DECADENT NARRATIVE: A REBOURS

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"But this is a truth of which
I will defer the telling."
Henry James, Washington Square

The posture of the Decadent writer is the familiar one of Narcissus: Decadent narrative is inherently self-implicating and self-focusing. The Decadent text is enamoured of itself, self-replicating and immediately present to itself as ceremonial model. At the same time, in amused awareness of its own pose, it defines itself as ironic distance and performs an implicit act of autocriticism and self-destruction through self-parody. Its essential narrative figures are extensions of irony, oxymoron and chiasmus, based on the coexistence and crossover of antithetical codes or states of being within one text: paradox and parody. An exquisite curlicue inscribed alongside the Mallarmean arabesque, Decadent style can be successfully imitated in Les Deliquescences d'Adore Floupette and The Green Carnation because of its own initial self—awareness as derivation and distortion. In Wilde's critical essays, the Symbolist reconciliation of opposites is transposed into a mechanistic shuffling of paradoxisms; in Adore Floupette, the Symbolist use of analogy evolves into catachresis; in Rebours , the narrative framework of the realistic novel, inherited from Zola, turns against itself. The Decadent text in France at the end of the nineteenth century takes up narrative at a moment of full crisis and stretches figurative language toward what Jarry will call a "polyhedric," uncontrollable form. Thus, Decadence tends toward a discourse of impossibility, as Gautier observed—form seized at the breaking point of contour, language at the asymptotic limit where it "expresses everything."
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Narcissus, in Wilde's version of the myth, comes to time river, bends over his image in the water, and the river looks with love at its own reflection in his eyes. When he dies, the river weeps or itself. When Narcissus looks at himself in the water, he also sees the reflection of the mountains and the sky behind him—and they are looking over his shoulder. The entire Decadent world mirrors Narcissus, a fragmented Narcissus who inscribes subjectivity upon a world that is his double and yet remains separate. Somewhere behind Narcissus his double laughs at him.

The Decadent world is a fallen world, a world after the Fall, by etymological tautology. Outside of the bounds of Edenic unity, it is regulated by dualisms—Eros and Thanatos, time and arrested epiphany. Fin de siecle Decadent narrative sees in itself a falling away from tIme source a degeneration from prototype, according to Max Nordau, that is governed both by time desire to return to origins and time ironic awareness of the infinite regression of origin and the inevitability y of repetition. Decadent narrative always seeks the new—" Au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver clu nouveau—and it necessarily repeats itself.  At its heart lies the ummending repetition of Desire, and so one aspect of Decadent artifice is mechanical reduplication—Plato's machine gone out of control. Decadent style in Maeterlinck's poetry, for example, is defined by Michael Riffaterre in terms of ostentatious artifice, that is, "a synonymy between images . . . that permits identification of the structures they refer to, and compels the reader to perceive the text as a formal exercise, as a sequence of variations for the sake of variation." Form produces its opposite automatically and the "very manifestness of these mechanical formal transformations is literally an icon of the artifice."1

Constant repetition results in ironic circularity, such as the degradation of progression in Gide's Paludes. The dark side of Decadence is supported by this formal irony, and it is this—more than the life of Oscar Wilde or the excesses of Le Jardin des supplices—that has allowed the harsher critics of Decadent literature to speak of it in terms of abulia, ataxia, aphasia, anemia, asocialismn, imbecility, nystagmus (trembling of the eyeballs), and so on. Much of Decadent literature would no doubt be understood by Northrop Frye as an ironic mode, characterized by sparagmos, by the disappearance of the hero, the absence of effective action, by disorganization and pine-defeat, self confusion and anarchy, or by George Lukacs as a form of Romantic

1 Michael Riffaterre, "Decadent Features in Maeterlinck's Poetry,' Language and Style, VII, No. 1 (Winter, 1974), 3-16.
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disillusionment expressing disintegration, passivity and impotent sorrow over a decomposing world. The search for immediacy amid presence, for the paradoxical union of contraries and the mystery of the totality,2 for the metaphor that will "thwart all contrasts," constantly undoes itself through parody, artifice, and distance. The Decadent text circles around an empty center.

But the prisoner of the cave is also the Mage divin, the Mage createur, as Teodor de Wyzewa said. This other side of Decadence—the optative nature of the quest—has been less discussed. In his reading of A Rebours, Victor Brombert has emphasized the elements of transcendental revolt and metaphysical aspiration.3 One could extend the discussion to much of Decadent literature, and its aggressive aspects could be viewed as the product of the agonism of the Mallarnmean avant- garde (Poggioli) or the fundamental agonism of the romantic quest for the ideal (Frye). A Rebours can also be re-examined in regard to the energy of its narrative structure, and des Esseintes's revolt recast, not in terms of its metaphysical ramifications within the novel, but in the paradoxical terms of the life and death of both character and discourse.

The Notice which opens A Rebours presents des Esseintes as the "seul rejeton of an ancient and once virile House. We are shown the portraits of his ancestors, who are paradigms of sexual aggression; their images display such alarming athletic vigor—their bulging clothes can hardly contain them—that they seem to burst the confines of the picture fl-ames. Des Esseintes appears directly to negate this libidinal force. His limp impotence betokens generations of tribal intermarriage and effemination, "la predominance de Ia lymphe dans le sang,"4 according to the Notice. The last member of a large and busily procreative family, he is the final ambiguous descendant—the very definition of degeneration. His father died of a vague illness. His mother died of exhaustion, having lived in closed, colorless rooms, and only occasion ally registering the presence of her child with a sad smile. Because of his resemblance to an ancestor "aux traits morts et tires," intermediary in the decline of the family, and his association with the old, bored servants and the "momies ensevelies" who, like him, are the "descen dants des anciens preux, les dernieres branches des races feodales" (p.31),

2 Heraclitus: 'God is day and night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger—all the opposites, this is the meaning." See Mircea Eliade's Mephistopheles and the Androgyne (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), for an understanding of paradox as a form of coincidentia oppositorum and for a sense of the religious tonality of Decadent paradox.

3 Victor Brombert, Huysmans et la Thebaide raffinee," in La Prison romantique (Corti,
    1975), pp. 158-77.

4 J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours (Fasquelle, 1961), p. 26. Henceforth page references for A Rebours will follow in the text.
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his youth prefigures the senility and decrepitude of old age. "Tout n'est que syphilis" (p. 129).

The Notice shows us des Esseintes in society: debauchery, debasement, ennui, amid lassitude above all—amid nervous disability exacerbated by sexual activity, by "amours exceptionnelles" and "joies de vicee," by the "perilleuses camesses des virtuoses" (p. 34). After the doctors counsel against such practices, des Esseintes abstains and then succumbs again, and the Zolaesque outline of his past concludes with these lines: "Alors, ce fut Ia fin; comme satisfaits d'avoir tout epuis, commne fourbus de fatigue, ses sens tomberent en lethargie, l'imnpuis samice fut proche Il se retrouva stir le cliemimin, degrise, seul, abomina— blement lasse, implorant une fin que Ia lachete de sa chair l'empechait d'atteindre" (pp. 34-35). This is a crucial moment in the text, a point of ritual death, a wish for death on the part of des Esseintes that is also the death wish of deterministic narrative: the impulse to arrive at "l'effet." An immediate resolution seems to be called for, and given des Es seintes's background, there is only one logical kind of ending for the story: death or madness, the silence of impuissance. The next paragraph begins: "Il etait d'ailleurs temps de se resoudre," and it restates des Esseintes's death wish—"ses idees de se blottir ... de se calfeutrer dans une retraite, d'assourdir ... le vacarme roulant de l'inflexible vie" (p.35). "Decadence" expresses itself here as the imminence of an ending which thrusts itself into the narrative from the very beginning, and as the process of falling, a Schopenhauerian life as constant dying. Des Esseintes—the last of his line—represents an ending in himself; his impuissance is a finality in itself.

What makes A Rebours a novel rather than a short story is that digressive quality of the text which subverts narrative logic and delays the consummation of aim emidimig for 200 pages, for fourteen of die book's sixteen chapters. The linear development of the narrative sequence is held at bay by a discourse that is not essentially narrative but rather encyclopedic and descriptive, engendered by the house at Fontenay, which occupies a self-sufficient and self-replicating space not subordinate to narrative sequence, and to which des Esseintes retreats. lime House serves as the impetus for the continuation of the story and the extension of the text. Yet when des Esseimites disappears into the house, so does narrative development. By choosing this retreat, des Esseintes is, in fact, choosing death in the form of isolation, enclosure, and artifice; he is also choosing stasis ("une arche immobile," p. 33)—the house is like a womb which sustains the life of character and discourse. The inventory of the possessions of the house (paintings, jewels, books, etc.) is the stuff of the book: "Le sujet s'agrandissait et necessitait de
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patiemites recherches: chaque chapitre devenait le couhis d'une specialite he sublime d'un art different" (Preface, p. 11); for fourteen chapters we have a sense of entropic degeneration des Esseintes's health spirals up and down without any real change. Such a digression, because it is analytical, additive, and categorizing, substantially thwarts the narrative sequence. The House is a trope of embellishment and embroidery, a device which allows for critical expansion (des Esseintes as the exegete of the texts of flowers and fluids), social discussion and philosophical contemplation.5 The discourse takes the place of the hero here, procreating text against time and the impotence of determined narrative. We might call to mind Barthes's discussion of delay in S/Z: "The dynamics of the text (since it implies a truth to be deciphered) is thus paradoxical: it is a static dynamics: the problem is to maintain the enigma in the initial void of its answer; whereas the sentences quicken the story's 'unfolding' amid cannot but help move the story along, the hermeneutic code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse; its structure is essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of language with an organized set of stoppages: between question and answer there is a whole dilatory area whose emblem might be named 'reticence,' the rhetorical figure which interrupts the sentence, suspends it, turns it aside 6 This point of death, interrupted coitus, repeats itself in a series of ritual deaths throughout the novel. In the dream of the Woman who is Flower (and Death), des Esseintes almost touches the dream image and when she seizes him, he feels himself dying and wakes. Stasis (masking entropy) and dynamism (energy) are the axes of the text: death and life, house and narrative, digression and progression, diversion and syllogism, paradigm and syntagm.

In the fifteenth chapter, the action picks up again: "Ia maladie reprit sa marche" (p. 247). A Rebours narrates the development of an illness ("ha marche de ha nevrose," p. 137); its narrative sequence is an illness, an inevitable decline. Now des Esseintes looks in the mirror and barely recognizes himself: "ce changement de visage l'effraya. Il se crut perdu" (p. 253). We have returned to the crucial moment of suspense of the Notice: all is over, imminent catastrophic threatens, there is nothing left but death to count among the possessions of the house. At that moment des Esseintes discovers within himself "une energie

5 "Le desir... de briser les limites du romnan, d'y faire entrer l'art, Ia science, l'histoire, de ne plus se servir de cette forme que comme d'un cadre pour y insemer de plus serieux travaux' (Preface, p.21). Narrative form is only a framework; the heart of the book is the house as museum (art, science, history).

6 Roland Barthes, SIZ, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p.75.
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d'homnme accule" (p. 254), lie writes to a doctor and the life forces take hold. Just when the constant shocks to his system "acheverent de he briser," and when, in a dream—like state, he has lost all feeling and emotion, "tout a coup he medecin entra" (p. 255). The doctor asks no questions, examines him, meads the text of his excretions, and leaves a prescription that brings des Esseintes back to life. In standard ecriture artiste form other forces work through parts of his body: "h'estomac se decida a fonctionner. . . les organes se restaurerent. . . les forces se retablirent" (p. 258). The doctor treats him like a child and he responds like a child; if Zola is the father assassinated in A Rebours, then God and the doctor are his replacements.

With des Esseintes's recovery, the plot is regenerated: "Decidement, je m'achemine vers ha sante" (p. 258). The chemin is the chemin of narration (see above: "Il se retrouva stir he chemin ) which allows for the possibility of an active des Esseintes plotting a course opposed to the "marche de la nevrose." The way down is the path of illness; the road up to health is also potentially the way to God implied in the last sentence of the novel, in the theme of embarktion. The return to life, however, only produces a reiterated death wish. The doctor tells him that to live he must heave the house, renounce autistic solitude, rejoin society, and ammuse himself the way others do. In other words, the doctor wants to rewrite the Notice. This is, he claims "umie question de vie ou de mort une question de sante ou de folie compliquee a breve echeance de tubercules. —Ahors c'est ha mort ou l'envoi au bagne! s'exclama des Esseintes exaspere Le medecin . . . sourit et gagna Ia porte sans lui repondre" (p. 259).

Why does the doctor smile? He is, of course, "imnbu de tous les prejuges d'un homme du monde" (p. 259), but he is also right. In the very next line, which opens the final chapter and whose first words could serve as a model which the whole story merely amplifies: "Des Esseintes s'enferma dans sa chambre ...," he closes his ears to the sound of nails being pounded into "les caisses d'emballage appretees par les domestiques" (p. 260). Des Esseintes's self~immmposed isolation was, after all, only a delaying tactic. He returns to society; life amid tIme doctor win; the vulgarity of the century and "detestable existence" wash over him His "beatitude'' is over. This means that the text will end presently, but its conclusion is no longer coincidental with des Esseintes's death or madness. Narrative logic has somehow been diverted to the extent that possible sequences of actions seem reoriented toward an open future: des Esseintes rents an apartment in Paris, and a new story presumably begins, which we might expect to be nothing but repetition, but of which nothing is sure. There is a brief pause, in
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which, "enfoui" in his armchair, des Esseintes dwells upon the ignominy of his age and then waking from his dream, he utters tIme famous apocalyptic curse: "Eh! croule domic, societe! meurs donc, vieux nmonde!" (p. 268). With the medicinal force of the house now immactive, words no longer sedate him: "les mots resonnaienit daims somm esprit comme des sons prives de sens; son ennui les desagregeait, leur otait toute signification, toute vertu sedative, toute vigueur effective et douce" (p. 268). Once again, nothing is left, "il n'y avait rien, plus rien, tout etait par terre" (p. 268), and so, like Pascal, he embarks.

The equivalence of the moment of death with the revival of life epitomizes Decadent paradox. This is the essence of Laforgue's world, where death is both celebrated and denied: "Comme rien n'est plus chatouilleux aux organismes superieurs que se sentir mourir tout en sachant qu'il n'en sera rien, le crepuscule et l'automne, he drame du soleil et de la mort sont esthetiques par excellence."7 This is Poe's world, too, where death-in-life and life-in-death constantly inter mingle, both in the corpses that retain life and in the horror of the passage to death ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"). But death in Poe's stories can be much more of a conclusive release than it is in A Rebours. To read all of Decadent narrative merely as a defeat by life is to ignore the cry of agony and nihilism, the vigor of Nietzschean irony, which subtend it. A Rebours, according to Huysmans, is written against Zola, against the "moribund" naturalist form it is born of a need to "ouvrir les fenetres, de fuir un milieu ou j'etouffais briser les limites du roman (Preface, p. 21). To deliver this "coup terrible," Huysmans chooses to operate by parody, which kills and revives in one stroke. On the one hand, he bases A Rebours on the model of heredity and degeneration which governs Zola's novels. On the other hand, he destroys the aesthetic pose and "dysenergy" of Decadence through caricature. Des Esseintes's aggressiveness is manifest, "il haissait, de toutes ses forces, les generations nouvelles" (p. 55). But what should also be clear is that the energy that both drives him toward death and constantly revives him is built into his character from the very begin ning in the Notice. The Satanic vaporization of "le riche metal de notre volonte," announced by Baudelaire in "Au Lecteur," the emblematic Decadent weakening of the will attendant upon a moribund society awaiting the barbarian rape, does not afflict des Esseintes. In him it is only the flesh that is weak, only the senses that "fall into lethargy." As a child, he is rebellious, stubborn, spiritually independent, "pointilleux,

7 Jules Laforgue, Moralites legendaires (Mercure (IC France, 1964), p. 206.
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fureteur, porte aux coimtroverses" (p. 110). A number of the chapters in A Rebours close with some sort of fall—either the physical act of falling back into a chair or on another level, tIme melapse of an illness or the "falling back'' to reality8—and Huysmans's energy to resume time narrative runs parallel to des Esseintes's capacity for self-creation and self- definition.

In Baudelaire des Esseintes is fascinated by time use of "umie hangue musculeuse et charnue ... une etrange sante d'expressions" to ex press the inexpressible, to capture "les etats morbides les plus fuyants, les plus trembles, des esprits epuises et des ames tristes" (p. 185). It is the contrast of health and morbidity, the fixing of time fugitive (which Baudelaire termed modernism in Constantin Guys) that attracts him. His own understanding of the "lavement nourrissant," the crowning artificiality of his stay at Fontenay, is built on the same opposition, on energy used to deny life: "Ce serait delcieux, se disait-il, si l'on potinvait, une fois en pleine sante, contimiuer ce simnphe regime Quelle economie de temps, quelle radicale delivrance de l'aversion qu'immspire aux gens sans appetit, Ia viande! quel definitif debarras de ha lassitude qui decoule toujoums du choix forcement restreint des mets! quelle energique pro testation contre le bas peche de la gourmandise! enfin quelle decisive insulte jetee a la face the cette vieille miature dommt les unifomes exi gences seraient pour jamais eteintes ! (p. 256; my italics). The youthful impatience of this iconoclasm so comitrary to time "leimts preambules" of artifice (p. 106), is born of desire used to negate desire, and energy turned against the self. Not only is des Esseintes trying to eliminate nature—understood as desire, in Zola, for example: La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret—and eradicate the last vestige of inherited familial desire in himself, but he is also trying to undo, throughout the novel, time child in him whose greatest joy was to walk alone in the countryside, to sleep "dans la prairie, a l'ombre des hautes meules ecoutant he bruit sourd des moulins a eau, humant le souffle frais de ha Voulzie" (p. 30). The potential of that child is shutoff by an act of will: "Il lisait ou revait. son esprit se comicentra" (p. 30). "Ainsi, par haine, par mepris de son enfance d'une jeunesse soulfmainmte et refoulee ... un tumulte se levait en son ame, un besoin de vengeance des tristesses endurees, une rage de salir par des turpitudes des souvenirs de fammiille, un desir furieux de panteler sur des coussins de chair, d'epuiser heurs dernieres gouttes, les plus vehementes et les plus acres des folies charnelles" (p. 38).

8 The text underlines the relationship of these moments to death Chapter X for
example "il s'afaissa evanoui, presque mourant sur la barre d'appui de la fenetre" (p.
162).
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Des Esseintes creates a world for himself through negation—but not passively. His flight from reality Comprises a need, a rage, a furious desire intensely concentrated: "Le tout est de ... savoir concentrer son esprit stir tin seul point, de savoir s'abstraire suffisammient pour amener l'hallucination et pouvoir substituer he reve de ha realite a la realite meme" (p. 51). As such, it ought in principle to admit neither extension nor succession, delay nor mediation. But immediacy and satiety are death ("epuiser . . . les folies charnelles") and des Esseintes never quite dies. The house at Fontenay represents the mediation and displacement of desire; his body, locus of desire and sexual revenge, crime and punishment, leads him to the point of death and holds him there, "implorant une fin que Ia lachete de sa chair l'empechait d'at teindre." As in all dreams, he wakes without dying: sadoinnasochistic sexuality punishes his parents in his own body, but not to the point of self-extinction.

A Rebours, in truth, is written against itself; at every moment character and text undo themselves. This is, of course, implicit in the title: "La force du sadismne ... git donc dams l'inobservance des preceptes catholiques qu'on suit meme a rebours" (p. 202). To commit sacrilege, one has first to accept the sacred; to debunk nature, one has first to glorify it; to correct the novels of Zola, Huysmans swallows them. Toward the aesthetics of the "roman concentre en quelques phrases" (p. 244), Huysmans contributes a text full of the "longuetirs analytiques" and the "superfetations descriptives" that des Esseintes despises. Inevitably, such a work becomes a parody of itself. The relationship between Huysmans and his main character is a complex one, and the degree to which they share common aesthetic principles or to which Huysmnans condemns des Esseintes would only be determinable if the irony of Huysmans's style were exactly measurable. But, as in all pastiche, the fundamental ambivalence of the style precludes precise decoding.

Huysmans terms the replacement of nature by artifice a "captieuse deviation," an "adroit mensonge" (p. 50). Are these positive or negative judgments? The celebrated tortoise whose back des Esseimites encrusts with jewels dies because "sans doute habituee une existence seden taire, a une humble vie passee sous sa pauvre carapace elle n'avait pu supporter he luxe eblouissant qu'on lui imposait, la rutilante chape dont on l'avait vetue, les pierreries dont on lui avait pave he dos, comme tin ciboire" (p. 82). The idea that the tortoise dies of culture shock, a country mouse in the home of its city cousin, a timid recluse dragged out into the light, offers a clear example of self-conscious excess, of a rhetorical figure calling attention to itself as exaggeration. Obviously,
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this is a joke; this is humor understood as self-focusing language which builds upon a lieu commun redoleinit of La Fontaine amid farce. But who makes the joke, and how can it be measured? Within the text itself, the figure is seen as distorting; the apposition, luxe—chape—pierreries, is not only rhythmical but clarifying and corrective, while the religious imagery seems to redeem the entire action. The text erases whatever judgment might be suggested.

The first example above leads to the most direct explanation of whiny this language works against itself: A Rebours speaks a language of untruth (artifice, illusion, deviation, mensonge) expressed in the idiom of truth. The positive value that should be transferred to artifice is always challenged by its own expression. Des Esseintes's adroit mensonge allows him to "jouir de chimeriques delices semblables, einin tous points, aux vrames" (p. 50)—similar in all points but one, that is: thmey aine not true, they ame "chimerical," and the connotations of that single word vitiate the argument. How, as more than one critic has observed, are we to be convinced that "la natuine a fait son temps" (p. 51), that locomotives are more beautiful than women, when Huysmans can find no way to describe them other than to speak of them as women?9

A Rebours borrowed its style and syntax from the contemporary "decadent" salon, which in turn had developed the oral equivalent of the Goncourts's ecriture artiste.10 Huysmans uses this style here for the first tune, in search of an "art plus subtil et pltins vrai" (Preface, p. 10) amid as parody, to vary, perhaps, the naturalist recipe he had been using as Zola's disciple: "Prenez une tranche de vie (Remy de Gourmont). However, this act of parody becomes, through interiorization, the stimulus for an entirely new authorial persona: the style of A Rebours becomes Huysmnans's style. And although, as in all parody, the text appears to go too far in certain directions, that caricatural element of excess is countered by the element of fascination. Excess, and thus self-directed irony, cannot be measured because its starting point cannot be determined.

Caricature is concentration, a focusing upon a limited number of points (in this instance: mechanical parallelism, syntatical  disjunction, noun pluralisation, abstract and verbal substanitives, impersonal constructions). In A Rebours caricature works to disrupt narrative development. Stylistic parody has a dispersive effect: it detracts from the

9 Huysmans's two locomotives are, in turn, an adorable blond and a monumental brunette. The first is "emprisonnee dans un etincelant corset de cuivre." the second "aux reins trapus, etrangles dans une cuirasse en fonte" (p. 53)—once again libidinal force is measured through its confinement.

10 See Maurice Cressot, La Phrase et te vocabulaire de J.-K. Huysmans (Droz, 1938) for a comprehensive analysis of Huysmans's style.
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main action in the same way that the trope of the house detracts; it substitutes for narrative sequence and becomes the principle subject matter of the text. Stylistic parody enables Huysmans to elaborate each individual sentence and, thereby, to lengthen the novel. Because time decadent use of language itself is offered as the subject matter of the text, Huysmans's style is marked by the open-endedness of the prose sentence and the interminable regression of parodic repetition. it does not take much of a critical bias to see that the question of language is central to A Rebours. There is little need to have recourse to Schopenhauer, Ribot, Egger, or any other nineteenth-century subjectivist theorist 11 to understand that style, for a writer of this period, is in itself an organization of reality, and that the use of language, the systematic distortion of syntactic norms, the panoply of "deliquescent" rhetorical devices in A Rebours is as much a part of the inventory of the house at Fontenay as the books des Esseintes catalogues. Death is impatient and life is patient, according to Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the roman concentre is unravelled in, A Rebours by the patiently extended 'joke" of the style, by the punch line that is always deferred.

If des Esseintes never quite dies, then neither does he go mad, despite the doctor's predictions. Madness does not really lie within time possibilities of this discourse: A Rebours is never a text monstrously out of control. it does come to an end in a mere 250 pages, after all—its encyclopedism is a restrained tendency, subject to logical rules of development. The detailing of the interior of the house gradually builds, according to classical rules of composition, toward the discussion of the modern library.12 Huysmans lists the works of the decadent Latin writers and then proceeds chronologically to the works of his contemporaries (he neatly dates Les Amours jaunes [1873] and Claire Lenoir [1867] along the way); when he comes to Mallarme, who incarnates "la decadence d'une litterature (p. 245) and "l'agonie de ha vieille langue" (p. 264), the force of digression begins to sputter out. TIme returmi to Paris may not constitute a coherent development of the algebra of the Notice, but it does provide an adequate container (departure/return) for the Fontenay episode.

Without analyzing Huysmans's style in detail, since that has been done so thoroughly elsewhere, it is evident that the constant retouches of ecriture artiste, the attempt to shape the French sentence into forms of

11 Karl Uitti has condensed some of the relevant material in The Concept of the Self in the Symbolist Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1960).

12 The last sentence of Chapter 111 leads directly into the discussion of nineteenth century literature, but that discussion is deferred for eleven chapters. The Fontenay catalogue develops its own sense of logic. deferral, and closure. Its exhaustion signals the intervention of the doctor; as one mechanism winds down the other winds up.
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greater expressiveness, do not give birth to unbridled proliferation, but rather attest to an attempt to further control language—as it is not controlled in some of the Latin farrago texts des Esseintes so admires. In his discussion of thee roman concentre des Esseintes postulates a sign so definitively and ingeniously constructed that "he lecteur potirmait rever, pendamit des semaines entieres, stir somi sens, a la fois precis et multiple" (p. 245). And this kind of dualism permeates the whole of A Rebours. The novel admits both the multiplicity of ambivalence and the limitations of precision—definition, comprehensibility, exhaustibility. Diversion is not infinite extension, paradox is not nonsense. At Fontenay, des Esseintes's world is a controlled world—controlled to the point of obsession. Only one thing escapes control—his body. And it is his body, acting out the contradictory imperatives of desire, that determines the action; it sends him to Fontenay and it brings him back.