Là-bas

by J.-K. Huysmans

  Produced by Suzanne Shell, Cori Samuel and the PG Online DistributedProofreading Team.

  LA-BAS

  (DOWN THERE)

  byJ.K. HUYSMANS

  TranslatedbyKEENE WALLACE

  [Transcriber's note:Original published 1891,English translation privately published 1928.]

  CHAPTER I

  "You believe pretty thoroughly in these things, or you wouldn't abandonthe eternal triangle and the other stock subjects of the modernnovelists to write the story of Gilles de Rais," and after a silence DesHermies added, "I do not object to the latrine; hospital; and workshopvocabulary of naturalism. For one thing, the subject matter requiressome such diction. Again, Zola, in _L'Assommoir_, has shown that aheavy-handed artist can slap words together hit-or-miss and give aneffect of tremendous power. I do not really care how the naturalistsmaltreat language, but I do strenuously object to the earthiness oftheir ideas. They have made our literature the incarnation ofmaterialism--and they glorify the democracy of art!

  "Say what you will, their theory is pitiful, and their tight littlemethod squeezes all the life out of them. Filth and the flesh are theirall in all. They deny wonder and reject the extra-sensual. I don'tbelieve they would know what you meant if you told them that artisticcuriosity begins at the very point where the senses leave off.

  "You shrug your shoulders, but tell me, how much has naturalism done toclear up life's really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of thesoul--or indeed the most benign little pimple--is to be probed,naturalism can do nothing. 'Appetite and instinct' seem to be its solemotivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field ofnaturalism is the region below the umbilicus. Oh, it's a hernia clinicand it offers the soul a truss!

  "I tell you, Durtal, it's superficial quackery, and that isn't all.This fetid naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life andflatters our positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute forceand apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers tothe nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects everyideal, every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond. It isso perfectly representative of bourgeois thought that it might be siredby Homais and dammed by Lisa, the butcher girl in _Ventre de Paris_."

  "Heavens, how you go after it!" said Durtal, somewhat piqued. He lightedhis cigarette and went on, "I am as much revolted by materialism as youare, but that is no reason for denying the unforgettable services whichnaturalism has rendered.

  "It has demolished the inhuman puppets of romanticism and rescued ourliterature from the clutches of booby idealists and sex-starved oldmaids. It has created visible and tangible human beings--afterBalzac--and put them in accord with their surroundings. It has carriedon the work, which romanticism began, of developing the language. Someof the naturalists have had the veritable gift of laughter, a very fewhave had the gift of tears, and, in spite of what you say, they have notall been carried away by an obsession for baseness."

  "Yes, they have. They are in love with the age, and that shows them upfor what they are."

  "Do you mean to tell me Flaubert and the De Goncourts were in love withthe age?"

  "Of course not. But those men were artists, honest, seditious, andaloof, and I put them in a class by themselves. I will also grant thatZola is a master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handlingof people is unequalled. Then, too, thank God, he has never followedout, in his novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles,adulating the intrusion of positivism upon art. But in the works of hisbest pupil, Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued withthe ideas of the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon ofchemist's slang serving to display a layman's erudition, which is aboutas profound as the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman. No, there isno getting around it. Everything this whole poverty-stricken school hasproduced shows that our literature has fallen upon evil days. Thegrovellers! They don't rise above the moral level of the tumblebug. Readthe latest book. What do you find? Simple anecdotes: murder, suicide,and accident histories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresomesketches and wormy tales, all written in a colorless style andcontaining not the faintest hint of an outlook on life nor anappreciation of human nature. When I have waded through one of thesebooks its insipid descriptions and interminable harangues go instantlyout of my mind, and the only impression that remains is one of surprisethat a man can write three or four hundred pages when he has absolutelynothing to reveal to us--nothing to say!"

  "If it's all the same to you, Des Hermies, let's speak of somethingelse. We shall never agree on the subject of naturalism, as the verymention of it makes you see red. What about this Mattei system ofmedicine? Your globules and electric phials at least relieve a fewsufferers?"

  "Hmph. A little better than the panaceas of the Codex, though I can'tsay the effects are either lasting or sure. But, it serves, likeanything else. And now I must run along. The clock is striking ten andyour concierge is coming to put out the hall light. See you again verysoon, I hope. Good night."

  When the door closed Durtal put some more coke in the grate and resumeda comfortless train of thought aggravated by this too pertinentdiscussion with his friend. For some months Durtal had been trying toreassemble the fragments of a shattered literary theory which had onceseemed inexpugnable, and Des Hermies's opinions troubled him, in spiteof their exaggerated vehemence.

  Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of mediocrepersons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-roomor a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would soon cease toproduce, and a less conscientious workman would be under the necessityof repeating himself over and over again to the point of nausea.Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outsideof naturalism. Were we to go back to the pyrotechnics of romanticism,rewrite the lanuginous works of the Cherbuliez and Feuillet tribe, or,worse yet, imitate the lachrymose storiettes of Theuriet and GeorgeSand? Then what was to be done? And Durtal, with desperatedetermination, set to work sorting out a tangle of confused theories andinchoate postulations. He made no headway. He felt but could not define.He was afraid to. Definition of his present tendencies would plump himback into his old dilemma.

  "We must," he thought, "retain the documentary veracity, the precisionof detail, the compact and sinewy language of realism, but we must alsodig down into the soul and cease trying to explain mystery in terms ofour sick senses. If possible the novel ought to be compounded of twoelements, that of the soul and that of the body, and these ought to beinextricably bound together as in life. Their interreactions, theirconflicts, their reconciliation, ought to furnish the dramatic interest.In a word, we must follow the road laid out once and for all by Zola,but at the same time we must trace a parallel route in the air by whichwe may go above and beyond.... A spiritual naturalism! It must becomplete, powerful, daring in a different way from anything that isbeing attempted at present. Perhaps as approaching my concept I may citeDostoyevsky. Yet that _exorable_ Russian is less an elevated realistthan an evangelic socialist. In France right now the purely corporalrecipe has brought upon itself such discredit that two clans havearisen: the liberal, which prunes naturalism of all its boldness ofsubject matter and diction in order to fit it for the drawing-room, andthe decadent, which gets completely off the ground and ravesincoherently in a telegraphic patois intended to represent the languageof the soul--intended rather to divert the reader's attention from theauthor's utter lack of ideas. As for the right wing verists, I can onlylaugh at the frantic puerilities of these would-be psychologists, whohave never explored an unknown district of the mind nor ever studied anunhackneyed passion. They simply repeat the saccharine Feuillet and thesaline Stendhal. Their novels are dissertations in school-teacher style.They don't seem to realize that there is more
spiritual revelation inthat one reply of old Hulot, in Balzac's _Cousine Bette_, 'Can't I takethe little girl along?' than in all their doctoral theses. We mustexpect of them no idealistic straining toward the infinite. For me,then, the real psychologist of this century is not their Stendhal butthat astonishing Ernest Hello, whose unrelenting unsuccess is simplymiraculous!"

  He began to think that Des Hermies was right. In the presentdisorganized state of letters there was but one tendency which seemed topromise better things. The unsatisfied need for the supernatural wasdriving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and theoccult.

  Now his thoughts carried him away from his dissatisfaction withliterature to the satisfaction he had found in another art, in painting.His ideal was completely realized by the Primitives. These men, inItaly, Germany, and especially in Flanders, had manifested the amplitudeand purity of vision which are the property of saintliness. In authenticand patiently accurate settings they pictured beings whose postures werecaught from life itself, and the illusion was compelling and sure. Fromthese heads, common enough, many of them, and these physiognomies, oftenugly but powerfully evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute anguish,spiritual calm or turmoil. The effect was of matter transformed, bybeing distended or compressed, to afford an escape from the senses intoremote infinity.

  Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation theyear before, although he had not then been so weary as now of _fin desiecle_ silliness. In Germany, before a Crucifixion by MatthaeusGruenewald, he had found what he was seeking.

  He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. Withextraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry ofadmiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of theCassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, theChrist rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, thearm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body.

  This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar fromour cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by theenormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of theirsockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords ofthe straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed readyto snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesturein which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. Thetrembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, orlike the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled withflea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from therods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they hadpenetrated.

  Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly,inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice.Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour ofgrey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and theloin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched,but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed oneon top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning greenbeneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, theflesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the grippingtoes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture ofthe hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the handspointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochreground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.

  Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircledby a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eyehalf opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiringfigure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; allthe drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jawracked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.

  The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mockingexecutioners into flight.

  Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost totouch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, keptwatch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour ofmucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen withweeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deepinto his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like agipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted andtangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs ofbark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at thesleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent withweeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erectbut broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access ofoutraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which hecontemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the crywhich threatened to rend his quivering throat.

  Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole fromthose debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since theRenaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, theAdonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with thecurly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whomthe faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ ofJustin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church,the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of oursins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

  It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of themost miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, ofthe beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greedof their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned bythe Father until such time as no further torture was possible; theChrist with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aidHim--He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

  In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passionwith all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying anincomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of theblows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor hadHe resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered uponthe unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like athief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself tothe deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the lastignominy of putrefaction.

  Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception andexecution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinitynor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores andbleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Gruenewald had passed all measure. Hewas the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, hissewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be trulytranscendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, asuperhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epilepticfeatures. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole,without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except theblood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestialsuper-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint Johnwhose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.

  These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with theexpression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is notheard. Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place tosupraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.

  Gruenewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artistknown such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely boundedfrom the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He hadgone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he hadextracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. Inthis canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying theunopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to makemanifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime theinfinite distress of the soul.

  It was without its equivalent in lit
erature. A few pages of AnneEmmerich upon the Passion, though comparatively attenuated, approachedthis ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and exsurrected life.Perhaps, too, certain effusions of Ruysbroeck, seeming to spurt forth intwin jets of black and white flame, were worthy of comparison with thedivine befoulment of Gruenewald. Hardly, either. Gruenewald's masterpieceremained unique. It was at the same time infinite and of earth earthy.

  "But," said Durtal to himself, rousing out of his revery, "if I amconsistent I shall have to come around to the Catholicism of the MiddleAges, to _mystic_ naturalism. Ah, no! I will not--and yet, perhaps Imay!"

  Here he was in the old dilemma. How often before now had he halted onthe threshold of Catholicism, sounding himself thoroughly and findingalways that he had no faith. Decidedly there had been no effort on thepart of God to reclaim him, and he himself had never possessed the kindof will that permits one to let oneself go, trustingly, without reserve,into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma.

  Momentarily at times when, after reading certain books, his disgust foreveryday life was accentuated, he longed for lenitive hours in acloister, where the monotonous chant of prayers in an incense-ladenatmosphere would bring on a somnolence, a dreamy rapture of mysticalideas. But only a simple soul, on which life's wear and tear had left nomark, was capable of savouring the delights of such a self-abandon, andhis own soul was battered and torn with earthly conflict. He must admitthat the momentary desire to believe, to take refuge in the timeless,proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with thepetty and repeated annoyances of existence, quarrels with the laundress,with the waiter, with the landlord; the sordid scramble for money; in aword, from the general spiritual failure of a man approaching forty. Hethought of escaping into a monastery somewhat as street girls think ofgoing into a house where they will be free from the dangers of thechase, from worry about food and lodging, and where they will not haveto do their own washing and ironing.

  Unmarried, without settled income, the voice of carnality nowpractically stilled in him, he sometimes cursed the existence he hadshaped for himself. At times, weary of attempting to coerce words to dohis bidding, he threw down his pen and looked into the future. He couldsee nothing ahead of him but bitterness and cause for alarm, and,seeking consolation, he was forced to admit that only religion couldheal, but religion demanded in return so arrant a desertion of commonsense, so pusillanimous a willingness to be astonished at nothing, thathe threw up his hands and begged off.

  Yet he was always playing with the thought, indeed he could not escapeit. For though religion was without foundation it was also without limitand promised a complete escape from earth into dizzy, unexploredaltitudes. Then, too, Durtal was attracted to the Church by its intimateand ecstatic art, the splendour of its legends, and the radiant naiveteof the histories of its saints.

  He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here onearth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in ourhomes, in the street,--everywhere when we came to think of it? It wasreally the part of shallowness to ignore those extrahuman relations andaccount for the unforeseen by attributing to fate the more thaninexplicable. Did not a chance encounter often decide the entire life ofa man? What was love, what the other incomprehensible shapinginfluences? And, knottiest enigma of all, what was money?

  There one found oneself confronted by primordial organic law, atrociousedicts promulgated at the very beginning of the world and applied eversince.

  The rules were precise and invariable. Money attracted money,accumulating always in the same places, going by preference to thescoundrelly and the mediocre. When, by an inscrutable exception, itheaped up in the coffers of a rich man who was not a miser nor amurderer, it stood idle, incapable of resolving itself into a force forgood, however charitable the hands which fain would administer it. Onewould say it was angry at having got into the wrong box and avengeditself by going into voluntary paralysis when possessed by one who wasneither a sharper nor an ass.

  It acted still more strangely when by some extraordinary chance itstrayed into the home of a poor man. Immediately it defiled the clean,debauched the chaste, and, acting simultaneously on the body and thesoul, it insinuated into its possessor a base selfishness, an ignoblepride; it suggested that he spend for himself alone; it made the humbleman a boor, the generous man a skinflint. In one second it changed everyhabit, revolutionized every idea, metamorphosed the most deeply rootedpassions.

  It was the instigator and vigilant accomplice of all the important sins.If it permitted one of its detainers to forget himself and bestow a boonit awakened hatred in the recipient, it replaced avarice withingratitude and re-established equilibrium so that the account mightbalance and not one sin of commission be wanting.

  But it reached its real height of monstrosity when, concealing itsidentity under an assumed name, it entitled itself capital. Then itsaction was not limited to individual incitation to theft and murder butextended to the entire human race. With one word capital decidedmonopolies, erected banks, cornered necessities, and, if it wished,caused thousands of human beings to starve to death.

  And it grew and begot itself while slumbering in a safe, and the TwoWorlds adored it on bended knee, dying of desire before it as before aGod.

  Well! money was the devil, otherwise its mastery of souls wasinexplicable. And how many other mysteries, equally unintelligible, howmany other phenomena were there to make a reflective man shudder!

  "But," thought Durtal, "seeing that there are so many more thingsbetwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy,why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It isno strain on one to admit the _Credo quia absurdum_ of Saint Augustineand Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible itwould not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes thefaculties of man it is divine.

  "And--oh, to hell with it! What's it all about, anyway?"

  And again, as so often when he had found himself before thisunbridgeable gulf between reason and belief, he recoiled from the leap.

  Well, his thoughts had strayed far from the subject of that naturalismso reviled by Des Hermies. He returned to Gruenewald and said to himselfthat the great Crucifixion was the masterpiece of an art driven out ofbounds. One need not go far in search of the extra-terrestrial as tofall into perfervid Catholicism. Perhaps spiritualism would give one allone required to formulate a supernaturalistic method.

  He rose and went into his tiny workroom. His pile of manuscript notesabout the Marshal de Rais, surnamed Bluebeard, looked at him derisivelyfrom the table where they were piled.

  "All the same," he said, "it's good to be here, in out of the world andabove the limits of time. To live in another age, never read anewspaper, not even know that the theatres exist--ah, what a dream! Todwell with Bluebeard and forget the grocer on the corner and all theother petty little criminals of an age perfectly typified by the cafewaiter who ravishes the boss's daughter--the goose who lays the goldenegg, as he calls her--so that she will have to marry him!"

  Bed was a good place, he added, smiling, for he saw his cat, a creaturewith a perfect time sense, regarding him uneasily as if to remind him oftheir common convenience and to reproach him for not having prepared thecouch. Durtal arranged the pillows and pulled back the coverlet, and thecat jumped to the foot of the bed but remained humped up, tail coiledbeneath him, waiting till his master was stretched out at length beforeburrowing a little hollow to curl up in.