Against Nature Read Free

beginnings. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic who interpreted European Symbolism for modernists such as Yeats and Eliot, called it the ‘breviary of the Decadence’, 3 while its most famous fictional reader, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, foundit ‘poisonous’ and ‘the strangest book that he had ever read’. 4 The novel has retained its cultish hold, as Marianne Faithfull recalls in her autobiography: ‘You would ask your date, “Do you know Genet? Have you read
A Rebours
?’’ and if he said yes you’d fuck.’ 5 It is a fine irony that a novel about an impotent, reclusive and prematurely aged reactionary should become a must-read in the vigorous counter-culture of the 1960s. Today’s readers may or may not feel the same as Dorian Gray or Marianne Faithfull; what is certain is that they will find it unlike any work of fiction they have encountered.
HUYSMANS, ‘DECADENCE’ AND
AGAINST NATURE
    [I]t is the difference between the raw, white and direct light of a midday sun beating down on all things equally, and the horizontal light of evening, firing the strange clouds with reflections… Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?
    Théophile Gautier,
Histoire du romantisme (History of Romanticism
)
    For Gautier, discussing his friend Charles Baudelaire, ‘Decadence’ is the dying sun as it projects its intricate and complex fires across the sky. It is twilight; not the Yeatsian ‘Celtic Twilight’ prior to daybreak and revival, but the twilight of a sun setting for the last time on a tired globe and its tired inhabitants. For the artists and writers who proclaimed themselves ‘Decadent’, it was a compelling metaphor: ‘we are dying of civilization’, wrote Edmond de Goncourt, a writer Huysmans admired and learned from. Many artists of the period invoked the decline and fall of the hyper-civilized Roman Empire as the most resonant ‘culture rhyme’ for modern France. Certainly there were grounds for such views: a sense of historical decline symbolized by a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, whomarched on the French capital in 1870, followed by the Commune and the siege of Paris in 1871, a bloody and divisive episode in French history whose memory endured until the Second World War. This they called ‘the débâcle’, and the symbolism was powerful: invaded and humiliated by the ‘barbarian’ Germans, then ruinously tearing itself apart, French civilization, guardian of ‘Latin’ values, appeared to have peaked and begun a slow collapse. Huysmans, a (non-combatant) soldier during the Franco-Prussian war and a civil servant during the siege of Paris, witnessed the French defeat, the Commune and its brutal repression, and the national soul-searching that came in their aftermath.
    But there was also a
malaise
more difficult to pin down: a sense that everything had been done, said, written, felt. As Des Esseintes muses reading Baudelaire, the late nineteenth century’s was a ‘mind that ha[d] reached the October of its sensations’. Yet there was something wilfully self-dramatizing about all these decadent attitudes – after all, the nineteenth century had known extraordinary technological, political and scientific advances, and all of these had happened at breathtaking pace. While many embraced these changes, others saw them in unambiguously negative terms: ‘we have spent the nineteenth century splitting hairs; how shall we spend the twentieth? Splitting them into four?’ asked one of Huysmans’ contemporaries.
Against Nature
is full of references to the century’s end, the end of art, the end of creativity, and it was to what Mallarmé called the ‘modern muse of Impotence’ that the new generation looked: all writing seemed a rewriting, every reading a