Huysmans and Surviving Modernity

By Professor G. Royper

Within the span of about six months, I discovered that two of my childhood friends were about to get married.

I was flabbergasted, mostly because the choice of woman and the relationship itself had been kept entirely secret from me. One friend could not even tell me himself, he had to have another mutual friend break the news that the knot was going be tied in just three weeks.

It wasn’t long until I learned why this had been kept so secret, and why my friend had been so guarded about his personal life for the past two years. As a White man, he had chosen an Asian woman as his future spouse. Readers of this Substack will know that we are pro-White and strongly opposed to miscegenation. My friend was as well shortly before he met this woman, and he had even reprimanded his sister for a similar relationship. Without even my knowledge, an invisible wedge had been driven between us and was pushing apart a friendship that went back decades.

For my other friend, the problem was less ideological. He had simply chosen a normie who he knew I wouldn’t like. The effect was the same though, and I was kept in the dark until nearly the very end. It is easy for me to sympathize with their decisions not to let me know, as doing so would have meant facing the uncomfortable reality that we no longer aligned on fundamental values, and therefore would struggle to have a friendship as close as the one we shared before.

At a certain age, most people have probably gone through an experience similar to this many times. Along with losing old friends, it becomes ever more difficult to replenish their ranks. Making friends as an adult is notoriously hard. We’ve probably all experienced a moment where we believe that we’ve found a kindred spirit, only to have our hopes crushed when an irreconcilable difference is discovered. After leaving childhood, beliefs and lifestyles solidify and become far more consequential. A child may disagree with another but their lack of responsibility for anything means that it’s of little consequence. As an adult, these differences become much harder to ignore.

The difficulty is magnified much further if one chooses not to conform to the pervading “normie” culture in society. Most people can at least form superficial friendships with others if they both like FanDuel and boating. If one does not have interest in these societal glues, then even these “friendships” become difficult. The more one strives for the transcendental, the more one will be separated from others, as one begins to recognize the ways in which nearly every group and community falls short. Truth and great art do not conform themselves to any one ideology. In the Middle Ages, this may have led some to join a monastery.

In Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans, our hero of the modern age creates what he believes to be a modern solution. Lacking any strong religious faith, Des Esseintes creates the closest approximation to a transcendent ideal that he can within his own house, by filling it with his eccentric and particular taste in art and literature, and then shutting himself off from humanity as much as possible.

Ultimately, his experiment fails, and Des Esseintes is forced to rejoin the real world. Upon being faced with this reality, Des Esseintes breaks into rage and despair:

“Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!” cried Des Esseintes, angered by the ignominy of the spectacle he had evoked. This cry of hate broke the nightmare that oppressed him.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “To think that all this is not a dream, to think that I am going to return into the cowardly and servile crowd of this century!” To console himself, he recalled the comforting maxims of Schopenhauer, and repeated to himself the sad axiom of Pascal: “The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon.” But the words resounded in his mind like sounds deprived of sense; his ennui disintegrated, lifting all significance from the words, all healing virtue, all effective and gentle vigor.

He came at last to perceive that the reasonings of pessimism availed little in comforting him, that impossible faith in a future life alone would pacify him.

An access of rage swept aside, like a hurricane, his attempts at resignation and indifference. He could no longer conceal the hideous truth—nothing was left, all was in ruins. The bourgeoisie were gormandizing on the solemn ruins of the Church which had become a place of rendez-vous, a mass of rubbish, soiled by petty puns and scandalous jests. Were the terrible God of Genesis and the Pale Christ of Golgotha not going to prove their existence by commanding the cataclysms of yore, by rekindling the flames that once consumed the sinful cities? Was this degradation to continue to flow and cover with its pestilence the old world planted with seeds of iniquities and shames?

The door was suddenly opened. Clean-shaved men appeared, bringing chests and carrying the furniture; then the door closed once more on the servant who was removing packages of books.

Des Esseintes sank into a chair.

“I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith.”

Against Nature mainly recounts Huysmans’ problems with the world, and provides little in the way of solutions. Huymans would later convert to Catholicism, and his future novels go into that more in-depth. Another author that Huymans admired, Barbey d’Aurevilly, read his work and concluded that Huymans’ diagnosis of society left with him with only two remedies:

In his review, Barbey d’Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling, “After Les Fleurs du mal, I told Baudelaire, ‘it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross.’ Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross.

While I have not yet read Huymans’ later works and cannot yet comment on his solutions, I’d like to highlight some parts of the book that show the difficulties that the longing soul of Des Esseintes experiences while trying to fix his problems through sheer material ingenuity.

Early in the book, Des Esseintes describes how he will only enjoy his sanctuary at night, while sleeping during the day. The point of this is so that he can revel in the particular pleasure of being active at night and feeling that the world is dead and tired around him. The reason that this is so pleasurable is probably because of the feeling that the world around him is no longer capable of holding him down, enfeebled by its own fatigue. Des Esseintes wants to escape from the burdens of the world, but ends up discovering entirely new and more abstract problems.

In this, he parallels one of his observations about his age. The society of the time (1890’s France) does everything it can to alleviate physical suffering, but at the same time has invented new horrors like universal conscription, where men are plucked from their homes, subjected to grueling conditions, and commanded to legally kill others. Whatever one thinks of the morality of war in general, having the average person go through this trial inevitably acts as a stimulant for immorality. Reduced physical suffering and amplified moral suffering creates a sort of contradiction, and a major theme of the book seems to be how attempting to eliminate suffering in one area tends to leads to new sufferings in another area.

Another example of this is the nature of prostitution. With utilitarianism and commercialism being the dominant forces of the age, men naturally yearn for more sentimentality and love in their relations with women to make up for this. Hence, the old and official brothels disappeared and in their place rose the tavern and its wenches. Men did not directly pay these women for their “services,” they wined and dined them, with the illusion of a chase and a need to “win” them. These foolish men did not realize though that they were spending far more money for an ultimately inferior product, with the women selling themselves no differently from the prostitutes of the past. The efficiency of modern society meant the rise of “idiotic sentimentality” in other areas such as this.

Des Esseintes laments that there is even a cosmic balance to the nature of suffering. He observes that the rich are really no happier than the poor, and have the same passions, worries, and paltry pleasures. He attributes this to the fact that one who suffers more develops a greater resilience to suffering, and so a minor pleasure is magnified by contrast, evening things out. In the same way, one who suffers little has no resilience, and therefore minor sufferings are amplified to an extent that the scale balances for them as well. This inversion becomes especially pronounced for a sanguine soul, for whom the petty vexations of life weigh upon to such an extent that they would even prefer a great tragedy.

Despite criticizing modernity for contradicting itself in this way, Des Esseintes becomes a very similar sort of contradiction. He withdraws from society and therefore removes the many irritants that cause him suffering every day, but his isolated and artificial lifestyle leads to a significant decline in his physical and mental state. Des Esseintes consoles himself with the work of Shopenhauer, convincing himself that suffering is inescapable. The pessimist philosophy does little though to satisfy his resentment at a world that seems rigged against the human race.

More than anything, Des Esseintes is frustrated by the fact that reality does not meet his very high standards and the transcendent ideal that they strive for. Even actual experiences are considered to be far inferior to his imagination, and he believes that even pleasurable experiences only seem that way with hindsight. As such, he nearly perfectly recreates the experience of a sea voyage in one of his rooms, without all of the bother of actually going on one. His entire lifestyle is an attempt to create a quasi-monastic life, without all of the discipline that goes into being a real monk.

Des Esseintes ponders how this escapism is natural when a man of talent is forced to live in a time that is dull and stupid, and reflects on how artists yearn for other ages, times where they imagine they would have been more in accord. This thought is tempting, but it contradicts Des Esseintes’ own observations on how sufferings replace sufferings. These past times can be similar to the experiences that only seem pleasurable with hindsight. Artists highlight the virtues of these times because of how much they want reality to meet their ideal. Seeing this ideal in a time that actually happened makes it seem like a possible reality. This art can be helpful in inspiring man to strive for an ideal, but it rarely reflects the whole reality of the time.

That being said, there is an argument to be made that there were greater immaterial virtues in the past, perhaps because the greater physical suffering of the past reduced moral and spiritual suffering. Des Esseintes becomes an ironic example of this, as his house includes paintings of his Gallic knight ancestors. Surrounded by physical suffering, these knights probably embraced an ideal of chivalry and piety that is little reflected in Des Esseintes. Des Esseintes, with no physical suffering himself and little in his society, is misanthropic and totally disconnected from God, both in his lapse from the Church and in his disdain for nature and mankind. He might imagine himself to have been more in accord with the Middle Ages, but he is doing little to strive for those virtues that make the era so appealing.

In the origins of Des Esseintes’ problem are the seeds of its solution. He attributes his love of eccentric creativity and aesthetics to his religious education, which fostered his aspirations towards a higher ideal. Despite being secular, Des Esseintes reads plenty of religious literature, and tells himself that he only has this attraction to the Church because of the great art and literature that it preserved, especially with old latin poems that Des Esseintes is especially fond of. What Des Esseintes does not yet realize though is that the superiority of his artistic taste can only be superior at all because it is more closely approaching something perfect and divine. Thomas Aquinas realized this as well, and he used it as a proof for God:

The fourth proof arises from the degrees that are found in things. For there is found a greater and a less degree of goodness, truth, nobility, and the like. But more or less are terms spoken of various things as they approach in diverse ways toward something that is the greatest, just as in the case of hotter (more hot) that approaches nearer the greatest heat. There exists therefore something that is the truest, best, and most noble, and in consequence, the greatest being.

Without a perfect target to approach, there would be no way to objectively define one work of art as superior to another.

Des Esseintes ends the novel in a state of extreme frustration and despondency, as he is thrust back into the disappointing world around him. He won’t find his perfect ideal in this world, nor will he find comfort in giving in to the baseness around him. Facing some form of suffering is unavoidable, and running away from the failures of the world will not solve Des Esseintes’ problems. The torments he faces are somewhat different from those of the chevaliers, but suffering is suffering and the courage and devotion of those chevaliers can be employed to respond to any form of it. If Des Esseintes can weave his love of beauty and creativity together with a better understanding of why they are valuable, he may be able to forge the armor that will allow him to withstand the spiritual batterings he will receive upon his return to the Babylon on the Seine.