I am back again. I
wish to write about Against Nature, which stands in
interesting contrast to Hunger. This book deals not with the
suffering of poverty, of many unfulfilled wishes, but its opposite,
the pain of satiety, of a man sick of all the possible pleasures the
world can offer. While Hunger is a semi autobiographical work,
Against Nature, which describes in detail the strange solitary
pursuits of the reclusive French nobleman Des Esseintes, was written
by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a humble civil servant, in 1874. In Hunger
dreams and creative thinking are born out of physical suffering
and serve as a distraction and tool for survival. In Against
Nature they arise out of a desperate wish for escape from the
mundane realities of life and ordinary pleasures. Both books
demonstrate for us the cycle of attempted escape from the world
through new schemes and fantasies, and the cruel fall back down to
the confusion and baseness of reality.
The plot of Against
Nature is extremely straightforward. The young Des Esseintes, a
sickly, dreamy boy educated at a Jesuit school, marked by their
religion but too much of an independent spirit to accept it, inherits
his parents fortune and attempts to squander it in the usual manner
among his contemporaries. He can find nothing in common with anyone
around him, finds their pleasures dull and pale. The old nobility,
“endlessly repeating insipid monologues and immemorial phrases. The
fleur de lis, which you find if you cut the stalk of a fern, was
apparently also the only thing that remained impressed on the
softening pulp inside these ancient skulls”. Other students of
religious schools "docile, good-looking ninnies, congenital
dunces who had worn their masters patience thin, but had none the
less satisfied their desire to send pious, obedient creatures out
into the world”. Students of pubic schools, “less hypocritical
and more adventurous, but no more interesting....their debauchery
struck him as being base and facile, entered into without
discrimination or desire, indeed without any real stirring of the
blood or stimulation of the nerves” He comes to realize that there
is no hope “of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took
pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude”. I guess this “studious
decrepitude” is one of the guiding themes of the book, for after
giving up on the society around him, Des Esseintes sells his
ancestral home, buys a small manor on the outskirts of Paris, and
begins to furnish it in such a way that he can retreat from the world
to pursue his strange passions.
From here the book
becomes a sort of guidebook for the perverse, misanthropic
intellectual. Some of Des Esseintes' pleasures are eccentricities
reserved for the wealthy, such as a short lived diamond encrusted
tortoise, collections of exotic perfumes and liqueurs that he uses to
compose symphonies of smell and taste, and a collection of tropical
plants. But he takes most of his enjoyment from novels, poems, and
paintings, which inspire strange fancies in his sickly mind and send
him off on secret reveries. The novel describes these works in great
detail and it becomes a sort of hymn to the dreamy, sinister, obscure
masterpieces through the ages. Though we are the very bourgeoisie
boors that he detests, we can, as is our class custom, steal his
cultured selections for our own muted enjoyment. Anyone who reads
this far might be assumed to harbour some of Des Esseintes' secret
diseases in their heart, and will find some escape and new realms of
dream and nightmare in these works
Petronious'
Satryricon: The antidote to all the high flown philosophy and
epic poems we usually read from the ancients. “This realistic
novel, this slice cut from Roman life in the raw, with no thought,
whatever people may say, of reforming or satirizing society, and no
need to fake a conclusion or point a moral; this story with no plot
or action in it, simply relating the erotic adventures of certain
sons of Sodom....without any comment whatever, without a word of
approval or condemnation of his characters' thoughts and actions, the
vices of a decrepit civilization, a crumbling empire” In this novel
“the society of the day has its fling- depraved ruffians, out for
what they can get, unnatural old men with their gowns tucked up and
their cheeks plastered with rouge, catamites of sixteen, plump and
curly headed, women having hysterics, legacy hunters offering their
boys and girls to gratify the lust of the rich testators, all of
these and more scurry across the pages of the Satyricon, squabbling
in the streets, fingering one another in the baths, beating one
another up like characters in a pantomime”
I have read this on
Des Esseintes' recommendation and can assure you that it deserves his
high praise.
Find it here:
Gustave Moreau:
“This mystical pagan, this illuminee who could shut out the
modern world so completely as to behold, in the heart of present day
Paris, the awful visions and magical apotheoses of other
ages....downcast and sorrowful, haunted by the symbols of superhuman
passions and superhuman perversities, of divine debauches perpetrated
without enthusiasm and without hope...his sad and scholarly works
breathed a strange magic”
Salome:
The Apparition:
Bresdin: Comedy of
Death
Jean Luyken:
Goya:
Odilon Redon:
Mallarme “A
wonderfully condensed style, an essence of literature, a sublimate of
art”
Verlaine “his
originality lay above all in his ability to communicate deliciously
vague confidences in a whisper in the twilight. He alone had posessed
the secret of hinting at certain strange spiritual aspirations, of
whispering certain thoughts...so softly, so quietly, so haltingly
that the ear that caught them was left hesitating, and passed on to
the soul a languor made more pronounced by the vagueness of these
words that were guessed at rather than heard.”
Edmond de Goncourt
“dream inducing suggestiveness...beneath the printed line lurked
another line visible only to the soul, indicated by an epithet that
opened up vast vistas of passion, by a reticence that hinted at
spiritual infinities no other idiom could compass”
Baudelaire,”He
had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his
way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached
those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetation of the
sick mind flourish.”
Poe “with
awful fascination he dwelt on the effects of terror, on the failures
of will power, and discussed them with clinical objectivity, making
the readers flesh creep...at the recital of these mechanically
devised nightmares of a fevered brain”
He sleeps all day,
rises at dusk, and spends his waking hours in art induced dreams, re
reading his favourite works, studying his paintings, spraying
perfumes or sipping drinks that also serve to draw him into strange
worlds of fantasy. The art and literature that Huysmans' exhaustively
catalogues is all worth investigating. We can make ourselves subtle
and misunderstood with the help of a few handy paintings and books.
All seem to contain “feverish desire for the unknown, the
unsatisfied longing for an ideal, the craving to escape from the
horrible realities of life, to cross the frontiers of thought, to
grope after a certainty, albeit without finding one, in the misty
upper regions of art”. All of them allow some escape from the
banalities of life, find some black humour in pointing out its
absurdities, and all of them ultimately reflect the brooding,
melancholy character of anyone who tries to think too deeply about
existence. Yet all these works of art are spoken about with a
reverence that is not often found, and this reverence elevates the
novel from a character portrait into something more. Of course our
hero is also in turmoil, trying to find peace in solitude but only
becoming entangled in his own riddles. Des Esseintes turns away from
the world with an almost religious resignation, collects religious
writing and artifacts, but is far too jaded to simply allow grace to
shine into his heart. He interprets and twists everything according
to his sick disposition.
“The belief that man is an
irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal
strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul, the
conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle
between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and
Christ- all this was bound to engender those internal discords in
which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it
were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and
prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been the
more obstinate in its pursuit” (161)
As the novel goes
on, Des Esseintes becomes physically ill, quickly weakens, and is
told by his doctor that the only cure is to give up his solitary life
and pleasures for a return to the city. Near death, he gives in to
the doctors wishes, and begins to rage against the society that he
must return to.
“After the aristocracy of birth,
it was now the turn of the aristocracy of wealth, the caliphate of
the counting house...the tyranny of commerce with its narrow minded,
venal ideas, its selfish, rascally instincts.
More cunning and contemptible than
the impoverished aristocracy and the discredited clergy, the
bourgeoisie borrowed their frivolous love of show and their old world
arrogance, which it cheapened through its own lack of taste, and
stole their natural defects, which it turned into hypocritical vices.
Overbearing and underhand in behaviour, base and cowardly in
character, it ruthlessly shot down its perennial dupe, the mob, which
it had previously unmuzzled and sent flying at the throats of the old
castes.
Now it was all over. Once it had
done its job, the plebs had been bled white in the interests of
public hygiene, while the jovial bourgeois lorded it over the
country, putting his trust in the power of his money and the
contagiousness of his stupidity. The result of his rise to power had
been the supression of all intelligence, the negation of all honesty,
the destruction of all art; in fact, artists and writers in all their
degradation had fallen on their knees and were covering with ardent
kisses the stinking feet of the high placed jobbers and low bred
satraps on whose charity they depended for a living. ....The
bourgeois were guzzling like picnickers from paper bags among the
imposing ruins of the Church- ruins which had become a place of
assignation, a pile of debris defiled by unspeakable jokes and
scandalous jests...could it be that this slime would go on spreading
until it covered with its pestilential filth this old world where now
only seeds of iniquity sprang up and only harvests of shame were
gathered?”
This sort of
writing is the chief attraction of the book. There are few tirades in
all literature equal in eloquence and venom. Now, I, this middle
class lout of the future, find myself in yet another peculiar comedic
situation. Undoubtedly some of Huysmans' writing here is ironic, for
Des Esseintes is a sort of over the top Type, decadent to the point
of absurdity. At times the author is having a laugh at his expense,
such as when his tortoise with the gold and diamond shell almost
immediately drops dead, or when he decides after reading Dickens to
travel to London only to visit the local English pub and quickly
return home. But there is undoubtedly some honest venom against the
ignorant of the day, and the novels and paintings are described with
an honest love that cannot be mere satire. Huysmans is perhaps
escaping his own mundanities by writing about this ridiculous,
exaggerated escape artist of the soul, and we as readers are seeking
perhaps to escape as well or perhaps only to paint ourselves with a
thin veneer of put-on melancholy and false intellectual depth. Des
Esseintes is a challenge to us aspiring appreciators of fine
literature and art, for can we really feel as deeply as he does the
sensations the artist tries to evoke in us, can we really immerse
ourselves as deeply in the false world that art attempts to create?
It is strange in a way that Des Esseintes is not a writer himself,
does not attempt to emulate any of those he admires. Perhaps the
greatest artist does not share his work, perhaps through the
inspiration of others he sends his soul into solitary worlds of dual
origin where only he is worthy of perceiving the unspeakable beauty
of what lies within. This is truly an act of love, to take what
another has created and to join with it in spirit to enter into a new
realm never seen again before or after. But of course the old joke
is always lurking. We cannot escape. The quest ends in failure, in a
forced return to the dreaded society. And what exactly were we
thinking when we tried to escape? My own dreams proved oh so pale
compared to the crude jokes and strivings of those around me, who
were only trying to show me the true path. Even such a great dreamer
as Des Esseintes finds his fantasies shattered in the end. Us, who
dream in black and white and barely feel or remember the meaning,
must depend on others to provide us with true emotions, true
thoughts, the highest of art in my experience. The simplest night of
joking with friends can sometimes stand above the subtlest tome. Or
perhaps I have gone horribly wrong. Why am I writing here alone to no
one? About this book? Trying to read again all these authors that
themselves do not know the end of the lonely path we seekers stumble
down, drunk on the dead dreams of other deviants. I will keep
rambling until I realize that I have fulfilled my random requirement,
to find in this book the absurd life I preach, the love for art and
strangeness that allows us to escape for a while, and of course the
laughter echoing from all sides, the spittle coming out of the
gullets of the healthy and raining down upon us.
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