Customer Reviews

Against Nature

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Frankly, I wrote this commentary on Margaret Mauldon's translation of A Rebours to divert the buyer to a much better one, that is, the classic translation by Robert Baldick, also available from Amazon.com.
This new modernized translation is supposed to be truer to the french original text, but it is not so. It's thorny and crammed with clashing sentences and too many words. Take for instance the prologue,
"Cramped and confined within those old frames where their great shoulders stretched across from side to side..."
Now compare this with Baldick's version which is more to the point,
"Imprisoned in old picture-frames which were scarcely wide enough for their broad shoulders.."
It's also obvious that Baldick's translation is much truer to the musical language that Huysmans wrote his book in. In fact Baldick mentions it in his preface to the translation. His assesment of A Rebours is also valuable for the understanding of the author's accomplishment.
The only thing valuable in this poor substitute is the appendix which consists of Huysmans' preface to A Rebours written twenty years after the novel. But to compare Baldick's translation, written in the late fifties, with this grammatical scramble is like comparing a nightingale's song to a cricket's. I sincerely recommend you rather buy Baldick's translation over this one.

Against Nature utterly captivated me. Never before had I read a novel that dared throw any and all narrative convention to the winds with such mad abandon. Huysmans himself thought the public would have no interest in it, and to be perfectly honest, I can't for the life of me see why he wasn't absolutely correct. And yet, for some reason, I just couldn't get enough. Chapters that do nothing more than expound upon Des Esseintes's favorite painters or Latin writers amount to little more than reader abuse, but I found them endlessly fascinating regardless. No doubt part of this was nothing more than shocked delight at the sheer perversity of the little experiment, but I don't think my interest was entirely predicated on novelty--Huysmans is actually quite a good writer (I read the Penguin edition, as translated by Robert Baldick, for what its worth), and Des Esseintes's whims, desires, and recollections are often so extravagantly bizarre as to be quite funny. And then, of course, there's the 'plants' chapter, which is quite probably the most grotesque and macabre thing I've ever read. It's a bit of a shame that it's stuck right in the middle of the book, as it does make the subsequent material seem a bit anticlimactic, but then again, if Huysmans had any sort of regard for narrative structure, he wouldn't have written this diabolical piece of work in the first place. If Zola was Pink Floyd, Huysmans was the Sex Pistols. You need to read Against Nature.

Assuming that this "Viking" edition is in fact the Penguin edition or some relation, this is by far the preferred edition of Huysmans' strange masterwork. The translation by Robert Baldick, Huysmans' most trustworthy biographer, is not only NOT slightly censored like the earlier English one reprinted by Dover... it's also a much livelier read. Which is important because, after all, there's not much of a conventional plot here; the story such as it is depicts the gradual enervation of a decadent aristocrat as he exhausts the pleasure to be found in every pleasure he can think of.

Huysmans was literature's great complainer, capable of finding the misery and ennui in any situation-- even bachelorhood in late 19th century Paris. And while the book is regarded mainly as a manual for decadent living (Dorian Gray kept it by his bed), full of recherche and recondite indulgences, Huysmans' depiction of the unending quest for novelty and sensation is also drolly funny at times-- as in the scene in which an impotent des Esseintes takes up with a ventriloquist in the hopes that she can get a rise out of him by impersonating her own husband threatening violence outside the door while they copulate

I'll assume that you already know about this book, or can get what you need from the other reviews. I'm just focusing on the edition: the 2004 Penguin Classics reprint of Robert Baldick's 1956 translation but with a new introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (and a new cover, of which more anon).

Now, I think of myself as a Huysmans 'completist,' and would have thought that I have a copy of just about every edition. But I've never seen this one in a bookstore (even here in NYC) and only came across it by accident on Amazon. As other reviewers have noted, the translation, though older, is much more readable than the Oxford Classics one. The latter has far more annotation, especially for the surveys of Latin and French "decadent" literature, but you really don't need that for more than your first reading. This is the edition to get if you plan to revisit the work from time to time, as I did (and do).

Why else? Well, the Oxford edtion is printed on cheap, thin paper that browned almost immediately, and produces irritating "see-through" effects; the cover, of my copy at least, instantly creased itself rather than folding, making it hard to hold (and ugly). This Penguin is on bright, white paper, and with larger type (though consequently is also a bit larger in size). Des Esseintes would approve!

But the main reasons are two: the intro, and the cover. McGuinness does a much better, or at least more interesting, job of relating the book to its time and ours, bringing in far more interesting tie-ins (Breton's "black 'umour" rather than "Huysmans's anality", Marianne Faithful saying she'd only bed guys who read the book, rather than Oxford's cringe-inducing comparison to Kurt Cobain(!)), though unlike Terry Hale in his introduction to the Penguin La Bas, he doesn't pick up on the fact that Huysmans' job at the "Interior Ministry" was actually comparable to our Dept. of Homeland Security rather than the traffic bureau.

But it was the cover that first led me to notice this on Amazon. It's a wonderful portrait by Franz Kupka (not Kafka!), "The Yellow Scale," which depicts an amazingly burnt out aesthetic type, wrapped up in a yellow robe, yellow book (of course) in one hand, and cigarette burning out in his other limp, yellow hand. Against the rest of the regulation black Penguin Classics cover, it's quite striking, and far more original than the old cover, Whistler's portrait of Montesquiou, or Oxford's Salome.

(While McGuinness's intro makes a good case for "Against the Grain" as a better title, beware of the Dover edtion under that name: it's old and expurgated, as is the illustrated one from the '30s). Buyer beware!)

In short, this is the one to get for the true Huysmaniac!

Who is Des Esseintes? A misanthrope, a learned man, a skeptical Catholic, a Schopenhauerian pessimist, an aesthete of the highest order. What is Des Esseintes like? Serious, thoughtful, anxious, emotional, reclusive, self-centered. Why do I know so much about this man? Because this 'novel' is really a description of Des Esseintes, a thorough investigation of his mind, his desires, his doubts, his dreams, his tastes and his illusions. It is a study so personal and penetrating as to be necessarily autobiographical, yet most of the book is not really about the man himself, but rather his tastes in literature, art and other fine things.

The work reminds one variously of an essay on aesthetics and a treatise on the modern condition, as we learn about Des Esseintes' thoughts and (more importantly) the emotions awakened by reading Petronius, Baudelaire, Dickens or Schopenhauer, or studying the paintings of Goya, Rembrandt, or Moreau. He lives in an isolated house far from company, and spends his time arranging his surroundings in predetermined ways: shelfing his priceless books, hanging his morbid paintings on the wall, color co-ordinating his furniture with extreme care, sorting his liqueurs. He does not want the world created by nature and history, he wants to create his own life and environment from scratch with only aestethic, philosophical and emotional considerations. This is what makes him decadent: the longing of a civilized man to create a new world all to himself, focusing single-mindedly on details, letting sensuality, form, and beauty reign over rules and rationality.

At the same time, Huysmans/Des Esseintes clearly struggles with the main problem of modern moral philosophy: how to live in a world without the order imposed and the meaning endowed by faith in absolute truth, transcendence and immortality. Having been taught in a Jesuit college, Des Esseintes longs for the sacraments and security of the Church, but is at the same time repulsed by its absurdities and full of doubts about its message. He seeks consolation in the pessimism of Schopenhauer, in denying life and the worth of human beings, in imagining evil and repugnant acts against all that is sacred. Yet this fierce movement back and forth between extremes never leads him to a higher unity and synthesis, it serves only to make him more neuralgic, dyspeptic and malevolent. He is too much of a perfectionist to be satisfied, too disturbed to be happy.

I love this decadent French novel! Hilariously absurd. The non-hero locks himself away in his bizarre home, and spends every other chapter commenting on his tastes in literature, music, art, cologne, food, etc, while experimenting with his effete senses and trying to make life bearable amidst his world-weary wealth and need for sublime excitement. (Many a modern disaffected suburban youth may be able to identify with this.) In so doing he simply becomes more withdrawn and ill, demonstrating the impossibility of living apart from real life. I especially like the part where he makes up his mind to go to London, but finds all the Englishness he needs by simply sitting the train station, and retires home again. One other critic said of the author and critic Huysmans that he would either commit suicide or retreat into the arms of the church. Indeed, he did the latter, having found that renouncing everything left him with nothing. This is a novel for those with sophisticated taste, and a keen sense of the absurd.

Against Nature is a book that deserves its own category. The book touches upon issues and conflicts that all intelectuals (both young and mature) face. The book is well written and is a great complement to someone that is experimenting with decadent type literature. I highly recommend this book. I also recommend that you check out some of the literature that the author recommends in the book, both the ones he praises and the ones he detests. In addition this book is what kept Dorian Gray up and knowing this linkage gave this book a great reputation. In addition one should remember the authenticity of this book as the other never expected it to do well, one could see why after reading it.

In the early 21st century, the primary reason for reading this unusual novel is historical: it exerted a phenomenal influence on the taste of late 19th century France and England. Although there is good reason to suspect that Huysmans's considered Des Esseintes a rather farcical creature, hordes of young aesthetes took his literary and artistic judgments with the utmost seriousness, apparently not noticing that his "experiment in living" was an abject failure.

One reason for many to read this book is the fact that the primary model for the character of Des Esseintes was the mildly notorious Robert de Montesquiou, who had the distinction of having been the inspiration for two memorable characters in French fiction. His portrait, in fact, adorns the cover of the Penguin Classics edition. Comte de Montesquiou also was the model for the memorable Baron de Charlus in Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME.

One of the important cultural functions that A REBOURS played in late 20th century France and Britain (it exerted virtually no influence in Germany or the United States) was to provide a laundry list of what was cool and what was not for the would be effete dandy. As a result, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Poe, Wagner, Redon, Moreau, Pascal, Schopenhauer, medieval sacred music, exotic flowers, artifice, affectation, and various and sundry similar artists and items made the cut, while Beethoven, Kant, Balzac, natural beauty, the social virtues, love, and a host of other seemingly worthwhile beings and ideas did not.

What is astonishing is how many people take Huysmans seriously, while he himself certainly intended this as a bit of a joke. Des Esseintes is, on any conceivable standard, a bore and a fool. His pretensions, his self-indulgence, his all-consuming narcissism cannot possibly be used as the basis of a life philosophy, and the vast bulk of his cultural pontifications are borderline absurd. His misanthropy is so extreme that it is impossible to have the slightest degree of sympathy with him. The complete revulsion when he sees the face of another human being is obviously intended to be comic in its effect. When, at the end of the book, his project to live completely apart from all others ends in failure, Huysmans clearly means this as a practical judgment on such foolery. The effect from beginning to end is meant to be satirical and comical. That so many took it seriously is nearly as funny. Huysmans's himself lived a life completely antithetical to that of Des Esseintes's, working his entire adult life in a government ministry, a career bureaucrat. And there is no indication that he would have liked to trade places with Des Esseintes.

The book is, however, quite fascinating. One would imagine it nearly impossible to write a 200-page novel that dispenses almost entirely with plot and instead details the rather silly and self-indulgent judgments about everything. It is not an easy read. I fought hard the temptation to skip three or four pages at a shot. His long, drawn out discussions of completely forgotten and minor figures lead to unpleasant reading, and even the discussions of famous and well known figures are scarcely better. Some eccentric details are marvelous, such as Des Esseintes's insistent that his female servant don a nun's costume when she goes to the shed in the back, to preserve the illusion that he is in a monastery, or the ship's dining room that he has built inside his regular dining room.

This utterly scented novel by the 19th century authour Joris-Karl Huysmann is in my opinion one of the best books written.

Revolving around the dandy, and aesthete des Esseintes who eschews modern life of that period, and everything common this book is somewhat like a detailed ledger. In the beginning he reminisces about his mistresses, and past life as a social butterfly

His artistic interests include Gustave Moreau, and the infamous prints of Goya which depicted the evils of people.

Huysmans' "spiritual autobiography" (Camille Paglia) is vastly disturbing and hilariously funny. Somehow both Decadent and proto-Modern, it straddles the 19th and 20th centuries with its deft combination of languid aestheticism and world-weary alienation, bound up in a dyspeptic, rapturous, cynical, obsessive and intensely self-revealing package. Baldick's translation is undoubtedly the best, allowing full rein to Huysmans' precious, overripe prose. Paglia's chapter on Huysmans in her Sexual Personae (indeed he appears throughout the massive work) is a nice companion piece.