Against Nature
Page 30
5. These were all signed Odilon Redon: Odilon Redon (1840–1916) illustrated the works of, among others, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarmé and Poe (his illustrations have appeared on the covers of Penguin Classics Poe editions). Redon’s Homage to Goya, a series of lithographs, appeared in 1885. Huysmans reviewed them in the Revue indépendante and wrote an essay on Redon entitled ‘Le Monstre’ (‘The Monster’) in Certains, his 1887 book of art criticism.
6. Proverbs by Goya: This painting by Goya (1746–1828) was a favourite of Baudelaire, who wrote enthusiastically on Goya’s ability to wring the beautiful from the ugly.
7. Theotocopuli: Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541–1614), better known as El Greco.
CHAPTER 6
1. De Laude Castitatis… Bishop of Vienne: De consolatoria laude Castitis ad Fuscinam sororem (In Praise of Chastity), by Avitus, Bishop of Vienne, has already been mentioned in Des Esseintes’ library inventory of chapter III.
CHAPTER 7
1. the Dominican Lacordaire… Sorrèze: Jean-Baptiste-Henri Lacordaire (1802–61) was a politically active preacher whose best-known work is his Conférences. He merged a belief that faith was compatible with reason with an emphasis on the mysticism of Christianity. The college of Sorrèze was a famous educational establishment in Tarn.
2. De Quincey: The work of Thomas De Quincey had been translated by the Romantic poet Alfred de Musset in 1818, and had profoundly affected Baudelaire (who adapted parts of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his Paradis artificiels).
3. ideas of monstrous depravity… abused: Huysmans studied and took long documentary notes on black masses, and satanism was partly the subject of his book, Là-Bas (The Damned, 1891).
4. Schopenhauer… came nearer to the truth: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), the German philosopher and contemporary of Hegel, was extraordinarily influential in France at the time. His World as Will and Idea and Aphorisms had massive impact. A key book in Schopenhauer reception is Elme-Marie Caro’s Le Pessimisme au XIXe siècle: Léopardi, Schopenhauer, Hartmann (Pessimism in the Nineteenth Century, 1878), and Théodule Ribot’s La Philosophie de Schopenhauer (1874). In his preface of 1903, Huysmans reassesses his attraction to Schopenhauer as a poor substitute for Christian faith.
5. Imitation of Christ: The Imitation of Christ was written by Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471). As he later does in his 1903 preface, Huysmans makes the connection between Schopenhaurean resignation and the resigned sorrow of Thomas à Kempis.
6. hydropathic treatment: Hydrotherapy was at the time a treatment for neurosis. Fumaroli notes the autobiographical dimension to this section, referring to Huysmans’ description in a letter to Zola (April 1882) of gruelling hydrotherapeutic treatment.
CHAPTER 8
1. It amused him… bourgeois blooms: The Baudelairean strain in this is clear. Baudelaire’s poems had been described as ‘flowers of evil sprung in the hothouses of decadence’, and the hothouse became the symbol of the rare, etiolated, unnatural growths of which the Decadents were fond. The ultimate expression of hothouse imagery is Maeterlinck’s poems Serres chaudes (Hothouses, 1889), but the image can be found in authors as different as Zola and Laforgue. We may note that even here, with the sensuality of the plants, Des Esseintes reads the labels: even these plants are textually interpreted.
2. tired of artificial flowers… fakes: In this about-turn the logic of artifice comes to a sinister but slightly comical halt, like the tortoise.
3. It all comes down to syphilis in the end: Syphilitic heredity is another means for the theme of heredity to wind its way into the book. Continuity in Against Nature is often figured as a decline or an undermining virus, and this dream of syphilis rampaging through the ages is one memorable instance, as the disease links epochs, generations and social classes.
CHAPTER 9
1. the solanaceae of literature: Solanaceous refers mainly to narcotic (and occasionally poisonous) plants, and Huysmans here evokes a kind of narcotic writing.
2. Siraudin: A famous confectioner, frequented also by the heroine of Edmond de Goncourt’s La Faustin (1882).
3. the Circus: The fascination with circus performers (such as Miss Urania) is characteristic of the late nineteenth century: Banville, Villiers and the Goncourt brothers in Les Frères Zemganno (The Zemganno Brothers, 1879) had explored the life and art of acrobats and circus performers.
4. dialogue of the Chimera and the Sphinx: The dialogue occurs in Flaubert’s La tentation de St Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Antony).
5. Des Esseintes ran his eyes over him: Marc Fumaroli notes that this episode was what attracted the young decadent poet and novelist Jean Lorrain to Huysmans. Lorrain, author of Monsieur Phocas, was Huysmans’ guide to underground Paris.
CHAPTER 10
1. For years now he had been an expert in the science of perfumes: Huysmans researched his perfumes, like his Latin poets, exhaustively. Among the sources for this chapter are S. Piesse, Des Odeurs, des parfums, et des cosmétiques (Smells, Perfumes and Cosmetics, 1877) and the catalogue Produits spéciaux recommandés de Violet, parfumeur brèveté fournisseur de toutes les cours étrangères (Special Products Recommended by Violet, Certified Perfumier, Supplier of All Foreign Courts, 1874). Des Esseintes is saturated with Baudelairean ideas: exegete of scents, interpreter of olfactory symphonies, he is also, thanks to his books and treatises, a technician of perfume. Scents and perfumes represent both essences (thereby endorsing Des Esseintes’ search for the distillation and concentration) and fakes (thereby satisfying his need for artifice). In this chapter, as throughout Against Nature, there is an unresolvable tension between the two.
2. Victor Hugo and Gautier: Victor Hugo (1802–85) and Théophile Gautier (1811–72) were among the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, pioneering Romantics and literary radicals. Gautier was the dedicatee of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and author of Emaux et Camées (Enamels and Gemstones, 1852) and the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin as well as volumes of fantastical tales and innumerable critical and journalistic essays. He became an exponent of ‘l’art pour l’art’ and was prized by the Symbolists (and later by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot) for his collection Emaux et camées. Hugo was the great figure of French literature, massively popular and active in every genre, author of, among much else, Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, the poetry collection Les Orientales and the play Hernani.
3. its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians: François Malherbe (1555–1628) was an influential French poet who prized clarity and economy in verse. Nicolas Boileau (1636–1711), author of Art poétique, was one of the great neo-classical poets. François Guillaume Andrieux (1759–1833) and Pierre François Marie Baour-Lormian (1770–1854) were reactionary classicists who were against the early Romantics. Baour-Lormian wrote the influential Le Classique et le Romantique (Classicism and Romanticism) in 1825.
4. Thémidore: Novel (1745) by Claude Godard d’Aucour.
5. Pantin was there… gaze was directed: From the artificial tropics of the hothouse and the scents of hay and flowers, Des Esseintes moves to the reality of Pantin, on the industrial margins of Paris.
CHAPTER 11
1. Galignani’s Messenger: An English-language daily in Paris. The paper carried a review of Against Nature, describing it as ‘a work of an entirely new but by no means healthy tendency’, leaving ‘a decidedly bitter taste’ (23 May 1884).
2. comic scenes by Du Maurier or John Leech… Raphael: George Du Maurier (1834–96), John Leech (1817–64) and Randolph Caldecott (1846–86), were English artists and caricaturists. John Everett Millais (1829–96) and George Frederick Watts were Pre-Raphaelite painters. Some of them Huysmans had seen exhibited at the Salon of 1881 and discusses in his 1883 volume of art criticism, L’Art moderne.
3. Little Dorrit, Dora Copperfield or Tom Pinch’s sister Ruth: The references are to characters from Dickens.
4. The spine-chilling nightmare of the cask of Amontillado: Des Esseintes is thinking of
Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846).
5. I’ve been steeped in English life… change of locality: Des Esseintes’ London, the perfect literary image, is an amalgam of the Pre-Raphaelites, De Quincey and Dickens, but also of commodities and labels. With Des Esseintes’ ‘journey’ to England we may compare Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying: ‘if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists…’
CHAPTER 12
1. Archelaus… Arnaud de Villanova: Archelaus was a fifth-century BC Greek poet and alchemist. Albertus Magnus was a medieval German philosopher. Raymond Lully (1233–1315) was a Catalan poet and philosopher. Villanova was a Spanish alchemist and astrologer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
2. This collection had cost him… peasant’s boots: In the following passage Huysmans names past and contemporary bookbinders, and we note that Des Esseintes spends more time touching these books than reading them.
3. The ‘side-splitting mirth’ of Rabelais… anathemas: François Rabelais (d. 1553), author of Gargantua et Pantagruel, was known for his humour and linguistic inventiveness. Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622–73), was the author of some of French theatre’s finest comedies. Des Esseintes dislikes his emphasis on ‘good sense’. François Villon, the medieval poet and author of Testament, was one of the prototypes of the poète maudit. Agrippa D’Aubigné (1552–1630), author of Les Tragiques (The Tragic Ones).
4. As for prose… straight to his heart: Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778), one of the most prolific writers in all genres in French literary history. A politically-engaged humanist philosopher, he fought against religious bigotry and political oppression. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), massively influential Swiss writer, author of autobiographical, critical, novelistic and political texts. Denis Diderot (1713–84), novelist, playwright and free-thinking critic, he was also politically active and editor of the Encyclopédie. Louis Bourdaloue (1623–1704) was a Jesuit priest known for his sermons that emphasized personal morality. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), was a poet, historian, churchman and orator, and was a member of Louis XIV’s court. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a philosopher, mathematician, scientist and Christian apologist. His Pensées were published in 1670.
5. Ozanam: Frédéric Ozanam (1813–53) was an influential liberal Catholic.
6. All these ecclesiastics… the Reverend Father Chocarne: This chapter is a résumé of key figures in nineteenth-century liberal Catholicism. Marc Fumaroli’s and Rose Fortassier’s editions give the dates, bio-bibliographies and precise significance of these writers.
7. Ernest Hello:(1828–85), a profound influence on the Symbolist generation, Hello translated and wrote a study of Jan Van Ruysbroeck’s Noces spirituelles (Spiritual Wedding) in 1869, from which the epigraph to Against Nature is taken. When the poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck published a translation of Ruysbroeck’s book in 1891, Huysmans declared: ‘There is more knowledge and understanding of the human heart in one page of [Ruysbroeck’s] than in all the Stendhals, Bourgets and Barrèses in the world!’ Hello was the author of a number of philosophical and aesthetic works, notably Le Style (1861).
8. a Catholic Duranty: Edmond Duranty (1833–80) was the editor of the review Réalisme. Also a novelist, he was an influential spokesman for realist literary doctrine.
9. Léon Bloy:(1847–1917), novelist, journalist and polemicist, was a friend and supporter of Huysmans, before becoming one of Huysmans’ most vicious critics.
10. Barbey d’Aurevilly: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808–89), novelist and right-wing journalist, dandy and friend of Baudelaire. His stories and novels are characterized by melodrama, blasphemy and sadism. Un Prêtre marié (A Married Priest) appeared in 1865. Les Diaboliques (The Devils, 1874) was prosecuted for obscenity.
CHAPTER 13
1. Portalis and Homais: Auguste Portalis (1801–55) was a statesman and politician of the July Monarchy. Homais is the name of the pharmacist in Madame Bovary, one of Flaubert’s great images of the pernicious stupidity of ‘common sense’.
2. riddecks: Bars (Flemish).
CHAPTER 14
1. for him, there were no such things as schools: Perhaps Huysmans was preparing the way for reception of his novel, but some of these ideas are reflected in his letters of the period, where he begins to doubt the validity of distinguishing between literary schools.
2. He now preferred… L’Assommoir: Each of these books is somehow considered an atypical, exotic, even overwritten example of its author’s work. Des Esseintes prefers the seemingly marginal, exotic or nostalgic novels to the more established realist ‘classics’ of Flaubert, the Goncourts and Zola.
3. Goncourt: Edmond de Goncourt (1822–96) and his brother Jules (1830–70) were novelists, historians and diarists. Their Journal is a fascinating and judgemental view of the period 1850–96, full of anecdotes and portaits of extraordinary people and tumultuous events. Their Germinie Lacerteux (1864) is a masterpiece of Naturalist writing, while Charles Demailly (1868), a story of an artistic young man brought low by a scheming wife and a malicious literary world, may have influenced Huysmans’ conception of Des Esseintes. After Jules’ death, Edmond continued to write. His novels include Les Frères Zemganno (1879) and La Faustin (1882).
4. In Zola… its natural postures: The reference is to Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret, 1875), the story of a young priest and his lover Albine set in an Edenic garden called Paradou.
5. Paul Verlaine: (1844–96), one of the main influences on the Symbolist movement and author of the influential Les Poètes maudits (The Cursed Poets, 1884). Verlaine lived the life of the ‘poète maudit’, but his poetry is known for its musicality, deliberate imprecision of effect and precision of craft.
6. Le soir tombait… s’étonne: Night was falling, an equivocal autumn night: the fair ones hanging dreamily on to our arms whispered words so specious that ever since our soul has been trembling and amazed. (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
7. Car nous voulons… littérature: For we still want light and shade, not colour, nothing but light and shade… and all the rest is literature. (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
8. Tristan Corbière: (1845–75), author of Les Amours jaunes (1873). Corbière was more or less unknown until Huysmans and Verlaine (in Les Poètes maudits) brought him to public attention. He was one of the French poets admired by Pound and Eliot.
9. Obscène confesseur des dévotes mort-nées: Obscene confessor of fair bigots still-born. (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
10. Éternel féminin de l’éternel jocrisse: Eternal feminine of the eternal fool. (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
11. Théodore Hannon: Belgian poet and author of Rimes de joie (Rhymes of Joy), which Huysman prefaced in 1881, and which contains a poem called ‘Cyprien Tibaille’, after one of Huysmans’ characters. By the time of Against Nature, the two were no longer friends.
12. Stéphane Mallarmé: (1842–98), the pre-eminent poet of the Symbolist movement, though his work in poetry and prose surpassed even Symbolism’s grand ambitions. Mallarmé responded to Against Nature with his own poem ‘Prose (pour Des Esseintes)’, one of his most linguistically and conceptually taxing poems.
13. Leconte de Lisle: (1818–94), leading member of the Parnassian movement, whose poetry prized impersonality, sculpted verse and stately rhythms.
14. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: (1838–89), one of the most eccentric and brilliant French writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Originally a poet, Villiers moved to prose and theatre. His novel L’Eve future (The Future Eve, 1886) and his play Axël (1890) are masterpieces of the ‘idealist reaction’ in French literature. His Contes cruels (Cruel Tales, 1883) contain the story ‘Véra’, a tale of a woman brought back to life by her husband’s idealism and will power. ‘Claire Lenoir’ is a supernatu
ral novella. Tullia Fabriana is a character in Villiers’ Isis.
15. Charles Cros: (1842–88), eccentric poet and polymath (inventor of the gramophone, pioneer of colour photography and astronomer), was, like Corbière and Villiers, a literary outsider even to literary outsiders such as the Symbolists.
16. of the first two Parnasses: The ‘Parnassian’ poets prized impersonality, craft and formal perfection against Romanticism’s lyrical inspiration and belief in the social value of art. The Parnasses were anthologies of poetry in which a variety of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century – Verlaine, Mallarmé, Banville, Leconte de Lisle – appeared.
17. O miroir… nudité: Oh mirror! cold water frozen by boredom within your frame, how many times, for hours on end, saddened by dreams and searching for my memories, which are like dead leaves in the deep hole beneath your glassy surface, have I seen myself in you as a distant ghost! But, oh horror! on certain evenings, in your cruel pool, I have recognized the bareness of my disordered dream! (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
18. Alors m’éveillerai-je… l’ingénuité: Then shall I awake to the original fervour, upright and alone in an ancient flood of light, lilies! and one of you for innocence. (Translation by Robert Baldick.)
19. Aloysius Bertrand: (1807–41), author of Gaspard de la nuit (Gaspard and the Night, 1842), hallucinatory Romantic prose poems.
20. Livre de jade: (1867), a prose poem by Judith Gautier (1846–1917), daughter of Théophile Gautier.
21. a glossary… medieval monasteries: In 1888, a Petit Glossaire des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (Short Glossary of Decadent and Symbolist Authors) was produced by the young Symbolist and Decadent writers, principally Paul Adam and Félix Fénéon. It included extracts from Verlaine, Mallarmé and several lesser-known writers, but surprisingly nothing from Huysmans himself.