Huysmans 1896
A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at? - Ronald Reagan (1966)
...Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!
In fact, not one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and so wonderful, which the ingenuity of mankind cannot create; no Forest of Fontainebleau, no fairest moonlight landscape but can be reproduced by stage scenery illuminated by the electric light; no waterfall but can be imitated by the proper application of hydraulics, till there is no distinguishing the copy from the original; no mountain crag but painted pasteboard can adequately represent; no flower but well chosen silks and dainty shreds of paper can manufacture the like of!
Yes, there is no denying it, she is in her dotage and has long ago exhausted the simple-minded admiration of the true artist; the time is undoubtedly come when her productions must be superseded by art.
Why, to take the one of all her works which is held to be the most exquisite, the one of all her creations whose beauty is by general consent deemed the most original and most perfect,--woman to wit, have not men, by their own unaided effort, manufactured a living, yet artificial organism that is every whit her match from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist in this world of ours a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and brought to birth amid the pangs of motherhood, the model, the type of which is more dazzlingly, more superbly beautiful than that of the two locomotives lately adopted for service on the Northern Railroad of France?
One, the Crampton, an adorable blonde, shrill-voiced, slender-waisted, with her glittering corset of polished brass, her supple, catlike grace, a fair and fascinating blonde, the perfection of whose charms is almost terrifying when, stiffening her muscles of steel, pouring the sweat of steam down her hot flanks, she sets revolving the puissant circle of her elegant wheels and darts forth a living thing at the head of the fast express or racing seaside special!
The other, the Engerth, a massively built, dark-browed brunette, of harsh, hoarse-toned utterance, with thick-set loins, panoplied in armour-plating of sheet iron, a giantess with dishevelled mane of black eddying smoke, with her six pairs of low, coupled wheels, what overwhelming power when, shaking the very earth, she takes in tow, slowly, deliberately, the ponderous train of goods waggons.
Of a certainty, among women, frail, fair-skinned beauties or majestic, brown-locked charmers, no such consummate types of dainty slimness and of terrifying force are to be found. Without fear of contradiction may we say: man has done, in his province, as well as the God in whom he believes.
...
He possessed in accordance with this taste a
marvellous collection of tropical plants, produced
by the cunning fingers of supreme masters of the
craft, following Nature step by step, recreating
her, taking the flower from its birth, carrying it
to maturity, imitating it to its final decease,
observing every shade of its infinite variety, the
most fleeting changes of its awakening and its
sleep, noting the pose of its petals blown back by
the wind or beaten down by the rain, sprinkling on
its morning leaves little drops of gum to
represent dew, fashioning it according to every
season,--in full bloom, when the twigs bend under
the weight of sap; or when it lifts its parched
stem and ragged corolla as the petals drop away
and the leaves fall.
This admirable art had long fascinated him; but
now he was dreaming of the construction of another
sort of flora.
He had done with artificial flowers aping the
true; he wanted natural flowers imitating the
false.
Against Nature (A Rebours), by J.-K. Huysmans, 1884
--
The title is almost untranslatable. Against the Grain sounds oddly anonymous [also Wrong Way]; Against Nature is closer to the spirit of the book. But since Huysmans explains that his hero, Des Esseintes, occasionally takes his nourishment ‘a rebours’ - through the rear end - when eating bores him, it could equally be translated as Up the Arsehole - a version that would have undoubtedly pleased the author.
The Word Painter of Paris: Joris-Karl Huysmans by Colin Wilson
Related Article:
A Rebours (Against Nature) - Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848 – 1907)
