SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “Huysmans's Against the Grain: The Willed Exile of the Introverted Decadent.” In Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences—A Jungian Approach, pp. 75-92. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Knapp discusses Joris-Karl Huysmans' controversial novel Against the Grain, suggesting that des Esseintes's self-imposed exile attests to his being deprived of love in childhood, resulting in his present inability to love.]

Willed exile and the deepest condition of introversion was the way chosen by Duke Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans's¹ extraordinary novel Against the Grain (1884). Inability to face reality, uncontrollable ennui, and hatred fo a society he saw as superficial, banal, vulgar, and materialistic: all motivated des Esseintes's withdrawal from the world and seclusion in a country home not far from Paris. Alienated from his fellow beings, Huysmans's antihero hoped that by cutting himself from the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical morass of contemporary society he would be left untainted and free to indulge his every wish. To this end, he regulated his life in such a way as to keep his mind and senses forever active in the creation of his own world of fantasy and artifice. His dehumanized existence revolved around the acquisition of rare and exotic objects: furnishings, paintings, books, flowers, foods, liqueurs.

The duke's exile, then, was based on neither a need for increased consciousness or understanding nor a desire to attain higher spiritual values. It was designed to cultivate sensual highs, states he would then analyze with the finesse and perspicuity of a scientist. His home, transformed into a virtual hothouse, resembled a laboratory for experimentation, offering him the visceral pleasures of the synesthetic experience. The resulting reveries and dreams, revolving for the most part around sexual encounters, including voyeurism, sadomasochism, homosexuality, and extreme misogyny, indicated a condition of severe psychological disequilibrium, unalleviated and in fact accentuated by exile and escapism.

Arthur Symons called Against the Grain “the breviary of Decadence.” Indeed, it was just that. The word decadent (from the Latin, cadere, to fall, to decline), is an exact description of Huysmans's hyperaesthetic, misanthropic, morbid antihero. It has been claimed that des Esseintes's comportment and inclinations were modeled on those of the effete Baron de Montesquiou-Fezensac and on Ludwig II of Bavaria, as well as on the author himself. Mention must also be made in this regard of Edmond de Goncourt's protagonist in Faustin (1882), a work that had much impressed Huysmans. Above all, Baudelaire and Poe were Huysmans's mentors. Like them, des Esseintes was morose by temperament, and a dandy who longed to bathe in an ideal world of eternal beauty and artifice. Unlike these writers, however, he was not a creative type; his yearnings were focused solely on the most efficacious gratification of his senses.

Neurologists and psychiatrists have ascribed des Esseintes's pathologically passive and morbid nature to erethism, a malady causing abnormal irritability of the nerves and hyperresponsiveness to stimulation. Inordinate acuteness of the sense of hearing (hyperacusis), of touch (hyperesthesia), and of smell (hyperosmia) encouraged him purposefully and systematically to excite his senses, allowing these to impact as powerfully as possible on his psyche and body.

EXILE/ESCAPISM

The Duke des Esseintes, the last descendent of an illustrious, noble, and inbred French family that had received its education from the Jesuits, lost his parents when he was seventeen. Never having received their love, he had always lived a lonely and detached existence. Thin and handsome, with steely blue eyes and overrefined aristocratic manners, he was deeply disdainful and resentful of his restrictive upbringing. That he opted for a life of debauchery and indulged in all types of excessive and unhealthy sexual experiences undermined his health and accounted for a turning-inward. Having sold the Château de Lourps, his ancestral manor, he moved to a villa in the outskirts of Paris, at Fontenay-aux-Roses, where he took up residence with only two human presences: the elderly couple who had cared for his mother.

The world of artifice into which des Esseintes exiled himself could, in some ways, be likened to that of a religious ascetic. Like the Trappists, for example, when des Esseintes gave up enslavement to society he opted for another rule: obedience to a dogma. His daily routine, like that of a monk, followed certain disciplines: he slept by day and remained awake at night; his meals followed certain culinary specifications; and silence was maintained at all times in his home. However, unlike the religious ascetic, who lives on a spiritual level, des Esseintes deluded himself that he sought solitude because of his hatred for the vulgar, his contempt for the mediocre, his hostility toward bourgeois entrepreneurs, and ignorant masses.

The evils this post-Romantic young man attributed to the outer world were, psychologically, a projection or a mirror image of his own empty and arid inner world. Unable to create or to give of himself and incapable of sounding out those factors which troubled him, he spent his time cultivating the exotic, preternatural, and involuted world of his fantasies.

Unbeknown to des Esseintes, exile was really a strategy: the elimination of the world of people and its replacement by a world of things. This strategy was instrumental in further dehumanizing an already severely alienated young man. His extreme cerebralness was focused on finding ways to take him out of himself by transcending empirical reality. Just as monks were constantly occupied with prayers or litanies, des Esseintes was obsessively concerned with the most effective way to ascend to supernatural spheres through ritualistic uses of objects.

The duke's approach to the world of things also had sexual implications; it was a means of sublimating his erotic impulses. Like fetishes, objects upon which certain values are projected, des Esseintes endowed paintings, rugs, plants, or even a bejeweled turtle with dynamic energy; this energy in turn activated his subliminal world. The redirection of his libido (psychic energy) from his unconscious to the outer world impregnated objects with certain virtues and powers. In des Esseintes's case, such excitation titillated his senses, thus arousing him sexually. The abaissement du niveau mental and the concomitant rise in emotional level put an end, at least momentarily, to his underlying fears of castration and impotence. So effective a healing technique did des Esseintes consider the world of things, that he looked upon objects as having medicinal value. The aged couple who were his only companions, in keeping with the hospital environment he had created for himself, were dispensers of drugs.

Des Esseintes's belief that seclusion would help him find release from his paralyzing and fearsome ennui was, of course, an illusion. Seclusion was an escape mechanism his superficial and undeveloped psyche considered a panacea. Such a view, however, is not unusual. Indeed, it is characteristic of some unformed and immature puer aeternus types who have never evolved or strengthened their ego (center of consciousness). Like the puer aeternus, des Esseintes wandered about from one experience to another, yielding to bouts of despair, despondency, and helplessness. Incapable of dealing with the problems at hand, of facing and struggling through the difficulties marring his life, he sought answers in the world of objects and the erotic fantasies, dreams, and hallucinations triggered by them.

HOUSE/WOMB/TOMB/UNCONSCIOUS

What does the house signify that des Esseintes chose not only to withdraw into it but to furnish it in keeping with his aesthetic sense? A mother symbol, it represents a containing, protective womb, and it is also tomblike. Like the mother, it is empowered with both positive and negative attributes: if the house is creative, nourishing, and fertilizing, it encourages growth; if it imprisons mind and psyche, it has the power to destroy life, to encourage rot and decay.

Psychologically, the house may also be looked upon as a symbol for the unconscious. Closed, hidden, filled with shadowy and mysterious elements, it is the setting within which des Esseintes performs his insalubrious rituals. Governed by subjective factors, he relies on what the outer object, the thing, constellates in his subliminal sphere. His already weakened ego is further devitalized, precipitating a condition of morbid subjectification.

BOOKS

Books, particularly those of Classical Latin writers, hold des Esseintes in thrall. His choice of authors and works reveals a correspondence between his inner climate and the one depicted in the particular work he is reading. As a mirror image or reflection of his unconscious, specific volumes may be viewed as mediators between invisible and visible worlds, encouraging cogitation. Let us note that the Latin word for mirror is speculum, the implication being that this object encourages speculation, contemplation, understanding.

The emphasis the duke places on books, and his boundless knowledge of literature in general and Latin texts in particular, indicates his highly developed thinking faculty. Everything in the outer world is related to or associated with the intellect through the logos principle, which connects, structures, abstracts, and conceptualizes all facts. Des Esseintes, therefore, feels comfortable theorizing on everything from mathematical problems to colors to perfumes, and he does so with the exactingness of a scientist. His meditations, focusing on harmonious gradations and degradations of tones, colorations, and ideas, act as catalysts, ushering him into a dreamworld. Thus is he able to continue to escape ever more deeply into his world of delusion and phantasmagoria.

As suggestive powers, books encourage him to displace himself via reverie or dream without ever leaving his chair. As a thinking/sensation type, he can experience with ease distant lands, mountains, ports, continually varying sounds, textures, odors, and sights. The libido he concentrates on the book (or any object) is so intense that it leads to its overvaluation. Moreover, his apperception of a volume encourages an introjection of his own inner state: a transfer of an unconscious content onto the object. The aesthetic enjoyment he derives from a book, and the rationalization that he believes is an objectification of his sense of pleasure, is in fact, an indication of his poor adaptation to life in general and to the volume—object/stimulus—in particular (Jung, Collected Works, 6:309, 360).

Because he is an introverted thinking/sensation type, his senses are conditioned to his thoughts. This determines the type of book he will enjoy, and indeed the works des Esseintes likes most are those that release the strongest sensations within him. Understandably, then, certain books have a strong erotic hold and act as a kind of instinctual or vital function.

The Latin writers he identifies as “decadent,” whose works line one wall of his orange and blue study, are des Esseintes's favorites. For him, the “decadent” period is positive, in sharp contrast to the negative characteristics the Sorbonne professors attach to it. Vergil's Aeneid, written in the so-called great period, he finds derivative: a mass of borrowings from Homer and others. Nor do Theocritus, Ennius, and Lucretius hold any interest for him. Cicero and Caesar are “dry” and “constipated.” Seneca, Suetonius, Tacitus, Juvenal, Quintilian, Pliny, Plautus, and Titus Livius incite no emotional reaction in him whatsoever.

The duke's favorite work is the Satyricon of Petronius. This author's vivid, sardonic, and intensely accurate vision of the vices and luxuries of imperial Rome is written objectively and without concern for humanity, like “decadent” novels, which contain no criticism of sociopolitical regimes and no attempt to reform noxious conditions. No better example of this genre can be found than Satyricon, which analyzes in the most delicate and perspicacious ways the mores of a period.

Petronius spares the reader no details, des Esseintes maintains, in his stagings of sodomy and lubricity, analyzing these with the finesse of a jeweler, while also omitting all moral commentaries. The duke's visceral reactions to Satyricon, as well as to other works of the period, such as the Metamorphoses, of Apuleius, are overt. He openly enjoys the erotic stimulation aroused by his readings and visualizations of happenings revolving around sadomasochistic pantomimes, voyeurism, enactments of lustful and perverse relationships, and debaucheries of all types. He visualizes the details like film clips, pondering one image after another: naked women on the prowl, men and women peeking at lovemaking in bedrooms through doors slightly ajar. Such mental voyeurism allows him to be the passive recipient in his own fantasy world. Satyricon opens him up to the bejeweled domain of exciting erotic and masturbational sensations.

JEWELS AND STONES

As a thinking/sensation type, des Esseintes is aroused by the continuously changing colorations of stones, depending upon their cut, shape, and the intensity or dullness of the light rays shining upon them. For him, they are living and active entities, just like books. Stones, like the duke's steely eyes and unfeeling heart, are hard and compassionless. The thirty-year-old nervous, hollow-cheeked bachelor experiences the luster, texture, and shape of stones in his house of dreams as yet another way of escaping. He bypasses the banal empirical world, penetrating an earthly paradise of his own manufacture.

The search for rare and exotic objects to furnish his solitude is uppermost in the duke's mind. Artifice, as opposed to objects emanating from the natural world, is what he most prizes. The many pages Huysmans devotes to descriptions of heteroclite jewels—their shapes, textures, and tints ranging from electric to cobalt blues, multiple nuances of indigos, blacks, greys, turquoises, salmons, roses, cinnabars, viscous reds, violets in all of their shadowy intensities—are not only marvels in themselves, but also disclose the author's empathy for his antihero's intensely sensual nature.

That stone is durable and less subject to the laws of birth and decay is a truism. As used by des Esseintes, however, the stone does not represent continuity, any more than does a mood or thought. Like fleeting luminosities or scintillae that shine when the lighting is right, the powers of stones are ephemeral, tenuous, and fragmented, concrete manifestations of des Esseintes's split psyche, when fantasies emerge, either beauteously prismatic or in horrific and deformed images. The thinking/sensation type cannot assimilate such ephemera into his psyche (Franz and Hillman).

The gem merchant, the only visitor allowed in des Esseintes's home, brings with him a most singular object: a living turtle with a shell that is painted brilliant gold and encrusted with rare stones. Des Esseintes has ordered it for a very special purpose. It is to be placed on his Oriental rug of yellow and purple tonalities, where the sparkling brilliance of its bejeweled carapace will create a sharp contrast, thereby lending the rug just the antique look he wants.

The turtle, from the Greek word Tartaros, a part of Hades sectioned off for punishment of the wicked, is complex in its symbology. The Egyptians looked upon the turtle as a chthonian entity, a fearsome power because it emerged clandestinely from beneath the waters or earth. To ward off any harm the turtle might inflict, such phrases as “May Ra live and may the turtle die” were formulated by this ancient people. As representative of the dark or shadowy aspects of the underworld, the turtle represented a negative factor in many cultures. Its domelike carapace, identified at times with a cosmos, house, or cranium, was frequently an unwelcome sight. However, because its four paws were firmly planted upon the earth, the turtle has also been associated with solidity, stability, longevity, and a material rather than a spiritual approach to life. An engraving in a fifteenth-century allegory, The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, depicts a woman holding a pair of outspread wings in one hand and a turtle in the other, contrasting spiritual and material domains (Fisher, 195).

Other attributes of the turtle explain the duke's choice of this animal. Because of its carapace, the turtle has a containing quality about it, and accordingly, is identified with woman and lubricity. In that its head and feet have the ability to protrude or withdraw, a phallocentric image is suggested. Interestingly enough, this androgynous animal, depicted in The Chimeras by Gustave Moreau, one of the duke's favorite painters, is featured with a woman's head; in his Orpheus, it stands for everything that is disquieting and negative. With respect to des Esseintes's psychology, the turtle signals dark, shadowy, regressive, and inverted powers within him. Its slowness represents stagnation; its involuted and obscure nature suggest confusion; its grounded condition enslaves it to matter alone.

Des Esseintes had chosen a cluster of flowers in Japanese arrangement for the turtle's lapidary decoration. The petals, leaves, stems, and border were to be set in brilliant and tastefully colored gems. Any jewels that might appeal to the upper bourgeoisie or to the masses, such as diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and the like, were anathema to the duke. His eyes were fixed on exotic stones: beryls, peridots, olivines, micas, cat's-eyes, cymophanes, and others. He would have these blended according to their tones, thus highlighting their inner flame and enhancing their effects upon each other. The uniqueness of the art object, which combined the natural with the artificial, made des Esseintes “perfectly happy.”

In addition to the immense pleasure brought him by the bejeweled turtle, he indulged his senses in yet another manner: by taking advantage of his hyperechema: the exaggeration of auditory sensations. With this in mind, he had built what he called a mouth organ: a closet filled with the rarest liqueurs, each bottle lying horizontally and each having its own silver spigot. By pressing a button hidden behind the closet's paneling, he controlled the spigot he wanted as well as the combinations and amounts of liqueurs to be decanted into his glass. Even more fascinating was the fact that each liqueur corresponded for him to the sound of an instrument: kummel was an oboe; mint and anisette were both flutes; kirsch was a trumpet. Certain virtually scientifically blended mélanges triggered his taste buds to such an extent that they would in turn heighten his auditory nerves, thus enabling him to hear entire symphonies, concertos, quartets, quintets, trios, chorales, pastorals, romances, whatever he programmed for himself.

Des Esseintes's synesthetic experience was so complete that he could hear complicated melodies in major and minor keys, as well as intricate rhythmic patterns, in terms of what he called mint solos, rum duets, and the like. Once his taste buds had been activated, his hearing became intensely acute, as did his olfactory sense; his thought patterns followed suit, triggering all types of melodies and revivifying memories from a distant past.

The synesthetic experience, as practiced by T. E. Hoffmann, Baudelaire, and other creative persons, is defined as a fusion of the senses, allowing the visual to be heard, smelled, touched, and tasted; the heard to be seen, touched, tasted, and smelled; and so on with all the senses. Synesthesia has been described as a great awakening, a psychic happening within the unconscious. In des Esseintes's case it affected his whole nervous system, with sometimes soothing but mostly shattering results.

The simultaneity of sense impressions during the synesthetic experience took des Esseintes into the timeless dimensions of reverie and of hallucination. During periods of heightened awareness, he succeeded in escaping his prosaic present and savoring the beauty and refinement of the fleeting sensation. On certain occasions, he was ushered into an incredible world of fantasy, ranging from the most exquisite to the most gruesome of privileged moments. One such reverie, brought on after the bejeweled turtle's arrival and following a synesthetic experience resulting from his use of the “mouth organ,” re-created an excruciatingly painful experience that had taken place three years previously: a toothache that had caused des Esseintes to awaken in the middle of the night. The pain was so acute that after waiting until seven in the morning, he ran out in search of a dentist. Stopping at the first dentist's premises he saw, he ran up a flight of filthy stairs. Although nauseated by the dirt and bloody spittle he saw around him, his torment was so great that he let the dentist push his index finger into his mouth, then take an instrument, and, with nothing to alleviate the pain, extract the decayed tooth. Strangely enough, after it was all over, des Esseintes felt “happy, younger by ten years.”

That the reverie focused on the extraction of a tooth is symptomatic to a great extent of the duke's psychological condition. In that teeth cut and dismember food, thereby paving the way for its ingestion into the stomach to enrich and strengthen the body, these entities are associated with the aggressiveness needed both to persevere in and preserve life. Because des Esseintes's tooth had split, rotted, and caused him lacerating pain that only extraction could remedy, one may view his reverie as a premonitory happening: his extreme introversion and reclusion was leading to a disintegration of his own ability to nourish himself, and was an important factor in depleting his vital energy. No longer was he able to defend himself from inner decay; no longer could he assimilate or cope with anything from the outside world. The extraction of the tooth indicated the necessity of ending the self-imposed exile that encouraged his introverted way of life.

Following des Esseintes's reverie, he happened to look down at the rug where the turtle had been placed to notice that it was no longer moving. After palpating it, he realized it was dead. Accustomed to a simple life of obscurity, the turtle did not have the stamina to bear the dazzling array of jewels embedded in its coat. It was so out of tune with itself that it could no longer function.

The synesthetic experience, the reverie focusing on the extraction of the tooth, and the death of the turtle indicate a disequilibrium within des Esseintes's psyche. Slowly and methodically, he was poisoning himself. Extreme seclusion and introversion were suffocating his very life. He had become a man imprisoned in his own mind. The ending of all communication with the outer world had cut off all flow of new air into his world. Thus did his ideas and the sensations to which they gave rise atrophy. Depleted and solipsistic, des Esseintes's world had become fungal and parasitic, feeding exclusively on itself. The psyche had offered him a premonitory sign: “extraction” from his hermetic life-style was the only alternative to death.

THE ART OBJECT

Des Esseintes was not yet ready to give up an existence that seemingly gratified all of his wishes. In the world of art, as in other domains, he veered away from any painting that might appeal to the masses or to the bourgeoisie. What haunted and mesmerized him were “subtle, exquisite” canvases “bathing in an ancient dream” and in utter corruption. Scenes of this type worked on his nerves and, by intensifying their perceptiveness, were instrumental in plunging him into unknown dimensions and bringing on the nightmares that were henceforth to plague his existence.

Des Esseintes was enraptured by one artist above all others: Gustave Moreau. He responded erotically to the depraved and seductive details and colorations in Moreau's painting Salomé. Its palace/cathedral with its crystalized mosaics and brilliant semiprecious stones, its architecture combining Muslim and Byzantine styles, mesmerized him. Most exciting to him, however, was Salomé's “solemn, almost august” stance as she began her lecherous dance. Her sensuality was strikingly enhanced for the duke by the “odor of the perverse perfumes” that emanated from her body through the shapes, rhythms, and textures embedded in the canvas itself.

Because des Esseintes viewed Salomé as an eternal and universal figure capable of transcending centuries—“superhuman” as “indestructible Lewdness” and “cursed Beauty”—she takes on archetypal stature. She is the Terrible Earth Mother, that feminine principle who demands the head of the Christian martyr as punishment for thwarting her desires. Destroying everything that lies in her path to sexual fulfillment, she becomes the agent of the enormous energy buried within the archetype. For the ascetic Christian, in this case John the Baptist, she is an abomination. For the materialistic Herod, whose weakly structured ego is under the complete dominion of his wife, Herodias, she is the incarnation of sensuality.

The more powerful the denunciation of Salomé in the Gospels, the more formidable does this erotic archetypal force become, and the more she seeks to transform John the Baptist into an object to manipulate, dominate, and conquer. As depicted dancing in Moreau's canvas, her feet touch the Great Earth Mother, drawing from it sustenance and power. Having completed her lustful dance, she is served John's head on a silver shield. Seizing it, she kisses it, trembles, delighting as she looks deeply upon its eyes, tongue, hair; her fervor remains unappeased even as she kisses the martyr's mouth. Unguided by any moral credo, Salomé lives out the most primitive level of her instinctual world while salivating for her prey. Huysmans writes:

In the works of Gustave Moreau … des Esseintes realized at last the weird and superhuman Salomé he had dreamed of. No longer was she merely the dancing girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body … she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of cursed Beauty supreme above all other beauties … the monstrous Beast [of the Apocalypse], indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of Troy … everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything she touches.

(Muehsam, 409)

So enraptured is des Esseintes by Salomé's sadistic play and so dependent is he upon her ability to arouse his whole erotic world that this archetypal figure has come to represent for him a grave psychological dancer. Men, exploited by her, become her votaries, passive recipients of her needs and desires, never aggressive or energetic in their own rights. Salomé has intrigued men of the cloth as well as creative spirits ever since Christian times, as attested to by the Gospels and many Patristic texts. Writers such as Flaubert and Wilde, artists such as Beardsley and Moreau, composers such as Richard Strauss: all were inspired by this awesome archetypal figure.

Psychologically, Salomé represents the castrating female who entices and then destroys the male while initiating him into her arcane and libidinous world. Like the prostitute, she is a woman degraded, who unconsciously chastises herself every time she performs a service for the man. By the same token, when the man buys her services, he is experiencing similar feelings of shame and debasement. It is not he who is of import to her, but what he can offer in material gifts. Without gold or lucre of some sort, he is valueless; hence each is an object and not a subject for the other. Both, therefore, experience schizoid attitudes; neither is able to relate to the other or to him/herself.

Des Esseintes—like Moreau, who drew Salomé over a hundred times in settings of sumptuous palaces, mosques, cathedrals, and Hindu temples—was haunted by her image. The intensity of his sensual reactions to Moreau's paintings of Salomé discloses his penchant for the harlot in general, and her in particular, as she swirls and swoops, rotates and pivots.

Other paintings by Moreau also electrified, vivified, and disquieted des Esseintes: for example, The Apparition, featuring Herod's palace, which now resembled the Alhambra, and an almost nude Salomé after the decapitation. Des Esseintes, the voyeur, seemed especially stimulated sexually by the gory details he ferreted out in this canvas: John the Baptist's flaming, gleaming, shining head, the tints radiating from its coagulated blood ranging from deep purple to lighter tonalities depending upon their placement near the beard and hair. The duke's identification with the old king, who “remained crushed, destroyed, overcome with vertigo,” as this “dangerous idol” danced in all of her eroticism, had a hypnotic effect upon him.

Some of Moreau's paintings preyed on des Esseintes's mind in the same way as did some of Baudelaire's poems. Both in their own way were “symbols of perversity,” of “superhuman loves,” of divine depravity. Moreau's canvases, unlike those of other painters whose works had been influenced by past masters, “derived from no one,” des Esseintes believed. Moreau had neither ancestors nor would he have any descendents.

Other works of art also hung on the duke's walls: the fantastic, lugubrious, and terrifying Religious Persecutions by the engraver Jan Luyken; Rodolphe Bresdin's landscapes bristling with their terrifying trees (The Comedy of Death, The Good Samaritan); El Greco's sketch of a Christ with its exaggerated lines and “ferocious colors”; Odilon Redon's horrific heads, his fearful humanized spiders, his stagnant livid heavens, monstrous flora and fauna, fearsome faces with their immense crazed eyes. The duke's taste in paintings was drawn to all that was freakish, abnormal, and distorted.

The archetypal images delineated in such paintings not only twisted and triturated the duke's optical and auditory nerves, but activated all of his senses, forcing them into the deepest of subliminal realms. Battling in his psyche were the Divine Christ (all Light, all Purity, all Good), versus Salomé (the Beast of the Apocalypse, the Terrible Earth Mother, the Evil and Sordid Harlot). In that both figures, psychologically speaking, are archetypal in nature, the power they exerted in des Esseintes's collective unconscious (that suprapersonal and nonindividual layer within the psyche) was inordinate.

The duke's erethism, accounting for his abnormal responsiveness to stimulation, was becoming acute, creating havoc with his psyche as well as with his digestive system. Rather than inspiring serenity and wholeness, his protracted contemplations of paintings, engravings, and drawings, particularly those revolving around the Salomé archetype, had a psychologically dismembering effect. Certain sexual proclivities, such as voyeurism, sadomasochism, and homosexuality, which des Esseintes had lived out during his years of excesses in Paris, had again taken hold in his world of reverie and dream, indicating the destructive nature and effect of these visualizations.

HOMOSEXUALITY

That des Esseintes is fascinated by the Salomé archetype, which is identified, psychologically, with the vagina dentata, indicates the power this devouring female has over him. In myths and legends, this kind of woman not only devours her lover emotionally, but tears his psyche to pieces by pulling and tugging at it with her demands. Unless the young male succeeds in breaking or at least loosening the stranglehold this Negative Earth Mother has on his psyche, he cannot hope to free himself from her, not will he ever experience ego consciousness or evolve psychologically. Throughout the centuries, the men associated with dragons and snakes, such as Saint Patrick, Saint George, and Saint Michael, to mention but a few, have succeeded in destroying the vagina dentata women in their mythical battles, thus disentangling themselves from the tentacles of the man-eating feminine principle.

Des Esseintes's extreme passivity and solipsistic nature have never entered into conflict with the vagina dentata power. Instead, he has allowed his psyche to be aroused and dominated by Salomé's energy and force. Because of des Esseintes's inability to relate to either men or women, and therefore to himself, his eros cannot connect or empathize with or even understand others, and is so repressed as to be virtually nonexistent. He frequently regresses in his reveries and dreams to childhood images and incidents revolving around homosexual and bisexual episodes. One icy evening, for example, seated in front of a warm hearth-fire, he recalls an experience he had a few years earlier, when he met a street urchin, probably about sixteen years old, so pale and thin as to be almost girllike. “Sucking on a cigarette” that would not draw, he approached des Esseintes for a light. After giving him one of his finest aromatic cigarettes, des Esseintes began chatting with the boy and then invited him for a drink, followed by a visit to an elegant brothel. Because it was the young man's first time, des Esseintes took pleasure in the lad's naiveté, gaucheries, and the mocking he received at the hands of the prostitutes. Significant as well was des Esseintes's goal of turning the young man into a thief. He reasoned that by indoctrinating him into a world of sexual pleasures, he would become accustomed to these joys, and that the moment des Esseintes stopped giving him the funds necessary to support his habit, the lad would steal to maintain it.

Although the duke's confusion as to gender identification, frequently evident in the puer aeternus type, is apparent in the above episode, what is particularly arresting is the fact that the lad is a mirror image of des Esseintes as he used to be at that age. He projects upon him (and the exquisite pleasure he derives from using the lad as a sex object in the brothel is increased by alluding to his feminine and virginal nature) a symbolic way of violating, of deflowering him. Whatever sadism is involved, it calls into activity the other half of the dynamic: masochism. Des Esseintes wants to experience the rejection and humiliation of the sophisticated ladies and the chastisement of society by becoming a criminal. Let us note that sadomasochism has frequently been identified with a death wish.

FLOWERS AND PLANTS

Des Esseintes's attention now focuses on the acquisition of rare and exotic species of flowers and plants. His personification of these brings a completely new dimension into his search for sensual gratification.

Flowers played an important role in antiquity. Certain gods, such as the handsome Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, Hyacinth, and Narcissus, were identified with their ephemeral natures: they died young, never developing into full manhood. Psychologically, they were prevented from doing so by the mother figure (symbolized frequently by the dragon or snake): the vagina dentata, a castrating force.

The aforementioned gods, also associated with the puer aeternus, lived through the woman (or the male partner) and were unable to grow firm roots into the soil (the world). They existed in a state of perpetual psychological incest with the mother or with what she symbolized for them. It is she whom they loved, feared, or sought to destroy. As appendages of the mother and, like an evanescent force or dream, they lived ephemerally, as does the flower (Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, 44).

In that flowers and plants are associated with the vagina dentata type, it is understandable that des Esseintes should be drawn to them. They are usually chosen for the home because of their beauty and sweetness of aroma, but the duke's tropical varieties are chosen for just the opposite reasons. The more bizarre, grotesque, terrifying, and destructive they are, the more he is attracted to them.

Used by him for ritualistic purposes, these Negative Earth Mother archetypes are animate in every sense of the word. Their branches, like venomous and constrictive snakes, are ready to coil and strangle any male approaching them. Their petals or “skin” are scarred, hairy, encrusted with scabs and blotched like ulcerated canker sores, rot, and gangrene. The leaves are engraved with furrows (“false veins”) and are covered with syphilitic and leprous pustules.

Moreover, many of the “vegetal ghouls” inhabiting the duke's home are carnivorous: there are Insect Eaters from the Antilles, Droserae of the peat-bogs “garnished with their glandular hairs,” and Cephalothi “capable of digesting, absorbing real meats.” Some flowers and plants with their tumorlike/tuberlike excrescences remind des Esseintes of the severely ill; others, endowed with long metallic leaves curling way down, he associates with umbilical cords. The very language used to describe these hideously scaled and deformed varieties suggests the visceral quality of his emphatic relationship with them.

The more macabre, grotesque, and spine-chilling these symbols of destructive feminine forces are, the more they arouse the duke's lust and passion. That des Esseintes's thinking also comes into play with regard to flowers and plants is evident in the scientific accuracy with which he enumerates and describes them. Nor can such verbal imagery be outdone even by such artists as Bresdin, with his hideous trees and plantings (The Comedy of Death and The Holy Family), or Redon, and his gruesomely fearsome faces (The Cactus Man, or Marsh Flower, Eyes in the Forest), which des Esseintes admires.

The second step in des Esseintes's ritualistic use of flowers and plants occurs in the olfactory domain. His exaggerated sense of smell (hyperosmia) has the power of bringing on hallucinations and dreams. Perfumes and other aromas are able to lead him into ever-profounder levels of introversion. Like primitive man and his magical ceremonies and sacrifices using incense of all types, des Esseintes sets his mind to work thinking up new ways of using things to enliven his autoerotic world.

As the air in the room inhabited by the flowers and plants becomes increasingly rarefied, their aromatic qualities exert an anesthetic effect. Like a narcotic (from the Greek, narke, numbness), they dull des Esseintes's rationality, while also encouraging his eyes to wander onto “the horrible tiger markings” of the Caladium, which he identifies with syphilis. Indeed, looking at them all, he remarks, “Everything is syphilis.” His reverie then takes root as he sees all of humanity attacked by this ancient and eternal virus. Exhumed in fossils, having been passed on from father to son, it is still active today “in all of its splendor, on the colored leaves of the plants!” Premonitory signs of some future cosmic cataclysm, they are to be viewed as rumblings of the giant battle to be waged between perversity and purity.

The intensity of des Esseintes's archetypal vision, the stifling heat of the room, and the mélange of aromas emanating from the flora has a soporific effect upon him. Lying down on his bed, he falls asleep moments later—not a restful slumber, for des Esseintes becomes a prey to a nightmare. Among its many terrifying incidents, one finds him riding on horseback at dusk in an alley when, suddenly, a human form appears before him. His blood congeals. He feels nailed to the ground.

This ambiguous sexless face was green; and opened onto violet eyelids; terribly cold, clear, blue eyes; and pimples surrounding the mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, skeletal arms, nude up to the elbows, trembling with fever, emerging from tattered sleeves; and emaciated thighs shivering in overly large cauldronlike boots.

The dread vision in question is that of Syphilis. As she (it) presses hard against him, des Esseintes breaks away, runs as swiftly as possible, only to see this “lamentable and grotesque” creature forever before him no matter what direction he takes. At one point she begins to cry; she tells des Esseintes she has lost her teeth, then taking some clay pipes from her apron, breaks them and plunges the shards into the holes in her gums. No sooner is this done than he warns her they will fall out and they do. His new attempt to flee leads to exhaustion. He shuts his eyes, again attempting to block out this diseased presence, whereupon he realizes that no matter what he does he can never evade or avoid “the horrific stare of Syphilis.” Neither walls, nor barriers, nor flight can shut the Flower-Virus out of his world. She is always there in multiple forms and with outstretched arms ready to encircle and strangle him. Indeed, she is now doing just that, as she mutates into a ferocious Nidularium with bladelike leaves that cut him severely. As blood flows and des Esseintes, now insane with fear, makes a superhuman effort to disengage himself, he awakens to realize that it is “only” a dream.

That des Esseintes associates destructive, though alluring, flowers and plants with the feminine principle and with Syphilis is a commentary on his fear and hatred of women. As castrators, these Flower-Women are vagina dentata types waiting to work their wiles on the unsuspecting male. In des Esseintes's dream, the narcotic effect of the Nidularium's aroma forces his defense to drop, making him all the more vulnerable. As he attempts to extricate himself from the grasp of this Flower-Woman, the blood oozing from the cut symbolizes castration, a loss of energy, and a wounding of the psyche. Unconsciously, women, for des Esseintes, are viewed as practitioners of sacred feminine rituals who wreak havoc upon young, innocent males. As they unleash their pent-up emotions, until then lying buried beneath a mask of voluptuous and enticing sensuality, they wound the young men for life.

That des Esseintes should identity women with flowers, plants, and disease also suggests a regressive approach to life. Vegetative imagery also abounds in Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), a work Huysmans admired immensely. Fungi and rotting or moldy plants delineate a comatose condition or severe mental illness. Since vegetation feeds directly on inorganic matter, it is looked upon as being connected with the chemical somatic process. To express this condition, Huysmans, like Poe, introduces plant life into his narrative, and in its most rudimentary and negative form, thereby underscoring the retrograde and miasmic elements involved.

THE SEX CHANGE

Recurring nightmares work on des Esseintes's already taut nerves. As his olfactory, visual, tactile, and auditory senses became increasingly acute, so, too, does his sense of taste, as previously noted. When he sucks on sarcanthus, violet candy, its strange properties, described as “a drop of feminine essence,” evoke an even more revealing reverie from his distant bawdy past.

The image of Miss Urania appears full-blown in his mind's eye. He resees her as she was in the past: an American circus acrobat of renown, with muscles like steel and arms like cast iron, who succeeded in arousing him sexually because as he peered at her she seemed to be undergoing a sex change. Her serpentine wiles, airs, affectations, and all those “sickening womanly sentimental ways” suddenly vanished, to be replaced by a highly developed, strong, agile, and powerful male. Concomitant with Miss Urania's sex change, des Esseintes felt himself becoming more feminine and overpowered by a desire to possess this woman/male. Needless to say, disappointment followed the consummation of the sex act. Instead of relaxing in the powerful and brutal arms of a Hercules, he was faced with woman in all of her “stupidity” and “puritanical” reserve. Worse, his reactions to her “glacial fondlings” made him increasingly impotent.

Such intersexuality, a shifting from one sex to another, indicates confusion and a lack of sexual identity, resulting often from a fear of castration. The derivation of Miss Urania's name in itself suggests the nature of the emotional distress: Uranus, the primordial Greek God of heaven, unwilling to allow his children to be born to the light of day for fear they would overthrow him, concealed them in the depths of the earth. His wife, the Great Earth Mother, encouraged them to rebel against him. The youngest, Cronus, waiting until Uranus was asleep, grasped his father's genitals with his left hand and castrated him with the flint sickle his mother had given him.

Symbolically, castration by the Great Earth Mother suggests the destruction of all creativity, aggressivity, and direction in life. In that puer aeternus types, such as des Esseintes, are her slaves and votaries, they are owned by her and involuntarily sacrificed to her. Psychologically, we may say that the duke's adolescent ego (sense of identity), has been drowned by the unconscious, which is tantamount to the ego's dismemberment. The phenomenon of castration, although implicit in previous images, is most overt in the Flower-Woman-Syphilis and Miss Urania sequences.

Since the fear of matriarchal castration has so deflated and degraded des Esseintes's ego, he loses all sense of reality with regard to his own body and sexuality. His regressing libido reactivates parental images, reestablishing an infantile relationship with them (Jung, Collected Works, 5:204). In des Esseintes's case, the devouring Great Mother is held accountable for the amputation of his ego, to be equated with the loss of his penis (Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, 117). Is it any wonder that his exile from society increases his already powerful feelings of alienation and cuts him off from any connection with life?

Although other visions of beguiling and powerful vagina dentata types point to des Esseintes's castration complex, an encounter of another kind, reveals his homosexual bent. One day, years earlier, near the Invalides, he had met a young schoolboy whose slim torso and thighs attracted him. What he looked upon with the greatest of pleasure, however, were the youngster's cherry lips. A liaison followed, and he confesses that he had never known such “perils of the flesh” nor felt more “painfully satisfied.”

Des Esseintes's hallucinatory reveries and dreams and his synesthetic experiences are draining his strength, leaving him devastated and distressed to the extreme. Suffering from double vision, dizziness, and continuous nausea, he finds himself unable to digest any food. His intensely nervous state is followed by high fevers and chills. A doctor is called. After examining des Esseintes he tells him that he has to leave “this solitude,” for it is a question “of life or death.” The reader is not told exactly what happens to him, but it is assumed that he reenters the venal city of Paris, for he does not seem cut out to lead any other kind of life, certainly not that of a Trappist.

Exile and introversion might have been a salutary way for des Esseintes had he analyzed his acts objectively and assimilated his fantasies consciously. Because they were used exclusively to cultivate his eroticosexual pulsations, to encourage hallucinatory reveries, and to fill the void which was his life, exile and willed introversion endangered his already weakened ego to the point of virtual dismemberment.

Throughout his months of exile, des Esseintes lived out the fate of the puer aeternus. As a personification of the infantile or inferior side of his character, he was fated to remain the undeveloped and callow youth about whom he fantasized in his sadomasochistic, transsexual, and homosexual encounters. That he experienced (temporary) satisfaction only with Miss Urania and in the consummation of the homosexual act suggests that it was only through the male that he could come into contact with the feminine aspect of himself, which he lived out through projection.

The scenes of voyeurism depicted in his reveries revolving around certain paintings and episodes in Satyricon allowed him to experience lascivious acts vicariously. His constant yearning for what he lacked, sexual consummation and the concomitant feelings of fulfillment and serenity, did not indicate a need for love or for the sexual act (as such yearning is commonly thought to indicate) but rather showed an inability to love. Had des Esseintes experienced real love from his parents during his early years, he might have related to others and to himself, understood and responded to the feelings called into play. Deprivation, however, had denied him the possibility of bestowing love upon others by giving of himself in a relationship.

Note

1. J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours. 116. Shortly after Huysman's birth in 1848 in Paris, his father became ill and his mother spent long years caring for him. When his father died in 1856, Huysmans was deeply depressed. He considered his mother's remarriage (to a Protestant) an act of betrayal to his father's memory. The birth of his half-sisters increased his sense of neglect and the rancor he felt against his mother. After passing his baccalauréat, he held a job at the Ministry of the Interior, did a stint in the army, and then began writing. His mentor was Zola, to whom he dedicated his novel The Vatard Sisters (1879) and Down Stream (1882); morose and misogynistic works followed. Only the world of art offered him some semblance of contentment and feelings of relatedness. Against the Grain was followed by Down There (1891), En Route (1895), The Cathedral (1898), and The Oblate (1903), his last works dealing with his search for holiness and need for penitence. He became deeply religious and spent some days among the Trappist monks.