Wednesday, April 13, 2016

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.

16 comments:

  1. Huh. Well, I didn't know Hannon, but followed the Wikipedia link to a longer piece by Paul Delsemme. Apparently, Hannon made it into "A Rebours" because he and Huysmans were friends for many years; Huysmans edited and introduced Hannon's early collection "Rimes de joie." After that, they drifted apart: Huysmans became more religious, and Hannon turned more to light verse, revues, journalism, and smut. Hannon was sometimes more admired as a painter than as a writer, and was friendly with James Ensor and Félicien Rops. I've enjoyed "A Rebours" and "Là-bas"; maybe I should venture into more Huysmans...

    ReplyDelete
  2. 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”

    That's great, really first rate, focusing on what's left out of Dickens, and then going off to act just like a Dickens character. Whatever vacuum Dickens contains, des Esseintes would seem to share.

    The Baudelaire is good, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Edited! Introduced! That's as bad as being in the same MFA program. And thus Hannon is Huysmans's only misfire - I guess this supports my implicit point.

    I suppose when my French improves I will have other priorities besides Hannon. But perhaps I will come across one of his flower paintings in a regional French museum.

    I was also wondering if more Huysmans would be a good idea. Là-bas would be next, I suppose.

    The failed trip to London is genuinely funny, and insightful, and that sort of thing. The long lists of orchids and Catholic writers, I leave those to individual tastes. The book descriptions, the bindings and fonts and so on, now who doesn't love that. The joke about the type looking like it was stomped into a book by a peasant may be the best gag, though.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I like the fact that French Wikipedia mentions that Théodore had an even more obscure brother, Édouard (he was an engineer and photographer who commissioned an elegant art nouveau hôtel), who doesn't even have a stub entry.
    Les Déliquescences, poèmes décadents d'Adoré Floupette, avec sa vie par Marius Tapora is a set of parodies of late nineteenth century French verse, published in 1885, which reflects Huysman's contemporaries.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Rimes de joie" was much admired; Huysmans wasn't the only one to like it. Hannon perplexed everyone by heading in a very different direction. I must admit that I'm curious about his book "The Priapic Kazoo." "A Rebours" and "Là-bas" are the only Huysmans books I've read, but they're both nutty and extravagant. Before them, he was a disciple of Zola, after them he became more Catholic, which I suspect calmed him down some.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This great post is only not great insofar as it reminds me that I've wanted to reread this great book (one of my first introductions to what you so rightly used to call Weird France) for about two decades now and haven't gotten around to it. What the hell have I been waiting for? The Dickens/deconstructionist bit is brilliant (many props to you for highlighting that conceit) as is Des Esseintes' plea for "gaminess" in literature. Yes, more gaminess, way more gaminess please!

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Floupette." Hey look, that book is in English, translated by a Pataphysician.

    No such luck with "The Priapic Kazoo." This is such a fun period of French literature to wander around in.

    Gaminess, yes - literature with strong flavor. And saying that, I'm about to start a William Dean Howells novel. What's wrong with me?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ""Floupette." Hey look, that book is in English, translated by a Pataphysician."

      That's how I came across it...

      Delete
  8. Howells? Which one? Prepare yourself for a far-removal from "gaminess." Confession: I like (enjoy) Howells. But I am at my core a 19th century transplant. Hence my current affair with Emily Dickinson at The Writers' Almanac. But I could use a dose of Howells, too.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Silas Lapham. I liked the other one I read, A Modern Instance, well enough. But the flavor was mild.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Silas Lapham...a novel about how paint is made. More or less. Still, more meat on its bones than A Rebours, which I hope to finish. I also want to comment on Huck Finn when I get a moment, but I'm deep into Melville's Pierre, which puts all of these other books to shame for sheer lunacy (in a good way, of course--it's Melville, after all).

    ReplyDelete
  11. The style / content contrast between Howells and Huysmans is amusing. Both in some sense Naturalism. What useless term!

    Pierre is a book I will dare someday. Try some of that Young American literature.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you're going to read Pierre, read Maurice Sendak's version.
      It's shorter and the pictures are pretty.

      Delete
    2. I hadn't realized that Sendak had two Pierre's, Melville's and his own, a story of a boy and a lion that is inspired by or emanates from Melville. So strange.

      Delete
  12. The Japanese have hundreds of comic books inspired by Pierre (in the same way as, say, Pola X was inspired by Pierre. Pierre and its exploration of the ambiguously perverse was, like a lot of Melville, way ahead of its time.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Japanese comics! And of a book still close to unknown in the U.S.

    ReplyDelete