The novels of Joris-Karl
Huysmans – Prophetic Parallels?
I
had the great good fortune when I was just sixteen years old of
quitting a boarding school in England and finding myself at the
University of Fribourg in Switzerland studying French Literature
under a brilliant teacher Robert Benoit Cherix – a convert from
Protestantism to Catholicism. One series of lectures he gave was on
French Catholic Literature in the 19th century starting
with Chateaubriand. Reading a selection of the recommended books the
one that impressed me most was "A Vau l'Eau" (Downstream)
by Joris-Karl Huysmans which struck me as the most depressing book I
had ever read. It is the story of a lowly civil servant trying and
failing to find a decent meal in the restaurants of Paris which leads
him to total despair.
Huysmans
began as a follower of the Naturalist Movement led by Emile Zola.
Novels depicting people whose lives were bound and limited by
generally awful social conditions. Huysmans followed Zola's
example with 'Marthe' the story of a prostitute.; 'Les Soeurs Vatard'
about the unhappy love affairs of two sisters and 'En Menage' about
failing marriages. However Huysmans gradually fell out with
Naturalism and he wrote that it had ended in a cul-de-sac. He saw
the characters in these novels as merely cardboard cut-outs without
souls. There was no grace which would enable them to do other than
to respond to impulses and instincts in their social setting. “A
Vau l'Eau” was the beginning of a reaction in that the conclusion
for the hero is utter despair – there is no way out. Zola believed
in Positivism and Progress. Huysmans did not.
His
next and most famous novel was “A Rebours” (variously translated
as 'Against Nature'). Here the hero is not a poor civil servant but
a rich aristocrat who sets out on a life of seeking every sensual
pleasure imaginable. “A Rebours” became a manual for
decadence influencing Oscar Wilde and others. Indeed to-day many
still regard it as such dismissing all of Huysmans later work. In a
later edition of “A Rebours” Huysmans writes in the Preface
that each chapter of “A Rebours” entailed deep research into
particular sensual specialities such as smell or taste or painting or
sculpture. As a disciple of Schopenhauer and an atheist he was
constantly surprised by what his researches told him about art and
the Catholic Church. How could such a religion 'invented for
children' have inspired such glorious works of art? He states that
the seeds of his later novels can be found in the chapters of “A
Rebours”.
His
next novel “En Rade” (“Laid up”) is a curious mixture of
dreams, one about visiting the moon, and an account of living in a
decaying Chateau amidst a rural scene which he describes with brutal
realism and disgust. Huysmans never liked the countryside. There is
a particularly gruesome description of the death of a cat. Huysmans
was beginning to sense that there was more to life than Zola's
'realism'.
There
followed four final novels brought together as “Le Roman de
Durtal”. Durtal is Huysmans himself. His interest in dreams in
“En Rade” leads to an interest in the life of the spirit with an
examination of Satanism in late 19th century France. The
centre piece of this first Durtal novel “La-Bas” (“Down there”)
is a biography of Gilles de Raiz, a follower of Joan of Arc, who
having lost his fortune hopes to recover it by appeasing Satan with
appalling acts of paedophilia. Court records of his eventual trial
say that he murdered some 200 children although it might have been
considerably more. The reality of Satanic phenomena haunted Huysmans
for the rest of his life. Satan has used paedophilia with
devastating effect for the Church in our own day.
“En
Route” follows and is the story of Durtal's return to the Church.
One evening he enters Saint-Sulpice in Paris during the Octave of
All Saints when the darkness hides what he calls the hideous nave.
“There he could soil his soul without being seen; he was at home”.
He recounts how he hears the unctuous speech, and the greasiness
of his accent of a well-fed priest pouring out the commonest of
platitudes to his listeners and Durtal is filled with disgust.
Suddenly though the organ starts and he hears the De
Profundis. At
first it calls to his pessimism but eventually he is thunderstruck
by it. “What music so ample or so sorrowful or so tender that it
might be, was worth the solemnities of the Magnificat,
the
august words of the Lauda
Sion, the
enthusiasms of the Salva
Regina, the
distress of the Miserere
and
of the Stabat,
the
ever powerful majesty of the Te
Deum”. For
Durtal the real proof of Catholicism lay in the art it had produced.
There follows a long discussion of sacred music based on his research
which had started with “A Rebours”. To-day Cardinal Aupetit has
clamped down on such traditional liturgy in Paris. You are more
likely to hear sacred music on Classic FM than in any church. Ave
Verum Corpus seems
to be a popular request at the moment. How many realise it is an
assertion of the Real Presence in which so many Catholics no longer
believe?
Durtal
prefers the text of the Dies
Irae to
that of the De
Profundis.
Benedict XVI explains in his book “Eschatology Death and Eternal
Life” in 1977 how “In the Dies
Irae
… we hear only of the fear of judgement, which contemplates the End
under the appearances of horror and of threat to the soul's
salvation.” This was not acceptable to most of his fellow
theologians who no longer believed in the existence of the soul or
indeed salvation. Benedict wrote that in opposing this “I took up
a position which was sharply opposed to the post-conciliar consensus
of a seeming majority of Catholic theologians”. Benedict
continues “Indeed, the Missal of Paul VI dared to speak of the soul
here and there, and that in timorous fashion, otherwise avoiding all
mention of it , The soul has been deleted where possible. As for
the German rite of burial, it has, so far as I can see, obliterated
it altogether.”
In
listening to sacred music Huysmans/Durtal suddenly realises that he
believes. The rest of En
Route
is the story of his gradual recovery of the practice of the faith
seeking out good liturgy in various Churches; it is a veritable “Good
Music Guide” to the Paris of his time. He finds a spiritual
director who directs him to orders of monks and nuns and the best
plainchant in a Convent of Benedictine nuns in the Rue Monsieur. A
convent later to be associated with Gabriel Marcel, Claudel,
Maritain, Mauriac etc.
Huysmans/Durtal struggles with his sexual life and the
devil. The description of this is graphic to say the least which
led many Catholics to say that it was not a book for their daughters
and to doubt his sincerity. Eventually his spiritual director sends
him to stay in a Trappist monastery where he makes his confession.
In fact Huysman's penance was one decade of the Rosary but he was not
sure he had got it right and thought he was supposed to say ten
complete rosaries. Later explaining to his confessor that he done
this, rather badly and grudgingly, he was told that his confusion was
merely a stratagem of the Devil to discourage him.
The
next book La
Catedrale
is essantially a guide to Chartres Cathedral describing every statue
with great erudition but at the same time a humorous description of
his domestic life with his housekeeper and priest friends,
His final book is “L'Oblat”. Huysmans/Durtal had
already visited Solesmes and admired the work of Dom Gueranger and
his revival of plainchant. However he found the monastery too
regimented for him and he realises that he was not suited to the life
of a monk. Instead his ambition was to found a group of Benedictine
Oblates made up of artists – writers, sculptors, illuminators,
composers etc. He therefore buys a house next to what in reality was
the Benedictine Monastery at Liguge near Poitiers a daughter house of
Solesmes. Huysmans places his fictional version as being near Dijon
in Burgundy describing the life of the Monastery and the liturgy in
great detail.
Huysmans becomes an oblate but his ambition to create a
group of artists fails. One of his fellow oblates is more
strict than the monks while his niece wears the day's liturgical
colours as ribbons in her hair and at the same time is extremely fond
of her food. Being in Burgundy they discuss whether
Gevrey-Chambertin should only be used as communion wine or whether
it should be drunk at table. They decide on the latter. Despite his
dislike of rural life Huysmans/Durtal does see this as his final
destination but gradually the shadow of the anti-clerical and
free-mason government of Waldeck-Rousseau begins to overshadow
everything with its desire to control and limit all religious life.
Huysmans/Durtal
wonders whether Leo XIII could not do more to oppose these
developments but obviously the political influence of the Papacy had
weakened after the loss of the Papal States. Waldeck-Rousseau, a
Catholic in the same mould as Biden or Pelosi, disgusts him. Certain
clerics are ambivalent; particularly the Bishop of Dijon who appoints
a rough and poorly educated diocesan priest to the Parish previously
ministered to by the monks. The Bishop decrees that the monks must
hand over their Abbey Church every Sunday to this priest who promptly
abolishes the use of plainchant and introduces awful modern hymns.
Further the monks were forbidden to hear the confessions of the
parishioners even those of the oblates. The latter take the train to
Dijon and just happen to meet a monk there. Huysmans recounts the
ensuing rows with great humour. To-day the present Bishop of Dijon,
anticipating Traditionis
Custodes by
a month, has
expelled the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter from his Diocese.
Eventually
though the monks are obliged to abandon the Monastery for the third
time in just over a century under the “Loi des Associations” of
1905. The monks move to Belgium. Durtal's idyll comes to an end
and he returns to Paris. The “Loi des Associations” is still in
existence and makes a mockery of the French state's pretensions to
Liberte,
Egalite et Fraternite. Recently
there has been a move to have it challenged before the European Court
of Human Rights.
Earlier
in En Route
Huysmans
makes a reference to Saint Lydwine de Schiedam and eventually he
wrote her biography. Huysmans's pessimism led him to the
consideration of the problem of suffering and he eventually found the
answer in the life of Saint Lydwine namely in the mystical theory of
substitution; the idea that the suffering of an innocent person can
expiate the sins of others and can bring them to virtue. He
discusses it in detail in L'Oblat.
St
Lydwine, born the same year that St Catherine of Siena died, had a
skating accident when young and suffered for the rest of her life
from what some now believe was multiple sclerosis. Huysmans himself
contracted cancer of the jaw and suffered for many years until it
killed him. Robert Baldicks's excellent biography gives a very
graphic account of his suffering. This mystical theory of dolorism,
has its origins in Luke Chapter 2 and Simeon's prophecy to Our Lady
that a sword would pierce her heart.
To-day some in the Church regard dolorism as being some
sort of aberration. Feminists regard being told “to offer it up”
as an example of how women are oppressed. The nineteenth century
Comtesse de Segur, author of books for children including “Les
Malheurs de Sophie” comes in for a lot of flack as a proponent of
dolorism. An order of nuns in France, whose work was the care of
the elderly which inevitably involves witnessing much suffering, were
suspected of harbouring excessively traditional ideas and they
received a visitation at the behest of their Bishop. A criticism of
the sisters was that their work day was broken up by prayer. 'Hache'
literally axed or chopped up, was the word used for describing how
the day was interrupted by prayer. Even stranger was the accusation
that the sisters entertained a 'sweetened' version of St Luke's
account of the Presentation with undue emphasis on the sword that was
to pierce the heart of Our Lady. This was dolorism in the eyes of
the visitors and the idea of offering up suffering in expiation of
sin was not acceptable. The report was largely withdrawn
subsequently but the heavy hand of Cardinal Joao de Braz, of the
Congregation for Institutes for the Consecrated Life, was such as to
lead the sisters to ask to be released from their vows rather than
accept a modernising tutelage. One can only fear for other
traditional orders now put under Cardinal Joao de Braz by Traditionis
Custodes.
One of the problems in reading Huysmans is his very
ornate language; some of his vocabulary is possibly invented or at
least unique to him. He is worth the effort particularly if you are
interested in sacred art but overall he is probably the most
interesting and greatest French novelist of the nineteenth century.
