Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  There were other poets, too, who could still excite his interest and admiration. One of these was Tristan Corbière,8 who in 1873, amid general indifference, had published a fantastically eccentric book of verse entitled Les Amours jaunes. Des Esseintes, who, in his hatred of all that was trite and vulgar, would have welcomed the most outrageous follies, the most bizarre extravagances, spent many happy hours with this book in which droll humour was combined with turbulent energy, and in which lines of disconcerting brilliance occurred in poems of wonderful obscurity. There were the litanies in his Sommeil, for instance, where he described sleep at one point as the

  Obscène confesseur des dévotes mort-nées.9

  It was scarcely French; the poet was talking ‘pidgin’, using a telegram idiom, suppressing far too many verbs, trying to be waggish and indulging in cheap commercial-traveller jokes; but then, out of this jungle of comical conceits and smirking witticisms there would suddenly rise a sharp cry of pain, like the sound of a violoncello string breaking. What is more, in this rugged, arid, utterly fleshless style, bristling with unusual terms and unexpected neologisms, there sparkled and flashed many a felicitous expression, many a stray line that had lost its rhyme but was none the less superb. Finally, to say nothing of his Poèmes parisiens, from which Des Esseintes used to quote this profound definition of woman:

  Éternel féminin de l’éternel jocrisse,10

  Tristan Corbière had, in a style of almost incredible concision, sung of the seas of Brittany, the sailors’ seraglios, the Pardon of St Anne, and had even attained the eloquence of passionate hatred in the insults he heaped, when speaking of the camp at Conlie, on the individuals whom he described as ‘mountebanks of the Fourth of September’.

  The gamey flavour which Des Esseintes loved, and which was offered him by this poet of the condensed epithet and the perpetually suspect charm, he found also in another poet, Théodore Hannon,11 a disciple of Baudelaire and Gautier who was actuated by a very special understanding of studied elegances and factitious pleasures.

  Unlike Verlaine, who was directly descended from Baudelaire, without any cross-breeding, especially in his psychology, in the sophistical slant of his thought, in the skilled distillation of his feeling, Théodore Hannon’s kinship with the master could be seen chiefly in the plastic side of his poetry, in his external view of people and things.

  His delightful corruptness corresponded with Des Esseintes’s tastes, and when it was foggy or raining the latter would often shut himself up in the retreat imagined by this poet and intoxicate his eyes with the shimmer of his fabrics, with the sparkle of his jewels, with all his exclusively material luxuries, which helped to excite his brain and rose like cantharides in a cloud of warm incense towards a Brussels idol with a painted face and a belly tanned with perfumes.

  With the exception of these authors and of Stéphane Mallarmé,12 whom he instructed his man to put on one side, to be set in a class apart, Des Esseintes was only very moderately drawn to the poets.

  In spite of his magnificent formal qualities, in spite of the imposing majesty of his verse, which had such a splendid air that even Hugo’s hexameters seemed dull and drab in comparison, Leconte de Lisle13 could now no longer satisfy him. The ancient world which Flaubert had resuscitated with such marvellous success remained cold and lifeless in his hands. Nothing stirred in his poetry; it was all a façade with, most of the time, not a single idea to prop it up. There was no life in these empty poems, and their frigid mythologies ended up by repelling him.

  Similarly, after cherishing him for many years, Des Esseintes was beginning to lose interest in Gautier’s work; his admiration for the incomparable painter of word-pictures that Gautier was had recently been diminishing day by day, so that now he was more astonished than delighted by his almost apathetic descriptions. Outside objects had made a lasting impression on his remarkably perceptive eye, but that impression had become localized, had failed to penetrate any further into brain or body; like a marvellous reflector, he had always confined himself to sending back the image of his surroundings with impersonal precision.

  Of course, Des Esseintes still appreciated the works of these two poets, in the same way that he appreciated rare jewels or precious substances; but none of the variations of these brilliant instrumentalists could now enrapture any more, for none possessed the makings of a dream, none opened up, at least for him, one of those lively vistas that enabled him to speed the weary flight of the hours.

  He used to put their books down feeling hungry and unsatisfied, and the same was true of Hugo’s. The Oriental, patriarchal aspect was too trite and hollow to retain his interest, while the nursery-maidish, grandfatherly pose annoyed him intensely. It was not until he came to the Chansons de srues et des bois that he could unreservedly enjoy the impeccable jugglery of Hugo’s prosody; and even then, he would gladly have given all these tours de force for a new work of Baudelaire’s of the same quality as the old, for the latter was without a doubt almost the only author whose verses, underneath their splendid shell, contained a balsamic and nutritious kernel.

  Jumping from one extreme to the other, from form bereft of ideas to ideas bereft of form, left Des Esseintes just as circumspect and critical. The psychological labyrinths of Stendhal and the analytical amplifications of Duranty aroused his interest, but their arid, colourless, bureaucratic style, their utterly commonplace prose, fit for nothing better than the ignoble industry of the stage, repelled him. Besides, the most interesting of their delicate analytical operations were performed, when all was said and done, on brains fired by passions that no longer moved him. Little he cared about ordinary emotions or common associations of ideas, now that his mind had grown so overstocked and had no room for anything but superfine sensations, religious doubts and sensual anxieties.

  In order to enjoy a literature that united, just as he wished, an incisive style and a subtle, feline skill in analysis, he had to wait till he reached that master of induction, the wise and wonderful Edgar Allan Poe, for whom his admiration had not suffered in the least from rereading his work.

  Better perhaps than anyone else, Poe possessed those intimate affinities that could satisfy the requirements of Des Esseintes’s mind.

  If Baudelaire had made out among the hieroglyphics of the soul the critical age of thought and feeling, it was Poe who, in the sphere of morbid psychology, had carried out the closest scrutiny of the will.

  In literature he had been the first, under the emblematic title The Imp of the Perverse, to study those irresistible impulses which the will submits to without fully understanding them, and which cerebral pathology can now explain with a fair degree of certainty; he had been the first again, if not to point out, at least to make known the depressing influence fear has on the will, which it affects in the same way as anaesthetics which paralyse the senses and curare which cripples the motory nerves. It was on this last subject, this lethargy of the will, that he had concentrated his studies, analysing the effects of this moral poison and indicating the symptoms of its progress – mental disturbances beginning with anxiety, developing into anguish and finally culminating in a terror that stupefies the faculties of volition, yet without the intellect, however badly shaken it may be, giving way.

  As for death, which the dramatists had so grossly abused, he had in a way given it a sharper edge, a new look, by introducing into it an algebraic and superhuman element; though to tell the truth, it was not so much the physical agony of the dying he described as the moral agony of the survivor, haunted beside the death-bed by the monstrous hallucinations engendered by grief and fatigue. With awful fascination he dwelt on the effects of terror, on the failures of will-power, and discussed them with clinical objectivity, making the reader’s flesh creep, his throat contract, his mouth go dry at the recital of these mechanically devised nightmares of a fevered brain.

  Convulsed by hereditary neuroses, maddened by moral choreas, his characters lived on their nerves; his women, his Morellas and Ligeias, possessed
vast learning steeped in the mists of German philosophy and in the cabbalistic mysteries of the ancient East, and all of them had the inert, boyish breasts of angels, all were, so to speak, unsexed.

  Baudelaire and Poe, whose two minds had often been compared on account of their common poetic inspiration and the penchant they shared for the examination of mental diseases, differed radically in the emotional concepts which played a large part in their works – Baudelaire with his thirsty, ruthless passion, whose disgusted cruelty recalled the tortures of the Inquisition, and Poe with his chaste, ethereal amours, in which the senses had no share and only the brain was roused, followed by none of the lower organs, which, if they existed at all, remained for ever frozen and virgin.

  This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in a stifling atmosphere, this spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention wandered, the prey of his imagination, which sprayed about him, like delicious miasmas, angelic, dream-like apparitions, was for Des Esseintes a source of indefatigable conjectures; but now that his neurosis had grown worse, there were days when reading these works exhausted him, when it left him with his hands trembling and his ears cocked, overcome, like the unfortunate Usher, by an unreasoning fear, an unspoken terror.

  He therefore had to hold himself in check and only rarely indulge in these formidable elixirs, just as he could no longer visit with impunity his red entrance-hall and feast his eyes on the horrors of Odilon Redon and the tortures of Jan Luyken.

  And yet, when he was in this frame of mind, almost anything he read seemed insipid after these terrible philtres imported from America. He would therefore turn to Villiers de I’Isle-Adam,14 in whose scattered writings he discovered observations just as unorthodox, vibrations just as spasmodic, but which, except perhaps in Claire Lenoir, did not convey such an overwhelming sense of horror.

  Published in 1867 in the Revue des lettres et des arts, this Claire Lenoir was the first of a series of stories linked together by the generic title of Histoires moroses. Against a background of abstruse speculations borrowed from old Hegel, there moved two deranged individuals, a Doctor Tribulat Bonhomet who was pompous and puerile, and a Claire Lenoir who was droll and sinister, with blue spectacles as big and round as five-franc pieces covering her almost lifeless eyes.

  This story concerned a commonplace case of adultery, but ended on a note of indescribable terror when Bonhomet, uncovering the pupils of Claire’s eyes as she lay on her death-bed, and probing them with monstrous instruments, saw clearly reflected on the retina a picture of the husband brandishing at arm’s length the severed head of the lover and, like a Kanaka, howling a triumphant war-chant.

  Based on the more or less valid observation that, until decomposition sets in, the eyes of certain animals, oxen for instance, preserve like photographic plates the image of the people and things lying at the moment of death within the range of their last look, the tale obviously owed a great deal to those of Edgar Allan Poe, from which it derived its wealth of punctilious detail and its horrific atmosphere.

  The same was true of L’Intersigne, which had later been incorporated in the Contes cruels, a collection of stories of indisputable talent which also included Véra, a tale Des Esseintes regarded as a little masterpiece.

  Here the hallucination was endowed with an exquisite tenderness; there was nothing here of the American author’s gloomy mirages, but a well-nigh heavenly vision of sweetness and warmth, which in an identical style formed the antithesis of Poe’s Beatrices and Ligeias, those pale, unhappy phantoms engendered by the inexorable nightmare of black opium.

  This story too brought into play the operations of the will, but it no longer showed it undermined and brought low by fear; on the contrary, it studied its intoxication under the influence of a conviction which had become an obsession, and it also demonstrated its power, which was so great that it could saturate the atmosphere and impose its beliefs on surrounding objects.

  Another book of Villiers’, Isis, he considered remarkable for different reasons. The philosophical lumber that littered Claire Lenoir also cluttered up this book, which contained an incredible hotch-potch of vague, verbose observations on the one hand and reminiscences of hoary melodramas on the other – oubliettes, daggers, rope-ladders, in fact all the romantic bric-àbrac that would reappear, looking just as old-fashioned, in Villiers’ Elēn and Morgane, long-forgotten works published by a Monsieur Francisque Guyon, an obscure little printer in Saint-Brieuc.

  The heroine of this book, a Marquise Tullia Fabriana, who was supposed to have assimilated the Chaldean learning of Poe’s women and the diplomatic sagacity of Stendhal’s Sanseverina-Taxis, not content with all this, had also assumed the enigmatic expression of a Bradamante crossed with an antique Circe. These incompatible mixtures gave rise to a smoky vapour in which philosophical and literary influences jostled each other around, without managing to sort themselves out in the author’s mind by the time he began writing the prolegomena to this work, which was intended to fill no less than seven volumes.

  But there was another side to Villiers’ personality, altogether clearer and sharper, marked by grim humour and ferocious banter; when this side was uppermost, the result was not one of Poe’s paradoxical mystifications, but a lugubriously comic jeering similar to Swift’s bitter raillery. A whole series of tales, Les Demoiselles de Bienfilâtre, L’Affichage céleste, La Machine à gloire and Le plus beau dîner du monde, revealed a singularly inventive and satirical sense of humour. All the filthiness of contemporary utilitarian ideas, all the money-grubbing ignominy of the age were glorified in stories whose pungent irony sent Des Esseintes into raptures of delight.

  In this realm of biting, poker-faced satire, no other book existed in France. The next best thing was a story by Charles Cros,15 La Science de l’amour, originally published in the Revue du Monde Nouveau, which was calculated to astonish the reader with its chemical extravagances, its tight-lipped humour, its icily comic observations; but the pleasure it gave was only relative, for in execution it was fatally defective. Villiers’ style, solid, colourful, often original, had disappeared, to be supplanted by a sort of sausage-meat scraped from the table of some literary pork-butcher.

  ‘Lord, how few books there are that are worth reading again!’ sighed Des Esseintes, watching his man as he climbed down the step-ladder he had been perched on and stood to one side to let his master have a clear view of all the bookshelves.

  Des Esseintes gave a nod of approval. There were now only two thin booklets left on the table. Dismissing the old man with a wave of his hand, he began looking through one of these, comprised of a few pages bound in onager-skin that had been glazed under a hydraulic press, dappled in water-colour with silver clouds and provided with end-papers of old lampas, the floral pattern of which, now rather dim with age, had that faded charm which Mallarmé extolled in a truly delightful poem.

  These pages, nine in all, had been taken out of unique copies of the first two Parnasses,16 printed on parchment, and preceded by a title-page bearing the words: Quelques vers de Mallarmé, executed by a remarkable calligrapher in uncial letters, coloured and picked out, like those in ancient manuscripts, with specks of gold.

  Among the eleven pieces brought together between these covers, a few Les Fenêtres, L’É pilogue and Azur, he found extremely attractive, but there was one in particular, a fragment of Hérodiade, that seemed to lay a magic spell on him at certain times.

  Often of an evening, sitting in the dim light his lamp shed over the silent room, he had imagined he felt her brush past him – that same Herodias who in Gustave Moreau’s picture had withdrawn into the advancing shadows, so that nothing could be seen but the vague shape of a white statue in the midst of a feebly glowing brazier of jewels.

  The darkness hid the blood, dimmed the bright colours and gleaming gold, enveloped the far corners of the temple in gloom, concealed the minor actors in the criminal drama where they stood wrapped in their dark garments and, sparing only the white patches in the water-colo
ur, drew the woman from the scabbard of her jewels and emphasized her nakedness.

  His eyes were irresistibly drawn towards her, following the familiar outlines of her body until she came to life again before him, bringing to his lips those sweet, strange words that Mallarmé puts into her mouth:

  …O miroir!

  Eau froide par l’ennui dans ton cadre gelée

  Que de fois et pendant les heures, désolée

  Des songes et cherchant mes souvenirs qui sont

  Comme des feuilles sous ta glace au trou profond,

  Je m’apparus en toi comme une ombre lointaine,

  Mais, horreur! des soirs, dans ta sévère fontainé,

  J’ai de mon rêve épars connu la nudité!17

  He loved these verses as he loved all the works of this poet who, in an age of universal suffrage and a time of commercial greed, lived outside the world of letters, sheltered from the raging folly all around him by his lofty scorn; taking pleasure, far from society, in the caprices of the mind and the visions of his brain; refining upon thoughts that were already subtle enough, grafting Byzantine niceties on them, perpetuating them in deductions that were barely hinted at and loosely linked by an imperceptible thread.

  These precious, interwoven ideas he knotted together with an adhesive style, a unique, hermetic language, full of contracted phrases, elliptical constructions, audacious tropes.

  Sensitive to the remotest affinities, he would often use a term that by analogy suggested at once form, scent, colour, quality and brilliance, to indicate a creature or thing to which he would have had to attach a host of different epithets in order to bring out all its various aspects and qualities, if it had merely been referred to by its technical name. By this means he managed to do away with the formal statement of a comparison that the reader’s mind made by itself as soon as it had understood the symbol, and he avoided dispersing the reader’s attention over all the several qualities that a row of adjectives would have presented one by one, concentrating it instead on a single word, a single entity, producing, as in the case of a picture, a unique and comprehensive impression, an overall view.