Then he turned his attention to embroideries - the collage of The Picture of Dorian Gray

With some new context, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) for the third time.  Three times is a lot for me, especially for a second-rate books like Wilde’s only novel, or collage fiction, or whatever it is.  But I had new information to bring to the book – Wilde’s criticism, his letters, especially some amusing sparring with newspaper reviewers which is instantly identifiable as what some of us now call “clickbait,” and finally J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (1884), a novel that is alluded to at tedious length.

The book does look quite a bit different to me now, so I suppose this exercise has been a success.

The parts of the collage are as follows:

1. The two page “Preface,” a prose poem in aphorism form.  “All art is quite useless,” etc.  I used to think the Preface was meant sincerely, an error on my part.

2. A penny dreadful horror story, a good one, with a murder and so on.

3. Passages stolen pretty cleanly from Huysmans, mostly in the hilarious Chapter 11, declared unreadable by many good readers, in which young, beautiful Dorian, given license to live a life of pure, consequence-free pleasure, vice and evil, spends his time as follows:

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East…

At another time, he devoted himself to music, and in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts  in which mad gypsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, and, crouching upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders…

Then he turned his attention to embroideries…

And so on.  “Then he became obsessed with quilting, and won several ribbons at the county fair.  Next, it was canning, especially spicy bread-and-butter pickles.”  Terrifying, the depths of Dorian Gray’s evil.

4. Prose versions of the paradox and banter that will soon, beginning with Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), form the core of an extraordinary series of plays.  Although often hilarious in the novel, this kind of dialogue is set free in the plays.  Wilde frequently loots his own novel, stealing the best jokes, and also some other jokes, and distributing them among the plays.  E.g. from Dorian Gray,

“Men have educated us.”

“But not explained you.”

“Describe us as a sex,” was her challenge.

“Sphinxes without secrets.”  (Ch. 17)

And from A Woman of No Importance (1893):

Lord Illingworth: What do you call a bad man?

Mrs. Allonby: The sort of man who admires innocence.

Lord Illingworth:  And a bad woman?

Mrs. Allonby:  Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.

Lord Illingworth:  You are severe – on yourself.

Mrs. Allonby:  Define us as a sex.

Lord Illingworth:  Sphinxes without secrets.  (Act I)

Apparently that line is so good it counts as a scored point in the banter duel.

It is to Wilde’s credit that he recognized that #4 was his great innovation but belonged in another form.  A couple of years later, the plays would make Wilde rich and (even more) famous.  A couple of years later than that, he was breaking rocks in prison.

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.

more fictional French interior decorating from Against Nature by J.-K. Huysmans - to enhance the vivacity of its colors

I want to continue my exploration of furniture design and interior decorating in the French novel with À rebours (1884) or Against Nature by J.-K. Huysmans, the touchstone of future Decadents.  Nana (1880) and Bouvard and Pecuchet (1881) both had a lot of material about interior design, so that’s three novels in a short time.  Kind of an undramatic path for the novel to go down, you might think, correctly.

In English, the Huysmans novel is best known as the source of the infamous Chapter 11 of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), in which Dorian Gray describes his horrible crimes, which include cultivating orchids and mixing perfumes and worst of all reads (“Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book”), maybe a little disappointing for readers expecting something a little less aesthetic.  Good readers, more than one, have told me that Chapter 11 is unreadable – it is certainly skippable – so now imagine that chapter puffed into an arch, plotless novel, with its own entire chapters devoted to orchids and perfumes and books, the tedious nadir of which is a long inventory of 19th century French Catholic writing, “an enormous mass of insipidity” (Ch. 12, 166).

The protagonist, des Esseintes, is an enormously wealthy aesthete suffering from nervous complaints who retires to the countryside to furnish the perfect house.  Most famously, hoping “to enhance the vivacity of [the]colours” of an oriental carpet, des Esseintes acquires a tortoise, but no, “the carpet was still too gaudy, too showy, too new.”  He has the tortoise gilded and encrusted with rare gems, soon killing the poor beast, which “hadn’t been able to bear the dazzling luxury that had been imposed on it” (Ch. 4).

This reminds me that des Esseintes’s mother had “died of exhaustion” (“Notice,” 36), which came from doing nothing at all.

Des Esseintes decorates with books.  He decorates the dining room in a sea theme, with the sunlight entering the room through an aquarium containing mechanical fish and “the odour of tar” sprayed into the room;  the crowning touch is “a table on which rested a single book, bound in sealskin, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, specially printed for him on laid paper of pure linen with a seagull watermark, each sheet of which was selected by hand” (Ch. 2, 52).

The great tension of the novel is the distance between the genuine opinions of the author, which are eccentric, and the nonsense of the protagonist, who is way way out there.  The book is one of the source documents of 1890s Decadence, but is at the same time a parody of Decadence, an attack on the very ideas it advocates.

For Huysmans, the book was a turning point, a first step towards his return to the Catholic Church and transformation into a genuine religious writer.  He writes in a “Preface, written twenty years after the novel” that is took him eight years to understand the path the novel had put him on, although Zola, “shrewder than the Catholics,” saw it right away and urged Husymans to stop undermining Naturalism, whatever that means.

The translation, ornate and sharp, is Brendan King’s.  Maybe I’ll write one more post, about the books, of course, the books, what else.