The Dedalus Book of Decadence: (Moral Ruins) by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online

Esseintes was a thinly-disguised representation of the author) as a man who had plumbed the depths of Decadence much more thoroughly than mere poseurs like Rachilde, and had returned, not only to tell the tale but to deliver a verdict. Huysmans was seemingly brought by experience to the same conclusion that Barbey D’Aurevilly had reached by consideration of the logic of the argument, that the Decadent road had only two possible destinations: the foot of the cross or the suicide’s grave. Huysmans not only chose the former on his own account, but went on to write a series of novels which painstakingly conducted a fictional projection of himself along the same route.
    The chief virtue which À rebours has is its plausibility. The effete aristocrat Des Esseintes has a fine record of perversions, but they are mostly behind him when the story – such as it is – begins. The lifestyle described by the text is close enough to the ordinary to make the character believable, and to make it possible for the reader to identify with him. Reading Rachilde or Jean Lorrain could only, in the final analysis, be a kind of textual voyeurism; in that sense if no other their novels are pornographic. By contrast, À rebours offered a central character whose sensibilities were Decadent through and through, but whose adventures in calculated perversity were as authentically impuissant as one might expect from a disorganised and apathetic person.
    Des Esseintes’ Decadence is certainly elaborate, but it is mostly cerebral; he spends most of his time reading, eating and strolling, and all his self-indulgences are bordered by detached anxiety. A note of sour realism is eventually forced to intrude upon his search for exotic experience when he takes medical advice which assures him that he simply cannot carry on if he wishes to avoid pain, misery and death – and having received that advice he suffers an entirely plausible, if very un-Decadent, attack of common sense.
    Des Esseintes observes himself constantly, becoming the ideal reader as well as the central character of the life-story whose narrative he laboriously constructs. He is more self-conscious than the other heroes of the Decadent boom, and his self-consciousness retains a suspicious hint of cold sanity which the likes of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Jean Lorrain were probably incapable of admitting to their work. À rebours is an essay feebly masquerading as a novel, and it is hardly surprising that it transcended the relatively tawdry genre of which it appeared to be a part to become a textbook of Decadence, and a handbook for those Decadents whose interest in the movement was more aesthetic than practical.
    Huysmans did not, of course, conclude his analysis of Decadence with À rebours. His next work, too, can be regarded as an amplification of themes found in Barbey d’Aurevilly, who had explored the role of active evil in modern life in his misogynistic collection of stories Les Diaboliques (1874; tr. as The She-Devils ). The series of novels with which Huysmans followed À rebours , chronicling the career of one Durtal, begins with a lurid examination of the temptations of Satanism, Là-Bas (1891).
    Durtal, fed up to the back teeth with the awfulness of modern Paris, attempts to escape into dreams of a more vivid time (such pursuits of the artificial paradises of legend-encrusted history are a significant sub-theme of Decadent fantasy). While researching a biography of France’s most notorious monster, Gilles de Rais, he is drawn into contact with the Satanists of contemporary Paris – in particular with Mme. Chantelouve, in whose company he attends a Black Mass. Eventually, though, Durtal plumps for God instead of Satan, and is drawn in En route (1895) to the other extreme of life in a Trappist monastery, before going on in La Cathédrale (1898) and L’oblat (1903) to explore other facets of the religious life.
    One recalls, of course, that Gilles de Rais sent the Churchmen of