Catholic Idiom and the Dialectic of Reading: A Meditation on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Novel À rebours

Abstract

Huysmans’s novel À rebours can be seen as an epitome of the dialectic implied by the term peccata lectionis: reading can only come into its own through certain ‘sins’ inherent to it while possibly compromising it. Such ‘sins’ are involved in the decision of the novel’s single protagonist and anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to withdraw into the solitude of his country house to live a life dedicated to aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. While celebrating his own eccentric fancies and artificiality of taste, the protagonist’s days of decadence, in their very antagonism towards both society and nature, are spent pursuing what can be called ‘reading of culture’. As ‘the reading of culture’ and its dialectics in the novel extend to and draw upon a wealth of references to the Catholic cultural tradition, the latter leads to a textual logic and a particular kind of lectio. It is in keeping with the novel being widely regarded as a harbinger of the ‘Catholic turn’ in its author’s career, Des Esseintes, at one point of the narrative, comes to explore the so-called ‘Catholic idiom’. Whereas his critique is aimed at 19th century Catholic writers in France and their indebtedness to the definitive rhetoric of the French Grand Siècle, the ‘Catholic idiom’, its particular textuality and the ‘reading of culture’ that is manifest in it may lie elsewhere in Huysmans’s novel itself. These likely reside in the textual logic of catalogues or ‘compendia’, that is, the listing of names within a category, which evokes mediaeval textual practices. The catalogue or ‘compendium’ as a genre within Huysmans’s novel fulfils the artificiality and vigour of the protagonist’s ‘reading of culture’—and the whole dialectic of the peccata lectionis.

1. Introduction

Alongside the invention, the various systems and the practice of writing, which have attracted much attention from scholars of culture, reading is also beset with its own problems. Just like writing, reading is also difficult to place in the context of the historical trajectory of civilisations. How fundamental is it to their birth and to their continuation? Is it early enough or late enough either as a rare or a widespread practice to be assigned either to the flourishing of a culture or to cultural decline? No doubt, it is easy to dismiss reading—and thereby the class of people who have dedicated their life to it—as plagued with too much mediation, artificiality and even isolation when compared to activities like fighting, hunting, or tilling the ground. One is even tempted to think that once reading as a skill becomes democratised in a mass culture, the latter is to lose its way, as it were, mired in its own growing complexities and sophistication, and it is in the course of decay. We tend to forget, however, how much physical strength and cultural vigour a sustained practice of reading is premised upon. The focus, the interest, the dedication and the discipline involved in the process require considerable energy levels, and it might be exactly the decrease in the duration and quality of reading that is indicative of a culture’s declining health.

It is to various ways and scenes of reading that the following study is dedicated, in conjunction with an enquiry into a manner of literary narrative that can be termed ‘Catholic idiom’. The ‘Catholic idiom’ as understood by this study is a textual form and a way of using language in which one can carry out what can be called a ‘reading of culture’; it arose with a wave of Catholic renewal in French culture at the end of the 19th century; this idiom draws on Antique and especially Mediaeval literary forms of lists, enumerations and ‘compendia’, which can mould the perusal of the most varied cultural phenomena.

Such a combination of interests—reading and the ‘Catholic idiom’—could hardly ever arise from more than a few literary works; the fact that this study derives these interests from an encounter with Joris-Karl Huysmans’s fin-de-siècle novel À rebours entails other ones, too, like the theme of decadence as a cultural attitude, the related topic of guilt (which, if issuing from the practice of reading as such, can truly be dubbed something like a peccatum lectionis), and the question of culture itself to which this novel is poised to give rise—so much so that it becomes one of those rare texts that come to perform ‘a reading of culture’.

2. The Vicissitudes and Dialectic of Lectio: Can Pure ‘Virtue’ or ‘Sin’ in Reading Actually Exist?

If someone happened to come upon the idea of reading implying certain ‘sins’ or reading itself being a ‘sinful’ activity, they could not avoid clarifying where the ‘virtue of reading’ (virtus lectionis) could reside if there existed anything as such. What would it look like if exercised in all virtue? It is not hard to guess that such a kind of reading would be practised entirely in the service of others; it would not do anything apart from serving society; it would, in an ideal case, have, as its subject, society itself—indeed, it would read, as a text, nothing but society.

Although there cannot possibly be many literary or scholarly works that get even close to this ideal, there is a book that lives up to it as much as any book ever could: a collection of newspaper articles and a subsequent analysis of their subject by the French philosopher and literary scholar Roland Barthes published in 1957 and entitled Mythologies (Barthes [1957] 2012). If Barthes’s book can justifiably be termed a ‘reading of society’ or ‘reading of culture’, it is not for a metaphorical reason, in the way in which any book delving deeply into society or culture can be dubbed as such. The basic assumption of Barthes’s book is that society is permeated through and through with a vast semiological system. In Barthes, language, either as text or as ‘speech’ becomes a model for understanding the most varied social phenomena and, consequently, for ‘reading society’ as it is rendered a multifaceted system of signs. Again, it is important to note that Barthes does more than a ‘discourse analysis’, giving preference to instances of ‘discourse’ as society’s most significant dimension, and focusing on language and texts in a narrow sense. Rather, he engages with a great variety of platforms, objects and media, ranging from the spectacles and conventions of the theatre of wrestling to the petty concerns of the astrology column in Elle magazine, from the iconography of Ancient Roman characters in the movies to the phenomenology of the ‘seamless’ assembly of a new Citroën model. Indeed, Mythologies is a singular panorama of the French culture of the 1950s.

To understand why Mythologies is what it is, a particular kind of reading, it is necessary to take a look at its central concept of ‘myth’. Myth is a kind of ‘speech’ and a kind of message; it is a secondary semiological system that feeds parasitically upon a primary one consisting of a signifier, a signified and a sign as a bond of these. This primary semiological system is made use of and appropriated by myth which renders it, as a whole, a ‘new signifier’ or what Barthes terms as ‘form’, employing it in the service of a ‘new signification’ (Barthes [1957] 2012, pp. 223–24). Apart from the collection of dozens of articles in the first half of the book, each of which is dedicated, without theoretical elaboration, to a particular myth, one of the examples Barthes analyses in detail in the second half is that of a black soldier in French uniform on the cover of a magazine which shows him saluting before the tricolour (Barthes [1957] 2012, p. 225). The image is not only a primary semiological system of a simple image of patriotism which just happens to use a black soldier as a signifier. Rather, there is myth as a secondary system at work here appropriating the image of patriotism and suggesting that the black soldier, in spite of the crimes of France’s colonial past, should be obliged and honoured, like any of her citizens, to serve the nation. This is an illuminating example to demonstrate that ‘myth’ is not only a semiological system in Barthes, but also the enactment of what he calls ‘bourgeois ideology’ making use of the idea of ‘nation’ for its own purposes. This ideology does its utmost, according to Barthes, to ‘depoliticise’ its myths and its power by showing them in a guise as ‘natural’ and ‘ahistorical’ as possible. In Barthes’s view, it pervades everything.

The whole of France is steeped in this anonymous ideology: our press, our films, our theater, our pulp literature, our rituals, our Justice, our diplomacy, our conversations, our remarks about the weather, a murder trial, a touching wedding, the cooking we dream of, the garments we wear, everything, in everyday life, is dependent on the representation which the bourgeoisie has and makes us have of the relations between the man and the world (Barthes [1957] 2012, p. 252).

Barthes’s book and its concept of ‘myth’ are a striking instance of a kind of reading which only acknowledges its own bright side or virtus, that is, its operation with a focus on society and for the sake of society. Let it be added that reading things only from the perspective of such virtus lectionis is perhaps particularly tempting for leftist intellectuals like Barthes and for all readers with a certain inclination towards self-righteousness.

Yet there is something that Barthes’s book fails to foster its readers’ awareness of. Reading can never unfold in the exclusive terms of virtue and in those of ‘the pure vigour of the intellect’ as Barthes’s reading of contemporary French culture, critique of ideology and perusal of the semiotics of society suggest. Not that reading could, taken as a whole process, ever escape a certain social engagement. It will never cease to imply, however, a kind of withdrawal from society and a kind of retreat into the solitude, selfishness and pleasure of a rarified attention. In other words, however conducive lectio is to ‘social virtue’ in the long run, it cannot help but exhibit something like ‘sinful behaviour’. Hence, reading involves the inescapable dialectic of a virtus peccatumque lectionis.

The protagonist of Huysmans’s novel À rebours (‘Against Nature’ in recent English translations, but the title also translates as ‘Against the Grain’), published in 1884 to become a key text of the decadent movement in literature and art, is probably the most memorable escapist in the oeuvre of a novelist whose narratives, for that matter, abound in escapes, withdrawals and retreats (McGuinness 2003, p. xxiii). Jean des Esseintes, the last scion of an old aristocratic family, decides to leave society and social life in Paris altogether and take up residence in a mansion outside the city in Fontenay-aux-Roses. What motivates Des Esseintes in his retreat is his disgust with the pettiness and mediocrity of society and his longing for a solitary existence which would allow him to indulge his literary and artistic taste and also his hunger for new sensations. He lavishes on the house the most eccentric furniture and decoration; the manor is to hold his strange and select collection of books and works of art. So pervaded is the novel’s narrative with sensual indulgence, individual pleasure and spitefulness against society (in fact, it is without any plot or story but memories and micro-events of this kind) that it can rightly be interpreted as an enactment of the peccatum lectionis itself—an enactment of reading for the reader’s own guilty pleasure—that stage of reading that is for its own sake. The interpretation of the figure of Des Esseintes as a reader already has, as it were, its own tradition in the postmodern criticism of Huysmans’s novel (see a summary in Rampton 2005), which not only has to do with the fact that the protagonist possesses a library and muses on books an awful lot of time. He is also a reader in a broader sense as, just as Barthes describes society and culture as systems of signs and thereby becomes a reader of these, Des Esseintes also treats and reads his fields of preoccupation as semiotic systems. It is a lectio to which the peccatum of Des Esseintes’ decadence so closely belongs, not only because the names of things make the impression, time and again, of replacing the things themselves that Des Esseintes so assiduously enumerates in his solitude (there is a certain parallelism created between Des Esseintes’s consciousness and that of the novel’s reader), but also because the protagonist explicitly considers his collections of objects such as flowers, perfumes and precious stones in terms of a language and a syntax.

There is one other particular feature of the peccatum lectionis in Huysmans that chimes with the virtus lectionis in Barthes. If Barthes’s practice of reading becomes a ‘reading of culture’ by virtue of the attention he pays to a most diverse spectrum of cultural phenomena, the reading of Des Esseintes should also be seen as such, even though their motives are diametrically opposed. While Mythologies is genuinely committed to contemporary culture in the 1950s, À rebours starts with the protagonist’s jadedness with contemporary fin-de-siècle culture and subsequent decision to abandon it—and it is precisely his, almost apocalyptic, consciousness of living at the end of culture and taking flight from it that makes him so sensitive to culture as such, taken, despite his elitism and his selection of what he deems best in culture, in a holistic sense. And this is the reason why Des Esseintes can hardly be viewed solely in the terms of a peccatum lectionis: as a ‘reader of culture as such’ and even as a ‘saviour of culture’ (cf. Brunel 1987, p. 21), even he, in his own ‘sinful’ way, shows a commitment to culture and thereby commitment to an alterity and to ‘others’. Just as ‘virtue’, when it comes to reading, cannot help but involve a moment of ‘sin’, peccatum lectionis cannot help but end up exhibiting some virtus.

When it comes to the concept of the peccatum lectionis as an angle from which to read Huysmans’s novel, this study opts for an interpretation which is markedly different from what the literature of the fin-de-siècle would otherwise suggest. For peccatum, in the context of this literature in general and of Huysmans’s À rebours in particular, is quite amenable to associations with sexuality and gender. The novel is in the midst of a cultural process leading from Baudelaire’s poetry to Decadent literature (Des Esseintes’s connoisseurship and adoration of Baudelaire and his becoming a decadent hero are not unrelated facts) and in which both the starting point and the terminus show a strong affinity towards ‘sexual sinfulness’. There might also be a strong indication in the novel that the illness increasingly plaguing Des Esseintes is none other than syphilis (Jourde 2022). Moreover, the contemporary discourse on books ‘causing harm to masculinity’ (cf. Proulx 2019) could steer the interpretation of À rebours towards Des Esseintes’s ‘sinfulness’ as a reader being informed by his queer gender and sexuality. Nevertheless, this study chooses another path, seeking the place of peccatum (and virtus) in the relationship of lectio with culture and society.

If there is such an ambiguity in Des Esseintes’s ‘reading of culture’, as indicated above, leading to ‘virtue’ in its own ‘sinful’ ways, it is particularly corroborated by the related ambiguity of the decadent movement of the fin-de-siècle itself.

3. Decadence and Its Contradictions

Before its heyday in the 1880s and the 1890s, the decadent movement had been in the making in the 19th century for quite a while. Whereas authors like de Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Théophile Gautier can all be named as its originators (Pierrot 1981, pp. 24–44), the movement’s ultimate origin was likely to be the Romanticism of the beginning of the century, with Chateaubriand’s famous dictum about ‘the sickness of the (new) century’ (mal du siècle), meaning the decline and rootlessness of aristocratic culture after the French Revolution. Indeed, it is the metaphor of ‘sickness’ that is most often associated with decadence: this theme in its literal-biological and metaphorical-cultural sense alike runs as a common motive not only through the works of the aforementioned authors, but also in those of the Décadence proper. What can be described as a ‘rhetoric of sickness’, which, within the decadent movement, became particularly prominent in the oeuvre of the Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio (Spackman 1989), also informs the narrative of Huysmans’s novel to a great degree. Among the reasons for Des Esseintes’s retreat from Paris into the solitude of Fontenay-aux-Roses is his impotence and his neurosis, which are the outcomes of both his extravagant lifestyle and the declining health of his family due to inbreeding over generations. The ill health of Des Esseintes, which is a strange mixture of physical and psychological disease, with one translating into the other, defines the rhythm of his life in his hermitage with recurring periods of complete paralysis and heightened mental activity. All in all, the novel’s exemplary thematisation of decay, sickness and decline certainly contributed to its becoming ‘the breviary of decadence’ (Arthur Symons).

The themes of sickness and decline are, however, only symptoms characterising the age of decadence, rather than its root. More to the point, although still somewhat far from an explanation, is the general feeling of nostalgia for distant ages and lands, which is clearly indicative of the lack of confidence in, and also of the unease with, the culture of this period (cf. Livi 1976, pp. 15–17). In this regard, the decadent movement is a successor to Romanticism with its own longings for the past and for exotic landscapes. There is, however, a crucial chapter in À rebours, which is particularly illuminating as to the relationship of the decadent zeitgeist with the past. It is the chapter that portrays Des Esseintes as revisiting a section of his library, the one that contains his favourite books in Latin. This part of the novel is a damning verdict on the classical Latin literature of the golden age while lavishing praise on Petronius, Apuleius, and a number of Late Antique and Early Christian authors; in fact, this chapter of the novel—Chapter Three—strives to replace the traditional canon of Latin literature with another one that is a whimsical selection of texts from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, and does so by arguing for something like a greater maturity, richer colours, and more rarified syntax and vocabulary of that period of the Latin language. This is a curious case of decadence (in the present) opting for decadence (in the past) since, according to the traditional and still prevalent approach of Latinists to this period of the language, it was by then undergoing decline and disintegration. This peculiar taste of Huysmans’s hero for literature is not as idiosyncratic in the French society of the 1880s as it seems: contemporary France was in those years quite commonly compared by her citizens to the utterly refined, but politically and culturally declining Late Roman Empire, while the Germans, as a matter of fact, ended up being likened to the victorious barbarians (McGuinness 2003, pp. xv–xvi): we are in the aftermath of French defeat by the Prussians in 1870. These comparisons and this historical moment clearly point to the fact that la Décadence is primarily a French movement; all the cultural ‘sickness’, pessimism and flight from a ‘mediocre present’ have contemporary French politics and social atmosphere as their primary source.

Here emerges a major contradiction in the decadent movement, which becomes a contradiction in Huysmans’s novel itself. How, to begin with, is a phenomenon like a ‘decadent movement’ possible at all? Despite the military defeat of France and its political turmoils in 1870–1871, the subsequent Belle Epoque in the country is an era of great literary and artistic creativity—indeed, Paris holds its spell on the rest of Europe as a capital of culture; this is a cultural accomplishment, of which la Décadence plays an integral part. Its proclaimed doctrine of decay, decline and cultural exhaustion notwithstanding, if it was to develop into a ‘movement’ and significantly contribute to the cultural life of the age, it must have displayed considerable artistic and intellectual vigour (cf. Livi 1976, p. 42). It is hardly possible for enervated invalids and exhausted neurotics to create what the decadents created in France in the 1880s and 90s. In like manner, the figure of Des Esseintes in À rebours is an embodiment of the contradiction of the whole movement he came to define. For, in spite of his physical and psychological sickness, and in spite of his approval and embrace of this sickness, his long sequence of extravagant fancies and their execution betray the effects of a strong will and an active and vigorous mind. This hero of decadence is just as ‘un-decadent’ in the powerful workings of his intellect as the movement itself.

What proves to be contradictory in the general idea versus the activity of decadence continues to be so in its grand mannerisms, such as its enshrinement of ‘the artificial’. At the beginning of the decadent period there is disillusionment with various things the Romantics held so dear such as ‘love’, ‘religious faith’ or ‘nature’—with the decadent rejection of nature being often deemed the most momentous. Indeed, decadent aesthetics created a rift with classical aesthetics ‘by dissociating art once and for all from the goal that had always been assigned it—the faithful imitation of nature regarded as the supreme norm’ (Pierrot 1981, pp. 10–11). It is this leitmotif of decadent aesthetics that finds an echo in the title of Huysmans’s novel, the canonic English translation of which, ‘Against Nature’, draws on several explicit examples in the novel of this leitmotif, with one among them in Chapter Two presenting a summary of it. After contemplating the chemical and other artifice required in Paris, at a bathing establishment on a pontoon in the Seine, for the perfect illusion of sea-bathing, Des Esseintes goes on with his musings:

The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail, to forget yourself sufficiently to bring about the desired hallucination and so substitute the vision of a reality for the reality itself. As a matter of fact, artifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes. (…) There can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humoured admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take her place whenever possible.

(pp. 22–23.)1

It is, however, not primarily nature that decadent artifice seeks to replace in the novel. It has already been argued elsewhere that the phrase à rebours in the title of the novel not only means ‘against nature’, but also ‘against society’, and the two antagonisms go hand in hand (Cogny 1980). Needless to say, it is the polemic against society that is more fundamental to the novel, since it is society and ‘the social’ that invest nature and ‘the natural’ with meaning and not the other way around: what Des Esseintes so often comes to attack in the name of the superiority of artifice is ‘the natural’ only in the sense of public taste and social conventions. Impacting on literature in a way typical of Decadent sensibility, it is this public taste and these social conventions themselves that act à rebours against the art and consciousness of protagonist and novelist (cf. Citti 1987, p. 33). Indeed, in Chapter Eight, on the protagonist’s passion for rare flowers, before coming upon his famed principle which brings artifice to new heights (‘now he dreamt of collecting another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes’, p. 83), it is pointed out that ‘[f]or a long time now he had despised the common, everyday varieties that blossom on the Paris market-stalls, in wetflower-pots, under green awnings or red umbrellas’ (p. 82). Or, Chapter Nine, for instance, after praising Goya’s supreme artifice, his ‘savage verve’ and his ‘harsh, brutal genius’, he finds it necessary to remark that ‘the universal admiration his works had won rather put him [Des Esseintes] off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them’ (p. 94).

Decadent artifice as portrayed in Huysmans’s novel implies a contradiction which is broadly consistent with Des Esseintes’s dialectical practice of peccatum lectionis. In the same way as the latter contradicts itself in shunning society and retreating from it, it is by its dismissive relationship with what is ‘common’ and shared by the general public that the concept of ‘artifice’ only adds a new dimension to the contradiction of decadence. For what is ‘artificial’ in the decadent sense derives entirely from what is ‘natural’, that is, from what is ‘common’ and ‘social’. While Des Esseintes is dismayed by the possibility of his taste ever coinciding with that of the public, he is desperate to go à rebours or ‘against the grain’ in society, turning his aesthetic preferences in a direction that is an affront to the same public. This is in accord with the Decadent ‘refusal of the contemporary milieu’ going as far as ‘a social or political revolt’ (Citti 1987, p. 36).

It is, however, crucial to ask whether the subject of decadent artifice, in conjunction with other subjects that have been discussed so far such as the intellectual vigour of decadence and the practice of the peccatum lectionis, can go beyond a mere thematic analysis of the novel; the question remains how these self-contradictory aspects play out in the novel’s formal and textual characteristics. At first glance, these aspects translate well into the novel’s form. This form can possibly and simply be defined as ‘additive’, not only because of the whole work’s overall sequence of chapters which, in the absence of a comprehensive story or plot, could easily be extended, reduced or rearranged without any significant damage to the whole, but also because of the ever-recurring lists or enumerations of things within many of the chapters which exhibit the same characteristics. These characteristics, at the time highly unusual in the history of novel writing, and especially when combined with Huysmans’s curious choice and arrangement of syntax and predilection for rare words, seem to accord with the above-named ‘decadent’ aspects of the novel—the writing is select, refined, idiosyncratic and stylistically powerful. Still, these long lists and enumerations in the novel leave the reader with a strange feeling and uneasiness. For one thing, the curious pedantry they involve does not quite square with decadent aesthetics. Furthermore, as a form, they evoke much older literary practices that were in use in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This feature, if correctly observed, can open up a perspective on a layer of À rebours which has remained undiscussed so far: its religious dimension.

4. The Compendia in À rebours and the Question of the Catholic Idiom

It might be controversial to call À rebours a ‘Catholic novel’, but it is certainly not entirely off the mark. To be sure, there are elements, allusions, themes and references to tradition that can be categorised as ‘Catholic’ or perhaps ‘Christian’, while these might not suffice for a categorisation of the whole novel as such. There is, for example, the aforementioned, striking Chapter Three that lists a long series of Late Antique and Early Mediaeval Christian authors as superior to the Latin classics of the Golden Age. Another fine example is provided by Chapter Seven, dedicated to the Catholic upbringing and education of Des Esseintes. Although immersed in all the memories that came flooding back from his years in the school of the Jesuit Fathers, to the extent that at one point ‘he began to wonder whether the seed which had fallen on apparently barren ground was not showing signs of germinating’, nevertheless ‘he was well aware, on looking into his heart, that he could never feel the humility and contrition of a true Christian’ (p. 72). And it is in a quite similar, but more dramatic key that the novel comes to an end with the protagonist making an impassioned plea with strongly Baudelairean reminiscences: ‘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!’ (p. 204). These examples could, however, without much difficulty be interpreted as belonging to the somewhat typical yearnings of secular 19th-century literature for a faith that had been lost. Yet, against such a background, and if the conclusion drawn from it is correct, Chapter Twelve strikes one as somehow out of place. Why would a typical 19th-century novel with a nostalgia for a lost faith present a long enumeration of the French Catholic authors of the century with the aim of criticising or praising, that is, evaluating them?

As a matter of fact, these themes and this register are in accord with the narrative Huysmans himself presented in a new preface to the novel twenty years after its writing—the story of the growth of his Catholicism of which À rebours is supposed to be the initial stage by way of an undercurrent is not without some credibility. At the time of writing his preface Huysmans is already a devout Catholic, having already completed the ‘novel of Durtal’ or ‘tetralogy of Durtal’, a sequence of four novels (Là-bas [1891], En route [1895], La cathédrale [1898], L’Oblat [1903]) which belong together as making up the story of the conversion and faith of their protagonist who can be interpreted autobiographically, as the alter ego of the author. What is particularly striking in the new preface by Huysmans is not his christening of À rebours as the novel of a Catholic (‘I could certainly sign my name at the bottom of the pages of Against Nature [À rebours] about the Church, for they seem indeed to have been written by a Catholic’ (Huysmans [1903] 2003b, p. 208)), but his conviction that his later, truly ’Catholic novels’, that is, his ‘Catholic tetralogy’ written during and after his conversion, are nothing but thematic and textual derivatives from À rebours: ‘… what strikes most as I read is this: all the novels I have written since Against Nature are there in embryo in this book.’ (Huysmans [1903] 2003b, p. 209).

It would not be too difficult to dismiss the ‘Catholic Huysmans’ together with the second, Catholic period of his writing as merely following a trend or a fashion in the fin de siècle. Without doubt, there was at the time a wave of conversions to Catholicism in literary, artistic and intellectual circles (Griffiths 1966), which was not quite unrelated to the simultaneous rise, at the waning of the secular and scientific 19th century, of spiritualism and theosophy and of a renewed enthusiasm for the occult (Pierrot 1981, pp. 79–92). As a matter of course, it would be erroneous to assume that these simultaneous trends of a ‘religious unease’ of the time (a fortunate term by Jean Pierrot) drew strength from one another rather than only staged a revolt against the same: the spirit of the 19th century. For, whereas there came about a general fermentation, in the social elite, of mysticism, occultism and even satanism (which was so vividly portrayed and exposed by Là-bas, the first Durtal novel by Huysmans) with all its vagueness and licence, the new Catholicism in France of a number of writers and artists was, quite surprisingly, of a dogmatic, intransigent and uncompromising kind on the monarchist far right of the political spectrum in a backlash against the liberal and ‘progressive’ Catholicism of the earlier part of the century (Griffiths 1966, pp. 5, 7–8). And indeed, Huysmans came to belong, by and large, to this renewed right-wing Catholicism. One has, on the one hand, no reason to cast doubt on the genuine character of his conversion just because Catholicism was on the rise, albeit in a limited way, in a certain social stratum of which he was a member. On the other hand, one might ask how genuinely Catholic his À rebours and subsequent writings are. How substantial is the contribution Catholicism makes, apart from certain Catholic themes and subjects, to the aesthetic quality of his work?

To answer this question, there emerges a notion in the broad panorama of 19th-century French Catholic literature in Chapter Twelve of À rebours, which can be of use: the notion of the Catholic idiom. Des Esseintes, surveying one day his select library, comes upon his collection of Catholic writers, and his thoughts turn toward the question of a distinct Catholic style. ‘The distinctive characteristic of this literature was the absolute immutability of its ideas and its idiom; just as the Church had perpetuated the primordial form of its sacred objects, so also it had kept intact the relics of its dogmas and piously preserved the reliquary that contained them—the oratorical style of the seventeenth century.’ (p. 135). Des Esseintes concludes that—perhaps with the exception of some very few greats of the Romantic school, Barbey d’Aurevilly in particular—it is the grand rhetoric of the French Grand Siècle that, with some minor concessions, and in spite of the demands and allures of contemporary life in the centuries in-between, remained intact in the best of Catholic literature. This observation, however, poses a question about Huysmans’s style itself. If À rebours is indeed to be seen as the beginning of his ‘Catholic period’, and if ‘the oratorical style of the seventeenth century’ doubtless does not make its appearance in the novel, where does Huysmans’s own manner of the ‘Catholic idiom’ reside?

Can this idiom possibly reside in the aforementioned, most striking formal characteristic of the novel, which is none other than its recurring use of lists, enumerations, ‘inventories’ or, the way they have also been termed, ‘catalogues’ (Brunel 1987) or ‘collections’ (Grojnowski 2010)? Can these ‘additive’ verbal structures, in conjunction with the ‘additive’ structure of the whole novel, originate from the Middle Ages, which, in turn, inherited the related legacy of Antiquity? Can these lists or ‘catalogues’ possibly hearken back to epic enumerations, biblical genealogies or the enumerative compendia of the Middle Ages with a specific subject, like the bestiaries, or with a general one like the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville? True, it has been suggested that ‘[a]s a formless enumeration of topics and a catalogue of aesthetic enthusiasms, Huysmans’s À rebours echoes Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, reviving the ancient encyclopaedic genre Northrop Frye called the ‘anatomy’, rooted in Menippean satire.’ (Porter 1997, p. 95). If so, and Huysmans’s, as it were, ‘formless enumeration of topics’ is only an echo from Flaubert and from a whole genre of world literature, it cannot possibly count as the form of a Catholic idiom. Yet, it is hardly ‘topics’ that Huysmans’s text keeps enumerating, and neither does Frye, when defining both ancient and modern genre he terms ‘anatomy’, go into textual details like an author’s predilection for lists of words and catalogues of things. In fact, the way Frye defines it, the genre can include À rebours and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, while the definition remains irrelevant as to the presence or absence of what I suggest being a ‘Catholic idiom’. Among other characteristics, Frye points out that ‘anatomy’, as a form of prose fiction, is ‘not primarily concerned with the exploits of heroes, but relies on the free play of intellectual fancy’ and ‘presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern’. Accordingly, the prose writer of anatomy, ‘dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme’ (Frye 1957, pp. 309–11). While these characteristics perfectly apply to Huysmans’s novel, there is something in the novel that remains untold if approached in Frye’s terms.

How do the narrator and Des Esseintes proceed with their lists and catalogues in À rebours? From these that they dedicate to the most varied subjects like colours, ancient and modern authors, gems and precious stones, alcohol, artists, flowers, perfumes and so on, let just a short one be quoted here, a passage on precious stones from Chapter Four (a subject that has the particular significance of being singled out in Huysmans’s preface):

For this purpose, he used only Ceylon cat’s-eyes, cymophanes and sapphirines—three stones which all sparkled with mysterious, deceptive flashes … (…) He finally decided on a series of stones with contrasting colours—the mahogany-red hyacinth of Compostella followed by the sea-green aquamarine, the vinegar-pink balas ruby by the pale slate-coloured Sudermania ruby.

(p. 43)

To get the shell of his pet (a tortoise) encrusted so as to replicate on its surface a Japanese drawing of a flower, Des Esseintes selects a series of rare gems that he renders in a corresponding series of equally rare names—the reader cannot evade the power of their exquisiteness in which name and gem are almost one. Although such enumerative verbal structures, of which this example is just a short but illustrative one, could naturally and easily make their appearance in Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, they do not—an absence which is more than curious. It is so not only because Flaubert’s undeniable closeness to and great inspiration for the decadent movement in general (Pierrot 1981, pp. 38–42) and Huysmans in particular (see, for instance, his accolade in the 1903 preface to À rebours: Huysmans [1903] 2003b, p. 205), and not only because À rebours itself is effusive about him more than once (in Chapters Nine and Fourteen), but primarily because Bouvard et Pécuchet (published posthumously in 1881, just three years before À rebours) is a novel which, by its plot and subject, would offer plenty of opportunities for similar rare lists and catalogues of words and things. In a similar way as Des Esseintes peruses the most varied fields of interest, full of rarities and peculiarities, Flaubert’s eponymous bourgeois anti-heroes survey the broadest spectrum of 19th-century science, scholarship and art, from agriculture to archeology, from geology to theatre. Nevertheless, there is not any parallel and enumerative survey of scientific, scholarly and artistic terms and names from the huge Latin and Greek vocabulary that was—or could have been—at the narrator’s disposal. If Bouvard et Pécuchet did make use of such lists and enumerations, the association of this textual form with Catholicism, in the context of the fin-de-siècle novel, would be untenable as Bouvard et Pécuchet has very little to do with the Catholic tradition. And it can also be argued the other way around, claiming that the absence of this form in Flaubert increases the likelihood that the presence of it in Huysmans has to do with the tradition to which the latter’s novel belongs and Flaubert’s does not. Apparently, Flaubert’s art of writing in Bouvard et Pécuchet was not amenable to the ‘Catholic idiom’, if that is what this study suggests it to be.

By contrast, in one of Huysmans’s later novels, La cathédrale, in the Durtal cycle, the textual form of lists, enumerations and catalogues reaches its apogee in Huysmans’s oeuvre, so much so that it amounts to constituting what can, with a mediaeval Latin term, called the compendium of the cathedral of Chartres, or rather various ‘compendia’ of the church’s various aspects. The plot of La cathédrale is almost as minimal as that of À rebours; it consists primarily of the protagonist’s conversations with his companions about the church and closely related topics like the veneration of the Virgin Mary. To compare this later novel with À rebours by means of a simple example, the subject of precious stones presents itself quite handily again. ‘The chapter on precious stones I took up again in La cathédrale’, Huysmans points out, ‘but from the perspective of the symbolism of gems. I gave life to the lifeless stones of Against Nature [À rebours].’ (Huysmans [1903] 2003b, p. 210). Here is one of the passages in which Durtal elaborates on the subject:

… a new set of variations on the subject of gems was executed … by a celebrated Spanish Abbess, Maria d’Agreda, who applies to Our Mother the virtues of the precious stones spoken of by St. John in the twenty-first chapter of the Apocalypse. According to her, the sapphire figures the serenity of Mary; the chrysolite shows forth Her love for the Church Militant, and especially for the Law of Grace; the amethyst, Her power against the hordes of hell; the jasper, Her invincible fortitude; the pearl, Her inestimable dignity ….

(Huysmans 1898, p. 140)

The list or enumeration of rare words naming precious stones in À rebours comes into its own, as a Catholic idiom, in the mediaeval ‘compendium’ on the same topic in Chapter Seven of La cathédrale—precisely as one form in the whole of one novel comes into its own in the related form in the other novel. And this perspective can be turned the other way around. What we read in À rebours as recurring ‘lists’ or ‘enumerations’ or ‘catalogues’ are the beginnings of a ‘Catholic idiom’ and of the genre of the ‘compendium’ which thrives so much in La cathédrale.

The Catholic idiom of ‘compendia’ is a form of reading, indeed, a form of reading culture. It invites and includes the two sides—and indeed the dialectic—of lectio: both its peccatum and its virtus. As peccatum lectionis, the Catholic idiom implies the principle of ‘refined selection’ and thereby a withdrawal from society. As virtus lectionis, it implies a ‘holistic drive’, an ‘enumerative tendency towards the whole’, and thereby an embrace of culture. However deeply connected the two opposite moves are, one turning into the other, one might say, in a first approach, that the Catholic idiom of ‘compendia’ in La Cathédrale is closer to the virtus of lectio, and thereby closer to its embrace of culture, while the nascent Catholic idiom of À rebours is closer to the peccatum of lectio, and thereby closer to its withdrawal from society. In a second approach, after due consideration, this view of the two kinds of Catholic idioms in the two novels turns the other way around. The lectio implied by the Catholic idiom of La Cathédrale tends strongly toward a full withdrawal from contemporary society—indeed, towards peccatum lectionis—, while the Catholic idiom and its lectio in À rebours is strongly inclined towards an embrace of contemporary culture—indeed, towards virtus lectionis.

In a sense—a quite paradoxical one—, À rebours is a less decadent novel than La cathédrale. The latter, in performing an almost complete withdrawal from contemporary society for the sake of the perusal of a mediaeval cathedral, has a conception which is as undialectical as that of Barthes’s Mythologies: while Mythologies aims at carrying out a pure virtus lectionis by acting as if dedicating itself to a ‘noble cause’, to ‘society’ and, in fact, to the reading of contemporary society alone, La cathédrale pretends to do something equally impossible—the pure peccatum lectionis of the private pleasure of an immersion in the mediaeval past of Catholicism. In like manner, La cathédrale makes use of its endless ‘compendia’ by way of a decadent ‘artifice’ against the taste of society; it exhibits, when it comes to the question of its decadence, more ‘cultural decline’ than ‘cultural vigour’. To the subject and the cultural attitude of the novel, its form of a Catholic idiom is a perfect fit. While La cathédrale and Mythologies are, in a sense, pure and uncomplicated ‘readings of culture’, this concept provides a more intriguing perspective on À rebours as a decadent novel. However nostalgic À rebours is, at a number of points, about the cultural and religious past, it shows enough cultural vigour and interest in contemporary culture for its Catholic idiom of ‘compendia’ to produce a curious and delightful effect. For Des Esseintes’s reading does not content itself with the Catholic authors of the 19th century, but extends to contemporary art like the works of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, and also to contemporary literature like the poetry of Mallarmé and Verlaine. In fact, À rebours itself was conducive to setting up a new literary and artistic canon, the emergence of which was unforeseen by most of Huysmans’s contemporaries. The peccatum lectionis as portrayed by the novel—in retreating to the solitary pleasures of aesthetic refinement to end up perusing culture through the lens of a ‘Catholic idiom’—gathers a momentum towards contemporary society that was always inherent to the decadent movement.