and Maeterlinck.

  3. the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe (1838), is a tale of seafaring mystery, mutiny and horror. It was translated by Baudelaire.

  4. Monsieur Pasteur’s method: Louis Pasteur (1822–95), the famous chemist and author of Études sur le vin (Studies on Wine, 1866) and Études sur la bière (Studies on Beer, 1876). Huysmans is alluding here to Pasteur’s discovery of a means of preserving wine and beer.

  5. artifice… human genius: This and the rest of the passages in this chapter are reminiscent of Baudelaire’s Peintre de la vie moderne. For contemporary readers, many of Des Esseintes’ ideas here would have seemed like an absurd over-literalization of Baudelaire’s influential principles.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. ‘the Decadence’: For Désiré Nisard, on whose Etude de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes latin de la décadence (Moral and Critical Study of the Latin Poets of the Decadence, 1834) Huysmans based some of this chapter, the term ‘Decadence’ was pejorative, denoting a literary period where ornament and description ran rife. For Des Esseintes, as for many of Huysmans’ contempor-aries, it was a positive term. Much of the debate around Decadence was conducted through discussions of language: against the refining, complicating and neologizing tendencies of so-called ‘Decadent’ writing, traditional French critics posited what was known as the ‘genius’ of the Latin (and by extension, French) language: clear, precise and economical. Des Esseintes is anti-classical in his tastes, dismissing Virgil, Cicero, Horace, etc. in often trenchant criticism, and preferring the ‘refined sweetness’ and ‘barbaric style’ of the writers Nisard had condemned.

  2. old Chick-Pea: Cicero, whose name in Latin means chick-pea.

  3. Petronius… Satyricon: Des Esseintes uses Petronius, author of The Satyricon, to upbraid Naturalist writing.

  4. Although he was perfectly at home with theological problems: From here onwards, Remy de Gourmont notes, Huysmans borrowed freely (or as Gourmont put it, ‘stole’) from Adolphe Ebert’s Histoire générale de la littérature du Moyen Age en Occident (General History of Medieval Literature in the West, published in French translation in 1883). Marc Fumaroli’s Gallimard edition copiously annotates the chapter, and makes use of a definitive article on Huysmans and Latin literature: Jean Céard, ‘Des Esseintes et la décadence latine’, Studi Francesi, 65–6 (May–December 1978), pp. 297–310.

  5. he stacked the rest of his shelves… the present day: After the seemingly exhaustive account in this chapter, we are brought abruptly to the present day. Des Esseintes leaves out swathes of historical development, all the while insisting on the continuity of the Decadence and making an implicit link between the Latin ‘Decadence’ and his own period. This chapter, with its critical values and polemical statements, forms a counterpart to the chapters on modern sacred and profane literature that occur later in the novel.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. and Des Esseintes accordingly decided… gold: This episode is based on Montesquiou’s gold-plated and jewel-encrusted tortoise. Edmond de Goncourt in a diary entry for 14 June 1882 calls it a ‘walking bibelot’, and one of the poems in Montesquiou’s collection Les Hortensias bleus (
Blue Hydrangeas) mentions the unhappy creature.

  2. This collection… he called his mouth organ: Des Esseintes’ ‘mouth organ’, an early version of a cocktail mixer, seems to have been based on a reading of Polycarpe Poncelet’s Chimie du goûtet del’odorat (Chemistry of Taste and Smell, 1755). The following passage is also permeated with Baudelaire’s ideas about correspondence and the harmonious joining of different orders of sensation.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. He had bought Moreau’s two masterpieces… Salome: The two works by Gustave Moreau (1826–98) that Des Esseintes possesses – Salome Dancing Before Herod and The Apparition – had been exhibited at the 1876 Salon and the 1878 Exposition universelle in Paris. Huysmans wrote an essay on Moreau in his book of art criticism Certains, and Moreau, despite being one of the most celebrated painters of the period, remained outside the various literary groupings that laid claim to his images. For Des Esseintes Moreau transcends history but also, significantly, genealogy: he has ‘no real ancestors and no possible descendants’.

  2. like Salammbô’s: The priestess in Flaubert’s exotic novel Salammbô (1862), set in Carthage after the first Punic war and describing the revolt of Carthage’s mercenary army.

  3. Jan Luyken: Dutch engraver (1649–1712), on whom Huysmans wrote an essay in Certains. Huysmans, like Des Esseintes, was attracted to the sensuality of the broken or suffering body.

  4. Bresdin’s Comedy of Death: Rodolphe Bresdin (1822–85) was a hallucinatory artist and engraver, and a friend of Gautier and Baudelaire. Montesquiou had written two pamphlets on Bresdin’s life and work. His Comedy of Death appeared in 1854.