Huysmans, realizing the gravity of his condition, drafts his will.

1907 Jan. Promoted to Officier de la Légion d’Honneur.

1907 12 May Death of Huysmans half an hour after the departure of Lucien Descaves, his literary executor.

1907 15 May Huysmans is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in the family grave.

1908 Posthumous publication of Trois Eglises et Trois Primitifs (Three Churches and Three Primitives).

Introduction

Thus when the universal sun has set does the moth seek the lamplight of privacy.

Karl Marx

‘Against Nature fell like a meteorite into the literary fairground,’ Joris-Karl Huysmans remembered in the preface to the 1903 de luxe edition of this notorious book.1 The image of the meteorite – spectacular, explosive, otherworldly – to convey literary strangeness had been used by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé in his enigmatic poem ‘Le Tombeau d’Edgar Poe’ (‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’, 1877). ‘Calm block fallen here below from an obscure disaster’, Mallarmé had written, and it is perhaps this line that Huysmans had in mind when he recalled the bemusement, the outrage and the marvel Against Nature provoked when it appeared in May 1884. In France and across Europe the book was read as the most flamboyant expression of what came to be known as ‘the Decadence’. It was held up by some as a cautionary tale and by others as a manual of modern living; it was read as a moral fable and as a chilling case study of crisis and debauchery. Many felt that it marked the end of the novel, while a few saw it as the beginning of a new way of writing. For many critics, including Huysmans’ former mentor and friend Emile Zola, Against Nature was an eccentric and unhealthy book, passionless, introspective, and above all glorying in its removal from the world. For others, like the critic and novelist Remy de Gourmont, it was formally and thematically liberating. It was a novel that seemed not to want to be a novel; nothing happened, and yet the writing was dense, crowded and allusive. It was obscene, garish, depraved; but it was also a curiously ascetic and inward book. It dwelt fascinatedly on bodily functions, messy ailments and lurid sexual adventures, but it appeared also to strive for serenity and peace. In at least one respect Against Nature can be called a classic: it portrayed its time but also intervened in it. There are poems and stories inspired by or indebted to Against Nature in almost every European language, and Huysmans’ creation even found its way into fiction as every wit, dandy or femme fatale had a copy ready to hand. The novel’s hero, Duke Jean Floressas Des Esseintes – hoarder of literary treasures, lover of artifice and liver of the artistically mediated life – had joined Edgar Allan Poe, Schopenhauer and Baudelaire on the fin de siècle bookshelf.

Against Nature is a brazen enough title in English, but in fact Against the Grain would better have captured the suggestive range of its French original, A Rebours, a far more open-ended title. To do something à rebours is to run countercurrent, to go against the flow, to do things the wrong way around; but it also suggests stubbornness, perversity, wilful difficulty – qualities and tendencies which Huysmans’ hero, Des Esseintes, shares with the novel that tells his story. By contrast, Against Nature is too reductive and unsubtle a title, and reflects the climate of its English reception rather than the range and complexity of the novel Huysmans wrote.2 By comparison with some of the more outlandish titles that appeared in 1884 – such as Péladan’s Le Vice suprême (The Supreme Vice), Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus or Elémir Bourges’ Crépuscule des Dieux (Twilight of the Gods) – A Rebours seemed mysterious and understated. The novel has proved critically inexhaustible, but it is also exhaustively written and perhaps exhausting to read. It is also about exhaustion: racial, social, moral, historical and aesthetic. It is a book of endings; yet for its author in his ‘Preface Written Twenty Years after the Novel’ (Appendix I), it is also a compendium of beginnings. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic who interpreted European Symbolism for modernists such as Yeats and Eliot, called it the ‘breviary of the Decadence’,3 while its most famous fictional reader, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, found it ‘poisonous’ and ‘the strangest book that he had ever read’.4 The novel has retained its cultish hold, as Marianne Faithfull recalls in her autobiography: ‘You would ask your date, “Do you know Genet? Have you read A Rebours?’’ and if he said yes you’d fuck.’5 It is a fine irony that a novel about an impotent, reclusive and prematurely aged reactionary should become a must-read in the vigorous counter-culture of the 1960s. Today’s readers may or may not feel the same as Dorian Gray or Marianne Faithfull; what is certain is that they will find it unlike any work of fiction they have encountered.

HUYSMANS, ‘DECADENCE’ AND AGAINST NATURE

[I]t is the difference between the raw, white and direct light of a midday sun beating down on all things equally, and the horizontal light of evening, firing the strange clouds with reflections… Does the setting sun of decadence deserve our contempt and anathema for being less simple in tone than the rising sun of morning?

Théophile Gautier, Histoire du romantisme (History of Romanticism)

For Gautier, discussing his friend Charles Baudelaire, ‘Decadence’ is the dying sun as it projects its intricate and complex fires across the sky. It is twilight; not the Yeatsian ‘Celtic Twilight’ prior to daybreak and revival, but the twilight of a sun setting for the last time on a tired globe and its tired inhabitants. For the artists and writers who proclaimed themselves ‘Decadent’, it was a compelling metaphor: ‘we are dying of civilization’, wrote Edmond de Goncourt, a writer Huysmans admired and learned from. Many artists of the period invoked the decline and fall of the hyper-civilized Roman Empire as the most resonant ‘culture rhyme’ for modern France. Certainly there were grounds for such views: a sense of historical decline symbolized by a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians, who marched on the French capital in 1870, followed by the Commune and the siege of Paris in 1871, a bloody and divisive episode in French history whose memory endured until the Second World War. This they called ‘the débâcle’, and the symbolism was powerful: invaded and humiliated by the ‘barbarian’ Germans, then ruinously tearing itself apart, French civilization, guardian of ‘Latin’ values, appeared to have peaked and begun a slow collapse. Huysmans, a (non-combatant) soldier during the Franco-Prussian war and a civil servant during the siege of Paris, witnessed the French defeat, the Commune and its brutal repression, and the national soul-searching that came in their aftermath.

But there was also a malaise more difficult to pin down: a sense that everything had been done, said, written, felt. As Des Esseintes muses reading Baudelaire, the late nineteenth century’s was a ‘mind that ha[d] reached the October of its sensations’. Yet there was something wilfully self-dramatizing about all these decadent attitudes – after all, the nineteenth century had known extraordinary technological, political and scientific advances, and all of these had happened at breathtaking pace. While many embraced these changes, others saw them in unambiguously negative terms: ‘we have spent the nineteenth century splitting hairs; how shall we spend the twentieth? Splitting them into four?’ asked one of Huysmans’ contemporaries.