There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool (Nature) has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface.
So basically, it is this whole thing. Huysmans was a novelist in the 19th century whose early works were part of the naturalistic school which sought out beauty and truth in the mundane, but later in his life this changed. He began to feel cramped and redundant inside the confines of nature and wished to supersede it through artifice. Maybe this would give us a more visceral or concentrated glimpse of beauty? Enter what is known as the “Decadent” literature. This school found its poster child in Dorian Gray, and this is how I came to hear about it. On a reread of the Picture of Dorian Gray, there was this quote:
It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him … It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own …
With such a recommendation, I had to add it to my list. The above quotation is a great summary. The main character(Des Esseintes) is an eccentric with a fortune whose only goal is to attempt to be the least bored person in the world. We follow along as he picks up various art forms, cultivates a refined taste for them and then slowly becomes disenchanted with them. He is interior designer, fashion designer, perfumer, art critic, book critic, music critic. While there are some interesting anecdotes from Des Esseintes (like the time he bought a turtle and attached a bunch of jewels to it to complete the look of a room in his house) on the whole this book was not very interesting to me. Do you remember that boring part in Picture of Dorian Gray, where Dorian is on his way down, and he spends all this time picking out draperies and selecting specific jewels for various items? Well imagine expanding that one chapter into an entire book and that is pretty much what this book is. Des Esseintes becomes Huysmans’ mouthpiece to air his opinions. Some of which are interesting if you are aware of what he is talking about, like Goya for example, and yes I would be “the first idiot” in this quote…
Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.
But there are also long sections comparing various esoteric religious writers to each other which meant next to nothing to me. That being said, his views are compelling and sometimes funny, like when he talked about the church being given communion bread that was made with illicit ingredients, which invalidated the transubstantiation rituals.
Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact.
It seems to me that Huysmans’ desire of escape into the artificial tracks with modern man. Yes, there are those who wish to return to nature, but they are the minority. Most are happy to integrate into virtual worlds. [in fact, one could argue that books themselves act as an artificial environment] The phrase “pictures don’t do it justice” will not be said forever. The fact that Des Esseintes was a neurotic, doesn’t speak too highly of modern man, on the other hand his neuroticism has a charm to it, much like the decadence movement as a whole. He despises theatre set pieces that imitate luxury with cheap materials, so he builds his bedroom in imitation of a monk’s cell but with the most expensive materials. He goes into a phase where he collects plants, starting with artificial plants and ending with real plants that look artificial. The decadence movement has long since died out, but to me it feels like a great explanatory lens when looking at society. In conclusion the ideas in the book were pretty interesting, but I think I would have preferred an essay or a short story, because there were large sections in this book that to me could be skipped, as I currently have no desire to read up on 15th century religious polemics.