Against the Grain

Against the Grain

By Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Translated by Groves & Michaux.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Preface
4. Notice
5. Against the Grain
   1. I
   2. II
   3. III
   4. IV
   5. V
   6. VI
   7. VII
   8. VIII
   9. IX
   10. X
   11. XI
   12. XII
   13. XIII
   14. XIV
   15. XV
   16. XVI
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Preface

Written twenty years after the novel.

I suppose all men of letters are like myself in this, that they never reread their works once they have appeared. Nothing in fact is more disenchanting, more painful than examine one’s phrases again after an interval of years. They have been in bottle, so to speak, and form a deposit at the bottom of the book; and, most times, volumes are not like wines which improve with age; once clarified in the fullness of time, the chapters grow flat and their bouquet evaporates.

Such is the impression certain bottles stacked in the Against the Grain bin made upon me when I had to uncork them.

Now, sadly enough, I endeavour to recall, as I turn over the pages, what precise state of mind I could have been in at the time I wrote them.

Naturalism was then at full tide; but that school, which was destined to perform the never-to-be-forgotten good service of showing real personages in accurate surroundings, was condemned to go on repeating itself, marking time forever on the same spot.

It would allow, in theory at any rate, almost no exception; it was therefore bound to limit its range to the delineation of everyday existence, forced, under pretext of making its characters alive, to create beings as like as they could possibly be made to the general average of people. This ideal was, in its class, realized in a masterpiece which has been, far more than L’Assommoir, the type and paragon of Naturalism, viz. the Education Sentimentale of Gustave Flaubert. This book was for all of us, men of the Soirées de Médan, a veritable Bible; but it brought little grist to our mill. It was done and ended, a thing not to be begun again even by Flaubert himself. Consequently we found ourselves reduced in those days to tack about, to prowl round all the countryside by roads more or less thoroughly explored before.

Virtue, being, we are compelled to admit, an exception here below, was for that very reason barred from the Naturalistic author’s scheme. Not possessing the orthodox Christian conception of the Temptation and Fall, we had no knowledge from what struggles and what tribulations it has arisen; the soul’s heroism, triumphant over snares and pitfalls, was inappreciable by us. It would never have occurred to us to describe this combat, with its ups and downs, its feints and flank attacks, not to speak of its skilled auxiliaries arming themselves very often far from the individual against whom the Evil One’s assault is directed, in the quiet of some remote Cloister; to us Virtue seemed the attribute of creatures devoid of intelligent curiosity or wanting in common sense⁠—hardly a stimulating subject, in any case, to treat from the point of view of art. Remained the Vices; but here the area capable of cultivation was restricted. It was confined to the territories of the Seven Deadly Sins, and even of these seven, one only, that against the Sixth Commandment, was fairly accessible.

The rest had been cropped cruelly bare, and hardly a grape was left to pluck in those vineyards. Avarice, for instance, had been squeezed to the last drop of liquor by Balzac and Hello. Pride, Anger, Envy had played their parts in every publication of the Romantics, and as dramatic motifs had been so violently distorted by the abuse of stage exigencies that it would have called for a veritable genius to rejuvenate them in a book. As for Gluttony and Idleness, these seemed to lend themselves to realization rather in subsidiary characters, to be more suitable to supers than to leading actors or prima donnas in the novel of manners.

The truth is that Pride would have been the most magnificent of all sins to study, in its infernal ramifications of cruelty towards others and false humility, that Gluttony, towing in its wake Lust and Idleness, and Theft would have supplied subjects for surprising investigations, if only writers had examined these offences with the lamp and blowpipe of the Church and possessing Faith. But as a fact not one of us was qualified for the task. We were therefore driven to handle and re-handle the sin of all others most easily laid bare, Lust, in all its various manifestations; God knows we did our best, but this amusement was