How could a novel so ending-obsessed, plotless and grid-locked by description be seen as liberating? In certain respects, it was a version of Flaubert’s dream of a book ‘about nothing’. Huysmans took pride in his novel’s lack of plot, telling Zola that he had ‘emasculated dialogue’. In his 1903 preface Huysmans claimed to have sought to break the limits of the novel in order to allow in ‘more serious work’. Against Nature is a hybrid, composed of different modes of writing: catalogue, inventory, case study, encyclopedia and scholarly treatise, while the chapters are arranged as compartments or glass cases.
In Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumously published in 1881), Bouvard and Pécuchet retire to a country house to become great scientists and scholars. They read books, perform experiments and discuss big subjects, but the problem is that they understand nothing. New knowledge and new ways of knowing simply lead to new ways of being stupid. Ahead of our era of artificial intelligence, Flaubert exposed the era of artificial stupidity, and there is an element of Bouvard and Pécuchet in Des Esseintes. It is legitimate to find some of his antics farcical: his world of knowledge without context, reference without points of reference, discovery without application is in part related to theirs. The scene where Des Esseintes plays his ‘mouth organ’ of liqueurs or orchestrates scents with his vaporizer, his imaginary trip to Britain based on reading of Dickens and Poe and port bottle labels in the restaurant, or his extraordinary sexual relationship with a ventriloquist who recites Flaubert – all these are eccentric adventures, but with a strain of comical pedantry too.
Des Esseintes searches for essences, but lives amid clutter. The most poignant moments occur when he tries to impose order on his world, or to uncover the hidden order of the world outside. He constantly tries to classify: people, plants, ideas, information, objects, sounds, scents, tastes. He dreams of the ‘syntax’ of precious stones, the ‘grammar’ of scents; he tries to compose symphonies of tastes and reads the entire social order into the different varieties of exotic plants. The Baudelairean world, alive with ‘correspondences’ becomes, in Against Nature, a dead world where the metaphor and the model run rife, where the classificatory structure dominates, and where mediated knowledge wins out over experience. His black feast to mourn his virility signals also the death of a creative urge, buried under heaps of books and paintings. Just as the house in Fontenay becomes a kind of living tomb, so Against Nature becomes a catacomb of reference and allusion, full of dead learning. Des Esseintes is a cross between a jailer and a curator; he can neither invent nor create, only absorb, consume and occasionally reorder what already exists. He is no more exemplary than Chateaubriand’s René, Camus’ Meursault or Goethe’s Werther. Though he became one of literature’s most famous and most imitated characters, for Huysmans and many of his more alert contemporaries Des Esseintes was a ridiculous figure, a caricature trapped in his own claustrophobic farce.
Against Nature was a self-exhausting genre, a one-off. It has more in common with the seemingly plotless and non-linear narratives of modernism than with most of the French fin de siècle fiction it inspired and pre-emptively surpassed. Perhaps only Remy de Gourmont’s Sixtine (subtitled Novel of the Cerebral Life, 1890) and Georges Rodenbach’s Symbolist masterpiece Bruges-la-Morte (1892) measured up to the novel that made them possible. Against Nature sits more comfortably alongside the works of Proust, Musil, Joyce and Woolf than those of Jean Lorrain or Rachilde or Octave Mirbeau. It is a literature of retreat, of reaction and of revolt, but it is also a penetrating and innovative study of individualism and alienation. Against Nature is a novel of surfeit: surfeit of knowledge, sensation, culture; and it culminates in a surfeit of self. It is a kind of Symbolist or Decadent Heart of Darkness in its thwarted dreams of isolation, power and discovery. Like Heart of Darkness it analyses the deadly game of self-fulfilment and self-escape; like Conrad’s great novel it ends with a snarl of pessimism both at the world and at the counter-world forged in its stead – forged in the sense of faked as well as newly created. It is a mysterious, difficult and absurd book. Des Esseintes is the last of his race but perhaps the first of his kind: the modernist anthologist, caught between a desire for cultural preservation and a drive for apocalypse. He too might have surveyed his dying century and foreseen the one to come; and he too, like the voice in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, might have murmured: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’.
NOTES
1. See Appendix I, for the preface.
2. Writers such as Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Decay of Lying’, Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and Havelock Ellis in Affirmations made Huysmans’ work appear as an example – rather than a diagnosis – of decadence and aestheticism.
3. Symons, The Decadent Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1899), p. 39.
4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. by Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), pp. 121–2. See Appendix II.
5. Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 100.
6. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878), Essays and Poems, ed. Claire Harman (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 138.
7. Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London: Harvill, 1991), p. 100.
8. Quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 27. Baldick’s biography is still a key reference work for modern Huysmans amateurs and scholars.
9. André Breton, Anthologie de l’humour noire, Oeuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Bonnet et al. (Paris: Pléiade, 1992), p. 997.
10. Léon Bloy, ‘Les Représailles du Sphinx’, Le Chat Noir, 14 June 1884.
11. James Joyce, ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’, Occasional, Critical and Political Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 173.
12. The Damned (Là-Bas), tr. Terry Hale (London: Penguin, 2001).
13. The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans, tr. and ed. Barbara Beaumont (London: Athlone, 1989), p. 48.
14. Ibid., p. 46.
15. Ibid., p. 55.
16. Ibid., p. 72.
17. The following year (1885) saw the publication of a parodic volume, The Deliquescences, by one ‘Adoré Floupette’, written by two poets – Vicaire and Beauclair – as a send-up of their ‘Decadent’ contemporaries. As Appendix II of contemporary reviews and responses shows, some of Huysmans’ readers thought of Against Nature as at least in part parodic.
18. For an account of images and representations of women in this period, see Shearer West, Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).
19. Ezra Pound, ‘The Approach to Paris’, New Age, 9 October 1913.
Further Reading
EDITIONS OF AGAINST NATURE
A Rebours (Paris: Charpentier, 1884). First edition.
A Rebours (Paris: A. Lepère, 1903). Limited edition (130 copies) with ‘Preface written twenty years after the novel’.
A Rebours appears in volume VII of the Oeuvres complètes of Huysmans (Paris: Crès, 1929; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine, 1972). There are two outstanding modern editions: Marc Fumaroli’s (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1977), and Rose Fortassier’s (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1981).
ON HUYSMANS
Baldick, Robert, The Life of J. K. Huysmans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).
Banks, Brian R., The Image of Huysmans (New York: AMS Press, 1990).
Beaumont, Barbara, (trans.), The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans (London: Athlone, 1989).
Borie, Jean, Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1991).
Cogny, Pierre, J.-K. Huysmans à la recherche de l’unité (Paris: Nizet, 1953).
Grojnowski, Daniel, À Rebours de J.-K. Huysmans (Paris: Gallimard/Foliothèque, 1996).
Huneker, James Gibbons, ‘The Pessimist’s Progress’, in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: Scribner, 1909).
Lloyd, Christopher, J.-K. Huysmans and the ‘Fin-de-siècle’ Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, c.1990).
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXTS
Birkett, Jennifer, The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870–1914 (London: Quartet, 1986).
Griffiths, Richard, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914 (London: Constable, 1966).
Hustvedt, Asti (ed.), The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from ‘Fin de Siècle’ France (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
McGuinness, Patrick (ed.), Symbolism, Decadence and the ‘Fin de Siècle’: French and European Perspectives (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
Pierrot, Jean, The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
Praz, Mario, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).
Spackman, Barbara, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Symons, Arthur, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1911).
West, Shearer, Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).
Note on this Translation
I have used Volume VII of Huysmans’ Œuvres complètes (Paris: Crès, 1929), in which certain errors contained in the first edition and in the standard Fasquelle edition have been corrected.
Huysmans’ style, which Bloy described as ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax’, is one of the strangest literary idioms in existence, packed with purple passages, intricate sentences, weird metaphors, unexpected tense changes and a vocabulary rich in slang and technical terms. I have tried to achieve the same effect, using the same constituents, in this English translation; and it is only fair to warn the reader that he may find that the resultant mixture, like the French original, is best taken in small doses.
I should like to thank the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for permission to reproduce passages I had already translated in my Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, 1955); my long-suffering friends and colleagues for help with the terminology of a wide range of subjects
Robert Baldick
May 1957
I would like to thank Margaret Bartley, Robert Mighall and Jonathan Patrick for their help and advice at various stages of this edition.
Patrick McGuinness
2003
AGAINST NATURE
I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time… though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean.
Jan Van Ruysbroeck1
PROLOGUE
Judging by the few portraits preserved in the Château de Lourps1 the Floressas Des Esseintes family had been composed in olden times of sturdy campaigners with forbidding faces. Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders, they were an alarming sight with their piercing eyes, their sweeping mustachios and their bulging chests filling the enormous cuirasses which they wore.
These were the founders of the family; the portraits of their descendants were missing. There was, in fact, a gap in the pictorial pedigree, with only one canvas to bridge it, only one face to join past and present. It was a strange, sly face, with pale, drawn features; the cheekbones were punctuated with cosmetic commas of rouge, the hair was plastered down and bound with a string of pearls and the thin, painted neck emerged from the starched pleats of a ruff.
In this picture of one of the closest friends of the Duc d’Epernon and the Marquis d’O,2 the defects of an impoverished stock and the excess of lymph in the blood were already apparent.
Since then, the degeneration3 of this ancient house had clearly followed a regular course, with the men becoming progressively less manly; and over the last two hundred years, as if to complete the ruinous process, the Des Esseintes had taken to intermarrying among themselves, thus using up what little vigour they had left.
Now, of this family which had once been so large that it occupied nearly every domain in the Ile de France and La Brie, only one descendant was still living: the Duc Jean des Esseintes, a frail young man of thirty who was anaemic and highly strung, with hollow cheeks, cold eyes of steely blue, a nose which was turned up but straight and thin, papery hands.
By some freak of heredity, this last scion of the family bore a striking resemblance to his distant ancestor the court favourite, for he had the same exceptionally fair pointed beard, and the same ambiguous expression, at once weary and wily.
His childhood had been overshadowed by sickness. However, despite the threat of scrofula and recurrent bouts of fever, he had succeeded in clearing the hurdle of adolescence with the aid of good nursing and fresh air; and after this his nerves had rallied, had overcome the languor and lethargy of chlorosis and had brought his body to its full physical development.
His mother, a tall, pale, silent woman, died of nervous exhaustion. Then it was his father’s turn to succumb to some obscure illness when Des Esseintes was nearly seventeen.
There was no gratitude or affection associated with the memories he retained of his parents: only fear. His father, who normally resided in Paris, was almost a complete stranger; and he remembered his mother chiefly as a still, supine figure in a darkened bedroom in the Château de Lourps. It was only rarely that husband and wife met, and all that he could recall of these occasions was a drab impression of his parents sitting facing each other over a table that was lighted only by a deeply shaded lamp, for the Duchess had a nervous attack whenever she was subjected to light or noise. In the semi-darkness they would exchange one or two words at the most, and then the Duke would unconcernedly slip away to catch the first available train.
At the Jesuit school to which Jean was sent to be educated, life was easier and pleasanter. The good Fathers made a point of cosseting the boy, whose intelligence amazed them; but in spite of all their efforts, they could not get him to pursue a regular course of study. He took readily to certain subjects and acquired a precocious proficiency in the Latin tongue; but on the other hand he was absolutely incapable of construing the simplest sentence in Greek, revealed no aptitude whatever for modern languages and displayed blank incomprehension when anyone tried to teach him the first principles of science.
His family showed little interest in his doings. Occasionally his father would come to see him at school, but all he had to say was: ‘Good day, goodbye, be good and work hard.’ The summer holidays he spent at Lourps, but his presence in the Château failed to awaken his mother from her reveries; she scarcely noticed him, or if she did, gazed at him for a few moments with a sad smile and then sank back again into the artificial night which the heavy curtains drawn across the windows created in her bedroom.
The servants were old and tired, and the boy was left to his own devices. On rainy days he used to browse through the books in the library, and when it was fine he would spend the afternoon exploring the local countryside.
His chief delight was to go down into the valley to Jutigny, a village lying at the foot of the hills, a little cluster of cottages wearing thatch bonnets decorated with sprigs of stonecrop and patches of moss. He used to lie down in the meadows, in the shadow of the tall hayricks, listening to the dull rumble of the water-mills and breathing in the fresh breezes coming from the Voulzie. Sometimes he would go as far as the peateries and the hamlet of Longueville with its green and black houses, or else he would scramble up the windswept hillsides from which he could survey an immense prospect. On the one hand he could look down on the Seine valley, winding away into the distance where it merged into the blue sky, and on the other he could see, far away on the horizon, the churches and the great tower of Provins, which seemed to tremble under the sun’s rays in a dusty golden haze.
He would spend hou
rs reading or daydreaming, enjoying his fill of solitude until night fell; and by dint of pondering the same thoughts his intelligence grew sharper and his ideas gained in maturity and precision. At the end of every vacation he went back to his masters a more serious and a more stubborn boy. These changes did not escape their notice: shrewd and clearsighted men, accustomed by their profession to probing the inmost recesses of the human soul, they treated this lively but intractable mind with caution and reserve. They realized that this particular pupil of theirs would never do anything to add to the glory of their house; and as his family was rich and apparently uninterested in his future, they soon gave up any idea of turning his thoughts towards the profitable careers open to their successful scholars. Similarly, although he was fond of engaging with them in argument about theological doctrines whose niceties and subtleties intrigued him, they never even thought of inducing him to enter a religious order, for in spite of all their efforts his faith remained infirm. Finally, out of prudence and fear of the unknown, they let him pursue whatever studies pleased him and neglect the rest, not wishing to turn this independent spirit against them by subjecting him to the sort of irksome discipline imposed by lay tutors.
He therefore lived a perfectly contented life at school, scarcely aware of the priests’ fatherly control. He worked at his Latin and French books in his own way and in his own time; and although theology was not one of the subjects in the school syllabus, he finished the apprenticeship to this science which he had begun at the Château de Lourps, in the library left by his great-great-uncle Dom Prosper, a former Prior of the Canons Regular of Saint-Ruf.
The time came, however, to leave the Jesuit establishment, for he was nearly of age and would soon have to take possession of his fortune. When at last he reached his majority, his cousin and guardian, the Comte de Montchevrel, gave him an account of his stewardship. Relations between the two men did not last long, for there could be no point of contact between one so old and one so young. But while they lasted, out of curiosity, as a matter of courtesy, and for want of something to do, Des Esseintes saw a good deal of his cousin’s family; and he spent several desperately dull evenings at their town-house in he Rue de la Chaise, listening to female relatives old as the hills conversing about noble quarterings, heraldic moons and antiquated ceremonial.
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