THE OBLIGATORY OLD BOOK REVIEW

J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours 

By Carlos Hernandez

These days, PoMo is so-so. We are fast approaching the millenium, but not—at least not in the West—with any glistering hope for the future, or, at the other extreme, any apocalyptic visions (bunkered religious zealots aside; they will always be with us, end of century or no) of society on the brink. Or, rather, we do get both of these messages in our media—natural disaster movies that curiously mix both elements like Volcano, Deep Impact, and the notably sophomoric Armageddon have been drawing big box-office crowds—but there’s little faith behind the bangs and brimstone, and the stories are saccharine and stilted, full of sci-fi cliches and fourth of July patriotism. And love interests. Can’t forget the love interests.

So the attitude with which we are entering into this new millenium is, in a word, boredom. U.S. letters are pretty bored right now.

Symptomatic of a decaying, decadent society? Harbinger of a destined fall from First-World bragging rights? Well, maybe not. After all, the world still has France, and France had it’s own fin de siécle case of pernicious ennui a century ago. They survived J. K. Huysmans’s À Rebours, after all.

À Rebours (1884; usually translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain) is a case in literary history of a novel, which itself is not terribly well-known outside of France and outside of the academy, exerting almost immeasurable influence on Western writers from whom no undergraduate can escape: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde (Dorian Gray actually reads À Rebours during the course of the novel). But, for the contemporary reader, there is a simpler, more immediate reason to read À Rebours. Comfort. It’s nice to know the 1899ers were as bored last century as we 1999ers are now.

The boredom of the novel’s protagonist, one Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, might be a little different from the American variety—des Esseintes is quite wealthy even though his estate is in decline, and quite averse to all things American—but his irascible, moody dissatisfaction with all things "real" should strike a sympathetic chord with anyone (read "everyone") who’s tried their hand at Satreian existentialism or, more recently, Derridean deconstruction. The lengths to which the novel’s protagonist goes to relieve his boredom are gorgeous and extraordinary, in the manner of European dandyism of the day. Des Esseintes is sickly, dyspeptic, a vestiginal left-over of a once proud and vigorous family of wealth and influence. But, above all else, he is an aesthete and an eccentric, and the thought of hobnobbing with the hoi-polloi is enough motivation for him to sell of his floundering estates and create a dandy’s paradise, complete with a "symphony" of liqueur casks, from which he could "play sonatas" of drink, a tortoise (soon dead) who’s shell is dipped in gold and set with jewels because the carpet needed something to deaden its too-garish colors, a collection of exotic flowers chosen because they looked so outlandish and excessive they appeared to be all but artificial, and of course a library, and of course a library that despises beloved writers (Virgil) and praises much less famous ones (Are you up on your Prudentius, your Sidonius Apollinaris?).

With everything chosen with the utmost care and deliberation, everything eschewing middle-class tastes, a hermitage so perfect in every detail, that perhaps it’s no wonder that des Esseintes spends a good deal of the novel leaving it. He goes to the dentist, the theatre, brothels, the "Rue the Babylon" (figuratively; a hustler asks him for directions there as a way of asking des Esseintes for a "date"), and, of all places, England, after having an Anglophilic attack induced by reading Dickens.

Well, he doesn’t quite make it to England, but it seems like nothing can be done to keep him at home, and maybe that’s because, whenever left to his own meditations, he becomes vulnerable to fits of ordinary life: he suffers "attacks" of religion, where he can’t seem to squelch a belief in God, and carnality, which leads him to acquire some rather uninteresting (to him) mistresses, and at least one mister.

Most people who read À Rebours initially, whether they liked it or hated it, saw it as a sort of dandy’s manifesto, a sort of rich-man’s (sic) version of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, but I have trouble seeing how to read this book without having the little red satirist in me laughing his head off. Des Esseintes is both well-read and ridiculous, eccentric and clueless, a man who defines refinement and real life as mutually exclusive, which of course places him in all kinds of situations in which not to laugh at him would take the greater effort—any time another character appears in the novel, even one so minor as the bargain dentist who yanks for him a decayed molar, des Esseintes is in for a "reality check" of ephiphantic proportions—that is, if he weren’t so bored that he’s grown inured to epiphanies. And the book’s ending—which telling you I think would spoil nothing, but I’ll refrain just in case—unravels all of des Esseintes machinations so summarily, it’s hard to wonder what exactly everyone found so inflammatory. The true perversion would be to allow des Esseintes to live forever in his dandified world: Molotov cocktails that deconstruct themselves can’t destroy anything else.

But the novel isn’t merely a perversion, nor merely a sardonic, self-incriminating tale of dandified woe. It’s an allegory for an age and, specifically, for the end of an age. Even decadence can recycle and renew itself. À Rebours is at every moment aware of its own limited scope, of its purpose as a momentary blip on the sonar: a document, more a catalogue, of predilections and peculiarities that soon will give way to different ones. And so nothing satisfies des Esseintes hypersensitive sensibilities, but worse still is to abandon these sensual pursuits, to let aristocracies finally die and to allow laizze-faire economics to reign supreme. Thus his ennui.

And, in a way, thus ours—with all the recent theorization of American late-capitalism and neo-Frankfurt Marxism and Material Feminism, sensuality has taken something of a back-seat in the way we talk about things. Des Esseintes does nothing but talk of everything in sensual terms, and it turns out to be bad for his health, but it’s also going to be hard going for him to leave behind the delights and favors he has grown so accustomed to. It’s not hard for us in 1999 to sympathize with him as, near the novel’s end, he broods in his chair, wondering what in God’s name he is going to do with himself now that desire itself has proven to be a disease requiring drastic treatments.