Opening Passage:
'Then you are so convinced by these new theories that you plan to jettison all the cliches of the modern novel -- adultery, love, ambition -- in order to write a biography of Gilles de Rais!'
After a pause, he contined:
'It is not the obscenity of Naturalism I detest -- the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines -- that would be foolish and absurd. Let's face it, some subjects can't be treated any other way -- Zola's L'Assommoir is living proof that works of tremendous vision and power can be constructed out of the linguistic equivalent of pitch and tar. Taht is not the issue, any more than the fact that I have serious reservations about Naturalism's heavy-handed, slapdash style. No, what I really object to is Naturalism's immorality on the intellectual plain -- the way it has turned literature into the living incarnation of materialism, the way it promotes the idea of art as something democratic!...' (p. 3)
Summary: Durtal is a writer who has been increasingly dissatisfied with the Naturalistic literary style that is in fashion; he was set on a different path by an experience with Matthias Grünewald's Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece. His current project is working through a biography of Gilles de Rais. He often talks about it and related matters with his friend, Des Hermies, who is a doctor who (possibly) has considerable writing talent but has never published anything because he realized that, whatever his ability, he was never going to write anything genuinely original. Through Des Hermies, Durtal meets Carhaix, the last bellringer in Paris; Carhaix, unlike Durtal and Des Hermies, is both Catholic and married, but they forgive him such relatively minor faux pas because Mme Carhaix is delightful and Carhaix is an interesting conversationalist, if a bit obsessed by the dying art of change-ringing. (Carhaix is so obsessed with bells, in fact, that one suspects, despite his obvious commitment to the faith, that he's Catholic in part because it makes it easier to be a bellringer.)The three, I suppose, are misfit artists -- Durtal, the artist who has broken off the fashionable style and is struggling to find his own; Des Hermies, the over-curious and ever-restless failed artist; and Carhaix, devotee of an art that is almost extinct and generally no longer appreciated.
Durtal's work on Gilles de Rais is the unifying thread of the story; as we go, we find out more and more about this man who once was a fellow warrior beside St. Jeanne D'Arc and then became a Satanist executed for raping and murdering children. Des Hermies, who in his capacity as a physician has an extraordinary number of connections and acquaintances, recommends that he consider looking at how Satanists work in present-day France. The most notable Satanist of modern-day is Canon Docre, an unfrocked and excommunicated priest; Des Hermies has never met him, but he knows that the Chantelouves have connections with him. Durtal happens to know the Chantelouves, in a somewhat interesting way, since he and Mme. Chantelouve have been carrying on a correspondence affair. Durtal uses this connection to try to learn more about Satanism and, eventually, a Satanic Black Mass that Canon Docre will be holding when he visits Paris. As the progress of the Gilles de Rais research increases, and we follow Gilles de Rais in his descent into evil, Durtal seems to undergo an opposing transformation, as he increasingly comes to regard his affair as a sordid and repulsive matter and finds the Satanists, and everyone and everything associated with them, off-putting. He doesn't believe any of it, but even he is shocked and made uneasy by the intensely petty sacrilege at the Black Mass and the malice expressed toward the Eucharist; he doesn't really know why, but the sacrilege just seems repugnant. Durtal accepts none of the dogmas, and yet the sacrilege and blasphemy just seems wrong.
That's more or less where it's left. Human beings are myth-makers, and when we speak of the modern age we weave a myth -- a myth of progress, of the banishment of superstition, of clear-eyed regard for reality. And Durtal's brush with Satanism has shown him what he was already beginning to recognize in the very modern style of Literary Naturalism: it's entirely fiction. Many of the things that make the modern age bearable are just slightly new versions of things that have always been, like having a nice meal with friends. The progress of the modern age is sometimes fake -- not always, perhaps, but a lot of it is only surface deep, and some of it is covering losses and deteriorations, like the loss of the art of change-ringing. You're free, of course, to think it's in some way a good trade, and Durtal (although not Carhaix) might not criticize you for it -- but it is a deterioration being spun as progress. But even when genuine, some of the progress is really just the old enduring into the present day -- basic points of chemistry were discovered by Renaissance alchemists, and the beauty of modern Paris is partly built on the Gothic and the Baroque. Nor has the modern age banished superstition. There are astrologers, alchemists, magicians galore. There are Satanic Black Masses going on under the secular age's nose, and a few of its shining lights are closely linked to them, and modern Frenchmen are terrified of Satanic curses. Durtal and his two friends find that there is an entire movement of heretical Catholicism going around, headed by a messianic prophet named Dr. Joannes, that is opposing, with magic, the Satanic curses of people like Canon Docre. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true or not; it is there. It is very obviously not banished, and it all has exactly the same right to be called 'modern' as anything in the myth. Certainly the myth does not let the Middle Ages off for the fact that magic and Satanism were disapproved then, and indeed disapproved more harshly than they are in the modern age; the myth of modernity simply points out that it was all there. And here it is again. It exists in the same calendar year; it is fomented by the same social causes; it interacts with the same cultural context. And far from being clear-eyed about this, people tell themselves fictional stories of how it's all in the past.
An age so self-deceitful cannot be anything but sick. But the story is not pessimistic; there is a sort of hope about the world that comes out of this, although only of a limited sort. If the modern age could not eliminate superstition, maybe there is something to religion. Maybe. If sacrilege and blasphemy still exist, we have not entirely lost a conception of the sacred. Not entirely. If the modern age could not banish Satan, maybe there is something to be said for Catholics worshipping God. Maybe, and maybe something. Durtal doesn't really believe any of it. What he does know is that the myth of the modern age is a lie. Whatever good there might be in modernity, the positivists and the Satanists are cousins, the priests are often blasphemers and the politicians often corrupt, and the world is full of sordid futility and evil. To see that is a sort of progress. Evil is a clue to what really means something. Durtal, however, has not gone farther than the beginning of that. Even Huysmans did not know where it all would lead; it's not even clear that, having published this book, he ever thought he would return to Durtal at all. But even if it all stopped here, it is something to have discovered that something might lead somewhere.
Favorite Passage:
Des Hermies rose and paced the room for a moment.
'That is all very well,' he groaned, 'but this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?'
'They will turn out,' replied Durtal, 'just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.' (pp. 264-265)
Recommendation: Recommended; I would say, 'Highly Recommended', but there are parts of the book that are definitely not for everyone. (The book is in some ways like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but with cleaner and more unified structure, and Satanic blasphemers rather than Templar enthusiasts.)
*****
J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas), Hale, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 2001).
