Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  Compositionally, Against Nature has much in common with the ‘classic’ Naturalist novel. André Breton’s image of the scribe at his desk surrounded by manuals and guidebooks, treatises on nervous illness, precious stones or horticulture is also the image of the Naturalist writer at work. What Breton goes on to mention – the cookery book – is no frivolous afterthought either, since it refers not just to the fact that food is never far away in a Huysmans novel (though gastronomic satisfaction is unattainable), but to the importance of ‘composition’, the measuring out of ingredients to make the right novelistic mix. This mix has confused critics, and Against Nature’s relationship with the literary tendencies of the period still poses difficulties. It is an unclassifiable book in that it seems to invite a number of classifications only to play them off – inconclusively – against each other. Is it Naturalist or Decadent or Symbolist? Need it be any of these? Is it perhaps a book in which Naturalist writing practice (document and description, analysis of symptoms) converges on ‘Symbolist’ subjects (solitude, refinement, fantasy) with a guiding thread of Decadent philosophy (pessimism, perversion, cultural élitism)?

  All of these literary tendencies are reflected in Against Nature, but all are ambiguously and at times parodically treated too.17 Mallarmé felt that the book contained ‘not one atom of fantasy’, and that Huysmans had proved himself ‘more strictly documentary’ than any other writer; but Zola condemned its incoherence and ‘confusion’. What may partly have disturbed Zola was not that Naturalism had been abandoned in Against Nature, but rather that it had been followed perversely. The relationship between Against Nature and Naturalism resembles the relationship between the negative and the photograph. Huysmans produced an inverted version of the Naturalist ‘race, moment, milieu’: Des Esseintes is the last of his race attempting to flee his historical moment by creating an artificial milieu. It was not that Against Nature was anti-Naturalist, but that it was Naturalist enough to have disturbing implications for Zola and his methods. The discussion in chapter III of Petronius’ Satyricon is tellingly framed in this respect: Des Esseintes reads it as a ‘realist novel’, a ‘slice cut from Roman life’ (echoing the famous Naturalist dictum that a novel must be a ‘slice of life’), but also emphasizes the fact that it is a ‘story with no plot’. This genre-defying satirical feat of documentary imagination might be a clue to what Against Nature is attempting.

  As for Against Nature’s celebrated espousal of the ‘Symbolist’ poets, who in 1884 were neither a movement nor a school (the Symbolist ‘manifesto’ appeared in 1886), this too is complicated. Many of Huysmans’ contemporaries would have seen Des Esseintes as a caricature of the Decadent reader-consumer, a misanthropic drop-out in a fetishistic relationship with his books and artworks. Although his tastes are new-fangled, quirky and rare, and although the ‘exquisite’ poetry of Mallarmé and ‘pidgin’ verse of Corbière were little known at the time, the fact that these are the tastes of a burned-out and spiteful elitist makes the compliment Huysmans pays to these writers ambiguous – it was certainly ambiguously interpreted by reviewers, as our appendix of critical responses to the novel shows. Des Esseintes predicts rather than reflects artistic tastes: we know the influence of Mallarmé on twentieth-century thought, we know too of Corbière’s impact on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire are classics while Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon are among the most widely recognized image-makers of their time. In 1884, however, his favourite artists and writers seemed obscure, irrelevant, and – with a few exceptions – destined for oblivion. One reviewer wrote that Des Esseintes’s selection of authors would, once their flashing fame had died, ‘date the book and limit its future value’. What promised to ‘date’ Huysmans’ novel in 1884 is one of the elements that keeps it modern.

  Huysmans’ 1903 preface is misleading, seeking as it does to rewrite the history of the book’s composition and interpretation to suit a different cultural moment and a different – Catholic – Huysmans. The Huysmans of 1903 sees Against Nature as evidence of the ‘underground workings’ of the soul groping for salvation. For him each chapter of Against Nature contains the ‘seed’ of the novels that followed: Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale (The Cathedral) and L’Oblat (The Oblate). He also retrospectively interprets Des Esseintes’s final words of the book as a prelude to conversion. There are problems with this, not least the fact that Huysmans did not convert until 1892 and that his writing meanwhile showed little evidence of these ‘underground workings’. The 1903 preface also takes the opportunity to settle a few scores and rewrites a few premises. By claiming Flaubert’s (L’Éducation Sentimentale as the key book, the novel after which nothing can be written, Huysmans downplays the value of Naturalism and the aesthetic and sociopolitical project of Zola, who had died the previous year. He also caricatures the principles of Naturalist writing and overplays his break with Zola and the Naturalists when in fact he maintained good relations with his former colleagues for several years. The rejection of Naturalism is to be found less in Against Nature than in the 1903 preface, an ambiguous text which is published here in an appendix because it should be treated with caution.

  THEMES AND STRUCTURES

  Against Nature was not the starting point but the consecration of a new literature… the novel is free at last.

  Remy de Gourmont, Le Livre des masques (The Book of Masks)

  Des Esseintes is a fictional character, but he is not pure invention. Huysmans was a shrewd observer of the dandies and eccentrics who frequented the literary haunts of Paris. Many of the people he knew seemed themselves larger than life: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the great playwright and novelist reduced to sparring partner in a boxing gym; Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, dandy, ultramontane Catholic and sadist; Francis Poictevin, dandified young novelist and aesthete. Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters such as Samuel Cramer in Baudelaire’s Fanfarlo and Charles Demailly in the Goncourts’ eponymous 1868 novel. The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust’s Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu (Montesquiou was a relatively capable poet and critic and not wholly ridiculous or mad). Many of the elements of Des Esseintes’s interior are based on details of Montesquiou’s lodgings as described by Mallarmé in letters to Huysmans, but it gives some indication of the strange times Huysmans lived through to recall that one of the book’s most implausible episodes – the jewel-encrusted tortoise – is based on fact. Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory in his collection Les Hortensias bleus (The Blue Hortensias), 1896). Zola (revealing his preoccupation with dirt, hygiene and tidiness of plot) was particularly exercised by the tortoise, telling Huysmans: ‘a rather bourgeois preoccupation niggled me: it’s lucky [the tortoise] died because it would have crapped on the carpet’ (letter of May 1884).

  Des Esseintes is a kind of Decadent everyman, but he is also a prototype. He has the classic Decadent childhood: a mother who inhabits dark rooms with some unspecified nervous disorder, dying for no clear reason. There is an absent father, a boarding school and loveless family existence. We are told that the Des Esseintes have used up their strength through generations of inbreeding, and that the present Duke is the last in the line, the culmination of a long process of ‘degeneration’. Against Nature opens, on the one hand, with a model of linearity and of the cyclic nature of Decadence; on the other, with crisis and dislocation. The Prologue notes not just the gradual decline of the family, but also the gaps suggested by the missing paintings. In the chapter on Latin Decadent poets we read that parts of the literary history are followed in immense detail, others are lost; Des Esseintes’s editions ‘tailed away to nothing’ and his collection makes a ‘prodigious jump of several cent
uries’ to the modern period. These two ways of organizing and narrating time are projected across the book’s treatment of genealogy and biology, in its use of political and cultural history, and its assessments of literature and art. This in turn is reflected in Against Nature’s structure: a narrative that progresses in a linear manner but is driven by ruptures, flashbacks and recollections that erupt unpredictably and often destructively into a near­static present. Des Esseintes attempts to recall certain memories by means of various stimuli, but he is also victim of memories he cannot control or does not want to revisit. This aspect of Huysmans’ novel has led to comparisons with Proust, though for Huysmans it remains purely at the level of narrative expedient. In Against Nature, the traditional novelistic plot has ‘degenerated’ and come to a near standstill; even Des Esseintes is often ‘squeezed out’ from entire swathes of his story by the renegade memories and the lists and inventories he has amassed.

  Des Esseintes, like the book that tells his story, is prodigiously but selectively learned. Not for him the rounded education, the balanced mind and healthy body. His tastes are for the quirky, the difficult, the outrageous. He savours the Latin Decadents, he enjoys the sense of the language losing its clarity, becoming complex and strange, ‘a pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces’. Des Esseintes is also impotent, and, like his creator, a misogynist. We should not refine this fact away: in Against Nature, as in so many ‘Decadent’ works, the misogyny is not incidental but in built.18

  Des Esseintes has sought ever richer, more dazzling and dangerous pleasures; ever more eccentric, artificial or stage-managed sexual encounters – his literary and artistic tastes are exclusive and his sexual tastes eclectic. There is something of the theatrical director in him, a thwarted creativity that expresses itself in a need to stage and direct his fantasy scenarios. Most importantly, he has the money to indulge these tastes and play out these scenarios. We notice how, despite his tirades against the ‘American century’, modern consumerism and ownership, he takes advantage of all of these. He owns, and money is rarely far from the surface of this book ostensibly about the ascetic and cultured life, the search for the uncontaminated pleasure of pure art. Indeed, his passion for reproducing, commissioning copies, having finely bound books and made-to-measure interiors is uncannily like that of the early twentieth-century (American) millionaire: buying, transporting, transplanting. He is also a book fetishist, in whom the bibliophile – the lover of the book as object – overcomes the reader. Des Esseintes does not read, preferring instead to wax lyrical about paper quality and bindings. Reading in Against Nature is only ever remembered or replayed, and all the evocative passages about Baudelaire or Mallarmé are memories of readings that finished before the novel began. Against Nature is about consumption in all its forms: financial, material, gastronomic, literary and artistic. With consumption there is also, inevitably (and in keeping with the Naturalist logic displayed by Zola’s concern for the defecating tortoise), expulsion. Des Esseintes takes enemas, has problems with his digestion, diets and then gorges himself. He takes strong literary medicine, and the artistic equivalent of the beef-tea he drinks may be found in the prose poetry he favours, what he calls the ‘osmazome’ or concentrated juice of literature. Des Esseintes does not simply wish to abandon the world, but to poison it (as his dealings with August Langlois reveal). We see him exercise his authority over servants and tradesmen, in a relationship which replicates the social order of the world he tries to escape. The more Against Nature banishes the world, the more it returns to haunt Des Esseintes, just as he himself is the mirror image of the materialism he hates.

  Another sense of the term ‘Decadence’ was provided for Huysmans’ generation by the classical scholar Désirée Nisard in his 1834 Etude de mæurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Critical and Cultural Study of the Latin Poets of the Decadence). Nisard defined Decadence in literary terms as the period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought and language. Against Nature certainly fulfils Nisard’s definition, though Des Esseintes’s ambition is not so much to collect as to select: he tries to distil, to anthologize, to sift. Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste (An Artist’s House, 1881) had stretched the boundary between the novel and the inventory, and Goncourt’s influence can be detected in Against Nature, weighed down by detail, buckling and coming to a standstill under the weight of description, as the poor tortoise dies beneath the burden of its finery. We may detect also Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ and Baudelaire’s ‘The Double Chamber’ in Des Esseintes’s interiors. In Against Nature, objects, like knowledge and memories, are collected and stored as the reader toils through thickets of descriptive prose. The language that had once described the world has edged out the world. In this respect, Against Nature is a Decadent book, but it would be mistaken to see it as a book that advocated Decadence.

  Early on in Against Nature Des Esseintes expresses his preference for the artificial over the natural, one of the defining attitudes of Decadence. ‘Nature… has had her day’, he muses, seeking the copy or the mechanically produced, not as a substitute for the natural but in preference to it. His is an artificial world: abstracted and decontextualized, full of gadgets and refined objects, custom-built and chemical. In the marvellous chapter on tropical flowers we see his logic reach an extreme point of Decadent perversion. Not content with artificial flowers, Des Esseintes goes further, choosing real flowers that seem to imitate artificial ones, thereby reversing the relationship between natural and artificial, copy and original. The dominant influence here is Baudelaire, who in his art writings argued a philosophically impressive as well as morally extreme case against la Nature. For Baudelaire, nature was what pushed human beings to kill and brutalize each other; the authority and civilization that maintained humane values were themselves artificial: laws, religions, moral codes. Baudelaire’s was a reaction against the given towards the made (‘who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?’ he demanded in Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life]), seeking to free art from the tyranny of representation. Des Esseintes’s view is subtly different: like Baudelaire he prefers the artificial, but unlike Baudelaire he still relies on reference to the model; he seeks the copy but needs to know what it has been copied from. As with his dependence on the tradesmen and suppliers who furnish his house, Des Esseintes constantly refers to what he claims to have abandoned. He is more outrageous in tone but less daring in intellectual substance than Baudelaire; we might even suggest that his views are a kind of crude copy of his mentor’s – that with Des Esseintes Baudelaire’s ideas have in fact ‘degenerated’. Thanks principally to Oscar Wilde, who repeated or paraphrased its contents not just in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Decay of Lying but in an array of on-and off-stage witticisms, this is the book’s most famous chapter. Against Nature has suffered from this, because Wilde focused attention on only one – highly ambiguous – thread in Huysmans’ novel; it is possible that Dorian Gray misinterprets his mentor Des Esseintes much as Des Esseintes misinterprets his mentor Baudelaire.

  One of Huysmans’ achievements in Against Nature, regardless of the double-dealing evident in his letters to Mallarmé and Zola, is to have imagined – or predicted – an alternative literary canon. The chapters on modern literature are subtle and forward-looking, and Des Esseintes’s tastes are more than simply indicated: they are justified and often compellingly analysed, while his dislikes are expressed in trenchant criticism. Des Esseintes’s thoughts on Mallarmé and Villiers, Verlaine and Corbière, Edmond de Goncourt and Flaubert are precise and analytical as well as perversely sophisticated. Huysmans was proud of his reading of Mallarmé, and his pages on Edgar Allan Poe are among the finest accounts of the French debt to the American poet who cast his spell over several generations of poets and prose writers. Des Esseintes is fascinated that this Decadent liter
ary field exists in a spectacular contraction of time: all of these modes of writing, all of these stages of French and all of these artistic tendencies coexist in Des Esseintes’s Paris, a modernist living museum of artists and artworks. In order to establish his literary tastes, Huysmans must also set out his distastes, and the great names of French writing, both living and dead, are paraded before us: Victor Hugo (still alive at the time Huysmans was writing), Rousseau, Voltaire, Molière are among the ‘classics’ Des Esseintes finds unoriginal, overblown or bourgeois. In painting, he admires Gustave Moreau for the luxury of his conceptions and the mythological dimension of his paintings, and for his removal from the ‘hateful period’ in which he lived. Moreau belongs nowhere, and it is revealing that in plans for Against Nature Huysmans had intended to use Degas as his exemplary artist, thus giving a very different slant to Des Esseintes’s artistic tastes. He admires the contortions of El Greco, and the Dutch engraver Jan Luyken for his depictions of suffering and torment, for images that ‘reek[ed] of burnt flesh’. There are also the ‘bad dreams and fevered visions’ of another contemporary, Odilon Redon, whose spare and mysterious paintings contrast with Moreau’s detail and incrustation.

  It was not just the content of Against Nature but its structure that was felt to be unusual. Dorian Gray noted that ‘It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character’, but Ezra Pound decades later put it more bluntly: ‘Huysmans escaped by putting an exceptionally dull young decadent in the midst of no milieu whatsoever.’19 For Remy de Gourmont Against Nature ‘freed’ the novel, but Zola condemned its lack of progress, its circularity and its ‘painful transitions’.