Byzantine efflorescences of the brain and complicated deliquescences of language - Huysmans reads

Against Nature  is obsessed with books and reading.  Several chapters are closer to literary criticism than to fiction, although the opinions are those of the character, rather than J.-K. Huysmans; who knows how they might differ.  Reading leads to action, too, to story.  The best single chapter in Against Nature is spurred by reading.

Des Esseintes, in the grips of his nervous illness, reads Dickens to “soothe his nerves,” but the complete absence of any sexual content whatsoever works him into a lustful frenzy – des Esseintes is a deconstructionist, reading the novel’s absences.  He decides that a trip to London will help him “escape from the wearying debauches of a mind dazed by endlessly working in a vacuum” (Ch. 11, 149).  He orders his things packed, takes the train to Paris, and shops.  Finally, he eats a real dinner in a restaurant, the only substantial food he eats in the entire book – oxtail soup, a haddock, roast beef and potatoes, “a lump of blue Stilton, its sweet taste impregnated with bitterness,” etc., along with “two pints of ale” and a “porter, that black beer that tastes of licorice juice without its sugariness.”

In other words, he behaves like something close to a normal person for a single chapter.  He enjoys himself so much that he decides there is no reason to actually go to London.  “’What aberration was I suffering from that I was tempted to disown my old ideas, to condemn the docile phantasmagorias of my brain, in order to believe, like some complete fool, in the necessity, interest and benefit of a real excursion?’” (160).  So he goes home.  A good comic episode.

“But it was his books that principally preoccupied him” (Ch. 11, 161).  He commissions individual editions, with attention to covers, paper, and type – “he didn’t want the books by his favourite authors in his library to be the same as those in other people’s, the typefaces of which looked as if they’d been stamped into ragpaper by the hob-nailed boots of an Auvergne rustic” (161-2).  So his Baudelaire, for example, is made up like “a church missal” on Japanese paper, bound in “genuine sow skin.”

Poe, Balzac, Baudelaire.  Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola.  Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé.  The latter list caught my attention.  Corbière had died young, but would have been thirty-nine when Against Nature was published.  Verlaine was forty.  Mallarmé was forty-two and essentially unknown, as was Corbière (“It was barely French,” 205).

I am trying to imagine a contemporary novel, one of our time, that contains substantial passages about living poets.  Poets not in the author’s MFA program.  Huysmans’s novel is to a large degree an exercise in taste-making, and as such its influence was substantial.  He gets a lot right, in a sense, my sense.  The only writer I didn’t know was the Belgian poet Théodore Hannon, best known, French Wikipedia implies, for being mentioned in this novel.  Anyone know him?   I should learn French and read him.

Des Esseintes, and surely Huysmans, desires “Byzantine efflorescences of the brain and complicated deliquescences of language” (Ch. 14, 197), or “gaminess,” as he amusingly calls it, literature that is pungent, that tastes too strong.