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Huysmanist, I felt obliged to do a little better.
    When doctoral students are planning to write their dissertation on a certain author and ask me in what order they should approach his works, I always tell them to privilege chronology. Not because the life has any real importance, but because, taken in order, an author’s books make up a sort of intellectual biography with a logic of its own. In the case of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the obvious problem was what to do with
À rebours
. Once you’ve written a book of such powerful originality, unrivalled even today in all of literature, how do you go on writing?
    The obvious answer is: with great difficulty. Indeed,
En rade
, which follows
À rebours
, is a disappointing book. How could it not be? And yet if its faults, its air of stagnation and slow decline, never quite overcome our pleasure in reading it, this is thanks to a stroke of genius on Huysmans’ part: to recount, in a book bound to be disappointing, the story of a disappointment. The coherence between subject and treatment makes an aesthetic whole. It gets pretty boring, yes, but you keep reading, because you can feel that the characters aren’t the only ones stranded in their country retreat: Huysmans is stranded there, too. It would almost seem that he was trying to go back to Naturalism – the sordid Naturalism of the countryside, where the peasants turn out to be more abject and greedy even than Parisians – if not for the dream sequences, which interrupt and ultimately hobble the story, and make it so impossible to classify.
    In his next book Huysmans finally finds a way out, using a tried-and-true strategy: he adopts a main character, an authorial stand-in, whose development we follow over several books. These are all things I managed to explain clearly enough in my dissertation. The trouble was what came next, because the whole point of Durtal’s development (and of Huysmans’) – from the first pages of
Là-bas
, with its farewell to Naturalism, through
En route
and
La cathédrale
and ending with
L’oblat
– is his conversion to Catholicism.
    Obviously, it’s not easy for an atheist to talk about a series of books whose main subject is religious conversion. In the same way, it’s hard to imagine someone who has never been in love, someone to whom love is completely alien, taking an interest in a novel all about that particular passion. In the absence of any real emotional identification, what an atheist slowly comes to feel when confronted with Durtal’s spiritual adventures – with the series of spiritual retreats, followed by eruptions of divine grace, that make up Huysmans’ last three books – is, unfortunately, boredom.
    It was at this moment in my reflections (I’d just got up and was having my coffee, waiting for the sun to rise) that I had an extremely unpleasant thought: just as
À rebours
was the summit of Huysmans’ life as a writer, Myriam was undoubtedly the summit of my love life. How would I ever get over her? The only realistic answer was I wouldn’t.
     
    While I was waiting to die, I still had the
Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies
. Its next meeting was in less than a week. Also, election day was coming up. Many men take an interest in politics and war, but these diversions never appealed to me. I was about as political as a bath towel. No doubt it was my loss. To be fair, when I was young, the elections could not have been less interesting; the mediocrity of the ‘political offerings’ was almost surprising. A centre-left candidate would be elected, serve either one or two terms, depending how charismatic he was, then for obscure reasons he would fail to complete a third. When people got tired of that candidate, and the centre-left in general, we’d witness the phenomenon of
democratic change
, and the voters would install a candidate of the centre-right, also for one or two terms, depending on his personal appeal. Western nations took a strange pride in this system,