Nana’s little sisterFrench author Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) published about two dozen books over the course of his literary career, but less than half of those have been translated into English. His first novel, Marthe: The Story of a Girl, was published in 1876. Huysmans writes in a naturalist style, a form of anti-romantic social realism that stresses unflinching descriptive detail. The Naturalist school of literature was founded by Emile Zola, who, upon reading Marthe, took Huysmans under his wing and mentored his early career. Of all of Zola’s protégés and imitators, Huysmans is the writer whose style most closely matches the master, at least for the first several years of his career. Judging by this impressive debut novel, Huysmans had already found his mature naturalist literary style before availing himself of Zola’s mentorship.
Marthe is born in Paris, the daughter of a painter and a factory worker. By the age of 15, both of her parents have died, leaving Marthe to care for herself. Like her mother before her, she works in an artificial pearl factory, crafting the fake jewels from powdered fish scales and glue. The pay is poor, the job is bad for her health, and she is surrounded by young women coworkers who regale her with tales of their dissolute lifestyles and licentious activities. She is discovered by a cabaret impresario who invites her to join the showgirls at a sleazy local theatre, and it is not long before Marthe learns that she can make a living by selling her body. From there, Marthe’s career runs the sexworker gamut from burlesque dancer to literal prostitute to a kept woman, the mistress of a sugar daddy. Along the way she meets Léo, a struggling poet and journalist, and the pair embark on a roller-coaster romance. Portions of the book are based on Huysmans’s own youthful love affair with a lady of the night.
Not long after Marthe, Zola published his own novel about a Parisian harlot, the classic Nana (1880). Zola’s novel is much more epic in scale and grander in scope than Marthe, which is a very short novel and intimate in its focus, similar to Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Zola makes Nana the high-class of whore of Babylon who has all the powerful men of Paris wrapped around her finger, while Marthe is a more realistic garden-variety prostitute, the girl next door gone bad like so many poverty-stricken urban women of her age. Despite Naturalism’s pretensions of brutally scientific realism, Zola would exaggerate elements of his novels for dramatic effect. Huysmans, on the other hand, would exaggerate elements of his novels for repulsive effect. In the three books I’ve read by him, he seems to go out of his way to disgust, put off, and offend his audience. In Marthe, for example, Huysmans’s descriptions of a low-rent flophouse and a sleazy back alley are so loaded with sordid detail you might want to put the Kindle down and sanitize your hands. There are also some pretty racy sex scenes in this book, not too graphic by today’s standards but enough to be considered pornographic in the 1870s. Not surprisingly, the book was banned. Charged with obscenity in France, Huysmans had the book published in the more free-wheeling Belgium.
Among English-language audiences, Huysmans is better-known for his novels Au Rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain) and Là-Bas (Down There or The Damned, a novel about Satan worship), but I found Marthe superior to them both. As an unromanticized depiction of social ills, this is a superb naturalist novel. Huysmans pulls no punches, and his prose is strikingly brilliant (at least in English translation). This is not a pleasant story, but Huysmans succeeds in viscerally immersing the reader into this sordid and squalid world. Zola is my favorite author, and I’m always look for other writers of a similar philosophy and style. Marthe is one novel in which one of the so-called lesser naturalists actually gives Maître Zola a run for his money.
Shock lit from a Zola protégéÉmile Zola, founder of the French literary school of Naturalism, was often castigated by his contemporary critics for including vulgar and disgusting subject matter in his novels. Much of what was considered vulgar and disgusting in the late 19th century, however, we today would just consider realism. One of Zola’s more prominent literary protégés, however, seemed to take such criticism as a challenge and proceeded to actively court controversy and deliberately shock readers with the decadent and gruesome content of his writings. Joris-Karl (or J. K.) Huysmans (1848–1907) was the author of À rebours (Against the Grain) and Là-bas (Down There or The Damned). The latter book, published in 1891, deals with the subject of Satanism in France.
In Paris, a writer named Durtal is working on a biography of a historical figure named Gilles de Rais (1405–1440), a French baron who fought alongside Joan of Arc. Gilles de Rais was tried and executed for abducting, torturing, raping, and murdering at least 140 children. According to Durtal, these heinous crimes, which Huysmans describes in graphic detail, were acts of Satanic worship. Durtal feels that in order to truly understand Gilles de Rais, he must delve into the activities of contemporary Satanists. His investigation leads him through a series of friend-of-a-friend referrals that bring him closer to rubbing elbows with real live devil worshippers in one of their Satanic ceremonies.
Much of the story is told through dinner conversations between Durtal and his friends des Hermies, a physician; Carhaix, a church bell-ringer; and sometimes Gévingey, an astrologer. It is to these listeners that Durtal relates much of the history of Gilles de Rais that he has uncovered. When Durtal is not dining with these companions, the story turns to his love life. He receives a letter from a secret admirer, a fan of his work, and begins an amorous correspondence with her. What comes out of the conversations between Durtal and his friends is a nostalgia for medievalism in preference to the modern world. Even though they’re not satanists, they enjoy dabbling in superstitions and the occult because such matters harken back to those earlier times. A lot of supernatural conspiracy theories are brought up at the dinner table, and it’s always somewhat unclear whether Huysmans actually believes this stuff, or if these are just the thoughts of his fictional characters. It was always clear where Zola stood on religion, but I don’t know Huysmans well enough to judge his supernatural inclinations.
Judging from Là-bas, Huysmans seems to want to be the Marilyn Manson of French literature. The way he’s written this book reminds one of those heavy metal bands that try really hard to be louder, harder, and more demonic than everyone else. Even for libertine France, there is a surprising amount of indecent and risqué content for 1891: semi-graphic sex, sacrilege and blasphemy, bodily functions and feces, mass murders, rape, sodomy, pedophilia, and, of course, a lot of talk about the devil. Even when Huysmans isn’t discussing one of these topics, he goes out of his way to digress gratuitously into some off-putting subject, such as food sanitation. There is a sexual affair in this book between Durtal and a married woman, but Huysmans doesn’t even make it titillating. Instead, he describes it as the most annoying, ungratifying, and pointless love affair imaginable.
There’s a lot that’s unpleasant about Là-bas, but it is interesting. Sometimes it reads like classic Zola-esque naturalism, and sometimes it reads like a 1970s Satanic B-movie. It’s rarely boring, which is more than I can say for Huysmans’s À rebours, but I can’t really recommend this as a great work of literature.
Splendid isolation
Against Nature, or Against the Grain (neither English title seems to be more commonly used than the other), a novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans, was originally published in 1884 under the French title of À rebours. This eccentric work of literature is an intimate portrait of the life, home, and habits of Jean des Esseintes, who is essentially the only character in the book. He is the descendant of robust aristocratic ancestors who distinguished themselves in battle and business. Generations of wealthy indulgence and idleness, however, have reduced the once powerful blood line to an anemic trickle. The last remaining vessel of this noble gene pool, Jean des Esseintes is an effete, effeminate aesthete resigned to a life of self-indulgence and decadent dissipation. Decadence, as portrayed in this book, does not take the form of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (though unnamed “perverse pleasures” are briefly alluded to). Rather, des Esseintes’s personal decadence revolves around art, literature, and furnishings. Exhausted and disgusted by society, he holes up in a house in the country which he molds into a rich cultural man-cave designed to indulge his five senses. Though occasionally des Esseintes ventures forth from his fortress, mostly the book is a catalog of everything he eats, drinks, reads, and collects.
Huysmans was a disciple of the author Emile Zola, leader of the literary school of naturalism. Though this book was Huysmans’s declaration of independence from that school, venturing off into symbolist territory, the influence of his former master can still be felt. The book is loaded with beautiful descriptive passages written in the naturalist mode. When taken alone, any page in the book is a vivid linguistic treat (at least that’s true of the English translation by John Howard), but together it all adds up to a rather dull and lifeless mess. The book is more a character study than a novel. Like the opening passages of some epic drama, the setting has been richly and intricately described; it’s just waiting for a plot. Instead, Huysmans merely uses the character of des Esseintes to express his own tastes. For example, there are at least four grueling chapters about books—ancient Latin literature, later Christian literature, modern French literature, some praise for Edgar Allen Poe—that you almost need a PhD to get through. If one wants to write literary criticism, then write it. Don’t dress it up as fiction and call it a novel. Authors like Zola, Victor Hugo, or Balzac would occasionally insert an essay into a novel, as an expository interlude, but Against Nature feels like a jumble of essays unsuccessfully masquerading as a novel.
Huysmans seems to be making two points here (and I’ll admit I may be grasping at straws): First, through centuries of wealthy indulgence and slothful entitlement the nobility have long lost any former claim to greatness they may once have had. Second, the culture itself—from literature to the Catholic Church—has likewise decayed to a despicable shell of its former self. Huysmans makes these points adequately in the first and last chapters. The rest is just a series of illustrative examples that beat the dead horse. The book has the feeling of a protomodernist manifesto in which Huysmans advocates striking out in a new cultural direction and rejecting past glories, except of course for those choice few past glories that the author himself deems worthy.
This book does have its fans, but to me it came across as a boring, failed experiment. Huysmans’s prose, however, does exhibit the makings of a great naturalist writer, so I’ll probably seek out more of his novels, perhaps earlier works more in keeping with Zola’s aesthetic. Hopefully one of them has a plot.
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