The novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans: Against Nature
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, published in 1884 and known in English as Against Nature, is his only completed novel. It is less a conventional story than a pressure chamber. Its solitary hero, Des Esseintes, inherits money, recoils from ordinary society, and turns rooms, perfumes, meals, theatre and ideas into instruments of experiment. The result is a key text in French Decadence and a challenge to readers who expect a novel to move outward through action.
The novel matters now because its private rebellion feels newly public. Des Esseintes can reject family, commerce, politics and artistic convention, yet his rebellion depends on commodities, urban sights and inherited capital. His ennui anticipates consumer fatigue; his catalogues of refinement anticipate the endless shelf of choices available through a phone. His spiritual desperation also gives modern accounts of isolation a specifically late-19th-century shape.
Reading it as merely scandalous wastes its structure. Huysmans compresses months of wandering and theatrical self-invention into a few discontinuous episodes, while recurring images of flowers, decay, artificial light and violated beauty bind the fragments together. The prose can imitate the excess it reports: sentences stall, digress, classify and contradict. Des Esseintes becomes both collector and specimen, an intelligent observer whose precision intensifies what he cannot master.
For Australian readers, the work is especially accessible through a digital library built around French public-domain writing. Translation, online reading and downloadable editions allow a nineteenth-century Parisian interior to travel with commuters, students and night-shift readers. Its details survive changed settings: tram windows replace carriage journeys, kitchen tables replace salon tables, and a downloaded chapter can be reopened after the household has gone quiet.
A novel built from refusal
Des Esseintes begins by resisting the life his family has designed for him. He refuses marriage, provincial respectability and the assumption that inherited property should produce a conventional career. Money becomes the condition of his escape, but not the answer to it. His dissatisfaction sends him through Paris, provincial roads and briefly abroad, returning each time to a private theatre of taste where every encounter may become an experiment.
The plot matters less than the appetite that drives it. Huysmans inventories churches, restaurants, paintings, perfumes, women, animals and moments of apparent revelation. This accumulation is not neutral description; it shows a mind trying to manufacture intensity. When reality fails to provide it, Des Esseintes creates artificial substitutes or turns ordinary life into drama. His famous passage from the sublime to the grotesque makes aesthetic shock a method of self-preservation.
The resulting book also resists the confidence of a narrator who seems to know everything. His claims about civilisation and human limits are repeatedly exposed by his behaviour, making the voice unreliable without becoming simple nonsense. A useful counterpoint is the collection’s account of Voltaire’s letters and activism, where public argument becomes a form of action; Huysmans places similar verbal energy in a hero determined to avoid a public role.
Faith, ugliness and the modern psyche
Des Esseintes’s spiritual crisis sits beneath his aesthetic games. He knows inherited Catholicism intimately enough to doubt its promise, yet faith remains the standard by which he judges emptiness, purity and disgust. Huysmans neither treats religious doubt as hypocrisy nor resolves it neatly. The final stages intensify the sense that beauty may be insufficient, that bodies fail, and that consciousness can become a burden.
The novel’s ugly materials are inseparable from its sharpened language. Flowers stink, insects devour, mouths reveal disease, and sex appears entangled with power and contempt. Des Esseintes often universalises the female body as a trap and treats servants as objects; modern readers should recognise the misogyny and class privilege within that vision rather than laundering it through the book’s exquisite prose. The cruelty is part of the experiment, not evidence that the narrative endorses it.
Psychological and existential interpretations can deepen the reading without making the work a case study in one diagnosis. Its obsessions anticipate compulsive attention, sensory overload and the feeling that refinement itself may become unhealthy. Contemporary reflections on death and unanswered mysteries offer a parallel doorway into that crisis: the persistent human need to impose meaning where certainty fails. Huysmans turns that impulse into both retreat and provocation.
The historical situations and present-day habits can be compared directly:
| Dimension | Huysmans in 1884 | The Australian reader today |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Private interiors, streets, trains and provincial excursions | Trams, light rail, kitchens, cafés and shared digital spaces |
| Tempo | Episodic wandering shaped by money and appetite | Fragmented reading shaped by work, notifications and travel |
| Access | Serial parts, borrowed books and scarce editions | Online previews, downloadable files, libraries and used-book shops |
| Central tension | Aesthetic freedom against spiritual emptiness | Consumer choice against attention and meaning |
| Historical frame | Paris and the crisis of fin-de-siècle culture | Australian law, publishing markets and digitally mediated habits |
Reading in an Australian city
Melbourne and Sydney make the novel’s urban rhythms easy to imagine. A reader can open Against Nature on a tram, a Sydney light rail carriage or during a lunch break, then carry its private rooms into shared spaces of coffee shops and suburban kitchens. Phones and headphones now supply the sensory curtain that Des Esseintes seeks through screens, curtains and carefully staged spectacles. The old Parisian bohemia arrives with contemporary Australian commuting.
The local market is similarly mixed. Australian readers buy new and used books through Dymocks, independent bookshops, online retailers and library collections, while subscription services and free digital editions have widened the routes into older literature. Availability can vary by format, and a physical copy may command a premium because its scarcity is visible on a shelf. Public-domain status helps make an edition inexpensive to discover, yet public access and commercial circulation are not always the same thing.
Copyright requires equally local attention. The Copyright Act 1968 determines protection according to matters including publication, authorship and the nature of the work, so a public-domain French text does not automatically make every translation, introduction or Australian edition free to reproduce. Checking the rights attached to a specific digital file is sensible, especially when downloading material for long-term use. These legal and market conditions shape access without determining literary value.
Symbols that still exert force
The novel’s motifs form a network rather than a code with one solution. Artificial flowers suggest both manufactured beauty and the failure of nature to satisfy desire; the snubnosed, exoticised nose carries ideas of offence into the body; church interiors turn faith into spectacle. Repetition makes these images accumulate. By returning to them in altered contexts, Huysmans shows how symbols can seduce the mind without resolving what troubles it.
Commodities provide another route into the book. Des Esseintes surrounds himself with costly objects, rare dishes and elaborate surroundings, then discovers that novelty can corrode pleasure. This is not simply a warning against luxury. It is a study of how objects become containers for fantasy, self-regard and fear of being ordinary. Contemporary recommendation feeds, endless menus and luxury branding make that examination less remote than Huysmans could have known.
Genre labels are useful only when kept porous. The work carries naturalist attention to heredity, environment and pathology; Decadent taste in artificiality and the solitary dandy; Symbolist faith in suggestion; and the disruptive force of an episodic novel. Its true achievement lies in their friction. Against Nature turns its hero’s cultivated personality against the conventions that might explain him, leaving readers with a book that is simultaneously meticulous and unstable.
A practical route into Huysmans
A first reading benefits from attention to pattern rather than suspense. Notice when a room, smell, religious image or theatrical scene returns, and how each recurrence changes its meaning. The plot can seem to pause because the hero’s inner classifications are the action. Readers who let the prose feel excessive will also see why its excess matters.
Several habits can make the experience more rewarding:
- Begin with the opening movement and track the hero’s refusal of family and ordinary social time before judging his later behaviour.
- Mark the sharpest transitions between beauty and decay, especially where a person or living body becomes part of an aesthetic arrangement.
- Keep the spiritual references in view, even when they sound archaic, because they control the novel’s changing definitions of purity, spectacle and despair.
- Compare one episode with another rather than following the journey as a straight causal plot; repetition and reversal create the architecture.
- Check the edition and translation, since choices about humour, obscenity and religious vocabulary can alter the balance between comedy and disgust.
A second reading can move from story to sentence. Read selected paragraphs aloud, look for the narrator’s shifts in certainty, and notice how lists turn desire into a system. Book groups gain from asking not only what Des Esseintes rejects, but what keeps him attached to the things he claims to despise. The digital edition can support this method because a saved chapter can be reread beside notes on the surrounding episodes.
Make the reading your own
Against Nature rewards readers who allow discomfort to remain unresolved. Its Parisian surfaces—perfume, paint, food, rhetoric and ritual—do more than recreate a lost century; they reveal how taste, belief and identity can become entangled in acts of attention. The central achievement is to make dissatisfaction itself the subject of sustained experiment.
To begin, explore BnF Collection eBooks, browse the French literary and historical shelves, and open the English edition of Against Nature. Save the work to a personal library, return to its recurring images, and let the novel sit alongside other books on art, religion, urban life and the limits of civilisation.