The Decadent World-View by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary criticism
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC.
Published: 2011-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

X. THE FRUIT OF THE POISONED TREE

Jean Des Esseintes’ retreat from Paris, as described in Á rebours, changes his literary and artistic tastes, causing him to shun, so far as is possible, books and pictures whose subjects are “confined to modern life”. For this reason, he begins to prefer the more exotic works of authors he once apparently valued for their realism. The last item in the exemplary list that he offers is his preference for Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret relative to L’Assommoir.

This is the only mention of Zola in the novel, and must have seemed a trifle ungrateful to readers familiar with Huysmans’ previous prose works, which had been heavily influenced by Zola’s work and by the Naturalist manifesto that the author had been stung into compiling by hostile criticism. Given that Des Esseintes takes the trouble to explain his fascination with Charles Baudelaire’s poetry at some length, and lavishes several pages of praise on the prose works of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Zola—who undoubtedly read the book—might well have felt short-changed, as he might also have done by Des Esseintes relentless championship of the artificial against the natural. The latter point of principle is a stark contradiction of the allegiance that Zola had eventually formed—though not without difficulty—as a result of chronicling the effects of hereditary corruption on the appalling Rougon-Macquart family.

Had it not been for that particular inversion of allegiance, Zola’s Naturalism and Huysmans’ revised version of Baudelairean Decadence would not have seemed dissimilar to many critics. Naturalists and neo-Decadents shared a fascination with the seamier side of life—extending from conventional immorality to what Baudelaire had called “the phosphorescence of putrescence”—and they seemed equally “decadent” in both the trivial sense in which the word was used by stern moralists and in the specific literary sense in which the epithet had once been hurled at any Romantic writer who trampled roughshod over the assumptions of Classicism. By the time Zola began chronicling the generations of the Rougon-Macquarts against the background of the Second Empire, Romanticism had become intellectually and aesthetically respectable—of which there was no better proof than the fact that Victor Hugo, exiled from Paris by Napoléon III, stayed away until the Empire fell even after being offered amnesty—and the new literary decadence seemed to be a further phase in literature’s headlong fall from Classical grace, in which Naturalist preoccupations with drunkenness and prostitution were at least as much at fault as Baudelariean scabrousness.

It is not surprising that the Rougon-Macquart novel in which Des Esseintes could still find solace in his elective exile is La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, because it is, in some respects, the odd man out in the set of twenty, representing an interesting moment in the moral and intellectual development of the series, at which its dynamic thrust might have veered off to take a different fork in the road to enlightenment. It is no coincidence that the eponymous protagonist of the final volume of the series, who is entrusted with

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