Eddie Watkins's Reviews > Against Nature

If the hero of this novel had a more anglo-friendly name, it would be the byword for hyper-neurotic aesthete dandies, as Sherlock Holmes is in the world of detective. I don’t know how to properly pronounce des Esseintes, so I have always referred to him as that guy from Huysmans’ novel. Truth be told I don’t even know how to properly pronounce Huysmans, or rather I think I do but when I do I feel self-conscious. So I usually just spend my time thinking about des Esseintes and Huysmans, rather than talking about them by name, living in my head with them as it were, which of course is appropriate as this book is all about living in one’s head. This on the surface sounds terribly appealing, since I am sure I am not the only person who feels the inside of his head is much more congenial than the outside of it. But don’t jump too fast at this enticement, for while Huysmans sets up a very seductive mise en scene wherein des Esseintes is free to indulge in byzantine aesthetics of his inner world, the large majority of des Esseintes’ enjoyment takes place beyond the confines of this book. In fact this book is a long drawn out account of his fall from inner grace, his slow alienation from the private paradise he assembled before the present day narrative occurs, and his eventual breakdown and expulsion from his dandified Eden. This fall is in fact all the narrative consists of, though the narrative occupies less than a quarter of the book. The bulk of the book is a treatise, in the form of private discourses, on the pleasures of art and literature and sounds and scents, etc. Or at least the pleasures are what the sympathetic reader is inclined to remember… It is just as much about how much he hates everything, and of how even many of his most trusted pleasures ultimately disappoint him. The book is in short a very successful argument for the pursuit of aesthetic pleasures while at the same time being a damning of those very pleasures, which in the end makes it a very powerful book, as des Esseintes is pursuing a spiritual path without completely realizing it; and as I understand it Huysmans charts these pursuits in his subsequent novels.