Against Nature Read Free Page B

Huysmans’ characters, as Mandelstam notes, are among the most physiologically sensitive in literature, and their quest for peace or fulfilment takes its toll not just on their spirits but on their bodies. In Des Esseintes’s case, the quest terminates indoors, the final bastion of the privacy that feeds on itself until there is nothing left. Des Esseintes thus became the exemplary Decadent figure: the last, sickly scion of a once great family, his mind addled by fantastical luxury and his body wracked by abuse, he retires from the nineteenth century – the ‘American century’ as both Des Esseintes and Huysmans call it – to build his own dream fortress.
Against Nature
is the tale of this obsession.
HUYSMANS AND
AGAINST NATURE
    It was as if everything that was disgusting and horrible in every sphere of life forced itself on his attention, and that all manner of abomination had produced an artist uniquely made to paint them and a man created expressly to suffer from them.
    Paul Valéry, ‘Souvenirs de J.-K. Huysmans’ (‘Memories of J.-K. Huysmans’)
    Joris-Karl Huysmans was born in 1848, the revolutionary year in which Flaubert set part of
L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education
), the novel Huysmans claimed in his 1903 preface had most influenced him. His father, who died in 1856, was an artist of Dutch origins, and the son would later refer to himself as a mystical Fleming beneath the skin of a neurotic Parisian. J.-K. Huysmans would produce some of the finest art criticism of his generation, and his attention was particularly drawn to nordic artists, the Flemish and Dutch, with whose cultures he retained a lifelong sympathy.
    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