One reviewer wrote that Des Esseintes’s selection of authors would, once their flashing fame had died, ‘date the book and limit its future value’. What promised to ‘date’ Huysmans’ novel in 1884 is one of the elements that keeps it modern.

Huysmans’ 1903 preface is misleading, seeking as it does to rewrite the history of the book’s composition and interpretation to suit a different cultural moment and a different – Catholic – Huysmans. The Huysmans of 1903 sees Against Nature as evidence of the ‘underground workings’ of the soul groping for salvation. For him each chapter of Against Nature contains the ‘seed’ of the novels that followed: Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale (The Cathedral) and L’Oblat (The Oblate). He also retrospectively interprets Des Esseintes’s final words of the book as a prelude to conversion. There are problems with this, not least the fact that Huysmans did not convert until 1892 and that his writing meanwhile showed little evidence of these ‘underground workings’. The 1903 preface also takes the opportunity to settle a few scores and rewrites a few premises. By claiming Flaubert’s (L’Éducation Sentimentale as the key book, the novel after which nothing can be written, Huysmans downplays the value of Naturalism and the aesthetic and sociopolitical project of Zola, who had died the previous year. He also caricatures the principles of Naturalist writing and overplays his break with Zola and the Naturalists when in fact he maintained good relations with his former colleagues for several years. The rejection of Naturalism is to be found less in Against Nature than in the 1903 preface, an ambiguous text which is published here in an appendix because it should be treated with caution.

THEMES AND STRUCTURES

Against Nature was not the starting point but the consecration of a new literature… the novel is free at last.

Remy de Gourmont, Le Livre des masques (The Book of Masks)

Des Esseintes is a fictional character, but he is not pure invention. Huysmans was a shrewd observer of the dandies and eccentrics who frequented the literary haunts of Paris. Many of the people he knew seemed themselves larger than life: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the great playwright and novelist reduced to sparring partner in a boxing gym; Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, dandy, ultramontane Catholic and sadist; Francis Poictevin, dandified young novelist and aesthete. Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters such as Samuel Cramer in Baudelaire’s Fanfarlo and Charles Demailly in the Goncourts’ eponymous 1868 novel. The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust’s Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu (Montesquiou was a relatively capable poet and critic and not wholly ridiculous or mad). Many of the elements of Des Esseintes’s interior are based on details of Montesquiou’s lodgings as described by Mallarmé in letters to Huysmans, but it gives some indication of the strange times Huysmans lived through to recall that one of the book’s most implausible episodes – the jewel-encrusted tortoise – is based on fact. Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory in his collection Les Hortensias bleus (The Blue Hortensias), 1896). Zola (revealing his preoccupation with dirt, hygiene and tidiness of plot) was particularly exercised by the tortoise, telling Huysmans: ‘a rather bourgeois preoccupation niggled me: it’s lucky [the tortoise] died because it would have crapped on the carpet’ (letter of May 1884).

Des Esseintes is a kind of Decadent everyman, but he is also a prototype. He has the classic Decadent childhood: a mother who inhabits dark rooms with some unspecified nervous disorder, dying for no clear reason. There is an absent father, a boarding school and loveless family existence. We are told that the Des Esseintes have used up their strength through generations of inbreeding, and that the present Duke is the last in the line, the culmination of a long process of ‘degeneration’. Against Nature opens, on the one hand, with a model of linearity and of the cyclic nature of Decadence; on the other, with crisis and dislocation. The Prologue notes not just the gradual decline of the family, but also the gaps suggested by the missing paintings. In the chapter on Latin Decadent poets we read that parts of the literary history are followed in immense detail, others are lost; Des Esseintes’s editions ‘tailed away to nothing’ and his collection makes a ‘prodigious jump of several centuries’ to the modern period. These two ways of organizing and narrating time are projected across the book’s treatment of genealogy and biology, in its use of political and cultural history, and its assessments of literature and art. This in turn is reflected in Against Nature’s structure: a narrative that progresses in a linear manner but is driven by ruptures, flashbacks and recollections that erupt unpredictably and often destructively into a near­static present. Des Esseintes attempts to recall certain memories by means of various stimuli, but he is also victim of memories he cannot control or does not want to revisit. This aspect of Huysmans’ novel has led to comparisons with Proust, though for Huysmans it remains purely at the level of narrative expedient. In Against Nature, the traditional novelistic plot has ‘degenerated’ and come to a near standstill; even Des Esseintes is often ‘squeezed out’ from entire swathes of his story by the renegade memories and the lists and inventories he has amassed.

Des Esseintes, like the book that tells his story, is prodigiously but selectively learned. Not for him the rounded education, the balanced mind and healthy body. His tastes are for the quirky, the difficult, the outrageous.