It All Comes Down to Artifice in the End (Notes Towards a Decadent Floraphilia)

A rebours by Ink-Yami (2017-18)

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I.

For me, Rupert Birkin is literature's greatest floraphile: a man who loves plants with a vital and perverse passion; a man for whom nothing satisfies like the subtle and responsive touch of cool vegetation upon his naked flesh - not even the love of a good woman. For whilst Birkin reluctantly returned to the human world and married Ursula, he always knew where he truly belonged and where he most wanted to deposit his sperm - in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves.

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II.

Just as perverse is the floraphilia of the aristocratic anti-hero of À Rebours: "Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers", writes Huysmans. However, unlike Birkin, he doesn't put his fondness into ecosexual practice and go rolling around wet hillsides, masturbating amidst a clump of young fir trees. Rather, Des Esseintes expresses his love of plants in a far more sophisticated and refined manner.

Des Esseintes is also discriminating amongst plants and doesn't embrace all flowers "without distinction of species or genus". In fact, he despises the "common, everyday varieties" that blossom in pots for sale at the local florist; "poor, vulgar slum-flowers [...] that are really at home only on the window-sill of a garret, with their roots squeezed into milk-cans or old earthenware pots".

Des Esseintes isn't too keen either on what he calls stupid flowers, such as the convential rose; flowers "whose proper place is in pots concealed inside porcelain vases painted by nice young ladies". In fact, whilst he can't help feeling "a certain pity for the lower-class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks", he loathed the bourgeois blooms that one finds in "cream-and-gold drawing-rooms". Ultimately, Des Esseintes kept his admiration exclusively for the "rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands, kept alive with cunning attention in artificial tropics created by carefully regulated stoves".

But, best of all to his mind, are artificial hothouse flowers made from rubber, paper, or synthetic material: "As a result, he possessed a wonderful collection of tropical plants, fashioned by the hands of true artists ..." But of course, a Decadent is easily bored. And so, whilst enthralled by the admirable artistry displayed in his collection of künstliche Blumen, Des Esseintes begins to dream of another kind of flora: "tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes."

This comically perverse acceleration of Decadent philosophy's anti-natural aesthetic all the way to its absurd conclusion - thereby reversing, as Patrick McGuinness points out, the relationship between nature and artifice, copy and original - is one of the most admirable aspects of À Rebours.       

Having soon assembled his astonishing collection of real fake flowers, including some remarkably sinister looking specimens that suggested disease and deformity rather than health and vital beauty, Des Esseintes is beside himself with joy:

"Yes, his object had been achieved: not one of them looked real; it was as if cloth, paper, porcelain and metal had been lent by man to Nature to enable her to create these monstrosities. Where she had not found it possible  to imitate the work of human hands, she been reduced to copying the membranes of animals' organs, to borrowing the vivid tints of their rotting flesh, the hideous splendours of their gangrened skin."

Fatigued by his horticultural handiwork and hothouse philosophizing, Des Esseintes goes to lie down on his bed. He soon falls asleep, but, alas, his sleep is disturbed "by the sombre fantasies of a nightmare", which concludes with an erotic encounter with an ashen-faced plant-woman, "naked but for a pair of green silk stockings". Her eyes gleamed ecstatically. Her lips had the crimson colour of an anthurium. And her nipples "shone as brightly as two red peppers".

As the dream intensifies, the plant-woman enfolds Des Esseintes in her tendril-like arms:

"He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but with an irresistible movement she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium blossoming between her uplifted thighs, with its sword-blades gaping open to expose the bloody depths.
      His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him - and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear."

I suspect that Birkin, in contrast to Des Esseintes with his eurotophobia and castration anxiety, would have been far more receptive to such a dream and would have awoken with blissful joy rather than a cold sweat.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick, introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness, (Penguin Books, 2003), Ch. 8, pp. 82-92. 

For a related post to this one on Des Esseintes (and his bejewelled tortoise), click here.

Reflections on the Death of a Jewel-Encrusted Tortoise

The decadent aristocrat Des Esseintes, whose retreat into an increasingly perverse and artificial inner life is depicted with such brilliance by J-K Huysmans in the 1884 novel À rebours (a title usually translated into English as either Against the Grain or Against Nature), is - as Patrick McGuinness points out - a fictional character, but he is not pure invention:

"Among the specific models for Des Esseintes was the eccentric King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who designed an artificial forest with mechanical animals, but there were also Baudelaire himself, Edmond de Goncourt and a variety of fictional characters [...] The most obvious model, however, was Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an aesthete and eccentric who provided the model for Proust's Baron Charlus in A la recherche du temps perdu ..."

Not only were many of the decorative elements of Des Esseintes's home based on details of Montesquiou's own, but the implausible figure of a jewel-encrusted tortoise creeping about Huysmans's novel was, outrageously, based on fact: "Montesquiou had the poor creature customized to his tastes, and when it died wrote a poem in its memory ..."

This certainly makes one read chapter four of Against Nature with a renewed fascination - and a greater sympathy - for the slow-moving beast:

"The tortoise was the result of a fancy which had occurred to him shortly before leaving Paris. Looking one day at an Oriental carpet aglow with iridescent colours [...] he had thought what a good idea it would be to place on this carpet something that would move about and be dark enough to set off these gleaming tints."  

Unfortunately, having purchased the tortoise and had it delivered to his home - and once it had been deposited on the carpet - it soon became apparent that "the negro-brown tint, the raw Sienna hue of the shell, dimmed the sheen of the carpet instead of bringing out its colours; the predominating gleams of silver had now lost nearly all their sparkle and matched the cold tones [...] along the edges of this hard, lustreless carapace".

Des Esseintes decides the only thing to do is to jazz the tortoise up a bit; to make it into a brilliant object (and artwork) in its own right; glazed in gold and encrusted with precious stones. But not just the familiar stones that vulgar people wear on their fingers; he wanted "startling and unusual gems " - both real and artificial - that, in combination, would "result in a fascinating and disconcerting harmony".

Job done - the tortoise suitably bejewelled - Des Esseintes felt perfectly happy and sat gazing at the splendid reptile as it lay "huddled in a corner of the dining room, glittering brightly in the half-light". Alas, his happiness doesn't last long as the tortoise dies: "Accustomed no doubt to a sedentary life, a modest existence spent in the shelter of its humble carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it ..."

And people complain about the crushing effects of poverty!

Interestingly, there are faint echoes of this scene in Brideshead Revisited (1945), when Rex Mottram presents his fiancée Julia Flyte with a small tortoise that has her initials set in diamonds in the living shell. Unlike Des Esseintes, however, the narrator of Waugh's novel (Charles Ryder) can see that the bejewelled tortoise is slightly obscene and in poor taste.

In even poorer taste, however, is what children of my generation used to paint on the backs of pet tortoises; believing their shells to resemble the steel helmets of German soldiers, we would cheerfully decorate them with Iron Crosses and swastikas. And if there's anything more depressing than a dandified, decadent tortoise, it's a Nazified tortoise ...       

Notes

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick, (Penguin Books, 2003). Lines quoted are from Chapter 4, pp. 40-49. 

Patrick McGuinness, 'Introduction' to Against Nature, ibid., pp. xxvii-xxviii.  

Eveleyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, (Penguin Books, 2000). The tortoise scene is in Chapter 6. 

For a related post to this one written in memory of J-K Huysmans (and his jewel-encrusted tortoise), click here.