À rebours (translated into English as Against the Grain or Against Nature)
(1884) is a novel by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. It is a novel in which
very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the
tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours
contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing
so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of
"decadent" literature.
Background
A rebours marked a watershed in Huysmans' career. His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic
depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans
regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of A rebours:
It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real
characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water. It scarcely
admitted - in theory at least - any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled,
under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of
mankind.
Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail,
but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Des Esseintes. In a letter of November 1882,
Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was
changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul
(Alone), was to become A rebours.[1] The
character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans on
his modest civil service salary was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. The writers and
dandies Baudelaire and Jules Barbey
d'Aurevilly also had some influence but the most important model was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes' house:
In 1883, to his eternal regret, Montesquiou admitted Stéphane Mallarmé [to his
home]. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered
candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that
the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls, and a strip of
altar railing. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably
coloured bindings, and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. According to
Montesquiou writing many years later in his memoirs, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. 'He went
away,' records Montesquiou, 'in a state of silent exaltation [...] I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring,
sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali-Baba's
Cave.'[2]
Plot summary
Des Esseintes as in the 1931 Illustrated Edition of
À rebours.
Though the book is widely believed to have no structure whatsoever, it does tell a relatively simple story. Des Esseintes is
the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely
decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without
telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside.
He fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert's
Bouvard and Pecuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in
intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love
affairs of his past in Paris.
He conducts a survey of French and Latin literature,
rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the
Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire
and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé[3], as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as
Virgil and Cicero, preferring later writers such as
Petronius and Apuleius as well as works of early Christian
literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. He
studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, he creates a garden of
poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surreal episodes, he has gemstones set in the
shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In one of the
book's more comic episodes, he spontaneously decides to visit London. When he reaches
the train station, he overhears some English visitors, whom he finds disgusting. Feeling that he now knows what London would be
like, he immediately returns home.
Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to
forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a nonbeliever trying to
embrace religion.
Reception and influence
Cover of a 1926 English translation with the caption "the book that
Dorian Gray loved and
that inspired
Oscar Wilde."
Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year -
but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to
say...[4] However, when it appeared in May, 1884, the
book created a storm of publicity; though many critics were scandalised, it appealed to a young generation of aesthetes and
writers.
Richard Ellmann describes the impact of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:
Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his ‘marvellous’
book. Bourget, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly;
Paul Valéry called it his ‘Bible and his bedside book’ and this is what it became for Wilde.
He said to the Morning News: ‘This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen’. It was being reviewed
everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted
with a book which even in its title defied them.[5]
Huysmans' former mentor, Zola, was less impressed and gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate
him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes' opinions and tastes were not his own but when
they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism", and accused him of "leading the
school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre,
exhausted by a single volume".[6]
While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose
work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour des Esseintes", published in La
Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's
works"[7]. The opening stanza gives some of its
flavour:
Hyperbole! de ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu...
Hyperbole! Can't you arise
From memory, and triumph, grow
Today a form of conjuration
Robed in an iron folio?
(Translated by Donald Davie)[8]
The Catholic writer Léon Bloy praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a
Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous Zola as if all the
interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them."[9] In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling: "After Les
Fleurs du mal I told Baudelaire it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross.
But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?"[10] His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s.
It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian
Gray. The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and
hedonism. Although his reputation remains relatively untarnished (perhaps due to his charm and looks), the reputations of his
"friends" seem to turn to dust as soon as he touches them. Ellmann writes:
Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans’s A Rebours…To a
correspondent he wrote that he had played a ‘fantastic variation’ upon A Rebours and some day must write it down. The
references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.[11]
Footnotes
- ^ Baldick p.115
- ^ Baldick pp.122-123
- ^ In the 1903 preface, Huysmans writes that he would have included
Rimbaud and Laforgue had he known their work at
the time.
- ^ Conversation reported by Francis Enne in 1883, quoted by Baldick p.131
- ^ Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Vintage, 1988) p.252
- ^ Reported by Huysmans in the 1903 preface to A rebours
- ^ Mallarmé Poésies ed. Lloyd James (Flammarion, 1989) p.170
- ^ Given in full in the Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation ed.
Charles Tomlinson (OUP, 1980)
- ^ Quoted by Baldick, p.135
- ^ Quoted by Baldick p.136
- ^ Ellmann p.316
Sources
- Robert Baldick: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (originally published 1955; revised
by Brendan King, Dedalus, 2006)
- Huysmans: Romans (Volume 1) ed. Pierre Brunel et al. (Bouquins, Robert Laffont, 2005)
- Huysmans: Against Nature translated by Robert Baldick (Penguin Classics)
External links
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