posted on 05 Jun 2016

Against Nature by J.K. Huysmans

When I first read J K Huysmans’ notorious fin de siècle classic, Against Nature, some time in the early-70s, I think I expected to find – and probably in my ignorance did find – a decadent, near-gothic novel along the lines of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, or even the much more obscure Garden of Evil by Octave Mirbeau.

The fact is, Huysmans’ book is not remotely like these other works of decadence and in many ways is a far stranger book and scarcely a novel at all.

For a start, it has only one character, the ailing, neurotic, orphaned aristocrat, Des Esseintes, and he is more cypher than character, a mechanism to enable Huysmans to examine an extreme, perverse, neurotic sensibility. (Indeed, one very astute contemporary reviewer referred to Des Esseintes as “a machine gone haywire. Nothing more.”)

In doing this, Huysmans appears to believe that he is engaged in a serious undertaking – using (or so he claimed) the analytical, sociological techniques pioneered by Zola and the Medan group of naturalist writers.  Zola, it must be said, didn’t believe him and the pair fell out.

Nor does it really have a plot. Offended by every aspect of the modern democratic age, the decaying aristocrat Des Esseintes decides to withdraw from the world. He finds a house just outside Paris and transforms it into the house of his dreams. He fills it with the best decadent art – opulent, febrile, grotesque; gorgeous objects, carnivorous plants, religious artifacts (he was schooled by Jesuits) and exotica; a superlative library of the rarest volumes; décor which reflects his love of artifice and extremes. Everything is obsessively chosen and perfectly placed and is intended to offer “that final touch of depravity” that is precious to the “experienced voluptuary”. The only uncertainty is whether he will survive the remarkable complex of neuroses that constitute his personality, or whether he will commit suicide.

This is not to say that Against Nature doesn’t have some marvellous bits. At times it is remarkably funny. The suffocating intensity and claustrophobia of Huysmans’ vision and highly-wrought prose are also superbly rendered in Robert Baldick’s 1956 translation. One of its most enjoyable sequences is the wonderful chapter where Des Esseintes, bewitched by his rereading of Dickens’ novels and in thrall to Dickens’ London, sets out to sail to England. But in the carriage on the way to Paris and while waiting for the boat-train he imagines himself already in London, and the London he constructs in his mind is so compellingly detailed and so overwhelmingly real (and wonderfully described) that he turns round and heads exhaustedly for home. “It would be madness,” he concludes, “to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality.”

It may well be, then, that the book’s most adventurous and avant-garde flourishes are also its greatest weaknesses. The fact that it has neither plot nor character to any real extent and superficially is perhaps little more than a perverse sort of ‘World of Interiors’, a style handbook – a “breviary of decadence”, in Arthur Symons’ memorable phrase – all limit its achievements.

But for all these faults, Huysmans continues to be an influential stylist and rereading Against Nature I began to hear contemporary echoes in the unlikeliest of places. For example, Bruce Chatwin’s obsessive description of objets and interiors, and the grotesque cataloguing of possessions in Bret Easton Ellis’s horrible book, American Psycho, both seem to owe something to Huysmans’ opulence.

Huysmans may not be very widely read today but I’m glad I gave the book another try. It is always interesting to return to books you think you already know and be completely surprised by what you find there.

And is Against Nature serious in its intentions? Well, Huysmans was a life-long bureaucrat who worked at the Ministry of the Interior for thirty-two years, and when he did finally retire he kept a stock of his old office notepaper, amended so that it read: Ministry of the Interior [Life].

I think it’s hard not to conclude that this wily old bureaucrat was stringing us all along. And I think I rather admire him for doing so.

Alun Severn

June 2016