Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans

First published:À rebours, 1884 (English translation, 1922)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Character study

Time of plot: Late 1800’s

Locale: Paris

Principal character

• Jean Des Esseintes, an aesthete

The Story:

The Des Esseintes family has a long history. In the Château de Lourps, the portraits of the ancestors show rugged troopers and stern cavalrymen. The family, however, follows a familiar pattern; through two hundred years of intermarriage and indulgence, the men become increasingly effeminate. Now the only remaining Des Esseintes is Jean, who is thirty years old. By a kind of atavism, Jean’s looks resemble those of his first grandsire. The resemblance, however, is in looks only.

Jean’s childhood was unhappy. His father, living in Paris most of the time, visited Jean briefly at school once in a while when he wished to give moral counsel. Occasionally, he went to see his wife at the château. Jean was always present at those hushed interviews in which his mother took little interest. Jean’s mother had a strange dread of light. Passing her days in her shaded boudoir, she avoided contact with the world. At the Jesuit school, Jean became a precocious student of Latin and acquired a fair knowledge of theology. At the same time, he was a stubborn, withdrawn child who refused all discipline. The patient priests let him follow his own bent, for there was little else they could do. Both his parents died while he was young; at his majority, he gained complete control of his inheritance.

In his contacts with the world, Jean goes through two phases. At first, he lives a wild, dissolute life. For a time, he is content with ordinary mistresses. His first love is Miss Urania, an American acrobat. She is strong and healthy; Jean yearns for her as an anemic young girl might long for a Hercules. Nevertheless, Miss Urania is quite feminine, even prudish in her embraces. Their liaison prematurely hastens his impotence. Another mistress is a brunette ventriloquist. One day, Jean purchases a tiny black sphinx and a chimera of polychrome clay. Bringing them into the bedchamber, he prevails on her to imitate Gustave Flaubert’s famous dialogue between the Sphinx and the Chimera. His mistress, however, is sulky at having to perform offstage.

After that phase, Jean begins to be disgusted with people. He sees that men reared in religious schools, as he was, are timid and boring. Men educated in the public schools are more courageous but even more boring. In a frantic effort to find companionship, he wildly seeks the most carnal pastimes and the most perverted pleasures.

Jean was never strong, and from childhood he was afflicted with scrofula. Now his nerves are growing weaker. The back of his neck always pains him; his hand trembles when he lifts a light object. In a burst of despairing eccentricity, he gives a farewell dinner to his lost virility. The meal is served on a black table to the sound of funeral marches. The waitresses are nude black women. The plates are edged in black; the menu includes dark bread, meat with licorice sauce, and wine served in dark glasses.

At thirty years old, Jean decides to withdraw from the world. Having concluded that artistry is much superior to nature, he vows that in his retreat he will be completely artificial. He finds a suitable house in a remote suburb of Paris and makes elaborate preparations for his retirement. The upper floor is given over to his two elderly servants, who wear felt coverings on their shoes at all times. He reserves the downstairs for himself. The walls are paneled in leather like book binding, and the only color for ceilings and trim is deep orange. In his dining room, he simulates a ship’s cabin and installs aquariums in front of the windows. The study is lined with precious books. With great art, he contrives a luxurious bedroom that looks monastically simple.

Among his paintings, Jean treasures two works of Gustave Moreau that depict Salomé and the head of John the Baptist. He ponders long over the meaning of the scenes. History being silent on the personality of Salomé, Jean decides that Moreau re-created her perfectly. To him, she is the incarnation of woman.

His library is his chief concern. Among the Latin writers, he has no love for the classicists: Vergil, for example, he finds incredibly dull. Nevertheless, he takes great delight in Petronius, who brings to life Roman decadence under Nero. He ardently loves a few of the French sensualists, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire among them. He also has a small collection of obscure Catholic writers whose refinement and disdain for the world suit his own temperament.

For months, his life is regular and satisfying. He eats breakfast at five and dines at eleven. About dawn, he has his supper and goes to bed. Because of his weak stomach, he is most abstemious in his diet. After a time, his old ailments come back to plague him. He can eat or drink very little, and his nerves pain him. After weeks of torture, he faints. When his servants find him, they call a neighborhood doctor, who can do little for him. At last, Jean seems to recover, and he scolds the servants for having been so concerned. With sudden energy, he makes plans to take a trip to England.

After his luggage is packed, he takes a cab into Paris. To while away the hours before train time, he visits a wine cellar frequented by English tourists and has dinner at an English restaurant. Realizing afresh that the pleasure of travel lies only in the anticipation, he drives himself home that same evening and thus avoids the banality of actually going somewhere. At one stage of his life, Jean loved artificial flowers. Now he comes to see that it would be more satisfying to have real flowers that look artificial. He promptly amasses a collection of misshapen, coarse plants that satisfy his aesthetic needs.

Jean’s energy, however, soon dissipates. His hands tremble, his neck pains him, and his stomach refuses food. For weeks, he dreams away his days in a half stupor. Thinking of his past, he is shocked to realize that his wish to withdraw from the world is a vestige of his education under the Jesuits. Finally, he becomes prey to hallucinations. He smells unaccountable odors, and strange women keep him company.

One day he is horrified to look into his mirror. His wasted face seems that of a stranger. He sends for a doctor from Paris. After the physician gives him injections of peptone, Jean returns to something like normal. Then he mistakes a prescription for a dietary supplement for a recipe for an enema. For a while, Jean is entranced with the notion of getting all his sustenance through enemas. One more activity, eating, would therefore be unnecessary.

Then the doctor sends his little artificial world crashing; he orders Jean to leave his retreat and live a normal social life in Paris. Otherwise, his patient will be in danger of death or at least of a protracted illness with tuberculosis. More afraid of his illness than of the stupid world, Jean gives the necessary orders and glumly watches the movers begin their work.

Bibliography

Antosh, Ruth B. Reality and Illusion in the Novels of J.-K. Huysmans. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. Rejects the opposition of realism and Decadence, which has dominated criticism of Huysmans. Antosh sees Huysmans’s work as presenting a tension between the real and the imaginary. Includes an excellent analysis of memory in Against the Grain.

Baldick, Robert. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1955. Rev. ed. Sawtry, England, Dedalus, 2007. One of the most authoritative biographies of Huysmans available in English. Contains valuable information about the writing of Against the Grain. In the new edition, Brendan King has extensively revised and updated Baldick’s notes to discuss new developments in Huysmansian studies.

Burton, Richard D. E. “Church Prowling: The Back-to-Front Pilgrimage of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884-1892).” In Blood in the City: Violence and Revelation in Paris, 1789-1945. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. Burton describes how French history from the start of the French Revolution until the end of World War I was filled with outbursts of political violence. He analyzes works by Huysmans and other French writers to show how this violence is reflected in nineteenth century literature.

Cevasco, G. A. The Breviary of the Decadence: J.-K. Huysmans’s “À rebours” and English Literature. New York: AMS Press, 2001. Cevasco examines the significant influence of Huysmans’s Decadent novel upon English literature, including the works of Oscar Wilde and James Jones. Includes bibliography and index.

Ellis, Havelock. Introduction to Against the Grain, by J.-K. Huysmans. Translated by John Howard. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1969. A fascinating reaction to Huysmans’s novel from an important English psychologist.

Friedman, Melvin J. “The Symbolist Novel: Huysmans to Malraux.” In Modernism, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978. Defines the Symbolist novel as being more concerned with words than with reality. As such, Against the Grain has great significance in the development of the modern novel.

Hafez-Ergaut, Agnès. Le Vertige du vide: Huysmans, Céline, Sartre. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. A comparison of the work of Huysmans, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Hafez-Ergaut maintains that the three French authors are united in their spiritual and philosophical quests and their use of sordid elements to describe the traumatic experiences of modern times.

Lloyd, Christopher. J.-K. Huysmans and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Defines the fin de siècle period as it applies to literature, and charts in detail the influence of Against the Grain on other writers.

Schoolfield, George C. A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884-1927. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Schoolfield’s analysis of thirty-two European and American Decadent novels and novellas begins with an examination of Against the Grain in chapter 1 and discusses that novel and Huysmans’s other works throughout the book.