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was not that Naturalism had been abandoned in
Against Nature
, but rather that it had been followed perversely. The relationship between
Against Nature
and Naturalism resembles the relationship between the negative and the photograph. Huysmans produced an inverted version of the Naturalist ‘
race, moment, milieu
’: Des Esseintes is the last of his race attempting to flee his historical moment by creating an artificial
milieu
. It was not that
Against Nature
was anti-Naturalist, but that it was Naturalist
enough
to have disturbing implications for Zola and his methods. The discussion in chapter III of Petronius’
Satyricon
is tellingly framed in this respect: Des Esseintes reads it as a ‘realist novel’, a ‘slice cut from Roman life’ (echoing the famous Naturalist dictum that a novel must be a ‘slice of life’), but also emphasizes the fact that it is a ‘story with no plot’. Thisgenre-defying satirical feat of documentary imagination might be a clue to what
Against Nature
is attempting.
    As for
Against Nature
’s celebrated espousal of the ‘Symbolist’ poets, who in 1884 were neither a movement nor a school (the Symbolist ‘manifesto’ appeared in 1886), this too is complicated. Many of Huysmans’ contemporaries would have seen Des Esseintes as a caricature of the Decadent reader-consumer, a misanthropic drop-out in a fetishistic relationship with his books and artworks. Although his tastes are new-fangled, quirky and rare, and although the ‘exquisite’ poetry of Mallarmé and ‘pidgin’ verse of Corbière were little known at the time, the fact that these are the tastes of a burned-out and spiteful elitist makes the compliment Huysmans pays to these writers ambiguous – it was certainly ambiguously interpreted by reviewers, as our appendix of critical responses to the novel shows. Des Esseintes
predicts
rather than
reflects
artistic tastes: we know the influence of Mallarmé on twentieth-century thought, we know too of Corbière’s impact on Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire are classics while Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon are among the most widely recognized image-makers of their time. In 1884, however, his favourite artists and writers seemed obscure, irrelevant, and – with a few exceptions – destined for oblivion. One reviewer wrote that Des Esseintes’s selection of authors would, once their flashing fame had died, ‘date the book and limit its future value’. What promised to ‘date’ Huysmans’ novel in 1884 is one of the elements that keeps it modern.
    Huysmans’ 1903 preface is misleading, seeking as it does to rewrite the history of the book’s composition and interpretation to suit a different cultural moment and a different – Catholic – Huysmans. The Huysmans of 1903 sees
Against Nature
as evidence of the ‘underground workings’ of the soul groping for salvation. For him each chapter of
Against Nature
contains the ‘seed’ of the novels that followed:
Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale (The Cathedral
) and
L’Oblat (The Oblate
). He also retrospectively interprets Des Esseintes’s final words of the book as a prelude to conversion. There are problems with this, not least the fact that Huysmans did not convert until 1892 andthat his writing meanwhile showed little evidence of these ‘underground workings’. The 1903 preface also takes the opportunity to settle a few scores and rewrites a few premises. By claiming Flaubert’s (
L’Éducation Sentimentale
as the key book, the novel after which nothing can be written, Huysmans downplays the value of Naturalism and the aesthetic and sociopolitical project of Zola, who had died the previous year. He also caricatures the principles of Naturalist writing and overplays his break with Zola and the Naturalists when in fact he maintained good