The story ends with him crying out, echoing Schopenhauer, the German philosopher whose pessimism shaped a generation of French writers: ‘only the worst happens’. In the 1903 preface Huysmans recalled that in starting Against Nature, he had

pictured another Mr Folantin, better-read, more refined and richer, who had discovered in artifice a diversion from the disgust of life’s petty torments and the Americanized manners of his day. I envisaged him soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings.

Although Against Nature is unique, it forms part of a series of novels of retreat that occupied Huysmans up to and including his extraordinary tale of satanism and sadism Là-Bas (The Damned) of 1891.12 Three years after Against Nature Huysmans published En Rade (Becalmed), the story of a young couple who move to the countryside to escape the expense and stress of Paris. Their rural idyll becomes a hell, as they are swindled by rapacious peasants and tormented by sickness and pests; their food is disgusting, the countryside too hot, too wet, too cold. In La Retraite de M. Bougran a retired ministry clerk misses his job so much that he has his flat decorated exactly like his former office and pays a retired office boy to bring him the letters he has posted to himself the previous day. He drafts tedious reports in his most bureaucratic French and is eventually found dead at his desk having scribbled a few last words of ministerial jargon.

Huysmans’ books are full of retreats: to the office, the bedroom, the library, the past, the monastery. The working title of Against Nature had been ‘Seul’ (‘Alone’), but in a sense all of his novels and stories had explored solitude, the aspirations of the yearning individual in a valueless world. It now remained for Huysmans to attempt a book that banished that world.

WRITING AGAINST NATURE

This book will at least have curiosity value among your works.

Zola to Huysmans, May 1884

In spring 1883 Huysmans told his friend, the Belgian poet Théodore Hannon, that he was ‘immersed in a very strange novel, vaguely clerical, a bit homosexual… A novel with only one character!’, adding that the book would contain ‘the ultimate refinement of everything: literature, Art, flowers, perfumes, furnishings, gemstones, etc.’13 A few months earlier Huysmans had requested help from Mallarmé for the literary dimension of this ‘ultimate refinement’, asking him to send a few uncollected poems for use in depicting Des Esseintes’s tastes in modern literature. Huysmans addresses Mallarmé as ‘Dear Colleague’, praising the ‘troubling sublimity’ of his poetry,14 but his correspondence reveals that he was playing literary double agent. In May 1884 he told Zola that in Against Nature, ‘I expressed ideas diametrically opposed to my own… this complete dichotomy with my own preferences allowed me to enunciate really sick ideas and celebrate the glory of Mallarmé, which I thought was quite a joke.’15 In the same letter he insists on the book’s methodological Naturalism, assuring Zola that he had followed the medical treatises on breakdown and nervous disorder, and emphasizing his extensive use of documents. But the following year (in September 1885), he was telling Jules Laforgue:

When I wrote that chapter on modern profane literature in Against Nature and I praised Corbière, Verlaine and Mallarmé, I thought I was writing for myself, and did not suspect that the whole movement was getting under way in that direction… As yet no one has penetrated the intimate depths of that chapter, despite the fact that I explained Mallarmé, that most abstruse of poets, so as to make him almost clear.16

Compositionally, Against Nature has much in common with the ‘classic’ Naturalist novel. André Breton’s image of the scribe at his desk surrounded by manuals and guidebooks, treatises on nervous illness, precious stones or horticulture is also the image of the Naturalist writer at work. What Breton goes on to mention – the cookery book – is no frivolous afterthought either, since it refers not just to the fact that food is never far away in a Huysmans novel (though gastronomic satisfaction is unattainable), but to the importance of ‘composition’, the measuring out of ingredients to make the right novelistic mix. This mix has confused critics, and Against Nature’s relationship with the literary tendencies of the period still poses difficulties. It is an unclassifiable book in that it seems to invite a number of classifications only to play them off – inconclusively – against each other. Is it Naturalist or Decadent or Symbolist? Need it be any of these? Is it perhaps a book in which Naturalist writing practice (document and description, analysis of symptoms) converges on ‘Symbolist’ subjects (solitude, refinement, fantasy) with a guiding thread of Decadent philosophy (pessimism, perversion, cultural élitism)?

All of these literary tendencies are reflected in Against Nature, but all are ambiguously and at times parodically treated too.17 Mallarmé felt that the book contained ‘not one atom of fantasy’, and that Huysmans had proved himself ‘more strictly documentary’ than any other writer; but Zola condemned its incoherence and ‘confusion’. What may partly have disturbed Zola was not that Naturalism had been abandoned in Against Nature, but rather that it had been followed perversely. The relationship between Against Nature and Naturalism resembles the relationship between the negative and the photograph. Huysmans produced an inverted version of the Naturalist ‘race, moment, milieu’: Des Esseintes is the last of his race attempting to flee his historical moment by creating an artificial milieu. It was not that Against Nature was anti-Naturalist, but that it was Naturalist enough to have disturbing implications for Zola and his methods. The discussion in chapter III of Petronius’ Satyricon is tellingly framed in this respect: Des Esseintes reads it as a ‘realist novel’, a ‘slice cut from Roman life’ (echoing the famous Naturalist dictum that a novel must be a ‘slice of life’), but also emphasizes the fact that it is a ‘story with no plot’. This genre-defying satirical feat of documentary imagination might be a clue to what Against Nature is attempting.

As for Against Nature’s celebrated espousal of the ‘Symbolist’ poets, who in 1884 were neither a movement nor a school (the Symbolist ‘manifesto’ appeared in 1886), this too is complicated. Many of Huysmans’ contemporaries would have seen Des Esseintes as a caricature of the Decadent reader-consumer, a misanthropic drop-out in a fetishistic relationship with his books and artworks. Although his tastes are new-fangled, quirky and rare, and although the ‘exquisite’ poetry of Mallarmé and ‘pidgin’ verse of Corbière were little known at the time, the fact that these are the tastes of a burned-out and spiteful elitist makes the compliment Huysmans pays to these writers ambiguous – it was certainly ambiguously interpreted by reviewers, as our appendix of critical responses to the novel shows. Des Esseintes predicts rather than reflects artistic tastes: we know the influence of Mallarmé on twentieth-century thought, we know too of Corbière’s impact on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire are classics while Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon are among the most widely recognized image-makers of their time. In 1884, however, his favourite artists and writers seemed obscure, irrelevant, and – with a few exceptions – destined for oblivion.