Part 1, The Devil Will Find Work
I have yet to discover a clear account of Etienne Carjat’s wounded hand, so I don’t know if the blood trickled or gushed. Were bones impacted or was it an historically exaggerated scratch? I want to believe that the sword went through, but not cleanly, that the blade disturbed the assumed order of small bones, making a place for itself. And the blood - it seeped from top and palm, curdling around hairs, slowly converting the familiarity of skin into a bloody unease, a foundation for the history of transgressive art.
The myth that artists had taken over the city developed in the aftermath of the Commune of Paris and retains a profound and lasting impact in the contemporary art world. The notion of the artist as an anarchistic catalyst of social change became the foundation for a series of philosophical and stylistic transformations that artists are still sifting through. Myths of artistic freedom, anarchy within the structured excitement of the city, lured Rimbaud to Paris, to his relationship with Verlaine, and ultimately to the party and argument that became the backdrop for Carjat’s stabbing. Freedom was a serious proposition, and young Rimbaud took it to an extreme.
The absolute freedom of the individual is society’s greatest horror. The social pact, the agreement that citizens make to trade aspects of freedom for a sense of security, cannot withstand complete freedom. The horror of social violation is echoed in the invention of the flaneur, a word initially used to describe a regimen of walks designed to occupy the minds and time of the newly emergent middle class. But the term flaneur became an attack on laziness, the social withdraw of the decadent. The devil will find work for idle hands to do. This bromide embodies the social anxiety around the developing middle class. Given the equation of leisure time and depravity, decadent art and literature became the frayed edges of a society ever on the verge of unraveling.
Of the decadents, perhaps the most shocking images come from J. K. Huysmans, whose novels explored topics that remain taboo more than a century later: the fictionalized, satanic underworld of Paris - delighting in tales of exalted excrement and ritualized murder. A Rebours, translated as either Against Nature or Against the Grain, is a tale of complete withdraw from the social world in favor of a solitary existence dedicated to sensory pleasure: a complete focus on aesthetic detail, the willful corruption of youth, orgies, homosexuality, syphilitic deterioration and pedophilia all located within a world of exotic plants, texts, images and color.
A Rebours begins with the main character, Des Essients, staring down a hall filled with family portraits, noticing that the personage depicted in each painting becomes increasingly frail as his eyes track from past to present. He then notes his own fragile condition and determines there is no use in perpetuating the failed proposition of his family lineage. He sells off the family estate, and all its furnishings, converting ancestry into capital. He has no concern for establishing a secure legacy, a good family for stable social advancement. Des Essients revels in the notion that he’ll have exactly enough money to finish out his days in precisely the manner he chooses. He embraces the decadent withdraw from communal life and retreats into indulgence, satisfying his senses in pleasures unimagined throughout the history of strong men who amassed the fortune Des Essients would spend on himself.
Huysmans abandons the most basic convention of fiction writing: narrative arch. His exhaustive vision of sensual adventure required another type of ancestral betrayal, that of his literary predecessors. He doesn’t dwell within the tricks of light and shadow that defined the moody psychology of the Gothic novel. He delivers a processed psychology, taking pains to precisely record the intellectual labor of decision making. He built a detailed portrait by tracing the minutia of how Des Essients draws a particular conclusion. Huysman favors decimating the family over the ghostly haze of sublimated betrayal familiar to the Gothic novelists.
Huysmans deals with concrete decisions about aesthetic worth. He posits conclusions, concrete decisions about the determined value of specific commodities. He indulges in the luxury of sensory impressions created by all items entering his home, paintings, colors, texts, foods, sounds, servants, etc. He controlled the analysis of his own decisions and the reward for the reader is the lengthy, unimpeachable rationale for each book on the shelf, for each decision in his home’s design and décor, and every pleasure incurred within. He writes with singular concentration on the intellectual labor involved in choosing a wall color, factoring in the varied and combined effects of trim color, natural and artificial light.
These pages of the novel offer a deep analysis of the decision making process, something most often left to impulse. The reader ultimately understands Des Essients’ exact rationale how he decided to curate his home. His attention to detail is as thorough as one expects of the Gothic Novel, yet he doesn’t allow for the psychological impressionism that the Romantics would have appreciated. The power of Gothic Literature exists in the netherworld of sublimation, the inscrutable, tensions built upon omissions and intentional misalignments. The power of Huysmans comes from an opposite direction, carefully directed signification, making sure that the readers’ tastes don’t interfere with his narrative momentum, replacing the facade of social convention with a roadmap to specific conclusions.
Des Essients decides in Chapter 5 that the architecture of his home in Fontenay is missing a kinetic element, something that will offer a periodic surprise of chance juxtaposition. He decides to have the shell of a living tortoise encrusted with precious metals and stones. Once suitably decorated, the tortoise is allowed to roam about the house offering a pleasant sensation of variety within the otherwise stagnant aesthetic of his home. Ultimately the weight of adornment destroys the animal, and the chapter ends uneventfully, though with the animal’s death. The life of the tortoise is not lingered on or offered as an empathetic device, it simply provides that an experiment of design has failed.
Kinetic decor faltered. The tortoise, reduced to an element of design, became stationary. The embrace of pleasure at the cost of all else is, perhaps, Huysmans’ most brilliant metaphor for decadence as it predicts Des Essients’ eventual demise without creating for a distinct narrative arc, a specific chain of events leading to an anticipated conclusion. It is never revealed what became of the tortoise shell, if it was merely discarded, if the animal rotted in place, or was stripped of flesh and his shell salvaged for decorative purposes, if the cabochons and gold were recycled into another piece or if the whole mess was simply discarded.
Understanding the tortoise is important because Des Essients’ frivolity exhausts his humanity. He provides a portrait of society on the edge of the abyss. He’s lost any sense of the value of life, even his own. This divorce of right and wrong makes him, perhaps, more amoral than even Gilles de Rais. For Des Essients, empathy has no currency in pleasure.
Huysmans’ world reflects the nightmare of anxiety surrounding the middle-class: the iniquitous associations of leisure time, positing the possibility of a crumbling social pact, a growing segment of society dedicated to their own pleasure above any sense of social need or responsibility. The horror of the tortoise, the ease with which the value of life is discarded for personal enjoyment precisely represents the threat of syphilis: the price of moral misstep, societies fragile nature.
Huysmans, the writer who willingly reveals the precise train of logic for why each thing in his fictional setting is the exact way that it is, falters on the subject of pedophilia. The male child is the instigator if not the aggressor, and in Chapter 9, Des Essients has only to agree to the child’s advances. The description is truncated, so the reader only knows that the two wander off together and that the events of that afternoon are recalled with sexual relish throughout Des Essients life. There is no description of sexual mechanics, or even a vague sense of which type of sex acts occurred. This is the only scene in which Des Essients is not in complete control, the active creator of his own world. He finds his limit passively participating in a child’s game. The pleasure of those moments returns in haunting excitement, but Des Essients needs a level of distance from this ultimate transgression. He separates himself from the act, unable to register the ethics of an afternoon with a young boy.
This scene exposes the limits of cultural thought, the farthest extent that a fictional character can stretch social convention, and ultimately represents a new model of ancestry. Huysmans feels the need to pass something along to a new generation, but elides traditional modes of reproduction. He is chosen by his successor and the ensuing unspecificity of the text becomes generative. Des Essients might not extend his lineage through the heredity, but Huysmans left room for readers to expand their thoughts into ever darker corners. The pedophilia scene is a sketch tipped into a text fleshed out to a photorealistic extreme. The differential of detail implores readers to color the pederastic scene in their own minds. To make sense of the scene, the viewer must interact with the full force of a prospect that Huysmans couldn’t.
Contemplating what is missing, what the decadent refused to write, extends the novel into the minds of its readers and requires them to think through the darkest proposal of social devastation. Huysmans recognized that youth is the future of intellectual perspectives, that social transgression is generationally based. Even though Des Essients was without family, his ideas maneuver themselves into successive generations through the space of the novel. Des Essients created a future by planting his seed in a child, Huysmans passed his ideas into the future in a body of leaves and dots of ink.