For Baudelaire, nature was what pushed human beings to kill and brutalize each other; the authority and civilization that maintained humane values were themselves artificial: laws, religions, moral codes. Baudelaire’s was a reaction against the given towards the made (‘who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?’ he demanded in Peintre de la vie moderne [The Painter of Modern Life]), seeking to free art from the tyranny of representation. Des Esseintes’s view is subtly different: like Baudelaire he prefers the artificial, but unlike Baudelaire he still relies on reference to the model; he seeks the copy but needs to know what it has been copied from. As with his dependence on the tradesmen and suppliers who furnish his house, Des Esseintes constantly refers to what he claims to have abandoned. He is more outrageous in tone but less daring in intellectual substance than Baudelaire; we might even suggest that his views are a kind of crude copy of his mentor’s – that with Des Esseintes Baudelaire’s ideas have in fact ‘degenerated’. Thanks principally to Oscar Wilde, who repeated or paraphrased its contents not just in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Decay of Lying but in an array of on-and off-stage witticisms, this is the book’s most famous chapter. Against Nature has suffered from this, because Wilde focused attention on only one – highly ambiguous – thread in Huysmans’ novel; it is possible that Dorian Gray misinterprets his mentor Des Esseintes much as Des Esseintes misinterprets his mentor Baudelaire.

One of Huysmans’ achievements in Against Nature, regardless of the double-dealing evident in his letters to Mallarmé and Zola, is to have imagined – or predicted – an alternative literary canon. The chapters on modern literature are subtle and forward-looking, and Des Esseintes’s tastes are more than simply indicated: they are justified and often compellingly analysed, while his dislikes are expressed in trenchant criticism. Des Esseintes’s thoughts on Mallarmé and Villiers, Verlaine and Corbière, Edmond de Goncourt and Flaubert are precise and analytical as well as perversely sophisticated. Huysmans was proud of his reading of Mallarmé, and his pages on Edgar Allan Poe are among the finest accounts of the French debt to the American poet who cast his spell over several generations of poets and prose writers. Des Esseintes is fascinated that this Decadent literary field exists in a spectacular contraction of time: all of these modes of writing, all of these stages of French and all of these artistic tendencies coexist in Des Esseintes’s Paris, a modernist living museum of artists and artworks. In order to establish his literary tastes, Huysmans must also set out his distastes, and the great names of French writing, both living and dead, are paraded before us: Victor Hugo (still alive at the time Huysmans was writing), Rousseau, Voltaire, Molière are among the ‘classics’ Des Esseintes finds unoriginal, overblown or bourgeois. In painting, he admires Gustave Moreau for the luxury of his conceptions and the mythological dimension of his paintings, and for his removal from the ‘hateful period’ in which he lived. Moreau belongs nowhere, and it is revealing that in plans for Against Nature Huysmans had intended to use Degas as his exemplary artist, thus giving a very different slant to Des Esseintes’s artistic tastes. He admires the contortions of El Greco, and the Dutch engraver Jan Luyken for his depictions of suffering and torment, for images that ‘reek[ed] of burnt flesh’. There are also the ‘bad dreams and fevered visions’ of another contemporary, Odilon Redon, whose spare and mysterious paintings contrast with Moreau’s detail and incrustation.

It was not just the content of Against Nature but its structure that was felt to be unusual. Dorian Gray noted that ‘It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character’, but Ezra Pound decades later put it more bluntly: ‘Huysmans escaped by putting an exceptionally dull young decadent in the midst of no milieu whatsoever.’19 For Remy de Gourmont Against Nature ‘freed’ the novel, but Zola condemned its lack of progress, its circularity and its ‘painful transitions’.

How could a novel so ending-obsessed, plotless and grid-locked by description be seen as liberating? In certain respects, it was a version of Flaubert’s dream of a book ‘about nothing’. Huysmans took pride in his novel’s lack of plot, telling Zola that he had ‘emasculated dialogue’. In his 1903 preface Huysmans claimed to have sought to break the limits of the novel in order to allow in ‘more serious work’. Against Nature is a hybrid, composed of different modes of writing: catalogue, inventory, case study, encyclopedia and scholarly treatise, while the chapters are arranged as compartments or glass cases.

In Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (posthumously published in 1881), Bouvard and Pécuchet retire to a country house to become great scientists and scholars. They read books, perform experiments and discuss big subjects, but the problem is that they understand nothing. New knowledge and new ways of knowing simply lead to new ways of being stupid. Ahead of our era of artificial intelligence, Flaubert exposed the era of artificial stupidity, and there is an element of Bouvard and Pécuchet in Des Esseintes. It is legitimate to find some of his antics farcical: his world of knowledge without context, reference without points of reference, discovery without application is in part related to theirs. The scene where Des Esseintes plays his ‘mouth organ’ of liqueurs or orchestrates scents with his vaporizer, his imaginary trip to Britain based on reading of Dickens and Poe and port bottle labels in the restaurant, or his extraordinary sexual relationship with a ventriloquist who recites Flaubert – all these are eccentric adventures, but with a strain of comical pedantry too.

Des Esseintes searches for essences, but lives amid clutter. The most poignant moments occur when he tries to impose order on his world, or to uncover the hidden order of the world outside. He constantly tries to classify: people, plants, ideas, information, objects, sounds, scents, tastes. He dreams of the ‘syntax’ of precious stones, the ‘grammar’ of scents; he tries to compose symphonies of tastes and reads the entire social order into the different varieties of exotic plants. The Baudelairean world, alive with ‘correspondences’ becomes, in Against Nature, a dead world where the metaphor and the model run rife, where the classificatory structure dominates, and where mediated knowledge wins out over experience. His black feast to mourn his virility signals also the death of a creative urge, buried under heaps of books and paintings.