A Rebours
 by J.-K. Huysmans



I

Just finished Huysmans' A Rebours, a book that I had known about and intended to read for over a decade. I now know precisely what was so attractive about it, and also why it took me so long to read it.

How can such a book exist? It's bold and imaginative at every corner, monstrously-magically erudite and yet at times uncomfortably personal, humble, and tender - at others, perfectly aggravating; its concepts are deep darkened gulfs from which hypersensual descriptions tower up like supremely decorated lilies; it's an encyclopedic treasury of allusions that once opened springs forth a menagerie of never-before-seen creatures from it's heavily-latched lid - a celebration of artificiality that palpitates and groans through the page. Finally it's, at the same time, a penetrating portrait of a woebegone solitary man and an expansive treatise on the history of a culture.

I must have first known about Huysmans in high school, when I bought, fetishized, but only briefly perused his decadent novel La-Bas. It was in the spring of 2001, however, when I really became aware of him. The previous fall, I had fallen headlong into the vertiginous whirlpool of Charles Baudelaire, reading much of Les Fleurs du Mal while working the drive-thru counter at a McDonald's in Florida. About that time, I read a biography on Baudelaire by a perspicacious Brit named Hemmings. Not only was I transfixed by all his accounts of Le Club des Hashischins, of Baudelaire's failed voyage to India, his political stance against his step-father, his incestuous love-hate tango with his mother, his fatal obsession with fine linens, etc, but the biography also afforded me a thorough glimpse into the make-up of the French literary world at that time. My mind ran way with such shadowy names like Joris-Karl Huysmans, Theophile Gautier, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Leconte de Lisle, Maxime du Camp...Who were these counts and scavengers, crepuscular gardeners, and sorcerous architects? Within a few months however, I had followed another tributary and found myself in the troubled grottos of the American expatriate sun-worshipper Harry Crosby - I had momentarily lost track of these delicate, accursed flowers of 19th century France.

Over a full decade later, I have found myself once again digging up the snow that covers these barely-remembered poetic ideologues. I'm not sure quite what possessed me to turn to Huysmans once more, but I'm glad I did. The quickening symphony of A Rebours envelops me in a furious bonfire of imagination,  which frantically swivels my head this way and that to catch the air that feeds the flame.

Baudelaire will always persist in my mind as not only the greatest French poet, but also one of the most original writers of all time. Huysmans is now for me among the pantheon. Huysmans' portrait of Duc Jean des Esseintes in A Rebours serves well to expand and penetrate more deeply into the Baudelairean ideal.




II

In the beginning of the novel, Des Esseintes, the distillation of a long line of debauched, degenerate aristocrats, suffering from a severe nerve disorder and fatigued with the world of man, has decided to remove himself once and for all to the countryside, where in his private hermitage he endeavors to recreate all the best parts of the world he's escaped. He has his dining room converted into a ship's cabin (so he can feel the excitement of a voyage without having to leave the table), he has a complicated tap system whereby he can imitate symphonies with different types of liquor, he buys a tortoise and gilds and bejewels its shell to emphasize the splendor of his carpet. There's another instance of strange avarice in Des Esseintes - he orders a truckload of artificially doctored tropical plants to line his rooms and rarefy the air. And of course, his momentary encomium to enemas toward the end of the book not only supports an arresting, world-puncturing perspective, but also opens out on (as I'm sure is intentional) an aerial glimpse of France's entrenched history in depravity.

Much of the novel is an extensive tour through Des Esseintes' memory, library, and art collection (in fact, at the end of the day, memory may be the exclusive motif of this novel). In the 3rd chapter, he hurls Virgil into the dust, and erects a pedestal for Petronius. Such famous classical authors as Livy, Tacitus, and Juvenal are handed their papers, but Apuleius is appreciated, Tertullian admired. At different times throughout the novel, Des Esseintes resumes his literary-historical interpretations, at one point ironing out the history of French Catholic writing through portraits of Barbey d'Aurevilly, Ernest Hello, Le Comte de Falloux, and several other figures whose names sound like exotic, preternatural taxonomies to our ears of the modern West. Finally, he spends a chapter dishing out deserts to his French contemporaries. He pays a somewhat tepid respect to Flaubert and Goncourt, but can't seem to apotheosize enough writers like Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Stephane Mallarme.

But his interests don't merely inhabit the literary sphere. He has a poor understanding of music, though he does find pleasure in the compositions of Schumann, Schubert, and in various plainsongs. His love of visual art, however, is exemplified by a 3-page curation of two of Gustave Moreau's Salome paintings, and animated discourse on Odilon Redon's visionary nightmares and on a series of engravings depicting various tortures by a little known Dutch artist, Jan Luyken. Of course, Des Esseintes' artistic sensibilities are borne out even further by his supremely dandified thoughts on interior decorating.

Tangled up in these scholarly reveries, we have accounts of Des Esseintes' fondness for the Jesuit masters that educated him, anecdotes regarding his since-withered, extremely diabolical sexuality, and past tales in which Des Esseintes plays the role of the most abject misanthrope. The whole while, Des Esseintes must deal with the growing exigencies of his isolation and neurosis - at one point, he is compelled to buy a digesting machine to help him absorb his nutrients, and throughout the novel he suffers from extreme dizzy spells, bouts of nausea, and all manners of enervating obsessions.




III

"Nature has had her day...with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible." This is the chief motto of the book, that Nature has finally revealed her limitations, and that man's artificial industries have finally in the end proven superior (hence the popular translation of the title: "Against Nature" - as opposed to "backwards" or "against the grain" which are perhaps more literal translations). To put into effect this bold theory, Des Esseintes concocts a life of the most excellent artificiality and aberration.

But while "Against Nature" may be the Duc's peculiar battle-cry (and is a slogan doubtlessly close to Huysman's heart), the main moral of the story may be summarized as "Nature Wins." The simple fact of the book is that the Duc is dying. However he thinks, whatever his proclivities, whatever the arguments he makes for or against the natural order, he does all with faintness of breath - his words trickle out of bluish lips, his stance is supported by quivering knees, his thoughts leak out of a mind beleaguered and gadded by swarms of physical concern. And he steadily gets worse as the novel runs its course. A course alongside Nature.

Nonetheless, to say that Huysmans' magnum opus is a mere moral tale with a neat, univocal statement at the end is to grossly misread the novel. Huysmans does his best to portray the impossibility of Des Esseinte's preferred lifestyle, the irreconcilable debauchery of it, the self-destruction involved with it, and the retrogressive cyclicality. At the same time, the reader can't help but identify with this psychologically deformed aristocrat - and I dare say, cherish the affiliation. His life is perfectly impossible, but lustrous in its impossibility.

Finally, though I am by no means an expert on French Symbolist or Decadent writing, and am just now beginning to inspect all the tiny sprouts that have emerged from its rotting spud, I will say that Huysman's A Rebours is the best rendition I have encountered to date of that world-weary soul that the Symbolists were so obsessed over, the most thorough exploration of that ennui that yawns the world away from Baudelaire's scaffold.