As I have returned to school in order to complete my bachelor’s degree in order to teach, I came across the writings of Frederick Douglass, reading ‘The Heroic Slave’. The name was always there, a part of my lexicon of historical names; however, honestly I never read him. I was overpowered by his mastery as a writer. The ability to convey the profound while telling an engaging dramatic story captured me. I wanted to share a paragraph.

“What, then, is life to me? it is aimless and worthless, and worse than worthless. Those birds, perched on yon swinging boughs, in friendly conclave, sounding forth their merry notes in seeming worship of the rising sun, though liable to the sportsman’s fowling-piece, are still my superiors. They live free, though they may die slaves. They fly where they list by day, and retire in freedom at night. But what is freedom to me, or I to it? I am a slave,—born a slave, an abject slave,—even before I made part of this breathing world, the scourge was platted for my back; the fetters were forged for my limbs. How mean a thing am I. That accursed and crawling snake, that miserable reptile, that has just glided into its slimy home, is freer and better off than I. He escaped my blow, and is safe. But here am I, a man,—yes, a man!—with thoughts and wishes, with powers and faculties as far as angel’s flight above that hated reptile, —yet he is my superior, and scorns to own me as his master, or to stop to take my blows. When he saw my uplifted arm, he darted beyond my reach, and turned to give me battle. I dare not do as much as that. I neither run nor fight, but do meanly stand, answering each heavy blow of a cruel master with doleful wails and piteous cries. I am galled with irons; but even these are more tolerable than the consciousness, the galling consciousness of cowardice and indecision. Can it be that I dare not run away? Perish the thought, I dare do anything which may be done by another. When that young man struggled with the waves for life, and others stood back appalled in helpless horror, did I not plunge in, forgetful of life, to save his? The raging bull from whom all others fled, pale with fright, did I not keep at bay with a single pitchfork? Could a coward do that? No,— no,—I wrong myself,—I am no coward. Liberty I will have, or die in the attempt to gain it. This working that others may live in idleness! This cringing submission to insolence and curses! This living under the constant dread and apprehension of being sold and transferred, like a mere brute, is too much for me. I will stand it no longer. What others have done, I will do. These trusty legs, or these sinewy arms shall place me among the free. Tom escaped; so can I. The North Star will not be less kind to me than to him. I will follow it. I will at least make the trial. I have nothing to lose. If I am caught, I shall only be a slave. If I am shot, I shall only lose a life which is a burden and a curse. If I get clear, (as something tells me I shall,) liberty, the inalienable birth-right of every man, precious and priceless, will be mine. My resolution is fixed. I shall be free.”

A quotation from a literary criticism book ‘The Rise of the Novel’ by Ian Watt. This scholarly effort examines the rise of the novel in the early eighteenth-century English writers: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. This quotation is taken from the chapter on Robinson Crusoe

…Here is invincible patience recommended under the worst of misery, indefatigable application and undaunted resolution under the greatest and most discouraging circumstances ‘.

Having asserted an autobiographical meaning for his story, Defoe goes on to consider the problem of solitude. His discussion is an interesting illustration of Weber’s view of the effects of Calvinism. Most of the argument is concerned with the Puritan insistence on the need for the individual to overcome the world in his own soul, to achieve a spiritual solitude without recourse to monasticism. The business is to get a retired soul’, he says, and goes on: All the parts of a complete solitude are to be as effectually enjoyed, if we please, and sufficient grace assisting, even in the most populous cities, among the hurries of conversation and gallantry of a court, or the noise and business of a camp, as in the in the deserts of Arabia and Lybia, or in the desolate life of an uninhabited island’.

This note, however, occasionally relapses into a more general statement of solitude as an enduring psychological fact: All reflection is carried home, and our dear self is, in one respect, the end of living. Hence man may be properly said to be alone in the midst of crowds and the hurry of men and business. Al the reflections which he makes are to himself; all that is pleasant he embraces for himself; all that is irksome and grievous is tasted but by his own palate.’ Here the Puritan insistence on possessing one’s soul intact from a sinful world is couched in terms which suggest a more absolute, secular and personal alienation from society. Later this echo of the redefined aloneness of Descartes’s ‘solus ipse’ modulates into an anguished sense of personal loneliness whose overpowering reality moves Defoe to his most urgent and moving eloquence:

“What are the sorrows of other men to us, and what their joy? Something we may be touched indeed with by the power of sympathy, and a secret turn of the affections; but all the solid reflection is directed to ourselves. Our meditations are all solitude in perfection; our passions are all exercised in retirement; we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude. All that we communicate of those things to any other is but for their assistance in the pursuit of our desires; the end is at home; the enjoyment, the contemplation, is all solitude and retirement; it is for ourselves we enjoy, and for ourselves we suffer.”

‘We covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude’: what really occupies man is something that makes him solitary wherever he is, and too aware of the interested nature of any relationship with other human beings to find any consolation there. “All that we communicate … to any other is but for their assistance in the pursuit of our desires’: a rationally conceived self-interest makes a mockery of speech; and the scene of Crusoe’s silent life is not least a Utopia because its functional silence, broken only by an occasional ‘Poor Robinson Crusoe’ from the parrot, does not impose upon man’s ontological egocentricity the need to assume a false façade of social intercourse, or to indulge in the
mockery of communication with his fellows.

Joris-Karl Huysmans is a French writer of sublime singular refinement, the journey of an artist, a writer. He fascinates me with his conviction to reveal the complexity and immensity of his life, studies, pursuit of his path, authentic to his calling of discovery, rejecting the modern while divulging, entertaining the classics, educated proficiently by Jesuits, his life defining a personalized understanding. The things Huysmans fearlessly explores are near and dear to his being—brutal honesty and forthright detailing are means of expression. In ‘The First Decadent’, James Laver dissects Huysmans most critically acclaimed novel ‘A Rebours’, a strange novel revealing intellectual debauchery, discarded nobility drawn into self-imposed exile within an overwhelming solitary artistic decadence—nature rejected for the perversity of a wandering interior life while confined to a home obsessively designed and constructed into a trapping. Huysmans is a profound demonstration of planting a fruitful seed within the muck and the mire.

Huysmans indeed, in the Preface which he wrote for ‘A Rebours’, after his conversion, calls sadism the ‘bastard of Catholicism’. It ‘presupposes a religion to be violated. It consists above all in a sacrilegious practice, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in an aberration which is completely ideal, entirely Christian. … The power of sadism, the attraction which it offers, resides entirely in the prohibited pleasure of transferring to Satan the homage and the prayers which are due to God; it resides therefore in the non-observance of the Catholic precepts, or even in observing them in reverse (the key word à rebours), by committing, in order the more to spurn Christ, the sins He has expressly cursed: the pollution of the cult and the carnal orgy.’

This is surely to claim too much. Sadism and sacrilege are not necessarily the same thing, although they are closely allied; but the passage is interesting as showing that the germ of Là-bas was already present in A Rebours.

In addition to the engravings of Luyken, des Esseintes exhibited on his walls the lithograph by Bresdin called La Comédie de la Mort. Rodolphe Bresdin is not a name that is very well-known today, but there was a certain vogue for his work, at the time of the publication of A Rebours, in the circles with which Huysmans was in contact. He was an extraordinary character who was employed for a time as a railway-man and road-mender. When he was in Paris he lived in a dilapidated shack in the suburbs ‘surrounded by a collection of incongruous objects amongst which cats lay feeding their young and spiders spun their webs’. He had considerable skill as an etcher, ‘pulled his proofs by means of a shoe brush and some blacking and sold them for a few francs to second-hand dealers who passed them off as Rembrandts.’ He taught etching to Odilon Redon, one of whose early etchings is signed ‘pupil of Bresdin’. Huysmans may even have met him through Redon, or through Catulle Mendès, for whose Revue Fantaisiste, Bresdin made a series of etchings. Later he produced lithographs of which La Comédie de la Mort is the most ambitious.

It is easy to see why it appealed to des Esseintes with its fantastic foliage, its lowering clouds, its gesticulating skeletons. In detail it is fantastically minute, but there was no question of drawing from the model. The artist,’ said Bresdin, ‘should not even glance at Nature. He has everything within himself.’ This might have stood as a motto for des Esseintes; it shows how completely Huysmans had broken with Zolaism and the doctrine of the Impressionists, when he could prefer to Manet and his followers the works of men like Bresdin and Odilon Redon.

For des Esseintes hung Odilon Redon too, in the vestibule leading to his bedroom, and Redon, who was a considerable artist, paid no attention to the outside world at all but drew his strange forms, his evocative images, his monstrous flowers terminating in human faces, entirely from the world of dream. He takes his place today as a precursor of the Surrealists.

In the bedroom itself was a drawing by Théotocopuli, ‘a Christ of singular hue, exaggerated design and ferocious colour. It was a sinister picture, in tones of wax-yellow and cadaverous green.’ Huysmans’ reference to it is half-apologetic, but it is interesting to see him anticipating, if he did not foresee, the now universal passion for El Greco. What he was seeking, of course, in all these pictures was an excitation of his sensibility, one might almost say a sharpening of his neurosis.

It is impossible to follow des Esseintes in all his researches. There is a chapter on flowers, there is a discussion of the effects of perfumes. He is tempted to start on a journey to England, but after a single visit to an English tavern in the Rue de Rivoli, decides not to risk losing by actually visiting the country, the ‘imperishable sensations’ procured by a meal of oxtail soup, haddock, beefsteak, Stilton, and rhubarb tart. Then, as if exhausted by this unwonted effort, he returns to his books.

……………He praises Barbey for his violent oscillations between mysticism and sadism, and declares that this book alone among the works of ‘contemporary apostolic literature (the phrase is Huysmans’ own), is the perfect witness of that state of mind, at once devout and impious, towards which his memories of Catholicism, stimulated by his neurosis, had often driven des Esseintes’.

He had an almost equal admiration for the writings of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and he embarks on a long discussion of his short stories which recall, on the one hand, the ‘mystifications’ of Edgar Allan Poe and, on the other, the cold and ferocious irony of Swift. In this there was much to chime with Huysmans’ own predilection, but perhaps he did not realise completely at the time what it was in Villiers which attracted him so much.

…………

As may well be imagined, A Rebours was a literary sensation of the first magnitude. Nothing quite like it had ever appeared before, and the public hardly knew what to make of it. Huysmans wrote to Zola: ‘I have trodden on everybody’s corns. The Catholics are exasperated: the others accuse me of being a clerical in disguise, the Romantics are offended by the attacks on Hugo, on Gautier, on Leconte de Lisle; the Naturalistes by the book’s hatred of the moderns.’

Zola himself was not very pleased. He saw that his young disciple was no longer of his company; he had gone off in another direction altogether.

‘The First Decadent: Joris-Karl Huysmans’ written by James Laver

The closing passage of ‘A Rebours’: “Ah! courage fails me; I feel sick. Lord, have pity on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who would believe, on the prisoner of life who sets out alone, into the night, under a sky no longer lighted by the consoling lamps of the ancient hope.”

Gustav Moreau ‘Salome Dancing Before Herod

Odiln Redon ‘The Cyclops’

Rodolphe Bresdin ‘la Comedia de la morte’

By the time the ship happens to sail by and pick up Pip “by merest chance,” the ocean has “jeeringly kept his finite body up” but has “drowned the infinite of his soul.” Pip has lost himself. He has come to feel “indifferent as his God” (Melville had been reading in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus about the “centre of indifference” as a stage to wisdom), and “from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot,” or “such, at least they said he was.” Pip stands before the gold doubloon that Ahab has nailed to the mast and, to the puzzlement of his shipmates (“Upon my soul, he’s been studying Murray’s Grammar!”), he conjugates the verb “to look”: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.” He has been emptied of self-consciousness, and protected by his evident idiocy against his white masters-whom he calls, knowing their propensity to rage, “white squalls”-he speaks the candid truth that they all see the world as a reflection of themselves. Even to the most explosive of them, Ahab, he dares to say: “Will ye do
one little errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who’s now been missing long.” As for Ahab, touched for the first time by the suffering of another human being, he questions Pip gently in an exchange worthy of Lear and his Fool:

“Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?”

“Astern there, sir, astern Lo! lo!”

“And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils
of thy eyes. Oh God! That man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through! Who art thou boy?”

In answer, Pip can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave:

“Pip! Pip! Pip! Reward for Pip! One hundred pounds of clay-five feet
high-looks cowardly-quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding!
Who’s seen Pip the coward?”

“Melville: His World and Works” Andrew Delbanco

‘And when you do,’ I said, ‘you’ll discover God. Uh, no doubt I’m putting it very clumsily. And besides, you’re no more than a child. But at least I can tell you this: you are setting off with your back turned on the world, for the world does not stand for revolt, but for submission, submission to lies, first and foremost. Go ahead for all you’re worth, the walls are bound to fall in the end, and every breach shows a patch of sky.’

‘Are you saying all this for the sake of talking-or are you-‘

‘It is true the meek shall inherit the earth. And your sort won’t try and get it from them, because they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Snatchers can only snatch at heaven.’

She was blushing deeply, and shrugged her shoulders.

‘You make me feel I could say anything. . . . I’d like to insult you. I won’t be disposed of against my will. I’ll go to hell all right, if I want to.’

‘I’ll answer for your soul with mine,’ I said impulsively.

She washed her hands under the kitchen tap, without so much as looking round. Then she quietly put on her hat, which she had taken off when she started working. She came slowly back to me. If I did not know her face so well, I might have said it looked tranquil, but the corners of her mouth trembled a little.

‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ she said, ‘if you’re what I think you are.’

‘The point is I am not what you think I am. You see yourself in me, as you might in a mirror, and your fate as well.’

‘When you talked to mother I was hiding under the window. And suddenly her face became so-so gentle. I hated you then. I don’t believe much in miracles, not any more than I do in ghosts, but I did think I knew my mother. She cared no more about pretty speeches than a fish for an apple. Have you a secret, yes or no?’

‘It’s a lost secret,’ I replied. ‘You’ll rediscover it, and lose it again, and others after you will pass it on, since your kind will last as long as the world.’

‘My kind? Whatever do you mean?’

‘Those whom God sends on and on forever, who will never rest while the world remains.’

George Bernanos