Against Nature (A Rebours) (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
The hipsters are right: society is trying to destroy you--not your body, or your mind, but you, the part which makes an individual. That's what society is: the aspect of human life that is not the self, but is communal, the part that causes humanity to behave like a colony of ants.As brilliant Nietzsche scholar Rick Roderick pointed out, advertisement is the opposite of psychotherapy. The idea of therapy is to take things that are hidden within your brain--biases, prejudices, hangups, fears, habits--and to bring them to the surface, to make you aware of them so they can be processed, or even gotten rid of. The idea of advertisement is to plant in your brain things you don’t realize are there, but which change the way you think. We conflate Coca Cola with comfort and familiarity, the Nike swoosh with athletic ability, Mickey Mouse with childhood; our idea of how relationships work is based on yoghurt commercials.Today, we marvel at the idea that people used to memorize The Iliad and recite it aloud--but when you’re ninety years old, you’re still going to remember songs about alka-seltzer, plastic dolls that pee, cartoon ninjas, and the commercial theme of your local water park. Think for a minute just how much space in your brain is devoted to information like that, stuff you don’t know you remember until suddenly, you hear it again. Now, think of how else that space could have been used: what would you rather you knew instead of those jingles? French? Greek philosophy? How to rebuild a carburetor?That’s how culture gets to you: it surrounds you all the time, trying to make you into a copy of itself, and you and everyone in that culture are a part of that system. We shame other people, we guilt them, we tease them, we make suggestions, we tell them little infectious phrases that are supposed to be helpful. Look over the comments on Goodreads some time and you’ll see it at work: people trying to shut up dissent, repeating mantras and plugging their ears, and who clearly think that insulting and belittling people is the same as discussion. But why shouldn’t they? It’s how they were socialized. Then, when people confirm our biases--when they align with our groupthink--we listen and nod, we praise them, we tell them ‘it’s so nice to talk to a person who understands’. It’s the confirmation of that tribal need to all be in the same boat together, on the same course.Then there are systems within that society--churches, military complexes, corporations, stores, entertainment industries, political groups--all of which are trying to sway you, trying to sway society, promoting their own best interests as if there were nothing artificial about it. It’s why we accept inequality, why we accept the massive scale of deaths every day from car accidents and untreated addicts and poor people who can’t afford medical treatment--we may not always like it--but we still accept it.Really, it’s pretty remarkable that we retain any individuality at all. I mean, how strong must that impulse be to reject all these things that people tell us we are supposed to be? We are reminded of this shit every day by books, movies, adverts, and assholes on the bus. Sure, we internalize it to some degree, but for a lot of us, we retain an iconoclastic streak that stops us from being taken over completely.As Roderick describes it, the mind is constantly under siege: we put up walls to keep out the overwhelming force of culture. Sure, some gets in, but our defenses keep a lot out. Ideas can be infectious, they can be viral, they pray on our hopes and fears, our prejudices and insecurities, but over time, we build up better and better defenses to recognize and root out these ideas.So when hipsters reject something popular, there’s a reason they have that knee-jerk reaction: they feel society’s fingers reaching into their skull and they instinctively flinch. That's why they don’t want to look like other people, or listen to their music, they don’t want to be advertised to or pandered to. They have constructed a sense of identity for themselves--what makes them them--and when they see someone else doing the same thing, it threatens their sense of identity.They’re wrong, of course, but their response makes a certain kind of sense. They’ve traded one aspect of culture for another. They are a subculture, but one that still feeds into and supports the main culture. They are rampant consumers, early-adopters who are constantly looking for new ways to spend their money because as soon as other people start liking what they like, they have to dump it all and buy new stuff. Every subculture becomes co-opted and sold back to the people for a profit, and the way corporations have maneuvered hipsters is brilliant. If they stop consuming fashion, products, information, politics, music, and craft materials, they lose their identity. And so, of course, we see that they are just as dominated and defined by the culture as the ‘sheep’ they so assiduously mock. They are conformists.That’s always been the problem, though, way back to the Dadaists: if you are obsessed with rejecting mainstream culture, that means you have to follow mainstream culture closely enough to know what it is doing, so you can then reject it. All your actions are defined by that culture, it’s just that instead of following the example, you do the opposite, which makes you just as predictable--which means you are just as useful to the culture. Predictable ants are useful ants.But of course, the real iconoclast doesn't identify themselves with certain bands or aesthetics, with clothes or objects. They create identity based around ideas--and society doesn't want to co-opt ideas. When society takes a movement and sells it back to us, the ideas are the first things stripped out.The iconoclast doesn’t look left and right to see what everyone else is doing before they act, because their actions aren’t defined by conforming to or rejecting what others do. They have an internal motivation, a philosophy which tells them what is worthwhile and what is not, and why.Real iconoclasts are cool. They are fucking amazing. They change the world, they have an ineffable magnetism. They control minds, they guide fashion, so that in a century, you can look back and say ‘we think the way we do, write the way we do, dress the way we do, because of a handful of people’. And what tends to define them when they are alive is a near-complete lack of recognition. Society attacks them in all the standard ways: guilt, mockery, critique. Society is uncomfortable, it wants to invade that mind, to break the siege and to remake the person as a useful ant under the status quo. This often kills the iconoclast, or drives him mad, or makes him bitter and misanthropic--sometimes all of the above.But misanthropy and bitterness are mind-killers. They halt thought. They turn the thinker into a self-prejudiced creature who is no longer willing to think or change, who has been so embroiled in the frustrating stupidity that surrounds him that it stops him in his tracks. That is the trap into which Des Esseintes falls in Huysmans' experimental novel, called A Rebours in the French, variously translated in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature.Des Esseintes is the false iconoclast, the man who is obsessed with being different for its own sake, but who does not know himself. The long lists of his preferences and dislikes that fill the book are, for the most part, empty opinions. They do not point to some grander philosophy or understanding.Again and again, he tells us that he despises this or that thing because a merchant's wife likes it. His sense of identity is threatened--he has built it around these objects and movements, and his fondest wish is to keep them all for himself. That is why he locks himself away, alone, and refuses to see anyone. Yet, even then, even in complete isolation, it is not enough to let him discover himself. Still, alone and unobserved, his likes and dislikes are defined by an outside culture which he claims to have rejected, but which seems to rule his every thought. His attempted iconoclasm becomes mere contrarianism. It is the misanthropy of the problem child who does things he knows he musn't do--not because he enjoys them, but out of a desire to betray the image of authority he has created in his mind.One of the more curious threads in the book is the effect which his religious education has had on him: though it has not made him a faithful man, it has inspired him to reject man and the world as worthless and flawed, and to instead spend his time living for another world, a false world which exists only in his mind.He is the prototype for the man who sits and plays Warcraft alone all day, every day, until he loses his job, his friends, and his family. Des Esseintes harps again and again on a desire to live in an artificial world of his own making--a virtual world. It does not really give him pleasure, it is just a way from him to avoid the world. It is a life without risk, a life where he does not have to confront anything uncomfortable or challenging, which will never hazard upsetting or drawing judgment from anyone--a pointless life of perfect safety which he romantically paints as fraught and challenging, because it allows him to imagine himself as the noble struggler against hardship--but solely on his own terms.Yet, ironically, he also complains about how there is 'nothing genuine' left in the world, how it is all artificial--for which he decries it--despite the fact that he spends the rest of his time trying to live in another artificial world of his own making. Clearly, artificiality is neither the problem nor the solution, but a mere cover-up for the real issues.His aesthetics are a replacement for faith, which explains why his house is filled with religious iconography repurposed into furnishings for his museum to himself--and yet, not himself, for throughout the text, though he spends his fortune to pursue every idea which seems to him pleasing at the time, none of it satisfies him--indeed, it drives him mad, makes him sick--it destroys him. He is not pursuing his own desires, he is not following his own thoughts and needs, and so he is never satisfied. Instead, he tries again and again to create identity through external trappings, like a college girl who wears a beret in order to feel worldly.These trappings invariably break down around him--they disappoint him, they do not live up to his hopes. He sits and recites opinions he already holds, and fearing disappointment, seeks nothing new. The whole situation is summed up in the fact that, when he thinks on the horror of being forced to return to society, he laments that he will not be able to meet any men like himself, men who share his opinions. He is not interested in engaging conversation, or in intelligence or brilliance, he does not despair of meeting remarkable people, he is upset because he cannot meet himself--or rather, the self he imagines himself to be.Indeed, he will almost certainly meet himself when he rejoins society, for it is full of people just like him, who put on a false front to try to convince themselves that they are interesting, but who live hollow lives, providing nothing to the world, leaving nothing of worth to the future, and doing nothing in which they can take the least pride. The unexamined life is not worth living--which is why it destroys him.If this had been a send-up of such a ridiculous fool, it could have proven a remarkable and wondrous work--it worked well enough for Carlyle, Cervantes, and Sterne--but, though there are certainly moments of irony and contradiction throughout, overall, the message seems to be that Des Esseintes is meant to be taken in earnest--that we are meant somehow to respect or find interesting the cobbles of his life, his scattered opinions, his false identity.Again and again, the text harps on these facts, repeats them, wallows in them. Each book Des Esseintes mentions is described by its color, the make of its binding, the type of dye used, the provenance of the ink within, the typeset, but all this detail is to no purpose. It is not like reading a treatise of William Morris' and coming to understand a particular aesthetic of how a book should be bound and why--it is a mere litany of excess, the dull and trashy kind of overspending which marks the parvenu.Certainly, there are some interesting scenes within the book--the famous tortoise episode actually achieving some real insight (and satire), but overall, the book is terribly dull--a piling on of detail upon detail without much central notion to hang them on. Some might argue that the theme is the gross emptiness of decadence, but I don't think the work's scattered repetition does very much to explore it.It isn't surprising that the work proved influential to men like Wilde, who had come to concentrate so fully on form over function that their wit consisted mostly of switching about common words in convoluted ways until they no longer meant much at all, an absurd style which lacks real bite--and that was the overwhelming impression I took away from Huysmans' work: that for all the fine words and lengthy lists and precise descriptions, there simply wasn't enough conceptual structure underneath to make it hang together. It was a pile of Gothic trappings whose sheer weight broke through the roof of the old church to lay all in a shambles on the floor.
Flabbergastingly weird. This can either be the best reason to give this book a chance, and also the greatest grounds for avoiding it like the plague. Just as a quick ‘heads-up’ for anyone fishing for a better review than my own, this book is titled “A Rebours” in its native French, and I’ve seen this title translated into English as both “Against Nature” and “Against the Grain”, (and while I’m partial to “Against Nature”, I’m sure the Bad Religion fans of the world can better appreciate the latter). I’m sure there are reviews out there under all three titles should this one leave you yawning, scratching your head at whatever I’m attempting to convey, or both.tI was lucky enough to come across this book by chance at a used bookstore, and after reading the brief description offered by Penguin on the back of the book, I was sold (at the reasonable rate of fifty cents). This compelling blurb by the publisher clued me in to several interesting things which may or may not have any bearing on the book. Firstly, Against Nature” is referenced (though not by title) by Oscar Wilde through the strange tastes of his impeccably debauched ‘dandy’ Dorian Gray. Next, the summary also states that the story concerns the ‘exotic practices and perverse pleasures of Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, a wealthy aesthete in search of an elusive ideal’, and while that is ridiculously vague, it seemed pretty alluring at the time. Lastly, they swear that translator Robert Baldick managed to preserve the richness and complexity of author Joris-Karl Huysmans’s style, and we all know that Robert Baldick has never failed to deliver. Yea right, as if I can tell the difference between the translating talents of Robert Baldick vs. Anyone Else, as if there is any chance that I myself would be able to ascertain what Huysmans intended to say compared to the translation. Mr. Baldick managed to work this tale into English, so for what it’s worth, I’m giving his translation a perfect score, although I’d have preferred an edition in my native tongue of Gibberish (though I assume there wouldn’t be many changes). tSince I was already committed to reading another book at the time of purchase, I simply checked around online to see what I was in store for when I finally tackled “Against Nature”, and walked away disheartened. (Note: These were the dark days before I knew about GoodReads, so my reviews were largely from Amazon.) Reviews tended to describe the book as unreadable, ridiculous, solipsistic to the extreme, piss-poor, and there were innumerable references to this being the quintessential ‘fin de siecle’ literary work. Fin de siecle, eh? Step 1: Find out what the hell that means. Obviously, as I need the sturdy Robert Baldick to hold my hand through the reading and my peer group isn’t renown for our cultural effrontery, this term means absolutely nothing to me, although I’ve spent enough time bellying up to the bar to know that La Fin Du Monde means something along the lines of ‘the end of the world’. As it turned out, this expression (fin de siecle) basically summed up the book, the opulent excesses and steady atrophy of one era giving way to a new era, replete with newfound hope and firmly rooted in reality and practicability. tIn “Against Nature”, this changing of cultural guards is placed under the microscope, individualized, and analyzed through the actions of des Esseintes, the last scion of a once-noble family which is nearing extinction. This whole concept of a new, promising era spawning from the decay of a previous one is personified in the struggles of des Esseintes, who has grown tired of contemporary society and retreats into seclusion, where he attempts to create the aesthetic ideal the people at Penguin promised me. This ideal, as I interpreted it, was twofold: his distaste for all naturally-occurring beauty and perfection, in favor of sterile and gaudy reproductions, and his dissatisfaction with prevailing tastes in art and literature, his own preferences generally run contrariwise to current opinions. Ignore the nay-sayers; contrary to the indictments that this book does not contain a story and is completely senseless and unstructured, I found “Against Nature” to be both a very understandable story (if a trifle odd) and a decent experiment in decadent allegory. I also thought it was interesting that the conflict can be described as Man Versus Everything; des Esseintes has a bone to pick with just about anything, society, nature, himself, you name it, the only thing which he doesn’t have unresolved issues with is the ‘ideal’ which he attempts to create, although, as the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that this lifestyle is incompatible with his own human nature, which made me feel like there was also an element of dark satire involved.tThe story begins with a brief run-down on des Esseintes’s upbringing and his eventual discontent with the decadent, bourgeois Parisian life he’s been living thus far; beginning with page one our main man is already at the end of his proverbial rope, disgusted with the snobbish idlers that make up his elders, and sickened by the numbskullduggery of his peers. While carrying on his disgusting charade of assimilating to this culture, des Esseintes is secretly relocating, he’s purchased a new residence outside of bustling Paris in Fontenay-Aux-Roses, where he plans to make a clean break from all humanity, including his own, and pursue some meaningful and intellectual introspection. This is where the book gets weird, and continues being weird basically until the end.tWhen I call this weird, I’m not trying to advocate that this book is unreadable or senseless; the style employed is just remarkably unusual, in that every assessment des Esseintes makes in the construction of his ideal setting is elaborated upon in painstaking detail and depth. A veteran interior designer would open a vein if subjected to d.E.’s thought processes and reasoning when selecting a color scheme for the various rooms in his property at Fontenay, much less his unique decisions concerning furnishing each of these rooms, each a study in one absurdity or another. The common bibliophile would sit, astounded, as he outfitted each bookcase with his custom-made editions, which he spares no expense either printing or describing. Gallery owners would fall short for a suitable description of his art collection and remain perplexed by his choices of arrangement and lighting upon each piece.tI initially found myself amazed at what I was reading, as I’d never come across anything written like this, with even the minutest aspects considered and pondered for what seems like eternity. This grew into complete fascination when d.E. begins to experiment and test the limits of the fraudulent existence he has begun weaving, and the analysis of the contents of his new environment. As he pores over his library, commenting on each volume and giving his insight, I could draw a parallel to the nature of des Esseintes to some of the ‘indie-rockers’ I’ve met in my day, who are capable of ruminating on 500 cds by 500 bands I’ve never heard of and making references to their stylistic roots, membership, and live-performance idiosyncrasies. I’d personally like to see a modern-day version of this book told from this angle, and I think it would be fitting (and easy) since, with the advent of the internet, withdrawal from the ‘real’ world isn’t particularly difficult, and a think a full desertion would be possible for one as wealthy as des Esseintes. I can imagine it now: ‘He considered the lyrical post-punk sensibilities which Ben Deily took with him from his multi-instrumentalist days with the Lemonheads before dissolving into obscurity with Varsity Drag, and how the resurrection of that unadulterated and raw wholesomeness was now being practiced and perfected by acts inspired by his efforts, such as Breaking Pangaea on their heartfelt e.p. “Take Apart the Words”, only to be painfully mangled by former collaborators posing as artistes in screaming nightmares such as Straylight Run’. On second thought, not only should someone else write that story, I might not want to read it after all…tHis assessment of his Latin and French works is stymieing, but his experimentation takes all this to a new level. In an effort to make everything as false and unnatural as possible, he sets up aquariums with fake fish, orders untold quantities of rare flowers in order to have them flawlessly reproduced, dabbles with bizarre perfumes, and as a sort of crowning masterpiece (in what becomes a parable for himself) he has a turtle encrusted with jewels, which dies under these ersatz conditions. In a move brilliant and ridiculous, he also reconstructs symphonies with liquors, taking sips of gin to emulate the reedy note of a clarinet, a hefty shot of Jager to represent the double-bassoon, a jigger of sweet, sweet rum to relate the fantastic notes of a picolo, and downs half a bottle of flavorless polish vodka to simulate the punch of the timpani. Wrong notes on the xylophone are indicated by a punishing swig of Malort.tOf course, with all this genuine strangeness, lack of human contact, and the completely unnatural living conditions, there’s a price to pay; the question is whether or not des Esseintes is ready to abandon his ideal and return to the norm, embracing the comparative innocence he once possessed; can he willingly abscond from this counterfeit existence he’s created?tI recommend this for anyone looking for something new; I’ve personally never read anything like it before or since. And I've really only touched upon the first half of the book.
What do You think about Against Nature (A Rebours) (2004)?
Des Essientes, a debauched noble at the end of his line, in rebellion against the modern world, humanity, and nature itself (the title is variably translated as "Aganist the Grain" or "Against Nature"), sells the family manor and retreats to a country house in order to languish in exquisite hypochondria and nervous affectation. What strength is left to him he expends obsessing over art, literature, design, and even gardening, in dissertations on artificiality and garish morbid splendor that compose most of the book. It is clear that, much as Huysmans seems to mock Des Essientes' finicky, maladapted nature at times, protagonist and author share the book's aesthetic inclinations* and these are what makes this 1884 "novel" a defining work of Decadence, of the entire fin-de-siecle era.As such, it's a terribly useful record of cultural context, but fortunately the book's pleasures extend beyond the academic and into sheer voluptuous descriptive prose. Unsurprisingly, Des Essientes expends much enthusiasm on a few writers whose incidental prose exceeds their overall literary vision, and this may be the case here. The narrative seems to exists mainly (and is indeed sufficient to) entirely submerge the reader in Des Essientes' overwrought decorating daliances, symphonies of liquour and perfume, orchid gardens, and faux ship-cabin dining chambers. And these sections are as absolutely splendid as they should be. Admittedly, the literary discussions, more removed from immediate detail, leave me a little colder. Especially when he veers into Latin Catholic theological manuscripts, a subject of which I have next to no knowledge or interest in. Yet they exert a strange magnetism for both protagonist and author. Of course, as they observe, blasphemy (reading "against nature" as "against god") only has real meaning from one who is at root a believer.*Aesthetic inclinations which, all too often, I also share to some extent. My own interest in Decadence begins with the fantastic proto-surrealist work of Symbolist painters like Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, both of whose paintings are of special importance to Des Essientes. Specifically, he hangs two Moreau renderings of Salome (who danced before Herod to procure the head of John the Baptist for her mother) in his sanctuary. Moreau painted many versions of this scene and story, but I believe this is one of the (amazing) paintings specifically referred to in the text:I've collected all of the art referenced in this novel that I could find here.
—Nate D
ao arrepio - no original À Rebours ou a Bíblia do Decandentismo - é publicado em 1884, provocando uma viragem na corrente literária da altura - o Naturalismo, de que era representante o (meu) Grande Émile Zola - e dando início ao Modernismo. É o livro amarelo que "envenena" Dorian Grey (de Oscar Wilde) e que ele considera responsável pela sua transformação e que o leva à perdição.Era um romance sem enredo e com uma única personagem. Trata-se de um mero estudo psicológico de um determinado jovem parisiense que passa a vida o tentar compreender no século XIX todas as paixões e métodos de pensamento pertencentes a todos os séculos, excepto ao seu... O estilo em que estava escrito era trabalhado e ao mesmo tempo claro e obscuro, recheado de gírias e arcaísmos, de expressões técnicas e de paráfrases elaboradas... (Excerto de O Retrato de Dorian Gray, sobre ao arrepio)Não gostei e não compreendi a personagem des Esseintes. Por isso não me conseguiu envenenar, nem seduzir, apenas aborrecer...
—Teresa
Sebastian wrote: "Ana wrote: "Mersi pentru info; stii cumva daca editia de la Minerva din '78 e mai buna?"Îmi pare rău, dar despre aia nu ştiu nimic. Însă pot spune că versiunea de la Penguin e destul de completă,..."Aaa, nu stiam de aia de la Pinguin. Mersi de pont :D
—Sebastian
