Against Nature (26 page)

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him, that only the impossible belief in a future life could bring him peace of mind.

A fit of rage swept away like a hurricane all his would-be resignation, all his attempted indifference. He could no longer shut his eyes to the fact that there was nothing to be done, nothing whatever, that it was all over; the bourgeois were guzzling like picnickers from paper bags among the imposing ruins of the Church – ruins which had become a place of assignation, a pile of debris defiled by unspeakable jokes and scandalous jests. Could it be that the terrible God of Genesis and the pale martyr of Golgotha would not prove their existence once for all by renewing the cataclysms of old, by rekindling the rain of fire that once consumed those accursed towns, the cities of the plain? Could it be that this slime would go on spreading until it covered with its pestilential filth this old world where now only seeds of iniquity sprang up and only harvests of shame were gathered?

The door suddenly flew open. In the distance, framed in the opening, some men in cocked hats appeared with clean-shaven cheeks and tufts of hair on their chins, trundling packing-cases along and moving furniture; then the door closed again behind the man-servant, who disappeared carrying a bundle of books.

Des Esseintes collapsed into a chair.

‘In two days' time I shall be in Paris,' he told himself.

‘Well, it is all over now. Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! – Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!'

I had this feeling about certain of the bottles stored in the bin marked
Against Nature
when the time came for me to uncork them.

And, with a certain melancholy, I am trying to recall, as I leaf through these pages, my possible state of mind when I wrote them.

In those days Naturalism was at its height; but this school of writers, which was to fulfil the invaluable service of placing real characters in precise settings, was condemned to repeat itself over and over, and endlessly to go over the same ground.

Naturalism had no room – in theory at least – for exceptions; it thus confined itself to the portrayal of ordinary experience, striving, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who came as close as possible to the average person. This ideal had been achieved, in its way, in a masterpiece which – far more than
L'Assommoir
– was the embodiment of Naturalism: Gustave Flaubert's,
L'Education sentimentale
. For those of us who met at the ‘Soirées de Medan', this novel was a bible; but little came of it. It was perfectly achieved, and even Flaubert himself could not write another book like it, so in those days we were all reduced to roaming around it and exploring more or less beaten tracks.

It must be admitted that Virtue is an exception here on earth, and so it was excluded from the Naturalist framework. Not having the Catholic conception of the fall from grace and of temptation, we were unaware of the struggles and sufferings from which Virtue springs; the heroism of the soul, triumphing over life's pitfalls, escaped us. It would not have occurred to us to describe this struggle, with its highs and lows, its wily attacks and feints, or the able allies standing at the ready deep in their cloisters and often far from those the Devil is assailing. Virtue seemed to us the attribute of individuals without curiosity or bereft of sense, and in any case of too little emotional interest to treat from an artistic point of view.

This left the vices; but there was little left uncultivated in that field. It was limited to the terrain of the Seven Deadly Sins, and even then only one of these – the one that set itself against God's sixth commandment – was more or less available to us.

The others had been dreadfully over-harvested, and there were barely any grapes left to pick. Avarice, for example, had been pressed to its last drop by Balzac and Hello. Pride, Anger and Envy had been dragged through every Romantic publication, and these dramatic subjects had been so unrecognizably distorted by theatrical overuse that it would have taken real genius to reinvigorate them in a book. As for Gluttony and Sloth, they seemed more suited to being embodied in minor characters and to fit supporting roles rather than lead roles and prima donnas in novels of manners.

The truth is that Pride would have been the most magnificent of sins to study, with its infernal ramifications of cruelty to others and false humility, or that Gluttony, dragging in its wake Luxury and Sloth and Covetousness, would have provided the material for surprising investigations, if these sins had been scrutinized by a Believer with the lamps and the torch of the Church; but none of us was ready for this task; so we had no alternative but to chew over the easiest offence of all to dissect, the sin of Luxury in all its forms. And God knows how we chewed over it, but this kind of roundabout ride was short-lived. Whatever we thought up, the novel could be summed up in these brief lines: knowing why Mr so-and-so committed or did not commit adultery with Mrs so-and-so. If one wanted to be distinguished and make one's mark as an author of the most fashionable sort, one made this sexual transaction occur between a marquise and a count; if on the contrary one wanted to be a popular novelist, a writer with all the tricks of the trade, one set it up between a low-class suitor and a common working girl; only the setting was different. The distinguished tone seems to have prevailed with today's reader, for I see that at
present he favours not plebeian or bourgeois love-affairs but continues to relish the waverings of the
marquise
as she goes to join her seducer in some small apartment whose appearance changes according to the decorative fashions of the day. Will she? Won't she? This is called a psychological study. Personally I have nothing against that.

However, I admit that when I happen to open a book and find the inevitable seduction and the no less inevitable adultery, I hasten to close it, having absolutely no interest in finding out how the promised idyll will end. Books with no documentary value, books which teach me nothing, no longer interest me.

When
Against Nature
appeared, that is, in 1884, this then was the situation: Naturalism was wearing itself out going over the same ground. The reservoir of insights that each writer had built up, drawing on himself and on others, was beginning to run out. Zola, who was a great designer of theatrical scenery, got along by painting bold and more or less accurate canvases. He was very good at suggesting the illusion of movement and life; his protagonists were bereft of soul, quite simply impelled by impulses and instincts, and this simplified the task of analysis. They moved about, accomplished a few summary acts, and their bold silhouettes peopled the settings that became the main characters of his dramas. In this way he celebrated the markets, department stores, railways, mines, and the human beings caught up in these settings played only secondary or walk-on roles. But Zola was Zola, that is to say a somewhat unwieldy artist, but with powerful lungs and heavy fists.

The rest of us, less broad-shouldered and seeking a more subtle and more truthful art, must have wondered whether Naturalism was not coming to a dead end, and whether we might soon be running into a brick wall.

To tell the truth, these reflections only came to me much later. I was vaguely searching for ways out of a dead end in which I was suffocating, but I had no fixed plan and
Against Nature
, which liberated me from a dead-end literature by letting me breathe again, is a perfectly unconscious work, put together without preconceived ideas, without plans for the future, without anything at all.

It came to me first as a brief fantasy, in the form of a bizarre short story; I imagined it partly as a counterpart to
A Vau-l'Eau
transferred to another world; I had pictured another Mr Folantin, better-read, more refined and richer, who had discovered in artifice a diversion from the disgust of life's petty torments and the Americanized manners of his day. I envisaged him soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century,
among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings.

And, as I thought about it, the subject grew, requiring patient research: each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, flowers, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant.

The strange thing was that, without my realizing it at first, I was drawn by the nature of my work itself to study the Church from a number of angles. It was in fact impossible to trace one's way back to the only unblemished times humanity has ever known, to the Middle Ages, without realizing that the Church was at the centre of everything, that art existed through her and by her. Not being a believer, I looked at her, a little defiant, taken aback by her greatness and her glory, wondering why a religion which seemed to me to have been created for children could have inspired such marvellous works of art.

I prowled around her, groping my way, guessing more than I could see, piecing together a whole for myself from the odds and ends I found in museums and in books. Today, after surer and more extensive investigations, as I look over the pages of
Against Nature
which deal with Catholicism and religious art, I am aware that this minute panorama, painted on the pages of notepads, is accurate. What I was painting then was succinct; it lacked development but it was truthful. Since then I have simply expanded and elaborated my sketches.

I could certainly sign my name at the bottom of the pages of
Against Nature
about the Church, for they seem indeed to have been written by a Catholic.

Yet I thought myself so far from religion! I did not imagine that it was only a short step from Schopenhauer, whom I admired beyond reason, to
Ecclesiastes
and the
Book of Job
. The premises about Pessimism are the same, only when the time comes to reach a conclusion, the philosopher disappears. I liked his ideas about the horror of life, the stupidity of the world, the mercilessness of destiny; I like them also in the Holy Scriptures; but Schopenhauer's observations lead nowhere; he leaves you, so to speak, in the lurch; in the end, his aphorisms are only a herbarium of dry plaints; whereas the Church explains the origins and the causes, indicates the conclusions, offers remedies. She does not limit herself to giving you a spiritual consultation, but treats and cures you, whereas the German quack, once he has proved the incurability of your condition, simply sneers and turns his back on you.

His Pessimism is nothing other than that of Scriptures from which he has borrowed it. He has said no more than Solomon, no more than
Job, no more even than the
Imitation
, which long before him summed up his philosophy in a single sentence: ‘In truth it is a wretched thing to live on this earth.'

From a distance these similarities and differences are clearly pronounced, but in those days if I noticed them I hardly lingered over them; the urge to conclude did not tempt me; the route marked out by Schopenhauer was smooth and scenic, I drove calmly along it with no desire to learn where it led. In those days I had no clear grasp of when debts would need to be repaid, no apprehension of when the end would come; the mysteries of the catechism seemed to me childish; besides, like all Catholics, I was completely ignorant about my religion; I did not grasp that all is mystery, that we live only in mystery, that if such a thing as chance existed it would be even more mysterious than Providence. I did not accept the idea of suffering inflicted by a God, I imagined that Pessimism could console elevated souls. What stupidity! It was precisely this that lacked evidence, that, to use a term beloved of Naturalism, had no ‘human document' to support it. Never has Pessimism been of any comfort to those sick in body or in soul!

After all these years, when I reread these pages where such resolutely false theories are presented as true, I smile.

But what strikes most as I read is this: all the novels I have written since
Against Nature
are there in embryo in this book. The chapters are, in fact, only the starting-points for the volumes that followed them.

The chapter on the Latin literature of the Decadent period was, if not developed, at least more searchingly explored when I wrote about liturgy in
En Route
and
L'Oblat
. I would republish it today without any changes, except in the case of Saint Ambrose, whose thin prose and turgid rhetoric I still dislike. He still seems to me as I described him then – a ‘tedious Christian Cicero' – but, by contrast, as a poet he is charming; and his hymns and those of his followers contained in the Breviary are among the most beautiful that the Church has preserved. I should add that the admittedly rather unusual literature of the hymnal could have found a place in the reserved compartment of this chapter.

I have no more taste for the classical Latin of Maro [Virgil] and of Chick-Pea [Cicero] now than I did in 1884; as in the days of
Against Nature,
I prefer the language of the Vulgate to the language of the Augustan age, even to that of the Decadent period, stranger though it may be, with its gamey stink and its marbled streaks of mould. After disinfecting and rejuvenating the language, in order to address a category of so far unexpressed ideas, the Church created a range of high-sounding expressions and exquisitely tender diminutives, and seems to
me to have fashioned for herself a language far superior to that of Paganism, and Durtal still has the same views as Des Esseintes on this subject.

The chapter on precious stones I took up again in
La Cathédrale
, but from the perspective of the symbolism of gems. I gave life to the lifeless stones of
Against Nature
. I do not for a moment deny that a beautiful emerald may be admired for the sparks that glitter in the fire of its green water, but if one is unaware of the language of symbols, is it not a silent stranger with whom one cannot converse and who is herself silent because we cannot understand her speech? But she is more and better than that.

Without going so far as to say, like the old sixteenth-century writer Estienne de Clave, that precious stones, like human beings, propagate by means of a scattering of seeds in the womb of the earth, one can certainly say that they are meaningful minerals, substances that speak; that they are, in a word, symbols. They have been seen in this way since earliest antiquity, and the figurative language of gems is one of the branches of a Christian symbolism completely forgotten by priests and laymen of our own day and which I have tried to reconstitute in outline in my books on the basilica of Chartres.

The chapter in
Against Nature
is thus only superficial and skimming the surface. It is not what it should be, an array of jewels from another world. It is made up of gems more less well described and more or less well displayed. That is all, and it is not enough.

The paintings of Gustave Moreau, the engravings by Luyken, the lithographs by Bresdin and Redon are as I still see them. I have no modifications to make to the arrangement of that little museum.

As for the terrible
chapter VI
, whose number corresponds, without any preconceived plan, to that of the commandment it transgresses, and for certain parts of
chapter IX
which may be classed with it, I would obviously not write them again in the same way. It would at least have been necessary to explain them more thoroughly in terms of that diabolical perversity that, in the shape of sexual depravity, takes over people's exhausted minds. It seems indeed as if nervous disorders opened fissures in the soul through which the spirit of Evil enters. There is an enigma in this that remains unexplained; the word ‘hysteria' resolves nothing; it may be enough to define a physical condition, to denote the uncontrollable turbulence of the senses, but it does not get at the spiritual consequences that fasten upon it, or especially, the sins of duplicity and falsehood which nearly always take root in it. What are the ins and outs of sin-laden malady? The sick one, his soul as it were possessed by a sort of domination entrenched in the disorder of
his wretched body – how much is his responsibility lessened? Nobody knows: on this subject, medicine talks nonsense and theology remains silent.