Against Nature is full of references to the century’s end, the end of art, the end of creativity, and it was to what Mallarmé called the ‘modern muse of Impotence’ that the new generation looked: all writing seemed a rewriting, every reading a rereading. But there was another story, equally compelling: in art, literature, social and political theory and in science, the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented innovation. With poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and the Symbolists, novelists such as Zola and Maupassant, artists such as Manet and Rodin, composers such as Debussy or Erik Satie, we might object that, on the contrary, this was no decadence but a period of astonishing artistic richness and diversity. Perhaps the belief that there was nothing new was itself a necessary prelude to creating the new. This is one of the great paradoxes of the late nineteenth century: that these contradictory views – of decadence and renewal, beginnings and ends, exhaustion and innovation – could be held simultaneously and often by the same people.

One of the great formative novels of French Romanticism, Chateaubriand’s René (1802), had helped define what came to be called the ‘sickness of the century’ (mal du siècle) felt by the rootless, aimless, self-indulgent aristocrats in a world which seemed not to need them. ‘Alone in the great desert of men’ was how René, ‘last of his race’, put it: it was a historical, sexual and cultural dispossession, but it gave the Romantic writer opportunity to explore the mysteries of the infinitely desiring but finite self. As late as 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson mocked the persistence of ‘René’s malady’ among the young of his own period: ‘Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year… look down from their pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life.’6 When Huysmans loosed Des Esseintes upon the reading public, people interpreted his character, for all his disturbing newness, as part of an unfolding tradition: an orphan perhaps, but an orphan with a pedigree.

The end of the nineteenth century seemed to mirror its beginning, but whereas the Romantics had their illusions shattered, the Decadents merely had their disillusionment reinforced. Osip Mandelstam uses a 1913 review of a Russian translation of Huysmans’ Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches, 1881) to distinguish between the Romantics and their Decadent successors, between the beginning and the end of the nineteenth century:

This book is almost intentionally physiological. Its primary theme is the clash between the defenceless but refined external organs of perception and insulted reality. Paris is hell… Huysmans’s boldness and innovation stem from the fact that he managed to remain a confirmed hedonist under the worst possible conditions… The decadents did not like reality, but they did know reality, and that is what distinguishes them from the romantics.7

‘Live? Our servants will do that for us’: the defiant words of the heroic and princely recluse of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890) became a supreme idealist battle-cry, uttered in heroic defiance of materialist society and its stultifying cult of bourgeois ‘common sense’. This was the epoch of the superman and of the individualist, but it was also the epoch of his less fortunate twin: the sickly, the consumptive, the neurotic. In Huysmans’ novels, the self is not a goal but a refuge, no longer an aspiration but a point of final fallback; the heritage of individualism remained, but wounded, humiliated and in retreat.

The Romantic heroes had travelled to exotic places in search of themselves, only to discover that it was themselves they were trying to escape. They had, like René, posed on seashores, mountain tops and volcanoes. Their Decadent successors were mired in the filth of the crawling cityscape, compulsively drawn to its alternating tedium and exhilaration; but they were drawn also to interiors, the ornate, meticulously furnished, airless rooms that symbolize their retreat. Huysmans’ characters, as Mandelstam notes, are among the most physiologically sensitive in literature, and their quest for peace or fulfilment takes its toll not just on their spirits but on their bodies. In Des Esseintes’s case, the quest terminates indoors, the final bastion of the privacy that feeds on itself until there is nothing left. Des Esseintes thus became the exemplary Decadent figure: the last, sickly scion of a once great family, his mind addled by fantastical luxury and his body wracked by abuse, he retires from the nineteenth century – the ‘American century’ as both Des Esseintes and Huysmans call it – to build his own dream fortress. Against Nature is the tale of this obsession.

HUYSMANS AND AGAINST NATURE

It was as if everything that was disgusting and horrible in every sphere of life forced itself on his attention, and that all manner of abomination had produced an artist uniquely made to paint them and a man created expressly to suffer from them.

Paul Valéry, ‘Souvenirs de J.-K. Huysmans’ (‘Memories of J.-K. Huysmans’)

Joris-Karl Huysmans was born in 1848, the revolutionary year in which Flaubert set part of L’Education sentimentale (Sentimental Education), the novel Huysmans claimed in his 1903 preface had most influenced him. His father, who died in 1856, was an artist of Dutch origins, and the son would later refer to himself as a mystical Fleming beneath the skin of a neurotic Parisian. J.-K. Huysmans would produce some of the finest art criticism of his generation, and his attention was particularly drawn to nordic artists, the Flemish and Dutch, with whose cultures he retained a lifelong sympathy.

In 1866, Huysmans joined the Ministry of the Interior, where he remained until 1898. The drudgery of bureaucratic routine was minutely detailed in a number of works, notably A Vau-l’Eau (Downstream, 1882), the novella that gave rise to Against Nature, and the strange story, La Retraite de M. Bougran (Mr. Bougran’s Retirement), written in 1888 but first published in 1964), of a retired bureaucrat addicted to the banality of his job. In 1870 Huysmans was conscripted into the army and later worked for the Versailles War Ministry during the Paris Commune. He describes some of his army experiences in Sac au dos (Knapsack, 1880), the story he contributed to the volume Les Soirées de Medan (Medan Evenings), a collective book by Zola and his disciples intended to showcase the work of the Naturalist writers. However, Huysmans’ first published work, Le Drageoir à épices (Dish of Spices, 1874), was far from being a Naturalist specimen. It was a collection of lurid, flashy and precocious prose-poems which one Parisian publisher, refusing the manuscript, accused of launching a ‘revolutionary Paris Commune in the French language’.8 Two years later, when Huysmans became associated with the Naturalists, he was a vocal defender of Zola and his principles, publishing a passionate defence of Zola’s L’Assommoir and of Naturalist writing.