Against Nature (4 page)

Des Esseintes is a kind of Decadent everyman, but he is also a prototype. He has the classic Decadent childhood: a mother who inhabits dark rooms with some unspecified nervous disorder, dying for no clear reason. There is an absent father, a boarding school and loveless family existence. We are told that the Des Esseintes have used up their strength through generations of inbreeding, and that the present Duke is the last in the line, the culmination of a long process of ‘degeneration'.
Against Nature
opens, on the one hand, with a model of linearity and of the cyclic nature of Decadence; on the other, with crisis and dislocation. The Prologue notes not just the gradual decline of the family, but also the gaps suggested by the missing paintings. In the chapter on Latin Decadent poets we read that parts of the literary history are followed in immense detail, others are lost; Des Esseintes's editions ‘tailed away to nothing' and his collection makes a ‘prodigious jump of several centuries' to the modern period. These two ways of organizing and narrating time are projected across the book's treatment of genealogy and biology, in its use of political and cultural history, and its assessments of literature and art. This in turn is reflected in
Against Nature
's structure: a narrative that progresses in a linear manner but is driven by ruptures, flashbacks and recollections that erupt unpredictably and often destructively into a near­
static present. Des Esseintes attempts to recall certain memories by means of various stimuli, but he is also victim of memories he cannot control or does not want to revisit. This aspect of Huysmans' novel has led to comparisons with Proust, though for Huysmans it remains purely at the level of narrative expedient. In
Against Nature
, the traditional novelistic plot has ‘degenerated' and come to a near standstill; even Des Esseintes is often ‘squeezed out' from entire swathes of his story by the renegade memories and the lists and inventories he has amassed.

Des Esseintes, like the book that tells his story, is prodigiously but selectively learned. Not for him the rounded education, the balanced mind and healthy body. His tastes are for the quirky, the difficult, the outrageous. He savours the Latin Decadents, he enjoys the sense of the language losing its clarity, becoming complex and strange, ‘a pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces'. Des Esseintes is also impotent, and, like his creator, a misogynist. We should not refine this fact away: in
Against Nature
, as in so many ‘Decadent' works, the misogyny is not incidental but in built.
¹⁸

Des Esseintes has sought ever richer, more dazzling and dangerous pleasures; ever more eccentric, artificial or stage-managed sexual encounters – his literary and artistic tastes are exclusive and his sexual tastes eclectic. There is something of the theatrical director in him, a thwarted creativity that expresses itself in a need to stage and direct his fantasy scenarios. Most importantly, he has the money to indulge these tastes and play out these scenarios. We notice how, despite his tirades against the ‘American century', modern consumerism and ownership, he takes advantage of all of these. He
owns
, and money is rarely far from the surface of this book ostensibly about the ascetic and cultured life, the search for the uncontaminated pleasure of pure art. Indeed, his passion for reproducing, commissioning copies, having finely bound books and made-to-measure interiors is uncannily like that of the early twentieth-century (American) millionaire: buying, transporting, transplanting. He is also a book fetishist, in whom the bibliophile – the lover of the book as object – overcomes the reader. Des Esseintes does not read, preferring instead to wax lyrical about paper quality
and bindings. Reading in
Against Nature
is only ever remembered or replayed, and all the evocative passages about Baudelaire or Mallarmé are memories of readings that finished before the novel began.
Against Nature
is about consumption in all its forms: financial, material, gastronomic, literary and artistic. With consumption there is also, inevitably (and in keeping with the Naturalist logic displayed by Zola's concern for the defecating tortoise), expulsion. Des Esseintes takes enemas, has problems with his digestion, diets and then gorges himself. He takes strong literary medicine, and the artistic equivalent of the beef-tea he drinks may be found in the prose poetry he favours, what he calls the ‘osmazome' or concentrated juice of literature. Des Esseintes does not simply wish to abandon the world, but to poison it (as his dealings with August Langlois reveal). We see him exercise his authority over servants and tradesmen, in a relationship which replicates the social order of the world he tries to escape. The more
Against Nature
banishes the world, the more it returns to haunt Des Esseintes, just as he himself is the mirror image of the materialism he hates.

Another sense of the term ‘Decadence' was provided for Huysmans' generation by the classical scholar Désirée Nisard in his 1834
Etude de mæurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Critical and Cultural Study of the Latin Poets of the Decadence
). Nisard defined Decadence in literary terms as the period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought and language.
Against Nature
certainly fulfils Nisard's definition, though Des Esseintes's ambition is not so much to collect as to select: he tries to distil, to anthologize, to sift. Edmond de Goncourt's
La Maison d'un artiste (An Artist's House
, 1881) had stretched the boundary between the novel and the inventory, and Goncourt's influence can be detected in
Against Nature
, weighed down by detail, buckling and coming to a standstill under the weight of description, as the poor tortoise dies beneath the burden of its finery. We may detect also Poe's ‘Philosophy of Furniture' and Baudelaire's ‘The Double Chamber' in Des Esseintes's interiors. In
Against Nature
, objects, like knowledge and memories, are collected and stored
as the reader toils through thickets of descriptive prose. The language that had once described the world has edged out the world. In this respect,
Against Nature
is a Decadent book, but it would be mistaken to see it as a book that
advocated
Decadence.

Early on in
Against Nature
Des Esseintes expresses his preference for the artificial over the natural, one of the defining attitudes of Decadence. ‘Nature… has had her day', he muses, seeking the copy or the mechanically produced, not as a substitute for the natural but in preference to it. His is an artificial world: abstracted and decontextualized, full of gadgets and refined objects, custom-built and chemical. In the marvellous chapter on tropical flowers we see his logic reach an extreme point of Decadent perversion. Not content with artificial flowers, Des Esseintes goes further, choosing real flowers that seem to imitate artificial ones, thereby reversing the relationship between natural and artificial, copy and original. The dominant influence here is Baudelaire, who in his art writings argued a philosophically impressive as well as morally extreme case against
la Nature
. For Baudelaire, nature was what pushed human beings to kill and brutalize each other; the authority and civilization that maintained humane values were themselves artificial: laws, religions, moral codes. Baudelaire's was a reaction against the given towards the made (‘who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?' he demanded in
Peintre de la vie moderne
[
The Painter of Modern Life
]), seeking to free art from the tyranny of representation. Des Esseintes's view is subtly different: like Baudelaire he prefers the artificial, but unlike Baudelaire he still relies on reference to the model; he seeks the copy but needs to know what it has been copied
from
. As with his dependence on the tradesmen and suppliers who furnish his house, Des Esseintes constantly refers to what he claims to have abandoned. He is more outrageous in tone but less daring in intellectual substance than Baudelaire; we might even suggest that his views are a kind of crude copy of his mentor's – that with Des Esseintes Baudelaire's ideas have in fact ‘degenerated'. Thanks principally to Oscar Wilde, who repeated or paraphrased its contents not
just in
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and
The Decay of Lying
but in an array of on-and off-stage witticisms, this is the book's most famous chapter.
Against Nature
has suffered from this, because Wilde focused attention on only one – highly ambiguous – thread in Huysmans' novel; it is possible that Dorian Gray misinterprets his mentor Des Esseintes much as Des Esseintes misinterprets his mentor Baudelaire.

One of Huysmans' achievements in
Against Nature
, regardless of the double-dealing evident in his letters to Mallarmé and Zola, is to have imagined – or predicted – an alternative literary canon. The chapters on modern literature are subtle and forward-looking, and Des Esseintes's tastes are more than simply indicated: they are justified and often compellingly analysed, while his dislikes are expressed in trenchant criticism. Des Esseintes's thoughts on Mallarmé and Villiers, Verlaine and Corbière, Edmond de Goncourt and Flaubert are precise and analytical as well as perversely sophisticated. Huysmans was proud of his reading of Mallarmé, and his pages on Edgar Allan Poe are among the finest accounts of the French debt to the American poet who cast his spell over several generations of poets and prose writers. Des Esseintes is fascinated that this Decadent literary field exists in a spectacular contraction of time: all of these modes of writing, all of these stages of French and all of these artistic tendencies coexist in Des Esseintes's Paris, a modernist living museum of artists and artworks. In order to establish his literary tastes, Huysmans must also set out his distastes, and the great names of French writing, both living and dead, are paraded before us: Victor Hugo (still alive at the time Huysmans was writing), Rousseau, Voltaire, Molière are among the ‘classics' Des Esseintes finds unoriginal, overblown or bourgeois. In painting, he admires Gustave Moreau for the luxury of his conceptions and the mythological dimension of his paintings, and for his removal from the ‘hateful period' in which he lived. Moreau belongs nowhere, and it is revealing that in plans for
Against Nature
Huysmans had intended to use Degas as his exemplary artist, thus giving a very different slant to Des Esseintes's artistic tastes. He admires the contortions of El Greco, and the Dutch engraver Jan Luyken for his depictions
of suffering and torment, for images that ‘reek[ed] of burnt flesh'. There are also the ‘bad dreams and fevered visions' of another contemporary, Odilon Redon, whose spare and mysterious paintings contrast with Moreau's detail and incrustation.

It was not just the content of
Against Nature
but its structure that was felt to be unusual. Dorian Gray noted that ‘It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character', but Ezra Pound decades later put it more bluntly: ‘Huysmans escaped by putting an exceptionally dull young decadent in the midst of no milieu whatsoever.'
¹⁹
For Remy de Gourmont
Against Nature
‘freed' the novel, but Zola condemned its lack of progress, its circularity and its ‘painful transitions'.

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
re
order 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.