Against Nature

by Joris-karl Huysmans

  The result was a wonderfully condensed style, an essence of literature, a sublimate of art. It was a style that Mallarmé had first employed only sparingly in his earliest works, and then used openly and audaciously in a piece he wrote on Théophile Gautier and in L’Après-midi d’un faune, an eclogue in which the subtleties of sensual pleasure were unfolded in mysterious, tender verse, suddenly interrupted by this bestial, frenzied cry of the faun:

  Alors m’éveillerai-je à la ferveur première,

  Droit et seul sous un flot antique de lumière,

  Lys! et l’un de vous tous pour l’ingénuité.18

  This last line, which with the monosyllable Lys! carried over from the previous line, conjured up a picture of something tall, white and rigid, and the meaning of which was made even clearer by the choice of the noun ingénuité to provide the rhyme, expressed in an allegorical manner and in a single word the passion, the effervescence, the momentary excitement of the virgin faun, maddened with desire by the sight of the nymphs.

  In this extraordinary poem, new and surprising images occurred in almost every line when the poet came to describe the longings and regrets of the goat-footed god, standing on the edge of the swamp and looking at the clumps of rushes that still retained an ephemeral impression of the rounded forms of the naiads who had rested there.

  Des Esseintes also derived a certain perverse pleasure from handling this minute volume, whose covers, made of Japanese felt as white as curdled milk, were fastened with two silk cords, one China pink, the other black.

  Concealed behind the covers, the black ribbon met the pink ribbon, which was busy adding a note of silken luxury, a suggestion of modern Japanese rouge, a hint of eroticism, to the antique whiteness, the virginal pallor of the book, and embraced it, joining together in a dainty bow its own sombre hue and the other’s lighter colour, and thereby giving a discreet intimation, a vague warning, of the melancholy regrets that follow the appeasement of sexual desire, the abatement of sensual frenzy.

  Des Esseintes put L’Après-midi d’un faune back on the table and began glancing through another slim volume which he had had printed for his personal pleasure – an anthology of prose poetry, a little chapel dedicated to Baudelaire and opening on to the cathedral square of his poems.

  This anthology included selected passages from the Gaspard de la nuit of that whimsical author Aloysius Bertrand,19 who applied Leonardo da Vinci’s methods to prose and painted with his metal oxides a series of little pictures whose brilliant colours shine like bright enamels. To these Des Esseintes had added Villiers’ Vox populi, a superb piece struck in a style of gold with the effigies of Flaubert and Leconte de Lisle, and a few extracts from that dainty Livre de jade20 whose exotic perfume of ginseng and tea is mingled with the fresh fragrance of the moonlit waters that ripple through the book from cover to cover.

  But this was not all. The collection also contained sundry pieces rescued from extinct reviews: Le Démon de l’analogie, La Pipe, Le Pauvre Enfant pâle, Le Spectacle interrompu, Le Phénomène futur and above all Plainte d’automne and Frisson d’hiver. These were Mallarmé’s masterpieces and also ranked among the masterpieces of prose poetry, for they combined a style so magnificently contrived than in itself it was as soothing as a melancholy incantation, an intoxicating melody, with irresistibly suggestive thoughts, the soul-throbs of a sensitive artist whose quivering nerves vibrate with an intensity that fills you with painful ecstasy.

  Of all forms of literature, the prose poem was Des Esseintes’s favourite. Handled by an alchemist of genius it should, he maintained, contain within its small compass and in concentrated form the substance of a novel, while dispensing with the latter’s long-winded analyses and superfluous descriptions. Many were the times that Des Esseintes had pondered over the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohobated juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters and piling up useful observations and incidental details. The words chosen for a work of this sort would be so unalterable that they would take the place of all the others; every adjective would be sited with such ingenuity and finality that it could never be legally evicted, and would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on its meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end, and also ascertain the present, reconstruct the past and divine the future of the characters in the light of this one epithet.

  The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed in a page or two, would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.

  In short, the prose poem represented in Des Esseintes’s eyes the dry juice, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art.

  This succulent extract concentrated in a single drop could already be found in Baudelaire, and also in those poems of Mallarmé’s that he savoured with such rare delight.

  When he had closed his anthology, the last book in his library, Des Esseintes told himself that in all probability he would never add another to his collection.

  The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted on its death-bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied in Mallarmé in the most consummate and exquisite fashion.

  Here, carried to the further limits of expression, was the quintessence of Baudelaire and Poe; here their refined and potent substances had been distilled yet again to give off new savours, new intoxications.

  This was the death-agony of the old tongue which, after going a little greener every century, had now reached the point of dissolution, the same stage of deliquescence as the Latin language when it breathed its last in the mysterious concepts and enigmatic phrases of St Boniface and St Adhelm.

  The only difference was that the decomposition of the French language had occurred suddenly and speedily. In Latin, there had been a lengthy period of transition, a gap of four hundred years, between the superbly variegated idiom of Claudian and Rutilius and the gamey idiom of the eighth century. In French, on the contrary, there had been no lapse of time, no intervening sequence of centuries; the superbly variegated style of the Goncourts and the gamey style of Verlaine and Mallarmé rubbed shoulders in Paris, where they existed at the same time, in the same period, in the same century.

  And Des Esseintes smiled to himself as he glanced at one of the folios lying open on his church lectern, thinking that the time would come when a learned professor would compile for the decadence of the French language a glossary like the one in which the erudite Du Cange had recorded the last stammerings, the last paroxysms, the last brilliant sallies of the Latin language as it perished of old age in the depths of the medieval monasteries.21

  CHAPTER 15

  After blazing up like a flash in the pan, Des Esseintes’s enthusiasm for his digester died down just as suddenly. His dyspepsia, banished for a little while, began plaguing him again, while all this concentrated food was so binding and brought on such an irritation of the bowels that he had to stop using the apparatus straight away.

  His illness promptly resumed its course, accompanied by hitherto unknown symptoms. The nightmares, the eye troubles, the hacking cough that came on at fixed intervals as regular as clockwork, the throbbing of the arteries and heart and the cold sweats were now followed by aural illusions, the sort of derangement that occurs only when the complaint has entered its final phase.

  Consumed with a burning fever, Des Esseintes suddenly heard the sounds of running water, of buzzing wasps; then these noises merged into one which resembled the humming of
a lathe, and this humming grew shriller and clearer until it eventually changed into the silvery note of a bell.

  At this point he felt his disordered brain being carried away on waves of music and plunged into the religious atmosphere of his adolescence. The chants he had learnt from the Jesuit Fathers came back to him, recalling the college chapel where they had been sung, and passing the hallucinations on to the senses of sight and smell, which they enveloped in clouds of incense and the gloomy light filtering through stained-glass windows under lofty vaults.

  With the Fathers, the rites of religion were performed with great pomp; an excellent organist and a remarkable choir made sure that these pious exercises provided both spiritual edification and aesthetic pleasure. The organist loved the old masters, and on feast-days he would make his choice from Palestrina’s or Orlando Lasso’s masses, Marcello’s psalms, Handel’s oratorios, and Bach’s motets, rejecting the sensuous, facile compilations of Father Lambillotte, so popular with the clergy, in favour of certain Laudi spirituali of the sixteenth century whose hieratic beauty had many a time captivated Des Esseintes.

  But above all else he had derived ineffable pleasure from listening to plainsong, to which the organist had remained faithful in defiance of current fashion.

  This type of music, at present considered an effete and barbarous form of the Christian liturgy, as an archaeological curiosity, as a relic of the distant past, was the idiom of the ancient Church, the very soul of the Middle Ages; it was the sempiternal prayer, sung and modulated to accord with the movements of the soul, the diuturnal hymn which had risen for centuries past towards the Most High.

  This traditional melody was the only one which, with its powerful unison, its harmonies as massive and imposing as blocks of freestone, could tone in with the old basilicas and fill their Romanesque vaults, of which it seemed to be the emanation, the very voice.

  Time and again an awe-struck Des Esseintes had bowed his head in response to an irresistible impulse when the Christus factus est of the Gregorian chant had soared up in the nave, whose pillars trembled amid the floating clouds of incense, or when the faux-bourdon of the De Profundis groaned forth, mournful as a stifled sob, poignant as a despairing appeal by mankind bewailing its mortal destiny and imploring the tender mercy of its Saviour.

  Compared with this magnificent chant, created by the genius of the Church, as impersonal and anonymous as the organ itself, whose inventor is unknown, all other religious music struck him as profane. At bottom, in all the works of Jomelli and Porpora, of Carissimi and Durante, in the finest compositions of Handel and Bach, there was no real renunciation of popular success, no real sacrifice of artistic effect, no real abdication of human pride listening to itself at prayer; only in the imposing masses by Lesueur he had heard at Saint-Roch did the true religious style come into its own again, solemn and august, approaching the austere majesty of plainsong in its stark nudity.

  Since then, utterly revolted by the pretexts a Rossini and a Pergolese had thought up for composing a Stabat Mater, by the general invasion of liturgical art by fashionable artists, Des Esseintes had held aloof from all these equivocal compositions tolerated by the over-indulgent Church.

  The fact was that this indulgent attitude, ostensibly intended to attract the faithful and really intended to attract their money, had promptly resulted in a crop of arias borrowed from Italian operas, contemptible cavatinas and objectionable quadrilles, sung with full orchestra accompaniment, in churches converted into boudoirs, by barnstormers bellowing away up in the roof, while down below the ladies waged a war of fashions and went into raptures over the shrieks of the mountebanks whose impure voices were defiling the sacred notes of the organ.

  For years now he had steadfastly refused to take part in these pious entertainments, preferring to recall his memories of childhood, even regretting having heard certain of the great masters’ Te Deums when he remembered that admirable Te Deum of plainsong, that simple, awe-inspiring hymn composed by some saint or other, a St Ambrose or a St Hilary, who, without the complicated resources of an orchestra, without the musical contrivances of modern science, displayed a burning faith, a delirious joy, the faith and joy of all humanity, expressed in ardent, confident, well-nigh celestial accents.

  The odd thing was that Des Esseintes’s ideas on music were in flagrant contradiction with the theories he professed about the other arts. The only religious music he really approved of was the monastic music of the Middle Ages, that emaciated music which provoked an instinctive nervous reaction in him, like certain pages of the old Christian Latinists; besides, as he himself admitted, he was incapable of understanding whatever new devices the present-day masters might have introduced into Catholic art.

  In the first place, he had not studied music with the same passionate enthusiasm that had drawn him to painting and literature. He could play the piano as well as the next man, and after long practice had learnt how to read a score more or less inefficiently; but he knew nothing of the harmony and the technique that were necessary to be able really to appreciate every nuance, to understand every subtlety, to derive the maximum pleasure from every refinement.

  Then again, secular music is a promiscuous art in that you cannot enjoy it at home, by yourself, as you can a book; to savour it he would have had to join the mob of inveterate theatre-goers that fills the Cirque d’Hiver, where under a broiling sun and in a stifling atmosphere you can see a hulking brute of a man waving his arms about and massacring disconnected snatches of Wagner to the huge delight of an ignorant crowd.

  He had never had the courage to plunge into this mob-bath to listen to Berlioz, even though he admired some fragments of his work for their passionate ardour and fiery spirit; and he was well aware that there was not a single scene, not even a single phrase, in any of the mighty Wagner’s operas that could be divorced from its context with impunity.1

  Slices cut off and served up at a concert lost all sense and meaning, for like chapters in a book that are complementary to one another and combine to reach the same goal, the same conclusion, Wagner’s melodies were used to define the characters of his dramatis personae, to represent their thoughts, to express their visible or secret motives, and their ingenious and persistent repetitions could only be understood by an audience that followed the subject from the start and watched the characters gradually taking shape and developing in a setting from which they could not be removed without dying like branches cut from a tree.

  Des Esseintes was therefore convinced that of the mob of melomaniacs who went into ecstasies every Sunday on the benches of the Cirque d’Hiver, barely twenty could tell what the orchestra was murdering, even when the attendants were kind enough to stop chattering and give it a chance of being heard.

  Considering also that the intelligent patriotism of the French made it impossible for any theatre in the country to put on a Wagner opera, there was nothing left for the keen amateur who was ignorant of the arcana of music and could not or would not travel to Bayreuth but to stay at home, and this was the reasonable course Des Esseintes had adopted.

  On a different level, cheaper, more popular music and isolated extracts from the old operas scarcely appealed to him; the trivial little tunes of Auber and Boïeldieu, of Adam and Flotow,2 and the rhetorical commonplaces turned out by such men as Ambroise Thomas and Bazin were just as repugnant to him as the antiquated sentimentalities and vulgar graces of the Italians. He had therefore resolutely abstained from all musical indulgence, and the only pleasant memories he retained from these years of abstinence were of certain chamber concerts at which he had heard some Beethoven and above all some Schumann and Schubert which had stimulated his nerves in the same way as Poe’s most intimate and anguished poems.

  Certain settings for the violoncello by Schumann had left him positively panting with emotion, choking with hysteria; but it was chiefly Schubert’s Lieder that had excited him, carried him away, then prostrated him as if he had been squandering his nervous energy, indulging in a
mystical debauch.

  This music thrilled him to the very marrow, reawakening a host of forgotten sorrows, of old grievances, in a heart surprised at containing so many confused regrets and vague mortifications. This desolate music, surging up from the uttermost depths of the soul, terrified and fascinated him at the same time. He had never been able to hum Des Mädchens Klage3 without nervous tears rising to his eyes, for in this lamento there was something more than sadness, a note of despair that tore at his heartstrings, something reminiscent of a dying love-affair in a melancholy landscape.

  Every time they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments called to mind a suburban scene, a shabby, silent piece of waste land and in the distance, lines of men and women, harassed by the cares of life, shuffling away, bent double, into the twilight, while he himself, steeped in bitterness and filled with disgust, felt alone in the midst of tearful Nature, all alone, overcome by an unspeakable melancholy, by an obstinate distress, the mysterious intensity of which precluded any prospect of consolation, of pity, of repose. Like the sound of a passing-bell, these mournful melodies haunted him now that he lay in bed, exhausted by fever and tormented by an anxiety that was all the more irresistible in that he could no longer discover its cause. He finally abandoned himself to the current of his emotions, swept away by the torrent of anguish let loose by this music – a torrent that was suddenly stemmed for a moment by the sound of the psalms echoing slowly and softly in his head, whose aching temples felt as though they were being beaten by the clappers of tolling bells.