Just as the house in Fontenay becomes a kind of living tomb, so Against Nature becomes a catacomb of reference and allusion, full of dead learning. Des Esseintes is a cross between a jailer and a curator; he can neither invent nor create, only absorb, consume and occasionally reorder what already exists. He is no more exemplary than Chateaubriand’s René, Camus’ Meursault or Goethe’s Werther. Though he became one of literature’s most famous and most imitated characters, for Huysmans and many of his more alert contemporaries Des Esseintes was a ridiculous figure, a caricature trapped in his own claustrophobic farce.

Against Nature was a self-exhausting genre, a one-off. It has more in common with the seemingly plotless and non-linear narratives of modernism than with most of the French fin de siècle fiction it inspired and pre-emptively surpassed. Perhaps only Remy de Gourmont’s Sixtine (subtitled Novel of the Cerebral Life, 1890) and Georges Rodenbach’s Symbolist masterpiece Bruges-la-Morte (1892) measured up to the novel that made them possible. Against Nature sits more comfortably alongside the works of Proust, Musil, Joyce and Woolf than those of Jean Lorrain or Rachilde or Octave Mirbeau. It is a literature of retreat, of reaction and of revolt, but it is also a penetrating and innovative study of individualism and aliena­tion. Against Nature is a novel of surfeit: surfeit of knowledge, sensation, culture; and it culminates in a surfeit of self. It is a kind of Symbolist or Decadent Heart of Darkness in its thwarted dreams of isolation, power and discovery. Like Heart of Darkness it analyses the deadly game of self-fulfilment and self-escape; like Conrad’s great novel it ends with a snarl of pessimism both at the world and at the counter-world forged in its stead – forged in the sense of faked as well as newly created. It is a mysterious, difficult and absurd book. Des Esseintes is the last of his race but perhaps the first of his kind: the modernist anthologist, caught between a desire for cultural preservation and a drive for apocalypse. He too might have surveyed his dying century and foreseen the one to come; and he too, like the voice in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, might have murmured: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’.

NOTES

1. See Appendix I, for the preface.

2. Writers such as Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Decay of Lying’, Arthur Symons in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and Havelock Ellis in Affirmations made Huysmans’ work appear as an example – rather than a diagnosis – of decadence and aestheticism.

3. Symons, The Decadent Movement in Literature (London: Constable, 1899), p. 39.

4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. by Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), pp. 121–2. See Appendix II.

5. Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 100.

6. Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878), Essays and Poems, ed. Claire Harman (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 138.

7. Osip Mandelstam, The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, ed.