HUYSMANS: WRITING AGAINST (FEMALE) NATURE
CHARLES BERNHETMER
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In the final Chapter of her brilliant new book, Breaking the Chain: Women,
Theory, and French Realist Fiction, Naomi Schor makes the sweeping Claim that
representation in its paradigmatic nineteenth- century form depends on the
bondage of woman" (1985:142). This thesis, with which I concur, leads Schor
to propose a revision in the familiar canon of nineteenth-century French
literature whereby "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve Future would displace
J.-K. Huysmans's A Rebours as the ultimate text of post-realism, for Villiers's
futuristic fantasy of a female android is the logical conclusion of a century of
fetishization of the female body" (1985:
145—146). I intend to demonstrate here that this proposed displacement is unnecessary in terms of Schor's own thesis, A Rebours fetishizes the female body with a violence that is, if anything, greater than that displayed in L'Eve Future because the perils entailed by failure are more intensely and vividly imagined both in regard to male sexual identity and to the very possibility of representation. L'Eve Future, with its idealizing plot that rejects the inadequate biological woman in favor of an artificial, if finally unintelligible replicant, dramatizes a philosophically sophisticated response to a phantasmatic fear of female sexuality that permeates every aspect of Huysmans's portrayal of the biological world.1
Yet a focus on Huysmans's (mis)treatment of women does indeed suggest a
necessary revision of traditional literary history: the collapse of the
distinction he was himself at pains to establish between naturalism and
decadence. In the preface to A Rebours written in 1902, eighteen years after the
novel's publication, Huysmans explains his reasons for breaking with the
naturalist school, of which his own early works had been exemplary, and with
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Zola, the master whom he had eloquently defended as recently as 1876 in a
pamphlet entitled "Emile Zola et L'Assommoir." By 1884, he writes,
naturalism was turning in circles, having exhausted its stock of observed
phenomena and reached a dead end in its artistic
method. Nothing new could be expected from this approach, now become predictable, repetitious and sterile. At the time, however, Huysmans did not perceive this situation clearly: "I was vaguely searching to escape from a blind alley where I was suffocating, but I had no well-defined plan and A Rebours, which liberated me from a literature without issue, giving me new air, is an entirely unconscious work, imagined without preconceived ideas, without any designs set aside for future use, without anything at all" (1977:60).2
Huysmans presents naturalism as a function of deliberate intention, a mode of writing without unconscious depths, exhausted because its material was limited on the one hand to an inventory of surfaces and sensations, and on the other to a reduction of emotions to instinctual appetites. This corresponds remarkably to the picture of naturalism that has prevailed in the traditional histories of literature. Granted, some critics have argued that Zola was above all a creator of myths, but this perception has for the most part caused them to associate his visionary qualities with Romantic
tendencies also present, for instance, in Balzac. Only recently have psychoanalytic and feminist interpretations of Zola begun to uncover the obsessive phantasies that pervade and drive his writing.3 Reading in terms of a phantasmatic scenario, one begins to suspect that Huysmans 's unconscious" project in A Rebours was not so much to turn away from naturalism as to revitalize its sources in the un- conscious and to find a new language in which he could at once express and control an obsession whose power had been lost in codified literary forms: the obsession with the female sexual body. In what follows I will attempt to trace the operation of an obsessive phantasmatic economy ·in Huysmans's writing and will briefly demonstrate some of the striking similarities in the ways Zola and Huysmans figure and disfigure the woman's body. Huysmans's fictions open most transparently onto the stage of the phantasmatic in the many remarkable dream narratives interspersed throughout their representational space. These accounts are, on the one hand, carefully controlled literary structures, whose - themes and images derive from and elaborate material already presented in the text, and whose artistic purpose is to give the reader the illusion of actual oneiric experience. On the other hand, these narratives are not simply representations of consciously contrived
2. All translations from the French are my own. 5. See, for example, Boric
(1971, 1975), Jennings (1972—1975, 1977) and Schor (1975, 1976).
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phantasmatic scenarios but are also products of what one might call a textual
unconscious, an unconscious revealed in and through the process of writing,
whose compulsive obsessions may be found to influence even those elements of the
narrative apparently most invulnerable to unconscious elaboration. Thus the
dream texts in Huysmans do not puncture the surface of an otherwise smooth-
flowing narrative discourse; rather they reveal the driving force of that
discourse and suggest the confused interpenetration of conscious invention and
unconscious phantasm in his creative process.4
Toward the end of a horrifying nightmare that takes up all of Chapter X of En Rade (1887), Jacques Marles sees an Incredibly ugly woman sitting on the rim of one of the towers of the church of Saint-Sulpice. Jacques wonders what this foul creature might be, "a sordid trollop who was laughing in a lewd and mocking manner,
her nose crushed from the end, her mouth wasted, toothless in front, decayed in back, barred like that of a clown by two streaks of blood. . . She held out over the square the double bag of her old breasts, the badly closed shutters of her paunch, the wrinkled sacks of her vast thighs, between which was displayed the dry tuft of a filthy seaweed mattress!" (1976:210). Overcoming his initial fear, Jacques manages to identify this grotesque, mutilated, degraded female through a remarkable feat of reasoning: "He succeeded in persuading himself that this tower was a well, a well that rose up in the air instead of sinking into the ground, but indeed a well." This, he says, explains everything, and he concludes: "This abominable whore was [the embodiment of] Truth" (p. 211).
Although in his nightmare Jacques Marles goes on to meditate on the many ways Truth acts as a prostitute (adopting every conceivable posture so as to caress each individual according to his particular lust for certitude), the bizarre reasoning that enabled him to identify this lascivious hag remains unexplained. How does a tower become an inverted well? One might begin to suggest a tentative answer by returning to the dream-event that marks the onset of this final episode of Jacques's dream. He has lost his cane, surely an unambiguous phallic symbol, and feels that "at this precise moment this event took on an enormous importance. He knew in a peremptory way that his life, his entire life, depended on that cane" (p. 207). In the manner of dreams, Jacques subsequently forgets all about his lost cane, but what happens next vividly illustrates the horrifying, life-menacing significance his unconscious attributes to being careless. The scene seems to stage the birth of a primal phantasy. One wall of the courtyard in which Jacques finds himself is made entirely of glass, behind which is a turbulent mass of water. Slowly
4. For an astute analysis of the function and structure of dream narratives
in Huysmans, see Carmignani-Dupont (1981).
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a female body emerges into the water, head first, from below the pavement. She
seems attractive at first, adolescent, virginal, but then Jacques notices that
she is bleeding from wounds in the hips caused by the iron teeth of a huge crane
that is lifting her up. She appears to accept her suffering "with a
languorous and cruel smile, suggestive of an agonizing pleasure" (p. 208).
As Jacques rushes forward to rescue her, he hears the sound of balls falling and
realizes that the woman has lost her beautiful blue eyes: "All that
remained at their place were two red holes that blazed, like fire-ships, in the
green water. And these eyes sprang up again, motionless, then again detached
themselves and bounced back.... Ah! how frightful were those successions of
azure gazes and of sockets bathed in blood! He gasped for breath in front of
this creature, splendid as long as she remained intact, hideous as soon as her
eyes became unstuck and fell away. This constantly interrupted beauty juxtaposed
to the most terrifying ugliness . . . was a horror without name" (p. 209).
The imagery of castration is unmistakable here. Woman lures man with the illusion of her being intact, complete, inviolate. In this state, she invites the male to phantasize that she is no different than he. Indeed, the attributes of the adolescent body emerging from the water (tiny breasts with rigid nipples, a firm torso, a flat stomach, a slightly lifted leg that hides the sexual organs) all suggest a disguised phallic image. However, the attraction of sameness is destroyed with the discovery of woman's gaping wound, the hideously bloody sign of her lack. Moreover, this discovery is not made once and for all. Woman's beauty is constantly interrupted, the eyes repeatedly return to their orbits, then again become unglued. Castration thus measures out the very rhythm of temporality. Translated into spatial terms, this is the truth of the tower that is actually a well in reverse. (In the dream, the young woman, once lifted by the crane onto the tower of Saint-Sulpice, becomes the toothless bloody-mouthed old whore.) Female lack absorbs the male erection into her bottomless pit. Indeed the erection is nothing more than the pit tumed inside out.
This turn, whereby the inside shows itself on the outside is, in Huysmans's
morbid imagination; an essentially pathological phenomenon. The wound of
castrated woman festers and becomes syphilitic. "Everything is
syphilis," Des Esseintes observes in A Rebours. "And he had the sudden
vision of a humanity ceaselessly mined by the virus of ages past"
(1977:197)- What is inherited from father to son, "the unusable
legacy," is the virus that thrives in the female sexual organs and erodes
the surface of the skin with pitted wounds and puffed-up chancres. Des
Esseintes's nightmare vision of Syphilis personified is accompanied,
significantly, by castration imagery. First the woman he is with, whom he is
unable to recognize, despite her having been "implanted for a long time
already in his
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inmost being and in his life" (p. 199), loses her teeth and vainly tries to replace them by thrusting bits of the white stems of clay pipes into the holes in her gums.5 The figure of Syphilis herself is then vividly imaged as both castrating and castrated. As Des Esseintes approaches this seductive, naked figure with a mixture of horror and fascination, black Amorphophalli (exotic plants the black stalks of which, scarred with gashes, he had compared earlier to "damaged Negro members," p. 194) suddenly spring up on every side and he feels "utter disgust at the sight of these warm, firm stalks twisting and turning between his fingers" (p. 203).
As Freud (1963:212) observes in his essay on Medusa's head, "a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration" while mitigating its horror by replacing the dreaded absence by a plurality of presences. Paradoxically, woman becomes phallic through the power she derives from her violent mutilation. Once the pullulating male members have disappeared from the stomach of Syphilis — who is also identified as "the Flower" — Des Esseintes is confronted with the horrible truth that haunts his unconscious as it does Jacques Marles's: "He saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its swordblades gaping open to expose the bloody depths" (p. 203). Thus the female sexual organs, flowers of evil, are armed with the very instruments of their own laceration.
It is important to see that Huysmans's phantasy here is not simply that woman is castrated, but that her sexuality operates a kind of undecidable mixture of male and female attributes. Huysmans associates this operation with a confusion of animal and vegetable realms. Woman as diseased phallic flower becomes, in the hallu cinated imagination of Gilles de Rais (as recreated by Durtal in La-Bas), woman as salacious self-fornicating tree:
Here the
tree appeared to him as an upright living being, with its head down,
hidden in the
hair of its roots, its legs in the air, spreading them apart then
dividing them
again into new thighs that open in turn, then become smaller and
smaller as
they move away from the trunk; there, between these legs, another
branch is
thrust, in a motionless fornication that repeats itself and diminishes,
from twig to
twig, up to the top; there again the trunk seems to be a phallus
that rises
and disappears under a skirt of leaves, or on the contrary that
emerges from
a green fleece and plunges into the soft belly of the earth
(1908:171).6
The branches of this tree, whose identification with female sexuality becomes clear when the entire forest is transformed into a nightmarish
5. This dental imagery recalls the memory Des Esseintes evoked earlier of his own mutila tion by a brutal doctor who, while pulling out a tooth, seems, on the level of unconscious association, so be simultaneously castrating and raping him. See Carmignani-Dupont (1981:60—61) and Collomb (1978:84).
6. My attention was drawn to this passage by Jean Decottignies's illuminating
discussion of it in his excellent article on La-Bas (1978:78).
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vision of "female triangles, great V's" (p. 172), these proliferating
branches are at once female thighs open to penetration by the phallus, and the
phallus itself. Increasing our sense of undecidability, Huysmans suggests
furthermore that the tree can be read interchangeably as emerging upwards from
the earth or plunging downwards into it. Thus female sexuality, by subverting
the stability of gender difference, upsets the order of high and low, active and
passive, animal and vegetable. Ultimately it infects the entire biological world
with the diseased blood flowing from its gaping wounds. A terrifying vision of
organic decomposition and degeneration is the final stage of Gilles de Rais's
hallucination:
On the
treetrunks Gilles now sees disturbing polyps, horrible gnarls. He
becomes aware
of exostoses and ulcers, of deeply-cut wounds, chancrous
tubercles.
atrocious blights; it is a leprosarium of the earth, a venerial clinic of
trees, among
which a red hedge suddenly comes into view . . . [whose] falling
leaves tinged
with crimson make him feel as if he were being soaked in a rain
of blood (p.
172).
It is tempting to limit the significance of these repellent images of female sexuality by ascribing them to the idiosyncrasy of Huysmans's peculiar neurotic sensibility. But Huysmans is only taking to its extreme point an obsessive fear of woman's sexual nature that pervades the male novelistic imagination throughout the nineteenth century. While I propose to demonstrate this thesis at length elsewhere, I do want to suggest here the remarkable close ness of Huysmans's phantasies of a morbidly productive feminine sexuality to Zola's equally phantasmatic portrayals of woman s desire in terms of organic inflammation and/or progressive decay.
Nana's decomposing body is the most memorable and best known image in Zola's works of active female sexuality revealed in the immediacy of its morbid physical degeneracy. Zola describes Nana's corpse, "a heap of pus and blood, a shovelful of putrid flesh" (1961:
1485), in such nauseating detail, less because he wants to punish her for her sins against bourgeois morality than because he is driven to expose the phantasmatic origins of her power in his unconscious. As Michel Serres (1975:239—242) has observed, Nana is a virus of epidemic proportions that corrupts everything it touches. The attraction she generates is in the service of the corruption she causes and, ultimately, embodies. Her bisexuality is a crucial element in Zola's portrayal of her corrupt nature. For her sexual contagion infects man and woman alike, decomposing them, making them like her, undoing their difference, until all are absorbed into her putrefying corpse, symbol of the decadence of an entire age and of its phantasmatic obsession.
A less famous passage in Zola that prefigures Huysmans's treatment of female
sexuality occurs in La Curee. An immense hothouse, teeming with the same kinds
of exotic tropical plants with which
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Des Esseintes, thirteen years later, will fill up his country retreat, here
constitutes the sexually charged environment in which Renee Sacard first
imagines, then consumates, incest with her son-in-law. Zola describes the
greenhouse as a kind of living organism, female, in heat, exuding sexual fluids
and a "penetrating, sensual" (1960:
357) odor di femmina. Stimulated by this vertiginous excess that fuses animal and vegetable — the twisted red leaves of the Begonia and the white, pointed leaves of the Galadium seem to the lovers "the rounded forms of hips and knees, sprawled on the ground, subject to the brutality of bloody caresses" (pp. 486—487) — Renee becomes increasingly masculine: "It was above all in the hothouse that Renee was the man" (p. 486). She easily dominates the passive and effete Maxime, "cette fille manquee" (p. 485), through her perverse and voracious sexual energy. Thus she becomes phallic precisely through her association with what is most intensely and characteristically female. And it is in her capacity as the phallic woman, the woman become man by the force of her sexual desire, that she resembles, "like a sister" (p. 485), the black marble sphinx that crouches at the very center of the great hothouse.
The enigma of the Sphinx is thus not quite as unreadable as Naomi Schor maintains in her article on femininity in Zola. She argues that in a mythopathology particularly active in the nineteenth century
- - the literarity of woman seems to be linked to her marmorisation, her enigmatisation" (1976:192). But as Freud points out in an essay Schor cites, the decapitated head of Medusa, symbolic of castration, turns the observer to stone, i.e., gives him an erection. The mystery of the sphinx is that she is at once decapitated (in the sense that her head is added on to an animal's body) and marmoreal, at once castrated and phallic. But this phantasmatic doubling of woman's power is, I insist, a secondary formation generated by the initial perception of female lack, of the terrifying wound. Woman does not constitute in herself the undecidability of difference: she produces it as a phantasized effect of the organic lesion that, in the obsessed male imagination, fissures her being. Thus it is no accident that Zola ends his extraordinary description of hothouse incest by evoking, in images that directly foreshadow Huysmans, the voracious mouth of woman as a bleeding red flower that figures her castration:
"[Renee's] mouth then opened with the avid and bleeding brilliance of the Chinese Hibiscus. - . - She had become the inflamed daughter of the hothouse. Her kisses bloomed and faded, like the red flowers of the great mallow, which last only a few hours and are ceaselessly revived, like the ravaged and insatiable lips of a giant Messalina" (p. 489).7
7. This passage is perceptively analysed by Jean de Palacio in a fascinating
article (1977). See also his complementary discussion (1981).
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Dramatically visible on the very surface of the Huysmans text, castration causes a fissure in the surface of the real, punctures the skin of representation, erodes its containing membranes, infiltrates and contaminates its tissues. "Specialist of skin diseases," writes Main Buisine in a suggestive article on the pathological porosity of Huysmans's world, "the describer ["descripteur"] is a dermatologist who can never stop detailing the lamentable state of innumerable membranes of all kinds" (1978:61). Fascinated, compelled, unable to avert his eyes, Huysmans, from his first book to his last, never stops detailing the ontological consequences of the exorbitant female wound as it corrupts, infects, rots, and decomposes the real. His much-touted evolution from naturalism to decadence to satanism to catholicism did not entail any fundamental change in his conception of the physical world, only changes in the perspective from which that world was viewed.
For instance, take this description in En Rade of the castle of Lourps where Des Esseintes was born: "In short, the infirmities of a terrible old age, the catarrhal expulsion of the water, the vitriolic blotches of the plaster, the rheum of the windows, the fistulas of the stone, the leprosy of the bricks, a whole hemorrhage of refuse, all had attacked this miserable hovel that, alone and abandoned, was - slowly dying in the hidden solitude of the forest" (1976:70—71).
The rotting body of the moribund castle bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the saint whose hagiography Huysmans wrote after his conversion, Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901). Her entire organism is rotten with purulent ulcers, pustulant tumors, gangrenous nerve-destroying maladies (her arm hangs by one strand): - "The forehead split apart from the roots of the hair to the middle of the nose; the chin broke away under the lower lip and the mouth became swollen; the right eye died out; . . she lost blood through the mouth, the ears, the nose" (1932:81), and, as if this were not enough, "then it was the lungs and liver that decayed" (p. 82) (I pass over additional infections) until finally she gets the hubonic plague. - And the miracle is that she lives 38 years in this devastated state! For her afflictions are not natural. They are the signs written in her flesh of her privileged relation to God, crowned ultimately when she receives the stigmata. By mystical substitution, she is continuing Christ's mission of suffering on earth as an expiatory victim. Thus she invites her suffering, actually requesting and receiving from her - beneficently sadistic master -a third plague-ridden abcess "in honor of the Holy Trinity" (p. 82).
There is, however, a significant difference between Jacques Marles's anxious
observation of the ruinous castle "dans un etat desorbite dame"
(1976:71; literally, "in a disorbited state of mind") and Saint
Lydwine's delighted perception of her body's progressive ruination: Jacques is
overwhelmed by his inability to deal rationally
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with a world in decomposition whereas Lydwine is able to read her physical
disintegration as a text. Her numerous wounds and dismemberments do more than
signify the horrifying reality of castration: they suggest the possibility of a
dialogue between the biological world and a transcendent one.8 Her physical
suffering signifies the overcoming of the female organism; her gaping wounds are
filled with the Divine Word; her disfiguration, in the very exorbitance of its
violence, is contained in and by God's purpose. While the narrative of Lydwine's
life connects castration and temporality in the, to Huysmans, satisfying mode of
excess,9 it simultaneously sublimates that narrative out of temporal
sequentiality into a transcendent mode of symbolic repetition. Lydwine's
reception of the stigmata is not a further emblem of her castration, but a
symbol of her being intact as a member of the mystical body of Christ dedicated
to the continued repetition of his Passion. It is, furthermore, one of the signs
of Saint Lydwine's mystical intactness, of her symbolic equation with Christ,
that her decomposing body is miraculously sublimated: "In a constant
miracle, [God] made her wounds into cassolettes of perfumes; plasters removed
pullulating with vermin gave off delightful scents; her pus smelled good,
delicate aromas emanated from her vomit" (p. 88).
Although Freud never presented a coherent theory of sublimation, the focus of his thinking on this issue concerns the displacement of sexual energy onto non-sexual activities, such as artistic creation and intellectual inquiry. In The Ego and the Id he associates this displacement with "the main purpose of Eros — that of uniting and binding — in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego" (1962:35). Melanie Klein (1975) corroborates this holistic view of sublimation: according to her, it involves a tendency to repair and restore the wholeness of the good maternal object that has been shattered by the sadistic destructive instincts. What is peculiar about sublimation in Huysmans is that its goal is the restoration of a purely phantasmatic image of wholeness, that of the phallic mother. This phantasized figure, let it be stressed, is not perceived as a sexually
8. Jean-Luc Steinmetz has made this point before me in his stimulating article "Sang sens" (1978). "The sheer number of ailments that assail Lydwine," writes Steinmetz (p. 86), "finally indicates clearly to her that a frighteningly incarnated language binds her to unity. And this language is in fact a writing applied onto living flesh."
9. In Les Fou les de Lourdes, published in 1906, two years before his death, Huysmans declares himself so blase about ordinary cases of mutilated, putrefying human bodies "sans luxe d'horreur particuliere" (1954:291; "without the special attraction of any particular horror") that only the most "exorbitant cases" (p. 291) can still give him "the giddiness of excess" (p. 292). Such satisfying horror, literally dis-orbited, is provided by "larval heads like that of this woman whose eye was brandished, resembling that of a slug at the end of a tentacle" (p. 291).
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desiring subject. She is not the sphinx, associated with woman's power to destabilize sexual identities, but rather an image of sexual sameness that functions to erase the traumatic fact of difference and define identity as universally masculine. Huysmans strives to sustain this phantasy even as he recognizes its unnatural artifice, its deceiving sublimation. This duplicitous perverseness, I will argue, makes sublimation in Huysmans less an ego-syntonic process than an ego splitting one.
But let us begin by identifying some of the manifestations of unifying sublimation in Huysmans's texts. Sublimating artifice is, of course, the function of many of Des Esseintes's experiments. His perfumes, for example, are all, with the single exception of jasmin, artistic representations of natural odors fabricated from diverse alcoholates and essences. They are simulacra, without organic content. Moreover, the perfumes, like Lydwine's body, are readable as texts, written in a coded language with various dialects and styles. Des Esseintes learns to understand "the syntax of odors" (1977:224) and to perform "the exegesis of those texts" (p. 226). The great attraction of this exercise is precisely its sublimating function: unity is reconstituted as a rigorously structured code, a system of signs whereby the mechanism of a work may be dismantled and reassembled. This enables the male artist, stand-in for God the Father, to imagine himself at the creative origin, or rather that origin, in Edward Said's terms (Said 1975), is now conceived not in a genealogical perspective but rather as an intentional beginning, a deliberate rupture with the syphilitic organic cycle.
This rupture initiates an artistic mode that is consciously anti- biological,
willfully unrealistic, and artfully superficial. The motivating scenario is
symbolic re-memberment: the maternal phallus must be returned to its phantasized
place. Thematically, in A Rebours this involves the creation of simulacra, or
artifacts that simulate nature without having nature's organic interiority. The
surface without depth, made-up, factitious, this is the ideal field for
phantastic remembering. By means of what Des Esseintes calls "a slight
subterfuge, an approximative sophistication of the object" (p. 106), he
hopes to obtain what the doctrine of mystical substitution obtains for Saint
Lydwine in Huysmans's later book, that is, the sublimation of nature's
degenerative violence into symbolic form. The danger, of course, is that this
formal representation will be so emptied of living content that it will be
entirely sterile, synthetic, inert, like the landscape Des Esseintes glimpses in
his dream just before the terrible appearance of the figure of Syphilis: "a
hideous mineral landscape . . . a wan, gullied landscape, deserted, dead"
(p. 202). The simulacrum, to be effective, must not destroy biological process
but must rather exhibit it as that which has been denied, controlled, marked,
like Des Esseintes's monstrous flowers,
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with the artist's stamp. "Through this cunning strategy," comments
Main Buisine (19 78:67—68), "disincarnation proceeds by a spectacular
exhibition of the organic, the evacuation of the real involves its display:
ostentation in order to protect oneself from what one would have preferred never
to have seen."10
This, of course, is precisely the strategy of the fetishist, and indeed one could argue that Huysmans's entire literary project is generated according to the formula Octave Mannoni (1969) considers typical of fetishistic behavior: "je sais bien, mais quand meme" ("I know perfectly well, but just the same"). Referentially, Huysmans is constantly evoking and vividly illustrating castration — he knows all too well about woman's difference — but still he wants to deny it. The force of this denial perversely contaminates the supposedly desexualized (or unisexualized) sphere of sublimated activity with sexual energy. Sublimation is thus not an escape from repression but a function of it. Indeed Jean Laplanche has persuasively demonstrated that the generative source of sublimation "involves the idea of a sort of repeated, continual neocreation of sexual energy, hence the continual reopening of an excitation. . . . This extemporaneous sexuality," argues Laplanche, "woven into the creation of a work is . . . ultimately linked to the question of traumatism" (1980:240—250). In my interpretation the traumatism involved in Huysmans's case is his perception of the absence of the mother's penis. Huysmans experiences this trauma, reopens its excitation, by portraying biological life on the model of female castration as a diseased hemorrhaging, an entropic loss of vital energy, but a loss that ostentatiously displays its biodegradable contents.
The morbid brilliance of this display, Des Esseintes maintains, has been effectively represented only at a few times in history when the arts reflected the disintegration of tyranically conventional social orders. In these decadent periods truth emerged from repression, and the exorbitant wound was revealed as the diseased being of the real. Significantly, Des Esseintes chooses images of biological decay to describe a language infected by decadence, the Latin language of the fifth century: "Completely rotten, she sagged, lost her members, spilling out her pus, retaining, in all the corruption of her body, hardly any firm parts" (p. 125). Such a putrefying verbal body, like the physical body of Saint Lydwine, obviously threatens the very possibility of intelligible representation. It takes an artist of the caliber of Baudelaire to express "thanks to a muscular and firmly fleshed-out style . . . those regions of the soul from which monstrous mental vegetations branch out" (pp. 261—262).
10. On the simulacrum. the entropic pathology of organic life, and the crisis
of representa tion in Huysmans, see the excellent articles by Francoise Gaillard
(19 78a and b).
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Baudelaire's style, Huysmans implies, incarnates a male triumph over female
monstrosity. It has the power "to fix in curiously healthy terms the most
fugitive of morbid states" (p. 262) - Huysmans's own style represents, I
believe, an effort to perform a similar fixation of temporal morbidity. This
project works to attack the referential function of language and to subvert the
organic model of narrative development.
The narrative structure of A Rebours, like that of Bouvard et Pecuchet which it resembles and from which it may derive, is discontinuous." The order of the chapters could easily he changed without appreciably affecting the story. Rather than unfolding the complexities of a novelistic plot, the chapters are juxtaposed as largely self-contained units. In the Preface of 1903, Huysmans writes of his "desire . . . to break the limits of the novel, to bring art, science, history into it" (p. 71). Each chapter, he declares in a suggestive formula, is "the sublimate of a different art" (p. 60). These "sublimates" act as experimental vehicles to stimulate phantasies and thereby displace present reality. The phantasies, which may evoke past experiences, in life or in the library, as well as imaginary possibilities, constitute the signified of much of the narrative. They have no logical or natural place in a temporal continuum. But however heterogeneous their referential contents may be, these carefully cultivated phantasies all have the same function of denying the real. Structural discontinuity in the Huysmanlan novel is in the service of unifying sublimation. For Huysmans, denial - is vital — and denial always bears specifically upon the traumatic perception of female castration. Thus it is no accident that in his Preface Huysmans declares that his formal project to "abolish the traditional plot" requires the suppression of "passion, woman (p. 71). But we have seen that this repressive sublimation of the trauma of woman actually serves to maintain that trauma as a continual source of sexual excitation stimulating the writing process. "In fetishists," writes Freud, "the detachment of the ego from the reality of the external world has never succeeded completely (1969:60)." "In very subtle cases the fetish itself has become the vehicle both of denying and of asseverating the fact of castration (19 63 :2 18).
Huysmans's writing is a function of this dilemma, associated by Freud with the splitting of the ego. Huysmans uses techniques of - rupture and discontinuity to re-member the surface of the text as "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard - - against it" (Freud 1963:216). He inserts great masses of dense erudite material, sometimes taken verbatim from unidentified sources. He cites literary texts at length and analyses their merits.
11. This connection is brought out in detail by Jean-Luc Steinmetz (1975).
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He makes lists of exotic proper names, of plants, of stones, of authors. He
loves rare, difficult words and a deliberately tortured syntax. The effect of
all this is to create a textual surface that, like the tortoise's shell Des
Esseintes orders encrusted with precious stones, is studded with elements alien
to biological life. The text's linear development and its referential function
are constantly being interrupted as the reader encounters verbal entities, large
or small, that impose their presence on his attention because of their rarity as
objects, their material density, their provocative strangeness. Thus Huysmans's
text can accurately be called ornamental, and the connection brilliantly
established by Naomi Schor (1983) in regard to one of Des Esseintes's favorite
novels, Salammbo , between textual ornamentation and fetishism applies perfectly
here. As Schor reminds us, the ornamental should not be conflated with the
secondary or accessory. Art history teaches that the original function of
ornament was of a magical and metaphysical order. And this is precisely its
function for Huysmans. The encrusted verbal surface serves, in Des Esseintes's
formula, to "supplement the vulgar reality of facts" (p. 105). The
supplement magically denaturalizes and sublimates. The female wound is repaired
in phantasy by a textuality that finds its source not in nature but in the
dictionary, the catalogue, the archive, the library. Textuality becomes
intertextuality . . . and we begin to realize that the example of Huysmans, if
it could be shown — as I believe possible — to have a certain general
applicability, would suggest that the modernist movement in the arts (beginning
in France with Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Manet), with its emphasis on the
discontinuous, the self-reflective, the opaque, was involved in a sublimating,
fetishizing effort to deny the female sexual body. This defensive effort,
however, was doomed by the very terms of its expression. As long as (female)
nature remains at the origin, the supplement can never take the place of that
which it augments. Huysmans's dazzling verbal gems are encrusted upon a
biological ground subject to the organic death process. "Mais quand meme,
je sais bien." It was not until he discovered the Supreme Dictionary, the
Divine Word, that decomposition composed itself, and Huysmans was finally able
to sublimate the temporal world into a textual Other.
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