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also victim of memories he cannot control or does not want to revisit. This aspect of Huysmans’ novel has led to comparisons with Proust, though for Huysmans it remains purely at the level of narrative expedient. In
Against Nature
, the traditional novelistic plot has ‘degenerated’ and come to a near standstill; even Des Esseintes is often ‘squeezed out’ from entire swathes of his story by the renegade memories and the lists and inventories he has amassed.
    Des Esseintes, like the book that tells his story, is prodigiously but selectively learned. Not for him the rounded education, the balanced mind and healthy body. His tastes are for the quirky, the difficult, the outrageous. He savours the Latin Decadents, he enjoys the sense of the language losing its clarity, becoming complex and strange, ‘a pagan tongue as it decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces’. Des Esseintes is also impotent, and, like his creator, a misogynist. We should not refine this fact away: in
Against Nature
, as in so many ‘Decadent’ works, the misogyny is not incidental but in built. 18
    Des Esseintes has sought ever richer, more dazzling and dangerous pleasures; ever more eccentric, artificial or stage-managed sexual encounters – his literary and artistic tastes are exclusive and his sexual tastes eclectic. There is something of the theatrical director in him, a thwarted creativity that expresses itself in a need to stage and direct his fantasy scenarios. Most importantly, he has the money to indulge these tastes and play out these scenarios. We notice how, despite his tirades against the ‘American century’, modern consumerism and ownership, he takes advantage of all of these. He
owns
, and money is rarely far from the surface of this book ostensibly about the ascetic and cultured life, the search for the uncontaminated pleasure of pure art. Indeed, his passion for reproducing, commissioning copies, having finely bound books and made-to-measure interiors is uncannily like that of the early twentieth-century (American) millionaire: buying, transporting, transplanting. He is also a book fetishist, in whom the bibliophile – the lover of the book as object – overcomes the reader. Des Esseintes does not read, preferring instead to wax lyrical about paper qualityand bindings. Reading in
Against Nature
is only ever remembered or replayed, and all the evocative passages about Baudelaire or Mallarmé are memories of readings that finished before the novel began.
Against Nature
is about consumption in all its forms: financial, material, gastronomic, literary and artistic. With consumption there is also, inevitably (and in keeping with the Naturalist logic displayed by Zola’s concern for the defecating tortoise), expulsion. Des Esseintes takes enemas, has problems with his digestion, diets and then gorges himself. He takes strong literary medicine, and the artistic equivalent of the beef-tea he drinks may be found in the prose poetry he favours, what he calls the ‘osmazome’ or concentrated juice of literature. Des Esseintes does not simply wish to abandon the world, but to poison it (as his dealings with August Langlois reveal). We see him exercise his authority over servants and tradesmen, in a relationship which replicates the social order of the world he tries to escape. The more
Against Nature
banishes the world, the more it returns to haunt Des Esseintes, just as he himself is the mirror image of the materialism he hates.
    Another sense of the term ‘Decadence’ was provided for Huysmans’ generation by the classical scholar Désirée Nisard in his 1834
Etude de mæurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Critical and Cultural Study of the Latin Poets of the Decadence
). Nisard defined Decadence in literary terms as the period of description, where verbal ingenuity replaced moral vision, ornament replaced substance and false