Against the Grain

This review is a copy of one I wrote for 'A Rebours' under its alternative title - 'Against Nature'. Perhaps it will be useful to readers of 'Against the Grain' - and act as a vector to the other reviews of this novel under the alternative title. This is an extraordinarily self-indulgent work, a tirade by the author against all those sensual things that we enrich our lives with - food, wine, literature, religion, music, travel ..... And yet, in the end, the hero of the story, Des Esseintes, fails in his attempt to isolate himself and cocoon himself in all these things he treasures so much - he becomes ill and has to abandon the attempt. So why does this 'novel' work? It is a very strange one, but it is certainly a novel(ty), perhaps even a nova! Is it the fluidity of the writing (and the translation I read by Margaret Mauldon)? Is it the content that connects in so many ways, in so many directions? For me there was a special fascination although the basis for me as I had lived my life was totally different to Des Esseintes. His experience was a withdrawal from the world after extravagant and self-damaging, self-indulgence. For me, I had imagined doing exactly what Des Esseintes did (but my life turned in a different direction), but my basis had been one of rigorous but perhaps equally self-damaging, self-denial. Would the outcome have been different? I can only speculate but I suspect not. I think Huysmans is right on the money!

Des Esseintes, the protagonist (and basically the only character) of this book, is a man of noble descent who has tried everything in life: he has mingled with the frivolous and found them vulgar and empty-headed. He has lived among the intellectuals and found them petulant and arrogant. He is tired of life, especially in these (his) vulgar and superficial times. So he sells a number of properties and buys a house in the countryside. His idea is to reject everything that is "natural" and concentrate on art and artifice. He lives in complete solitude, barely interrupted by a couple of silent servants. He spends much time choosing the colors, the furniture and the pictures for his house. Along the book we are witnesses to his tastes in a number of realms, such as painting, literature, flowers, perfumes and music. Sometimes it seems to be just a long catalogue of sophisticated, rare and decadent pieces. This book is a big fantasy of reclusion, of elegancy, of sophistication. Give yourself some time and be an eccentric for a day. If you read it with a sense of humor, you'll find an enjoyable piece of French décadentisme, certainly on the periphery of the Western Canon, but representative of a way to view life.Its atmosphere is very Gothic, gloomy, silent and full of beautiful things. The main character is a bit of a lunatic, but his bored and irritable personality has a touch of glamour. If you sometimes feel filled up with the world, if you sometimes fantasize about winning the lottery and then buying a big house full of the things you love, a place to retire and reject society and all its annoying and ugly characteristics, then you will find this book a very cool way of retiring from the world.

It really doesn't surprise me that this novel has been reviewed by only one person at this site. What a statement about the reading patterns of present-day culture! From my teens through my twenties, I snatched up every Penguin Classic I could find on the bookshelves in NYC and San Francisco. I guess I just came up in a different literary milieu. This novel was one of the true gems that I encountered at that time. This is probably the seminal avante-garde novel. It's hero, Des Esseintes, is basted on Absinthe (or hashish) half the time and his life is one prolongued hallucination. The author takes the reader so intricately into the main character's life, that we are living alongside him, absorbed in his decadence. We are invited to his parties (which rival Trimalchio's), are absorbed in his fantasies (which rival Fellini's)and basically are tripping with him in his unique and solipsistic universe. Oscar Wilde described this as the strangest work of fiction he had ever come across. Though not a great Wilde fan, I couldn't agree with him more on that point.

Huysmans' "spiritual autobiography" (Camille Paglia) is vastly disturbing and hilariously funny. Somehow both Decadent and proto-Modern, it straddles the 19th and 20th centuries with its deft combination of languid aestheticism and world-weary alienation, bound up in a dyspeptic, rapturous, cynical, obsessive and intensely self-revealing package. Baldick's translation is undoubtedly the best, allowing full rein to Huysmans' precious, overripe prose. Paglia's chapter on Huysmans in her Sexual Personae (indeed he appears throughout the massive work) is a nice companion piece.

Assuming that this "Viking" edition is in fact the Penguin edition or some relation, this is by far the preferred edition of Huysmans' strange masterwork. The translation by Robert Baldick, Huysmans' most trustworthy biographer, is not only NOT slightly censored like the earlier English one reprinted by Dover... it's also a much livelier read. Which is important because, after all, there's not much of a conventional plot here; the story such as it is depicts the gradual enervation of a decadent aristocrat as he exhausts the pleasure to be found in every pleasure he can think of. Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate