He savours the Latin Decadents, he enjoys the sense of the language losing its clarity, becoming complex and strange, ‘a pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces’. Des Esseintes is also impotent, and, like his creator, a misogynist. We should not refine this fact away: in Against Nature, as in so many ‘Decadent’ works, the misogyny is not incidental but in built.18

Des Esseintes has sought ever richer, more dazzling and dangerous pleasures; ever more eccentric, artificial or stage-managed sexual encounters – his literary and artistic tastes are exclusive and his sexual tastes eclectic. There is something of the theatrical director in him, a thwarted creativity that expresses itself in a need to stage and direct his fantasy scenarios. Most importantly, he has the money to indulge these tastes and play out these scenarios. We notice how, despite his tirades against the ‘American century’, modern consumerism and ownership, he takes advantage of all of these. He owns, and money is rarely far from the surface of this book ostensibly about the ascetic and cultured life, the search for the uncontaminated pleasure of pure art. Indeed, his passion for reproducing, commissioning copies, having finely bound books and made-to-measure interiors is uncannily like that of the early twentieth-century (American) millionaire: buying, transporting, transplanting. He is also a book fetishist, in whom the bibliophile – the lover of the book as object – overcomes the reader. Des Esseintes does not read, preferring instead to wax lyrical about paper quality and bindings. Reading in Against Nature is only ever remembered or replayed, and all the evocative passages about Baudelaire or Mallarmé are memories of readings that finished before the novel began. Against Nature is about consumption in all its forms: financial, material, gastronomic, literary and artistic. With consumption there is also, inevitably (and in keeping with the Naturalist logic displayed by Zola’s concern for the defecating tortoise), expulsion. Des Esseintes takes enemas, has problems with his digestion, diets and then gorges himself. He takes strong literary medicine, and the artistic equivalent of the beef-tea he drinks may be found in the prose poetry he favours, what he calls the ‘osmazome’ or concentrated juice of literature. Des Esseintes does not simply wish to abandon the world, but to poison it (as his dealings with August Langlois reveal). We see him exercise his authority over servants and tradesmen, in a relationship which replicates the social order of the world he tries to escape. The more Against Nature banishes the world, the more it returns to haunt Des Esseintes, just as he himself is the mirror image of the materialism he hates.

Another sense of the term ‘Decadence’ was provided for Huysmans’ generation by the classical scholar Désirée Nisard in his 1834 Etude de mæurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Critical and Cultural Study of the Latin Poets of the Decadence). Nisard defined Decadence in literary terms as the period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false complexity replaced clarity of thought and language. Against Nature certainly fulfils Nisard’s definition, though Des Esseintes’s ambition is not so much to collect as to select: he tries to distil, to anthologize, to sift. Edmond de Goncourt’s La Maison d’un artiste (An Artist’s House, 1881) had stretched the boundary between the novel and the inventory, and Goncourt’s influence can be detected in Against Nature, weighed down by detail, buckling and coming to a standstill under the weight of description, as the poor tortoise dies beneath the burden of its finery. We may detect also Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ and Baudelaire’s ‘The Double Chamber’ in Des Esseintes’s interiors. In Against Nature, objects, like knowledge and memories, are collected and stored as the reader toils through thickets of descriptive prose. The language that had once described the world has edged out the world. In this respect, Against Nature is a Decadent book, but it would be mistaken to see it as a book that advocated Decadence.

Early on in Against Nature Des Esseintes expresses his preference for the artificial over the natural, one of the defining attitudes of Decadence. ‘Nature… has had her day’, he muses, seeking the copy or the mechanically produced, not as a substitute for the natural but in preference to it. His is an artificial world: abstracted and decontextualized, full of gadgets and refined objects, custom-built and chemical. In the marvellous chapter on tropical flowers we see his logic reach an extreme point of Decadent perversion. Not content with artificial flowers, Des Esseintes goes further, choosing real flowers that seem to imitate artificial ones, thereby reversing the relationship between natural and artificial, copy and original. The dominant influence here is Baudelaire, who in his art writings argued a philosophically impressive as well as morally extreme case against la Nature.