Observing the Unnatural in Jørgensen’s "Against Nature"
A Reading of Huysmans through Lacan and White
“...with the phantoms that dominate, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.”
In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel Against Nature, the singular character of Jean des Esseintes grapples with his individual self-existence, as seen through his experimentation of complete seclusion. His drive to establish a life in which he is the sole being reflects his narcissistic temperament and his fear of disease and inevitable decay, and is in direct relation to his unrealized dream of returning to a state of existence in which he previously maintained no sense of self. Through placing the text in conversation with Jacques Lacan’s 1949 essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” it can be discerned that des Esseintes’s true motive in living in seclusion is his unconscious desire of death–that his apparent hypochondria is a result of the development of his imago at the time of his mirror stage evolution in infancy. There exists a connection between des Esseintes’s desires and aversions that suggests the argument that all desire is unnatural. Within close reading of Against Nature through Lacan, Jens Lohfert Jørgensen’s “The Bacteriological Modernism of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature,” and the work of Nicholas J. White in his 1993 article “Narcissism, reading and history: Freud, Huysmans and other Europeans” there arises an argument that all desire itself is against nature, and that the only naturally occurring drive manifests itself in the death of the subject: the single reality that des Esseintes tries so hard to resist.
As Against Nature is a work of early modernist fiction, Jørgensen explores the impact of the development of germ theory around the late 19th century in regards to the fear of death and decay that Huysmans illustrates in the character of des Esseintes. Jørgensen argues that it is the lack of control that is suggested through the discovery of bacteria that leads to the development of “cenesthesia” what he describes as “the mind’s perception of the state of the body” (Jørgensen 96). As Lacan would argue, this self-perception that Jørgensen is describing of one’s body is a transformation that “takes place in the subject when he assumes an image” (NA 1112). In Against Nature, this would have occurred at the time of the mirror stage development in des Esseintes as an infant.
Jørgensen writes, “Examples of this are provided by the recurrent account of the development of the physical and mental exhaustion that lead des Esseintes to take refuge from society in the first place” (Jørgensen 96). The argument here is that des Esseintes’s desire to retreat from the world and live in seclusion is largely driven by his need for total self-control, something that is impacted by outside influences and is weakened by his fear of contamination. As Jørgensen continues his reading of the impact of germ theory and its link to des Esseintes, it becomes apparent that his argument is leading towards the idea that it is the human knowledge of bacteria itself that is unnatural, and was something that only came into human knowledge around the time of Huysmans’s novel.
Jørgensen highlights the theme of narcissism in des Esseintes’s visible hypochondria through des Esseintes’s art collection, highlighting Huysmans’s attention to hidden detail. He suggests that des Esseintes’s narcissistic fear of illness is expressed through the decadent purchases he makes in the novel. Jørgensen argues that while des Esseintes suffers from no real illness--merely meta illnesses, illusions stemming from his heightened cenesthesia--he fills the void of physical ailments by purchasing art that inspires illness. Jørgensen writes: “Enumerating the contemporary religious volumes in his library in chapter 12, the narrator states that ‘in reality he was only interested in unhealthy works, works that were sapped and inflamed by fever.’ Art has to be infectious in order to ‘excite’ des Esseintes. On the other hand, he perceives the public success of works of art as an act of pollution” (Jørgensen 98). The choice of pollution to describe this desire emphasizes how unnatural this narcissistic desire is to be the sole being to experience a work of art, illustrating that the individual desire to be the only one “infected” is not a naturally occurring drive.
This is connected to the work of Lacan as read by Danny Nobus in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, who argues that if “human beings are to maintain their humanity by relying on the recognition of others, the fight for prestige should not be settled in death” (Nobus 111). As des Esseintes is a man who has reached a state in his life in which he is paralyzed by the realities of adulthood yet naturally cannot find a way to return to infancy, he must instead face the undeniable reality of death. The seclusion from the world in Against Nature driven by the desire for self-control is therefore unnatural. In relation to the question of natural and unnatural, Jørgensen writes that the influence of self-control upon naturalism and narcissism is “a re-enchanted fear of the possibility that nature might not, after all, be controllable” (Jørgensen 101).
As Jørgensen establishes a bacteriological understanding of unnatural desire in Against Nature, White writes on the direct link between des Esseintes’s bacteriological narcissism and Lacan’s mirror stage theory. White argues that it is the mirror stage itself that works as a function of des Esseintes’s body, preventing his psyche from realizing his true desire of death and instead clouding his mind with unnatural desires. White writes, “In Lacanian terms, moreover, narcissism is negotiated at the mirror stage as an instance of the ‘function of the imago which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality’” (White 262). White argues that it is the mirror stage itself that becomes a function of des Esseintes’s body, the body that Jørgensen argues is the root of the hypochondria and the origin of his fear of death.
As in White’s essay, it is the mirror stage that develops the narcissistic tendencies in the character of des Esseintes, and is what prevents any recognition of true desires. Further, White explores what it is about self-seclusion that represents apparent narcissism and false desire in des Esseintes. White writes, “The mirror-stage and economy as a function of the body occupy the theoretical space of negotiation between, on the one hand, the lisibilité of the obsessional neurotic and the expansive narcissist and, on the other, the scriptible quality of the paraphrenic and the retracted narcissist” (White 264). The argument here is that in reading Against Nature through the mirror-stage theory it becomes apparent that Huysmans combines a readability in des Esseintes’s neurosis yet does not pose a position to challenge why readers would find it pleasurable to witness the life of a narcissist. White argues that therefore the desires that des Esseintes experiences through the book are ones of a false nature, as they are nothing more than shallow desires hiding deeper fears that cannot be uncovered until the natural occurrence of death.
In placing White’s and Jørgensen’s individual readings in conversation with one another, an argument can be made that the singular natural drive in des Esseintes’s experience is the desire for death, and that all his aesthetic desires are merely artificial in origin. When placed in the context of the mirror stage, it is shown that a drive to revert to a state of functioning without an imago is proof that the end of desire is death. If one cannot place oneself within the world one ceases to exist, which is the true motive behind des Esseintes retreating into a life of seclusion. This is illustrated through his hypochondria, through narcissistic tendencies, and through what Lacan would deem to be “paranoiac knowledge” [as the Norton Anthology states, “knowledge itself is structured like paranoia, in that it projects a coherence onto the world that may not be there” (NA 1112)].
Similar to Jørgensen’s bacteriological study that the knowledge of germs places human beings in an unnatural state of awareness, Lacan would argue that des Esseintes’s obsession with his physical condition is the result of unnatural knowledge, or a coherence placed upon his inner world that does not exist in reality. As an example, at one point in the novel Huysmans writes that des Esseintes does fall genuinely ill as a result of his refusal to sleep–fearing his own heartbeat. The narrator reflects upon this illness in comparison to the past instances of fabricated illness, describing how des Esseintes would wear fur coats in the height of the summer and “could make himself shiver, telling himself as he deliberately forced his teeth to chatter: ‘Ah, this wind is glacial, it’s freezing here, it’s freezing!’ and almost end up convincing himself it was cold! Unfortunately such remedies no longer worked now that his illness had become real” (Huysmans 190). The choice of the word “real” to define the illness evokes the argument made by White that suggests it was a real illness that des Esseintes wanted, and thus proves that his ultimate natural desire was death.
The most important argument that can be made in reflection of White’s and Jørgensen’s respective writings is that it is through the narcissistic mind that des Esseintes develops his aversion and unnatural desires. In relation to the mirror-stage theory, it is the moment in which he became self-aware that narcissism developed within his imago and began to fuel his individualistic desires that all tie together the overall desire to cease his existence, and proves that through desire there is merely a drive for death.
White illustrates des Esseintes’s narcissistic hypochondria through his self-seclusion as merely a function of his body and Jørgensen suggests why this function and desire to obtain knowledge of germs are so inherently unnatural to humankind. Both authors incorporate the undeniable theme of death that is found throughout Against Nature, as des Esseintes’s aggressive obsession with his health is the driving desire behind his attempts to create his own world in which to exist. Nobus writes on Lacan’s understanding of where this narcissistic aggression stems from: “Aggressivity is thus as much an intra-psychic, as an ‘inner-personal’ incident, a phenomenon Lacan linked to ‘destructive and, indeed, death instincts,’ which explain ‘the evident connection between the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, [and] the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other’ (Nobus 113). In discussion of Against Nature, the “other” in this analysis represents all capacity for desire that is found within the character of des Esseintes. This definition of aggressive obsession proves White’s discussion of the inherent narcissism being something connected to self-desire that developed during the mirror stage.
In consideration of the mirror stage that occurs during infancy when a child lacks the capacity for desire yet has no sense of self, Nobus writes on the development of the imago: “it is moreover inaccessible because it has neither depth, nor contents, and one can neither manage nor wield it. In addition, the imago is complete: unlike the child, it has no insufficiencies and it also seems to enjoy the comfort of having nothing to demand or desire” (Nobus 117). This is the state which des Esseintes desires to revert to. He wishes to experience no desire at all, and in this is seeking the death of desire–therefore desiring death itself. The mirror stage proves that there is no desire that is naturally occuring because, like every human, des Esseintes was born without the ability to place himself in time and space. It is this unnatural development of the imago that prevents him from living a purely satisfied life content without desire. As humans are born with no desire, only needs, des Esseintes’s drive to live in seclusion and solitude is to escape his own desires, to return to a state of existence that lacks a developed imago. The undeniable issue that arises in this desire is that it is false, that his true desire is death, as he can only determine what he wants because he has experienced the mirror stage. The conflict of this state of being as illustrated by White, Jørgensen, and Lacan via Nobus highlights the true reality of death, the drive established through the experience of the mirror stage, and the mortal desire for detrimentally superfluous knowledge. In conclusion, as Huysmans writes, des Esseintes’s unnatural desire drove quite a deadly destiny:
He had revealed the morbid psychology of a mind that has reached the autumn of its experiences, had described the symptoms of a soul conscripted by suffering and licensed by spleen, had exposed the growing decay of feeling after the enthusiasm and belief of youth have evaporated, when other remains but the arid memory of miseries borne, intolerable things endured and affronts suffered, by intelligences oppressed by an absurd destiny (Huysmans 164).
Works Cited
Huysmans, J.-K (Joris-Karl). Against Nature. Translated by Brendan King, Dedalus, 2008.
Jørgensen, Jens Lohfert. "The Bacteriological Modernism of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature." Literature and Medicine, vol. 31 no. 1, 2013, p. 91-113. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lm.2013.0008.
Leitch, Vincent B., et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Nobus, Dany. Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2019.
White, Nicholas J. “Narcissism, Reading and History: Freud, Huysmans and Other Europeans.” Paragraph, vol. 16, no. 3, 1993, pp. 261–273. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43263411. Accessed 16 May 2021.
Snagged by this quote ""...Continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax." (Léon Bloy, quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans)" and this. "“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
David Houston
hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui,---is pretty good
If I questioned where decadence came from, I thought of it from the past and as a metaphor so I don't think I would have seen the connection to germ theory. I was also surprised by how advanced the language of psychology was at the time considering the field felt like it was still in the early research stage in the seventies and later. In my peek-a-boo view, it felt like, 'Maybe stirring up negative transference isn't the way to go' was a fresh idea only twenty five years ago. I love purple prose and have a broad art for art sake stripe. Thanks will definitely read some more.