Against Nature (3 page)

In 1866, Huysmans joined the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1898. The drudgery of bureaucratic routine was minutely detailed in a number of works, notably
A Vau-l'Eau (Downstream
, 1882), the novella that gave rise to
Against Nature
, and the strange story,
La Retraite de M. Bougran (Mr. Bougran's Retirement
), written in 1888 but first published in 1964), of a retired bureaucrat addicted to the banality of his job. In 1870 Huysmans was conscripted into the army and later worked for the Versailles War Ministry during the Paris Commune. He describes some of his army experiences in
Sac au dos (Knapsack
, 1880), the story he contributed to the volume
Les Soirées de Medan (Medan Evenings
), a collective book by Zola and his disciples intended to showcase the work of the Naturalist writers. However, Huysmans' first published work,
Le Drageoir à épices (Dish of Spices
, 1874), was far from being a Naturalist specimen. It was a collection of lurid, flashy and precocious prose-poems which one Parisian publisher,
refusing the manuscript, accused of launching a ‘revolutionary Paris Commune in the French language'.
⁸
Two years later, when Huysmans became associated with the Naturalists, he was a vocal defender of Zola and his principles, publishing a passionate defence of Zola's
L'Assommoir
and of Naturalist writing. Huysmans soon became acquainted with the most innovative writers and artists of the period. Among his friends and correspondents were Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Mallarmé – a representative cross-section of the many literary tendencies of the time.

Huysmans' first novel,
Marthe, histoire d'une fille (Marthe: Story of a Prostitute
), was published in 1876. According to his biographer (and the translator of this edition of
Against Nature
), Robert Baldick, it was the first novel to deal with prostitution in licensed brothels, memorably described as ‘slaughterhouses of love'. His next book,
Les Soeurs Vatard (The Vatard Sisters
), which appeared in 1879, contains a character, the artist Cyprien Tibaille, who is eccentric and inward, an idealist caught in a disappointing world. Flaubert, to whom Huysmans sent his novel, admired it but criticized it on two counts. First, he claimed that, like his own
L'Education sentimentale
, there was no ‘false perspective' in the novel and thus no ‘progression of effect': ‘art is not reality', Flaubert told him, ‘like it or not, we must choose carefully among the elements [reality] provides' (undated letter of February–March, 1879). Flaubert's second criticism concerned Huysmans' passion for rare, difficult or specialized vocabulary: whether refined or coarse, arcane or streetwise, Huysmans' love of words attracted notice from his earliest work. After
Les Soeurs Vatard
, there followed
En Ménage (Living Together
, 1881), about a failing and claustrophobic marriage, which Zola describedas‘a page of human life, banalyet poignant'. Interestingly, several of Huysmans' early ‘Naturalist' novels were important to André Breton, the self-styled leader of the Surrealists, who was fascinated by Huysmans' apparently subversivelife: a penpusher and bureaucrat writing his disturbing novels at his ministry desk, often on ministry headed paper. This is how Breton, in his
Anthologie de l'humour noir (Anthology of Black Humour
, 1939), imagined Huysmans at work:

Some critics have suggested that there was little in Huysmans' previous work to prepare for
Against Nature
, but this is misleading. Readers of his early novels had already noticed his fixation with the demeaning mundanities of life, with daily existence as a pleasureless assault course of disappointment and minor degradation. Huysmans was interested in the stuff of lives that would never amount to tragedy, but this did not mean that his prose needed to be flat and factual. Besides the descriptive detail, documentary precision and social observation associated with Naturalism, Huysmans' style – as Goncourt, Flaubert and Zola noticed – was colourful and nervy, full of rare words and startling adjectives. Edmond de Goncourt had found even in
Marthe
that Huysmans was too easily tempted by ‘the fine expression, the brilliant, startling or oddly archaic word', and that this threatened to ‘kill the reality of [his] well-conceived realistic scenes' (letter of October 1879). Reviewing
Sac au dos
, the novelist Jean Richepin had called Huysmans' writing ‘the debauchery of style: rare substantives, strange epithets, unexpected fusions of words, archaisms and neologisms' (
Gil Blas
, 21 April 1880). It is curious to see how responses to Huysmans' ‘Naturalist' work resemble responses to
Against Nature
, in which, as Léon Bloy puts it, Huysmans is ‘continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax'.
¹⁰
Huysmans' contemporaries had noticed also his
attentiveness to the intimate emotional and intellectual processes of characters who were often sensitive creatures, men (very occasionally women) designed for pain and disappointment, battered by the casual brutality of modern life. These characters were often isolated; lost and bruised and ill-fitted to their lives, they were not ‘types' but exceptions. Where Zola excelled at painting the crowd, Huysmans excelled at portraying the individual; where Zola plotted the progress of a family, Huysmans fixed his eye on the bachelor, the unpartnered or the isolated. The Naturalists are often simplistically read, with critics crying foul whenever they spot a metaphor or an imaginative reflex in a ‘Naturalist' book. We do not need to worry about classifying Huysmans, but to remember that there was plenty of room in Naturalist theory and practice to exercise the imagination and to perfect the art of illusion. A valuable insight into Huysmans' style and his contexts (those in which he was read as well as those in which he wrote) comes from James Joyce. ‘The very intensity and refinement of French realism betrays its spiritual origins', wrote Joyce, before noting, in a beautiful and precise formulation, ‘the angry fervour of corruption… that illuminates Huysmans's sad pages with a blighted phosphorescence'.
¹¹

The nearest analogy to Huysmans' manner, this sense of ‘blighted phosphorescence', was what was known as
‘écriture artiste'
, the rarefied, hypersensitive style of the Goncourt brothers, the aristocrats of Naturalist writing. In one of
Against Nature
's most memorable images, Des Esseintes describes the Goncourts' style as ‘gamey', and calls Edmond de Goncourt's writing ‘penetrating and sickly, tense and subtle'. For Des Esseintes, language, like meat, is at its tastiest as it is turning – as, on the cusp of rotting, the flavours are released. It is one of
Against Nature
's recurrent analogies: between food and language, and if the reader finds Huysmans' style ‘hard to swallow' or ‘hard to keep down' this is as it should be. After all, this was an author who regularly wrote to his friends asking for information on technical language, bureaucratic lingo, street slang, and who relished the strange words he dredged up from glossaries and manuals.

It was the short novel
A Vau-l'Eau
that opened the way for
Against Nature
. Its hero Folantin searches without success for good food, decent furnishings, good male and female company. The story ends with him crying out, echoing Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whose pessimism shaped a generation of French writers: ‘only the worst happens'. In the 1903 preface Huysmans recalled that in starting
Against Nature
, he had

Although
Against Nature
is unique, it forms part of a series of novels of retreat that occupied Huysmans up to and including his extraordinary tale of satanism and sadism
Là-Bas (The Damned
) of 1891.
¹²
Three years after
Against Nature
Huysmans published
En Rade (Becalmed
), the story of a young couple who move to the countryside to escape the expense and stress of Paris. Their rural idyll becomes a hell, as they are swindled by rapacious peasants and tormented by sickness and pests; their food is disgusting, the countryside too hot, too wet, too cold. In
La Retraite de M. Bougran
a retired ministry clerk misses his job so much that he has his flat decorated exactly like his former office and pays a retired office boy to bring him the letters he has posted to himself the previous day. He drafts tedious reports in his most bureaucratic French and is eventually found dead at his desk having scribbled a few last words of ministerial jargon.

Huysmans' books are full of retreats: to the office, the bedroom, the library, the past, the monastery. The working title of
Against Nature
had been ‘Seul' (‘Alone'), but in a sense all of his novels and stories had explored solitude, the aspirations of the yearning individual in a valueless world. It now remained for Huysmans to attempt a book that banished that world.

Compositionally,
Against Nature
has much in common with the ‘classic' Naturalist novel. André Breton's image of the scribe
at his desk surrounded by manuals and guidebooks, treatises on nervous illness, precious stones or horticulture is also the image of the Naturalist writer at work. What Breton goes on to mention – the cookery book – is no frivolous afterthought either, since it refers not just to the fact that food is never far away in a Huysmans novel (though gastronomic satisfaction is unattainable), but to the importance of ‘composition', the measuring out of ingredients to make the right novelistic mix. This mix has confused critics, and
Against Nature
's relationship with the literary tendencies of the period still poses difficulties. It is an unclassifiable book in that it seems to invite a number of classifications only to play them off – inconclusively – against each other. Is it Naturalist or Decadent or Symbolist? Need it be any of these? Is it perhaps a book in which Naturalist writing practice (document and description, analysis of symptoms) converges on ‘Symbolist' subjects (solitude, refinement, fantasy) with a guiding thread of Decadent philosophy (pessimism, perversion, cultural élitism)?

All of these literary tendencies are reflected in
Against Nature
, but all are ambiguously and at times parodically treated too.
¹⁷
Mallarmé felt that the book contained ‘not one atom of fantasy', and that Huysmans had proved himself ‘more strictly documentary' than any other writer; but Zola condemned its incoherence and ‘confusion'. What may partly have disturbed Zola was not that Naturalism had been abandoned in
Against Nature
, but rather that it had been followed perversely. The relationship between
Against Nature
and Naturalism resembles the relationship between the negative and the photograph. Huysmans produced an inverted version of the Naturalist ‘
race, moment, milieu
': Des Esseintes is the last of his race attempting to flee his historical moment by creating an artificial
milieu
. It was not that
Against Nature
was anti-Naturalist, but that it was Naturalist
enough
to have disturbing implications for Zola and his methods. The discussion in chapter III of Petronius'
Satyricon
is tellingly framed in this respect: Des Esseintes reads it as a ‘realist novel', a ‘slice cut from Roman life' (echoing the famous Naturalist dictum that a novel must be a ‘slice of life'), but also emphasizes the fact that it is a ‘story with no plot'. This
genre-defying satirical feat of documentary imagination might be a clue to what
Against Nature
is attempting.

As for
Against Nature
's celebrated espousal of the ‘Symbolist' poets, who in 1884 were neither a movement nor a school (the Symbolist ‘manifesto' appeared in 1886), this too is complicated. Many of Huysmans' contemporaries would have seen Des Esseintes as a caricature of the Decadent reader-consumer, a misanthropic drop-out in a fetishistic relationship with his books and artworks. Although his tastes are new-fangled, quirky and rare, and although the ‘exquisite' poetry of Mallarmé and ‘pidgin' verse of Corbière were little known at the time, the fact that these are the tastes of a burned-out and spiteful elitist makes the compliment Huysmans pays to these writers ambiguous – it was certainly ambiguously interpreted by reviewers, as our appendix of critical responses to the novel shows. Des Esseintes
predicts
rather than
reflects
artistic tastes: we know the influence of Mallarmé on twentieth-century thought, we know too of Corbière's impact on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire are classics while Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon are among the most widely recognized image-makers of their time. In 1884, however, his favourite artists and writers seemed obscure, irrelevant, and – with a few exceptions – destined for oblivion. One reviewer wrote that Des Esseintes's selection of authors would, once their flashing fame had died, ‘date the book and limit its future value'. What promised to ‘date' Huysmans' novel in 1884 is one of the elements that keeps it modern.

Huysmans' 1903 preface is misleading, seeking as it does to rewrite the history of the book's composition and interpretation to suit a different cultural moment and a different – Catholic – Huysmans. The Huysmans of 1903 sees
Against Nature
as evidence of the ‘underground workings' of the soul groping for salvation. For him each chapter of
Against Nature
contains the ‘seed' of the novels that followed:
Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale (The Cathedral
) and
L'Oblat (The Oblate
). He also retrospectively interprets Des Esseintes's final words of the book as a prelude to conversion. There are problems with this, not least the fact that Huysmans did not convert until 1892 and
that his writing meanwhile showed little evidence of these ‘underground workings'. The 1903 preface also takes the opportunity to settle a few scores and rewrites a few premises. By claiming Flaubert's (
L'Éducation Sentimentale
as the key book, the novel after which nothing can be written, Huysmans downplays the value of Naturalism and the aesthetic and sociopolitical project of Zola, who had died the previous year. He also caricatures the principles of Naturalist writing and overplays his break with Zola and the Naturalists when in fact he maintained good relations with his former colleagues for several years. The rejection of Naturalism is to be found less in
Against Nature
than in the 1903 preface, an ambiguous text which is published here in an appendix because it should be treated with caution.