Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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For that alone, this book has every reason to fail, and yet I found myself as unexpectedly fascinated by the insights of the main character as the French people did in 1884. it mattered little to him if, by the light of day, they were inspid or crude, for it was at night that he lived…one was more oneself (when) alone then…the mind only grew animated and active with the approach of darkness. The novel follows a young aristocrat named Jean Des Essientes who retreats from busy city life to a home in the country to spend the rest of his days pursuing aesthetic philosophy.

The main character is an older, somewhat wealthy gentlemen who is so fed up with his meaningless lifestyle that he goes into complete seclusion in the countryside.The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. A rebours was indeed part of a 'poisonous' Decadent French literature, and was identified by Arthur Symons as 'the breviary of the Decadence'. The yellow book is apparently confirmed by Wilde to be a thematic allusion to Huysmans's A Rebours in Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls and a strip of altar railing.

I'm just focusing on the edition: the 2004 Penguin Classics reprint of Robert Baldick's 1956 translation but with a new introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (and a new cover, of which more anon). Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Rather than drawing from human nature and seeking to understand humanity, Huysmans found his oeuvre with the paintings of Gustav Moreau and he was linked to the heady extremes of symbolist poetry by the likes of Mallarme and Moreas. he left them and drew closer to men of letters, with whom his mind should have had more affinity and felt better at ease. He is upper class and wealthy, the last of a degenerating line of inbreeding toffs, whose mother died of nervous exhaustion, his father of ‘some obscure illness’.This Penguin is on bright, white paper, and with larger type (though consequently is also a bit larger in size). And so we come to what has often been noted as being the linchpin of Decadence, and the book upon which the Decadent movement of fin de siecle France rests. In the end, “whatever he tried, an immense feeling of ennui oppressed him…then his health grew weaker and his nervous system more strained,” until he finally decides to create a sanctuary of intellectual and artistic stimulation off in the suburbs, near enough to Paris to reassure him, but far enough away to isolate him from “a hateful age of undignified boorishness. Many critics were appalled by its apparent lack of morality, while young Dandies and Aesthetes were attracted to it for its idolisation of art and sensation.

Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics. The Yellow Scale," which depicts an amazingly burnt out aesthetic type, wrapped up in a yellow robe, yellow book (of course) in one hand, and cigarette burning out in his other limp, yellow hand. From what I’ve read of his letters, he seemed to be constantly dissatisfied with how people perceived him and his work.

Huysman's erudite encapsulations of Classical history and literature are marked by a strong sense of the privileged position he was able, by means of his wealth, to attain. He’s a swooning misanthrope, a cad with OCD over the arrangement of his books on their shelves, an over-educated recluse. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He lines a tortoise with gold so it will go with his carpet, but when that doesn’t work he encrusts it with obscure gems (diamonds and pearls are just too vulgar). He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour Des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. Mundane Made Awesome: Des Esseintes' "hobbies" (the word seems inadequate) are described by Huysmans in lavish style and as if they are of epic importance, which to the central character, they are. Des Esseintes does indeed progress as a character, however unwillingly, as he discovers his intended escape to be little more than a self imposed delusion. While still quite entertaining and filled with the usual Huysmanian admixture of autobiographic confessional and well-versed knowledgability and critical insight relating to various areas of obscuritania, the ‘shock factor’ that so many readers then and now seem to relate upon discovery of the novel was entirely absent.

Like Durtal in La Bas (and later, as I understand it, in his Catholic trilogy), he is seeking an intellectual and aesthetic escape into a mythic or at least mythologized past, where things must have been better, where the problems Huysmans’ ciphers and masks of the projected self struggle with would never have existed. The protagonist fills the house with his eclectic art collection, which notably consists of reprints of the paintings of Gustave Moreau (such as Salome Dancing before Herod and L'Apparition), drawings of Odilon Redon, and engravings of Jan Luyken. But that in itself does not invalidate the remainder of the novel, its assertions, or what the man is striving to create – an attempt to rise above, or at least remove oneself from, a distasteful decline in culture and disagreement with the crassness of economists and the like about the centrality of Mammon as motivator and rationale for human discourse and life aims.