Artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes…with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.
(À rebours, chapter 2)
It was to him that this voice, as mysterious as an incantation, was addressed; it was to him that it spoke of the feverish desire for the unknown, the unsatisfied longing for an ideal, the craving to escape from the horrible realities of life, to cross the frontiers of thought, to grope after a certainty, albeit without finding one, in the misty upper regions of art!
(Chapter 9 cf p.117)
The title, the French phrase ‘A Rebours’, translates into English as ‘Against the Grain’ or ‘Against Nature’.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, born in 1848 to a French mother and Dutch father (hence his unfrench surname) supported himself with a steady job as a minor civil servant in Paris (where his colleagues knew him as simply ‘Georges’), while he wrote novels to amuse himself.
His first three novels followed the school of Naturalism led by the great Émile Zola. But he bridled at the documentary grimness and the extensive sociological research demanded by this style and so, in his fourth novel, A rebours, struck out in a new direction.
He was as surprised as anyone when it took Paris by storm. Its depiction of a neurasthenic aristocrat who retires to a house of his own design to experiment with an exquisite life of the senses immediately struck a chord with members of the Aesthetic movement, not only in France but Britain and across Europe. The poet Paul Valéry called it his ‘Bible and his bedside book’.
In the 1890s the Aesthetic movement intensified into what came to be known as the Decadence, the conscious exploration of the darker, morbid side of life, exaggerated into fantastic visions. Literature took on the tones of melodrama in British works like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in a consciously literary work like Heart of Darkness, even in fairly ‘straight’ works like the more melodramaticSherlock Holmes stories, and, of course, in Oscar Wilde’s ‘scandalous’ contribution to the genre, The Picture of Dorian Grey.
In France with its strong counter-revolutionary Catholic tradition, they took these things more seriously and intensely. Words like ‘blasphemy’ and ‘sin’ in the mouths of Oscar Wilde characters were little more than a style accessory; but in the minds of genuine Catholics they denoted real and soul-threatening facts. Anyway, A Rebours became a kind of handbook for the Decadent Movement, a breviary, a missal, a set of instructions.
Arguably, ‘the Decadence’ is best understood via key paintings in the parallel style of Symbolism, particularly the over-ripe paintings of Gustave Moreau and the strange works of Odilon Redon. In England, maybe the most ‘decadent’ products in any form were the amazing drawings of Aubrey Beardsley and the notorious Yellow Book (1894 to 1897).
A rebours
So what is À rebours about?
Prologue [early years and fast living in Paris] (8 pages)
Well, it starts with a brief prologue limning the personality of the central character, Jean des Esseintes. The book is going to be about him and him alone. Des Esseintes is the weak and weary, worn-out, last scion of a once-great aristocratic house, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. His childhood was plagued with illnesses. His parents hated each other. His father was absent most of the time. His mother spent most of her time lying in a darkened bedroom, subject to nervous attacks if exposed to even the slightest light or noise. Abandoned and crushingly lonely, the young Jean spent most of his time in the library, living through books.
In fact the Prologue is unexpectedly funny in a savage satirical way, taking the mickey out of de Esseintes’ wretchedly unhappy parents, the teachers at his Jesuit school who don’t know what to do with the bright unfocused boy and then his various attempts, as an adult, to find his tribe, to find a group of people to fit in with. He tries four or five different types (his actual family, starting with tedious cousins; sensible but dull men his own age; fast-living aristos; the literary set; so-called ‘freethinkers’) and finds them all unbearably boring. He has become ‘a jaded sophisticate’ (p.111).
During his Paris years Des Esseintes:
- wears a suit of white velvet with a gold-laced waistcoat, and a bunch of palma violets in his shirt front instead of a cravat
- holds a black-themed funeral dinner, held in honour of his dead virility, described in a page which is worth reading and rereading for its (literally) black humour
Des Esseintes tries sex: he attends unconventional dinner parties where the women strip off; he beds singers and actresses; he takes mistresses already famed for their depravity; he pays for call girls with specialist skills; eventually he seeks satisfaction in the gutter, among the filthy proles. The effort was making him weak and shaky but still he tried ‘unnatural love affairs and perverse pleasures’ but, in the end, he emerged disgusted with the whole thing and himself, and ill with boredom.
The key thing to emphasise is that the excesses of these bachelor debaucheries have made him ill, exacerbating his many boyhood ailments:
The excesses of his bachelor days and the abnormal strains put on his brain had aggravated his neurosis to an astonishing degree and still further diluted the blood of his race. (p.94)
He has become:
a feeble, broken-down, short-winded creature (p.111)
And so it is that, utterly worn out, trembling with nervous exhaustion and disgusted by people and contemporary society, by ‘the money grubbing ignominy of the age’ (p.194), Des Esseintes sells the big ancestral home, the Chateau de Lourps, selling off the setting of his bored miserable childhood, and retires to a house he has had completely redesigned and refurbished to his tastes on the outskirts of Paris (‘on the hillside above Fontenay-aux-Roses’). He seeks a solitude and silence which are ‘a well merited compensation for the years of rubbish he’s had to listen to’ (p.132).
Now the narrative proper begins and turns out to be a series of chapter in each of which Des Esseintes explores, in obsessive detail, aspects of the worlds of sensual pleasure, esoteric knowledge, the exquisite and beautiful and perversely tasteful, carrying out a syllabus of ‘delicious, atrocious experiments’ (p.129). The narrative is, in other words, ‘almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes’s aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.’
Des Esseintes’ weakness
The key thing to emphasise is that Des Esseintes is no swaggering Byronic buccaneer. He is pale and wasted. He is ill. He is weak:
sapped by disillusionment, depressed by hypochondria and weighed down by spleen.
All he wants is absolute peace and quiet. All his pleasures are solitary, slow and virtually silent. He is the extreme opposite of the sex and drugs and rock and roll lifestyle. He brings the two old servants from the ancestral home with him but makes them wear felt slippers, all the doors are oiled and all the rooms soundproofed because his nerves are so poor. It is not a lusty virile decadence, but the exquisite mental pleasures of someone on their last legs. The house really is a retreat from the world.
You might expect Des Esseintes would organise riotous feasts packed with elaborate dishes, but that is to mistake his mental and physical frailty. In reality, his stomach is so done in by his previous fast living (referred to and dismissed in the Prologue) that he can only manage the plainest of fare: breakfast consists of two boiled eggs, toast and tea. (Mind you, he has breakfast at 5pm, lunch at 11pm, and toys with a simple dinner at dawn; decadents, like symbolists, being unhealthily attracted to the night.)
Not exuberant sensuality, but boredom and spleen, and underneath everything, profound ill health, are the keynotes of the whole thing.
Chapter 1 (7 pages)
The decoration of the house, its fabrics, colours and designs, the walls lined with leather, the mouldings and plinths painted deep indigo, the massive 15th century money-changers’ table, the tall lectern, the windows of blue-ish glass dressed with curtains cut out of old ecclesiastical stoles
Chapter 2 (8 pages)
Describes the pipes, ducts, aquarium and dim windows Des Esseintes rigs up in his dining room so as to feel like he’s in a steamship on a grand cruise. This leads into a dithyramb in praise of artifice and artificiality:
Travel struck him as a waste of time since he believed that the imagination can provide a more-than-adequate substitution for the vulgar reality of actual experience.
And:
There can be no doubt that by transferring this ingenious trickery, this clever simulation to the intellectual plane, one can enjoy, just as easily as on the material plane, imaginary pleasures similar in all respects to the pleasures of reality. (p.35)
Which leads up to the declaration that, contrary to several thousand years of aesthetic theory, which has drummed home the message that the true artist needs to return to nature, that nature is truth etc etc, contrary to all this Des Esseintes insists that the artificial is always superior:
As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. (p.36)
Which leads on to the amusing thought that Nature is a clapped-out old crone, a cliché, serving up the same stereotyped old special effects, red sunsets, glistening moonglow etc etc yawn. What is needed is the new aesthetic of complete artificiality.
(This passage amounts to a manifesto in praise of Artifice and, more than specific passages about jewels or flowers, is probably the ”Bible’ part of the book, the bit which other authors read again and again. It certainly lies behind, or is virtually repeated, in Oscar Wilde’s essays about the superiority of art over nature.)
Chapter 3 (13 pages)
A prolonged, descriptive and hilariously opinionated review of his encyclopedic collection of Latin literature, from Plautus to the tenth century. Particularly funny are his contemptuous dismissals of the classics, Virgil, Horace, Cicero et al, witness:
the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace’s vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted old clown… (p.41)
Later in the book, discussing French literature, he explains this at further length:
Imperfection itself pleased him, provided it was neither base nor parasitic, and it may be that there was a certain amount of truth in his theory that the minor writer of the decadence, the writer who is incomplete but none the less individual, distils a balm more irritant, more sudorific, more acid than the author of the same period who is truly great and truly perfect. In his opinion, it was in their confused efforts that you could find the most exalted flights of sensibility, the most morbid caprices of psychology, the most extravagant aberrations of language called upon in vain to control and repress the effervescent salts of ideas and feelings. (p. 185).
He prefers more heterogenous authors of the later, ‘Silver Age’ such as Petronius (he gives a plot summary of the Satyricon) and Apuleius (author of The Golden Ass) before moving on to consider numerous obscure works of early Christian literature.
Chapter 4 (10 pages)
Des Esseintes needs a centerpiece to bring out some of the colours in a rare oriental rug he owns and has the bright idea of gilding and then embedding the shell of a tortoise with gemstones and placing it on the rug. This leads in to a review of the colour and meaning of jewels, which is itself punctuated by a description of the ‘mouth organ’, a device for mixing amounts of expensive liqueurs so as to produce symphonies of flavour on his palate. He even devises mixes of flavours to mimic the effect and instrumentation of classical music (symphony, string quartet etc).
For some reason the chapter ends with a farcical anecdote about a raging toothache which kept him up all night till he rushed off at opening time to the first cheap dentist he could find who tugged and tugged at the septic molar like a fairground huckster. In its crude farce, this episode is oddly out of kilter with the solemn intensity of most of the book, but then Huysmans didn’t realise he was writing a book which would become a ‘Bible’.
Chapter 5 (15 pages)
A long description of, then meditation on, the painting of Salome Dancing before Herod by top Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau. In his view Salome appears as ‘a great venereal flower, grown in a bed of sacrilege, reared in a hothouse of impiety’ (p.68). Then further analysis of Moreau’s watercolour of her, titled ‘The Apparition‘.
In his red boudoir des Esseintes has a series of engravings by Jan Luyken, titled ‘Religious Persecutions‘, a collection of the most disgusting and horrifying tortures humans can impose on each other, which make him choke with horror. Other works of art he loves include:
Plus numerous works by Odilon Redon which plunge deep ‘into the horrific realms of bad dreams and fevered visions…exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium’, reminding Des Esseintes of the many fever dreams of his own sick boyhood (p.73).
As a break from modern artists, he has a lurid Christ by El Greco which he loves gazing at.
This segues into a passage describing how he’s decorated his bedroom. Bedrooms come in 2 types, one for the pleasures of the flesh, the other restrained and monastic. Having got sex out of his system in Paris, Des Esseintes makes his bedroom into a chaste retreat. Characteristically, he seeks to mimic the effect of a plain and worn monastery but by using exquisite and expensive materials. This is dryly funny but what I took from the description is that:
like a monk he was overwhelmed by an immense weariness, by a longing for peace and quiet (p.76)
Chapter 6 (6 pages)
Sitting quietly in front of a quiet fire he has two memories, both satirically funny:
When one of his group of bachelors back in Paris, D’Aigurande, announces he intends to get married, Des Esseintes is the only one who supports him but not out of common goodwill. The reverse. When he hears that the bride-to-be plans to move into one of the circular flats in the new blocks of flats lining the new boulevards, he knows there’ll be comedy ahead and indeed there is, as the new couple struggle to find furniture to fit the shape and layout of the flat, leading to endless arguments, the wife eventually moving to a new normal-shaped flat where none of their rounded furniture fits, D’Aigurande spending more and more time out seeking distraction while she has an affair. This was precisely the cruel entertainment Des Esseintes had anticipated and then relishes.
The second memory is deliberately monstrous. Des Esseintes comes across a street urchin who asks him for a light. Instead Des Esseintes takes him to a high class brothel and pays for him to have sex with one of the whores. The madam of the house asks why. Des Esseintes shares his sadistic plan, which is to pay for the boy to have sex there every fortnight for a few months, and then abruptly cut him off. The idea is to get him addicted to the high life so that, when he’s suddenly deprived of it, it forces him into a life of crime, leading him eventually to murder some bourgeois householder returning home to find it being burgled by the boy. The madam is shocked, but then she has a lot of odd clients. Anyway, back in the present Des Esseintes is chagrined because although he scours the Police Gazette, he never sees a report about the boy. He feels cheated.
Chapter 7 (12 pages)
Living such a retired, solitary life, Des Esseintes is puzzled and discomfited to discover that many of the questions about life which he smothered during his Paris years, now return to haunt him. Although he was raised by Jesuits, he thought his scepticism secure, but now he’s starting to wonder. Creating the atmosphere of a monastic cell, living a chaste life, reading Christian writers in Latin, he finds his scepticism becoming wobbly.
He comes to realise that his tastes, for artificiality and eccentricity, stem from the subtle sophistical studies of his boyhood education. Weeks pass and he finds his head full of theological speculations, or, their converse, morbid fantasies of grotesque blasphemies.
(Only in Catholic countries is this kind of extremism possible. England with its tea party Church of England never inspired the same fanatacism or morbidness. Anger, yes, as in controversies about Tractarianism, Anglo-Catholicism etc. But no Anglican speculated about putting holy oil and wine to depraved sexual uses as Huysmans does.)
Then these moods leave him, he finds his feet again, reinforces his scepticism by reading (the philosopher) Schopenhauer, disgusted and appalled at the spectacle of a world of pain. The world isn’t guided by a benevolent Providence but is the mangled product of aimless, blind striving.
Now his illnesses come back to haunt him. Terrible headaches, a nervous cough which wakes him in the early hours, searing heartburns. He almost gives up eating, forces himself to go for long walks in the country, puts down his books but almost immediately falls prey to excruciating boredom. He has an idea: to fill the house with hothouse flowers.
Chapter 8 (11 pages)
The flower chapter. In Paris he collected fake flowers, exquisite copies. Now, tired of fake flowers that look like real ones, he wants to collect real flowers that look like fakes. Suffice to say he likes flowers with diseased perfervid colouring, as if stricken with syphilis or leprosy. Sounding very like Oscar Wilde, Des Esseintes declares that:
‘The horticulturalists are the only true artists left to us nowadays.’ (p.102)
That night he has an atrocious nightmare in which he is accompanying a working class woman somewhere when a horse gallops ahead of them, turns and reveals the rider to be a half skeleton, half blue and green demon, with red pustules round the mouth, the figure of Syphilis. The nightmare unfurls through many scenes until the climax when he finds himself embraced by a demon woman, covered in pustules and, as she pulls him (and his erection) closer, her vulva changes into a red wound in the shape of the Venus Flytraps delivered to his houses earlier, the sharp teeth, the glistening digestive juices as she pulls him closer…and he wakes up in a fearful sweat.
Chapter 9 (11 pages)
The nightmares continue, evidence of Des Esseinte’s mounting neuroses. He tries a variety of cures but nothing works. He is all the more irritated as most of the rare flowers he bought at such cost have died. To try and soothe his nerves he reviews his art collection, enjoying the savage skill of Goya’s Caprices, Rembrandt.
Iller than ever, he tries the novels of Charles Dickens, supposedly good for convalescents but is revolted by the stereotyped virginity and chasteness of its young people. This sets off an equal and opposite reaction, and he finds himself shaken by images of perverted lust. He has a small box of purple bonbons, improbably named Pearls of the Pyrenees, which trigger memories of female moments, french kisses, debauches, conquests, sex – ‘Morose delectations’.
He remembers his affair with an American trapeze artist who turned out not to be the agile athlete he hoped for in bed, but prim and Puritanical. The affair with a ventriloquist. One night he placed statues of the Sphinx and the Chimera in his bedroom and had her pitch voices into each, reading out a script from Flaubert. But all the time he is fighting a losing battle against his impotence. He tries having sex with children but their pained grimaces are too samey and boring (p.116). Lastly he remembers being picked up by an attractive young man with whom, apparently, he had a homosexual relationship for a few months.
Like everything else, these memories leave him ‘worn out, completely shattered, half dead’.
Chapter 10 (12 pages)
The chapter on perfumes, the most neglected art of all, displaying Des Esseintes’ usual encyclopedic knowledge and exquisite discriminations, as he sets out to educate himself in the ‘the syntax of smells’, ‘the idiom of essences’, until his sense of smell has ‘acquired an almost infallible flair’.
He gives a history of perfumes which accompany and match French history, certain scents associated with the reigns of Louis 14, 15 and 16, with Napoleon, the restored monarchy etc. Descriptions of his experiments, mixing and mingling rare scents and aromas to create landscapes of the senses, reams of poetic prose describing the aromas he creates on the bed of a vision of a great meadow and swaying linden trees.
Suddenly he has a blinding headache and has to throw open the window to clear the room of its stifling atmosphere. In a brisk mood he decides to sort out the tumble of cosmetics he owns, in his bathroom. Most of these were bought at the insistence of a woman he had an affair with, who loved her nipples to be scented, but couldn’t achieve climax unless she was having her hair combed, or when she could smell soot, wet plaster or the dust thrown up by a summer rainstorm.
One thing leads to another and now he quotes a 2-page-long prose poem he wrote inspired by a visit to this woman’s sister on a day of rain and mud and puddles, which sounds like this:
‘Under the lowering sky, in the humid atmosphere, the houses ooze black sweat and their ventilators breathe black odours; the horror of life becomes more apparent and the grip of spleen more oppressive; the seeds of iniquity that lie in every man’s heart begin to germinate; a craving for filthy pleasures takes hold of the puritanical, and the minds of respected citizens are visited by criminal desires.’ (p.127)
‘Decadent’ enough for you? In fact the prose poem reaches the rather complicated conclusion that invalids, worn out be their debauchery in Paris, often head to the countryside to recuperate, where they die of boredom. He suggests that with a little imagination, their doctors could use perfumes to create the atmosphere of Parisian brothels, thus giving their patients the pleasant impression of being back in their Parisian fleshpots without any of the enervating physical requirements!
But when he throws open the windows he smells again a strong scent of frangipani and, in his weakened state, wonders if he is possessed by some evil spirit, and falls fainting, ‘almost dying’, across the windowsill. It cannot be emphasised enough how the entire narrative is based on Des Esseintes’ almost complete mental and physical collapse.
Chapter 11 (14 pages)
As a result of this collapse his terrified servants call a doctor who declares there’s nothing wrong with Des Esseintes before our hero shoos him out of the house. Suddenly, on a whim, based on his earlier attempt to read the novels of Dickens, des Esseintes conceives the mad idea of going to London. He has the old servant pack his things and is off in a cab to the train station within hours. Next thing he knows he is at the station and engaging a cabbie to take him to a bookstore to buy a guide to London. But as they trot through the streets of Paris Des Esseintes has a vivid and very enjoyable vision of London, the London of fogs and non-stop rain, and soot and rumbling tube trains and miserable pedestrians.
At the bookshop he peruses guidebooks to London, mostly noting lists of paintings hanging in London galleries. He likes the most ‘modern’ works and it is interesting to see that, for a super aesthete like des Esseintes, this means John Everett Millais and George Frederick Watts.
Having bought a guide he goes to the Bodega, a big wine emporium, where he finds himself surrounded by Englishmen about whom he is entertainingly rude:
There were laymen with bloated pork-butcher faces or bulldog muzzles, apoplectic necks, ears like tomatoes, winy cheeks, stupid bloodshot eyes and whiskery collars as worn by some of the great apes. (p.137)
Drifting into a reverie he superimposes on all these faces the names and characters from Dickens’ novels, imagining the hooting of tugs behind the Tuileries are those of boats on the Thames. He then takes the cab through the filthy rainy Paris weather to a warm tavern near the station for the train to Dieppe and boat onto Newhaven.
Here Des Esseintes stuffs himself with an unusually large meal (thick greasy oxtail soup; smoked haddock; roast beef and potatoes; several pints of ale; stilton, then a rhubarb tart; a pint of porter followed by a cup of coffee laced with gin).
There are many English men in the tavern but also some English women, about whom he is also amusingly rude:
Robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives, cheeks as red as apples, long hands and long feet. They were enthusiastically attacking helpings of rump-steak pie – meat served hot in mushroom sauce and covered with a crust like a fruit tart. (p.140)
Eventually the bad weather outside, the warmth inside, the effect of an unusually heavy dinner, and being surrounded by English men and women contribute to the growing sense that there’s no need to go to London. In his imagination he’s already been.
After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn’t he already in London whose smells, weather, citizens, food and even cutlery were all about him? (p.143)
Only a ninny can imagine it is necessary, interesting or useful to travel abroad. And so, with a certain inevitability, he takes the cab back to the Gare de Sceaux, and a train back to Fontenoy, arriving (comically) with:
all the physical weariness and moral fatigue of a man who has come home after a long and perilous voyage.
This is broadly funny. Des Esseintes barely seems the hero of a satanic novel of moral debauchery any more, but a figure of fun, a comically etiolated, knackered, degraded version of the dashing hero of many an adventure novel by his compatriot Jules Vernes.
Chapter 12 (22 pages)
The second longest chapter, a review of French Catholic prose literature.
Des Esseintes (slightly comically) returns to his books as if after a long absence when he has, in fact, been away for one day. It’s a return to the mode of hyperaesthetic review which we’ve seen in the preceding chapters.
Obviously, not only is his book collection of rare and tasteful books, but he insists on having them specially printed – on special paper, printed with hand-made fonts, bound in rare and precious bindings. It is an orgy of exquisite taste, requiring specialist vocabulary such as ‘mirific’ and ‘blind-tooling’.
It is here that he gives a page-long dithyramb to the patron saint of decadence, Charles Baudelaire, who went further than anyone before him to explore ‘the symptoms of souls visited by sorrow, singled out by spleen…[at the age when] the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth have drained away.’ (p.147)
In Des Esseintes’ opinion, few other writers compare; certainly, he is not impressed by the ‘classics’ such as Rabelais and Corneille, Voltaire, Diderot or Rousseau. Pascal he likes for his austere pessimism and ‘agonised attrition’.
When it comes to the nineteenth century literature, he divides it into two classes, Catholic and secular. Catholic writing is good for stating abstract concepts and intellectual distinctions but the general run of Catholic writers is dire.
He is humorously rude about a set of women Catholic writers for their banality (it’s worth mentioning that Huysmans drops casually insulting comments about women throughout the book). Catholic writers generally have fallen victim to a conventional and frozen idiom, drained of all originality – with the exceptions of Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, the Abbé Peyreyve, the Comte de Falloux, Louis Veuillot, Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam, the Abbé Lamennais, Comte Josephe de Maistre, Ernest Hello and others he singles out.
Reading about these priests and polemicists makes me eternally grateful that England is (or was) a Protestant country, untroubled by the bitter and savage arguments about the role of Catholicism in public life which divided France, and the bitter splits which divided French Catholicism (between Ultramontanists and Gallicists). The bitter divides and the spiteful bigotry underlying French society were to come spilling out in the grotesque Dreyfus Affair a decade after this book was published (1894) whose antagonisms reverberated on to the time of the Great War.
A Catholic writer who went too far for the Church authorities was Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808 to 1889). Des Esseintes likes d’Aurevilly’s more extreme works because they feed his taste for ‘sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever’ (p.160).
Discussion of d’Aurevilly’s novels A married priest and The devils leads into a meditation on the fact that sadism only really makes sense within the context of Catholic faith. Sadism is a form of sacrilegious rebellion, a spiritual as much as a physical debauch. Without a God and Church to defy, it’s just being cruel.
Des Esseintes shares the fruits of his investigations into the Malleus Maleficorum and the Black Mass, describing a naked woman on all fours whose naked rump has been ‘repeatedly soiled’, serving as the altar from which the anti-congregation take a demonic host printed with the image of a goat, and so on.
Yes, of the entire canon of French Catholic prose, d’Aurevilly is the only one des Esseintes really enjoys reading because his works offer:
those gamy flavours and unhealthy spots, that bruised skin and sleepy taste which he so loved to savour in the decadent writers, both Latin and monastic, of olden times. (p.165)
(See my review of d’Aurevilly’s best known collection of stories, Les Diaboliques.)
Chapter 13 (12 pages)
There’s a heatwave. Feeble Des Esseintes is prostrated. He can’t eat, is almost choking with nausea. He takes down a bottle of Benedictine liqueur which he describes in a half-page prose poem, visions of medieval monks at their alembics.
Going out into the garden to recover his strength he sees a bunch of working class boys fighting in the lane which triggers negative thoughts. What’s the point of the scrofulous little brats being born in the first place? Why does society sell the means of contraception but locks up anyone who has an abortion? Maybe fornication should be banned outright. Then ‘a dreadful feeling of debility came over him again’ (p.172).
He tinkers with a few more liqueurs but they sicken him. We learn that, during his florid Paris heyday he tried hashish and opium but they only made him sick. He would have to rely in his imagination to carry him to other worlds.
He goes back indoors to seek relief from the heat, slumps into a chair and plays with an astrolabe he bought on the Left Bank. Now his mind drifts, reminiscing about walks around Paris, it dawns on him that licensed brothels are slowly being closed down and invariably replaced with taverns. This suggests to him that men tire of walking in, paying, having sex and walking out again. Too easy. In a tavern, on the other hand, you encounter women who you have to banter with, overcome, barter with, in some kind of degraded joust. If you score, there’s more of a sense of achievement. What idiots men are! Des Esseintes reflects, and goes to find some food for his troubled stomach.
Chapter 14 (23 pages)
French secular literature. At one point Des Esseintes worshipped Balzac but, as his health failed, Balzac came to seem too healthy. He changed to Edgar Allen Poe. He wants to be lifted ‘into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion’ (p.180). Hating modern life, as he does, he comes to dislike books which record it, from Flaubert to Zola. Instead he turns more and more to the fantastical, to the artificiality of Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. He wants to escape the dullness and stupidity of his age, and fancy himself in another era, another world.
Then begins his review of nineteenth century French literature, starting by admiring Flaubert’s Salammbô, then analysing Edmund de Goncourt. What he, Des Esseintes, seeks in a book is ‘dream-inducing suggestiveness’ (p.183). After considering Zola he makes a major point about the appeal of minor, lesser writers. They are less consistent, less predictable and so more likely to include quirks and oddities which reveal strange corners of psychology and style.
Then the poets. He has a page on Paul Verlaine, who he describes as mysterious, vague, eccentric. And so on to Tristan Corbieres, Theodore Hannon. He no longer likes Leconte de Lisle and even Gautier no long appeals: they don’t make him dream any more, they no longer up vistas of escape. Hugo and Stendhal no. Nobody comes close to the pleasure given him by Edgar Allen Poe. The closest anyone comes is the Contes cruels of Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a few of which he summarises (and which I recently reviewed).
Finally, his servant has filed his small collection of contemporary books on his shelves and leaves Des Esseintes with a specially printed selection of the finest poet of his times, Stéphane Mallarmé. Above all, des Esseintes loves the fineness of Mallarmé’s prose poems which is Des Esseintes’ favourite literary form. Verlaine, Mallarmé, represented the delicious decadence of the French language.
It is very symptomatic that Des Esseintes associates aesthetic excellence with illness, decline and collapse. Thus a little hymn celebrating the idea that the French language itself has finally reached the end of the road, is in terminal decay, since decay, decadence and death are his standard trope.
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…this was the death-agony of the old tongue which, after going a little greener every century, had now reached the point of dissolution… (p.199)
All this is, in my opinion, actually a very suburban prejudice. Every generation likes to think it is the last one, that things are going to the dogs, can’t carry on this way, everything’s collapsing – whereas, in fact, rather disappointingly, things do just keep carrying on. It is a very common prejudice.
Then again, in the context of the narrative, you could argue that Des Esseintes’ opinion of the collapse of the French language really only reflects his own physical collapse. Like all his other opinions, it is highly subjective and self-referential.
Chapter 15 (11 pages)
Des Esseintes had had his servants install a food digester to cater to his sensitive stomach. It works for a while then wears off and symptoms of illness return – eye trouble, hacking cough, throbbing arteries, cold sweats, and now aural delusions i.e. he starts hearing things which aren’t there. He hears the school bell and then the hymns he learned at his Jesuit school.
Which segues into lyrical praise of medieval plainsong and Gregorian chant. As he himself notes quite a few times, not least in the passage about sadism, quite a few of the things Des Esseintes likes are meaningless without the context of Roman Catholicism. Sometimes he is deliberately rebelling against it, as in his fondness for blasphemous writers, but other times he is very sensitive to the true Christian spirit, with no irony.
And so it is here, where he deprecates almost all classical music as showy and straining for ‘popular success’ (a thought designed to make any true aristocrat shudder); only plainchant is the true ‘idiom of the ancient church, the very soul of the Middle Ages’ (p.202).
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. (p.203)
He is hilariously rude about public concerts where:
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. (p.204)
Or you are forced to listen to:
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. (p.203)
The only ‘modern’ composers he can bear are Schumann, but above all the songs of Schubert which speak to his high-strung nerves, which wake a host of forgotten sorrows and thrill him to the marrow.
One day he sees his face in the mirror and is appalled. His face is shrunken, covered in wrinkles, hollow cheeks, big burning watery eyes. He is not at all like the image chosen for the cover of the Penguin Classics edition, the painting by Giovanni Boldini of the dashing, dapper Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou – that gives a completely misleading image of a dandy at the height of his powers, whereas the whole point is that Des Esseintes is a man utterly at the end of his rope.
He has his man rush to Paris to fetch an eminent and expensive doctor then falls to hypochondriac fretting and then into a doze. The doctor enters his bedroom unannounced, inspects him, writes out a simple prescription and leaves with barely a word.
Turns out the doctor has prescribed peptone enemas which appear to require the servant to place a tube or syringe up his anus and inject nutrition. Des Esseintes is overcome with hilarious glee, regarding this as the acme of the artificial way of life he has been seeking all his life. What could be more ‘against nature’ and a rejection of the whole messy way of stuffing our faces and chewing revolting foodstuffs which nature has condemned humanity to?
True to form, it crosses Des Esseintes’ mind that the ideal connoisseur could create dishes and combinations of flavours to be included in the mixture of nutrients being injected up his bottom – a thought which surely anticipates the Surreal blasphemies of a writer like Georges Bataille.
Slowly Des Esseintes recovers his strength till he can walk about his house unaided, though with a stick. As his health revives he renews his interest in interior decoration, coming up with ever-more byzantine new combinations. However, on his next visit his doctor informs him he must give up this reclusive, super-nervous, anxious way of living, return to Paris and live like other people, take his pleasures in ‘normal’ enjoyments, to which he whines:
‘But I just don’t enjoy the pleasures other people enjoy.’
Tough. It’s life or death. Keep on living as he is, and he’ll lose strength, go mad and die.
Chapter 16 (9 pages)
The doctor insists he needs a change of scene, to mix with society, to have friends. And so with great reluctance, Des Esseintes has his precious belongings packed up ready to ship back to a new apartment he is to rent in Paris.
This triggers a review of possible companions: all the young squires he used to run with will be married by now and having affairs; the money-grubbing bourgeoisie are beneath contempt, spreading all around them ‘the tyranny of commerce’; the aristocracy as a whole is dying out, ‘sunk into imbecility or depravity’, selling off their ancestral homes, their vices and crimes all too often leading them to court and then onto gaol like common criminals. He is disgusted by the way the Church, also, has caught the commercialism of the age, advertising all kinds of tacky products in Sunday supplements, Trappist beer, Cistercian chocolates.
He wants to believe, he wants to have faith, but the modern writings and even practices of the Church have been corrupted and adulterated. And so – after a bilious and very funny diatribe against the revolting bourgeoisie – the last pages of the book turn into a plea to God.
‘Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!’ (Final sentence, p.220)
So the book ends in such a way as to drive home the simple idea that the entire Decadence is a kind of disappointed Catholic faith, so angry with its disillusion that it turns to childish debaucheries and blasphemies in order to spite its disappointing parent. Unable to escape its firm foundation in Catholicism, À rebours ends with a surprisingly sincere prayer.
More incidents than you’d expect
From this summary you can see that the text is emphatically not simply a series of encyclopedia entries on a set of luxury topics (art, literature, jewels, perfumes etc), but that Huysmans goes to some lengths to shake his narrative up and vary it with real-world actions and events.
In the the ‘present’ of the narrative this includes the visits of various tradesmen and a doctor, and the big episode of the trip to Paris in chapter 11. A bit more subtly, the narrative is broken up with plenty of memories of active events: such as relationships with various lovers (trips to the circus to see the acrobat), the farcical trip to the dentist, memories of the visit to the sister-in-law of a lover which inspired his prose poem, the time he took the street urchin to the brothel, and so on.
Decadent rhetoric
Obviously the book is drenched in the rhetoric of ‘decadence’, with liberal use of classic adjectives and phrases from the genre. I made a list, curious to see how many times he could recycle the same basic ideas, and the answer is, quite a few times:
- horror
- spleen
- filthy pleasures
- tortured
- fiendish
- diabolical
- voluptuous pleasure
- licentious obsessions
- new and original ecstasies
- paroxysms celestial and accursed
- atrocious
- drunk with fantasy
- abominable
- ghastly screams
- glaring infamies
- delights
- hideous hues
- spine-chilling nightmare
- foul uncontrollable desires
- dark and odious schemes
- fear
- morbid depravities
- monstrous vegetations of the sick mind
- diseases of the mind
- the burning fever of lust
- the typhoids and yellow fevers of crime
- self-torment
- bitterness of mind
- incest
- disillusion and contempt
- weary spirits and melancholy souls
- gloomy ecstasies
- melancholy madness
- sacrilegious profanities
- secret longings
- atrocious delusions
- insane aspirations
- disgust
- mystic ardours
- cruel revulsives
- secret reveries
- occult passion
- monstrous depravities
- anxiety
- anguish
- terror
- nightmares of a fevered brain
- delicious miasmas
- dream-like apparitions
- inexorable nightmare
- sexual frenzy
- painful ecstasy
- new intoxications
- despairing appeal
- stifled sob
- mystical debauch
- a dying love affair in a melancholy landscape
- exquisite funereal laments
- steeped in bitterness and filled with disgust
- obstinate distress
- tormented by anxiety
- torrent of anguish
- this hairy death’s head
- incoherent dreams
- dark venereal pleasures
- subtly depraved and perverse type of mysticism
Of Moreau:
He himself remained downcast and sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman passions and superhuman perversities, of divine debaucheries perpetrated without enthusiasm and without hope. (p.69)
So an impressive collection of over-ripe and melodramatic language. But two other themes stand out and are less remarked on:
1. Decadence = exhaustion
Overcome with infinite fatigue, he slumped helplessly against the table. (p.167)
The keynote for me, is not the perversities and damned thoughts etc etc so much as the relentless tone of exhaustion. Des Esseintes only goes into retirement because his nerves have been shredded by his fast-living Paris lifestyle, and our hero is continually trembling on the brink of passing out, when he’s not having nightmares, night sweats, trembling and shaking as he lifts a cup of weak tea to his white lips.
And this air of exhaustion is something he seeks out in art and literature. The painter Luykens was, he tells us, a fervent Calvinist who:
composed and illustrated religious poems, paraphrased the Psalms in verse, and immersed himself in Biblical study, from which he would emerge haggard and enraptured, his mind haunted by bloody visions, his mouth twisted by the maledictions of the Reformation, by its songs of terror and anger. (p.71)
Obviously a lot is going on in that passage but for me, the key word is haggard. And what he likes in the later Latin literature which he collects is the sense of breakdown and decay. Half way through the book I started making a separate collection of key words on this theme
- feeble
- broken-down
- short-winded
- fainting
- feverish
- weeping
- choking
- spluttering
- sick room routine
- ailing
- anaemic
- debility
- alarming weakness
- apathy
- bored inactivity
- exhaustion
- organic diseases
- intellectual senility
- last stammerings
- exhausted by fever
In his discussion of the author Barbey d’Aurevilly Des Esseintes makes the candid remark that he is ‘really interested only in sickly books, undermined and inflamed by fever’ (p.160). It’s not too much of a stretch to call Decadence the aesthetic of illness.
Comedy
Given the book’s reputation as the Bible of Decadence, it’s unexpectedly funny.
He is savagely funny about his dull cousins in the Prologue. He is ferociously snobbish about the bourgeoisie, about shop-keepers and butcher’s wives and their meretricious, banal tastes.
He doesn’t just carry out a survey of Latin literature from Plautus to the tenth century, he massacres some of the most famous names in the classical canon, rubbishing Virgil and Horace very amusingly, and in a manner which must have been designed to render traditional Latinists apoplectic.
In a deliberately offensively funny section, the passage in praise of The Artificial, he first of all states that surely the most exquisite creation of nature is woman (‘the most perfect and original beauty’) but then goes on to say that, has not Man now produced something more dazzling beautiful than the most beautiful woman, being…’the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway’ (p.37), a deliberately offensive notion which anticipates the posturing of Marinetti’s Futurists 30 years later.
Then there are the hilarious descriptions of ugly English men and women in the aborted journey to London chapter (‘Robust Englishwomen with boyish faces, teeth as big as palette-knives’) and the thumping contempt the ignorati who attend public concerts, in chapter 15.
Maybe the one central theme of the French literature which is now regarded as canonical, from Flaubert and Baudelaire, through writers like Huysmans, through the Surrealists and on into the Existentialists, is their hatred of the bourgeoisie. Witness the diatribe against the filthy middle classes on almost the last page of the book. French authors will do anything to escape the taint or accusation of having bourgeois tastes. Whereas the same hatred of the middle classes just isn’t in evidence in English literature, lots of which is written virtually in praise of the middle and upper middle classes – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Henry James, E.M. Foster.
Robert Baldick’s translation (brings out the comedy)
The translation I read is pretty old, the 1959 Robert Baldick one published by Penguin Books. However, unlike many translations of nineteenth century classics, it is immediately likeable and entertaining. Apparently:
Huysmans’s work was known for his idiosyncratic use of the French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting, satirical wit
and this is exactly what comes over in Baldick’s translation. He uses a wider vocabulary than you might expect – I mean I was entertained by his unusual and out-of-the-way words – and certainly brings out Huysman’s biting wit. I laughed out loud at several places in the short Prologue, where he describes young men of his own age as ‘docile, good-looking ninnies, congenital dunces who had worn their masters’ patience thin’. In addition Des Esseintes:
discovered the freethinkers, those bourgeois doctrinaires who clamoured for absolute liberty in order to stifle the opinions of other people, to be nothing but a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites whose intelligence he rated lower than a village cobbler’s.
And the venom of his contempt is funny. Or the snobbishness. Like his refusal to use any of the obvious jewels on the tortoise because they are the kind worn by vulgar businessmen or upon ‘the tubulous fingers of butcher’s wives’ (p.55).
This snobbery is also evident in the passages about Goya and Rembrandt who he is embarrassed at liking because the rest of the world likes them too, and there is nothing worse than sharing the same taste as the ghastly bourgeoisie and having to listen to their inane praise of works of which, as an initiate, as a superior being, you have such a better grasp and appreciation (p.108).
If the mob start liking something, Des Esseintes hastily drops it and worries that his ‘taste’ (i.e. aristocratic superiority) is failing him. Throughout the book the adjective ‘aristocratic’ is a word of unqualified praise. Among other things, the Decadence was deeply elitist.
I bought this paperback when I was 17, alongside my edition of Baudelaire’s poems, desperate to enliven my humdrum suburban existence with the Flowers of Evil. Forty years later, some of Des Esseintes’ passages, like the rant against Virgil, his amusing abuse of middle-class taste, and even more in the farcical toothache scene, made me smile or even laugh out loud. When I was a stricken teenager I thought life was a tragedy and books like this fed that feeling. Now I know it’s a comedy and mostly what I find in them is different flavours of comedy.
French literature is more sexually open than English
Quite apart from anything else, the novel demonstrates the vast difference between French and English literature of this time in regard to women and sex. Huysmans doesn’t describe the sexual act itself, but he freely describes going to brothels, the charms of the different ladies, of attending parties where women strip off, he mentions breasts and nipples and even, apparently, what one of his lovers required in order to climax.
Absolutely none of this could have been written by or even hinted at by English authors, who subjected themselves to a ferocious self censorship. Same with Americans, possibly even more Puritanical. It’s significant that of the many lovers des Esseintes reminisces about, by far the most frigid and unsexual was American (the disappointingly prudish and passive acrobat, page 112).
I’m not sure when English writers caught up with French ones in terms of candour and honesty about sex: would it have been the 1960s, maybe? On a deeper level, it seems to me the English still haven’t caught up with the best Continental authors in capturing a genuinely relaxed, at-ease-with-themselves attitude towards bodies and sex.
Credit
À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans was published in French, in Paris, in 1884. All references are to the English translation by Robert Baldick published by Penguin paperback in 1973.
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