Against Nature Read Free Page A

rereading. But there was another story, equally compelling: in art, literature, social and political theory and in science, the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented innovation. With poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and the Symbolists, novelists such as Zola and Maupassant, artists such as Manet and Rodin, composers such as Debussy or Erik Satie, we might object that, on the contrary, this was no decadence but a period of astonishing artistic richness and diversity. Perhaps the belief that there was nothing new was itself a necessary prelude to creating the new. This is one of the great paradoxes of thelate nineteenth century: that these contradictory views – of decadence and renewal, beginnings and ends, exhaustion and innovation – could be held simultaneously and often by the same people.
    One of the great formative novels of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand’s
René
(1802), had helped define what came to be called the ‘sickness of the century’ (
mal du siècle
) felt by the rootless, aimless, self-indulgent aristocrats in a world which seemed not to need them. ‘Alone in the great desert of men’ was how René, ‘last of his race’, put it: it was a historical, sexual and cultural dispossession, but it gave the Romantic writer opportunity to explore the mysteries of the infinitely desiring but finite self. As late as 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson mocked the persistence of ‘René’s malady’ among the young of his own period: ‘Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year… look down from their pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life.’ 6 When Huysmans loosed Des Esseintes upon the reading public, people interpreted his character, for all his disturbing newness, as part of an unfolding tradition: an orphan perhaps, but an orphan with a pedigree.
    The end of the nineteenth century seemed to mirror its beginning, but whereas the Romantics had their illusions shattered, the Decadents merely had their disillusionment reinforced. Osip Mandelstam uses a 1913 review of a Russian translation of Huysmans’
Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches
, 1881) to distinguish between the Romantics and their Decadent successors, between the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century:
    This book is almost intentionally physiological. Its primary theme is the clash between the defenceless but refined external organs of perception and insulted reality. Paris is hell… Huysmans’s boldness and innovation stem from the fact that he managed to remain a confirmed hedonist under the worst possible conditions… The decadents did not like reality, but they did know reality, and that is what distinguishes them from the romantics. 7
    â€˜Live? Our servants will do that for us’: the defiant words of the heroic and princely recluse of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s
Axël
(1890) became a supreme idealist battle-cry, uttered in heroic defiance of materialist society and its stultifying cult of bourgeois ‘common sense’. This was the epoch of the superman and of the individualist, but it was also the epoch of his less fortunate twin: the sickly, the consumptive, the neurotic. In Huysmans’ novels, the self is not a goal but a refuge, no longer an aspiration but a point of final fallback; the heritage of individualism remained, but wounded, humiliated and in retreat.
    The Romantic heroes had travelled to exotic places in search of themselves, only to discover that it was themselves they were trying to escape. They had, like René, posed on seashores, mountain tops and volcanoes. Their Decadent successors were mired in the filth of the crawling cityscape, compulsively drawn to its alternating tedium and exhilaration; but they were drawn also to interiors, the ornate, meticulously furnished, airless rooms that symbolize their retreat.