Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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Sorry to disagree, but I’ve always found artificial recreations or similes of the real thing to be at best lacking – worse, utterly distasteful.

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. The basic premise is that Des Esseintes, the novel’s anti-hero, has become so disillusioned with modern society and the pettiness of those around him that he decides to hole himself up in a rural French mansion, cut off from everyone, and dedicate himself to the pursuit of sensation. As the first and most prominent group of authors to subscribe to the tenets, principles and stylistic aesthetic of the genre, it could even be put forth therefore that this book is the rock upon which the abandoned and deconsecrated church of Decadence has been built. Push red button for help becomes in French something like “For the assistance of On the way to catch his boat,he stops off at a British cafe in Paris, and eats a vast meal surrounded bt Englishmen.His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. Licentious and mystical obsessions mingled confusedly, haunting his brain…a stubborn desire to escape the vulgarities of the world and to plunge, far from the venerated customs of the past, into original ecstasies, in raptures that were either celestial or infernal. While it is true that it may have been primarily if not singlehandedly responsible for Wilde’s shift from wry if essentially populist entertainments like The Importance of Being Earnest to more ‘sordid’ aesthetic efforts such as Salome and Dorian Gray (whose lead character refers to an influential “poisonous little book” during the course of the proceedings, which was in fact A Rebours), it is also true that such literary precedents as Barbey D’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (and his adoption and advertisement of Dandyism per se), closely related Romantic writings from the likes of Theophile Gautier (who was one of the first to adopt the derisive term of “decadent” as a badge of honor and stylistic descriptor of his own efforts) and works even Des Esseintes notes as influential such as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and translations of Poe, the poetry of Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme, and artists like Gustave Moreau and Felicien Rops were already producing works in this vein.

He claimed no cures, offered the sick no compensation, no hope; but when all was said and done, his theory of Pessimism was the great comforter of superior minds and lofty souls; it revealed society as it was, insisted on the innate stupidity of women, pointed out the pitfalls of life, saved you from disillusionment by teaching you to expect as little as possible, to expect nothing at all if you were sufficiently strong-willed, indeed, to consider yourself lucky if you were not constantly visited by some unforeseen calamity" (Huysmans 2003, p. I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers.

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. 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).

Through smell alone he manufactures, for instance, a meadow filled with lilacs with a sweating woman in its centre. As critics from all sides lambasted this book, and him for writing such a wretched thing, one critic stood out to him by simply saying, "After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross. However it is important to recognise Huysmans's debt to Baudelaire, as many of the themes and motifs of his book - the egotism, perversity, artificial sensations, finding beauty in 'le mal', the sense of ennui and fatigue - were formulated by Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris. Aside from the difficult chapters about literature, it’s very entertaining, drawing you into a unique, intimate, bizarre world.We’re told about the symphonies he composes on his ‘mouth organ’, a line of casks of different liquors, each one representing a musical instrument.