In Joris-Karl Huysmans’ Against the Grain, peculiar sexual affiliations of the character (s) are hinted in the title. The said title alerts its reader to the likelihood of occurrences that are out of the ordinary, opening their mind up to the possibility of experiencing the extraordinary through the story that the author spins. Huysmans focuses on the main character, who he names Des Esseintes, a man consumed by his love for flowers. Des Esseintes appreciates the beauty and variation in flower types, which he compares to the categories of people within the society. However, the author documents that after running a flower shop for a long time, Des Esseintes became eager to try a new experiment which would seek to realize the goal of natural flowers is imitating artificial ones. His revolutionary idea was an expression of his innermost feelings which sought societal change to allow him to become who he truly was. He was tired of conforming to societal norms and wished that society would adapt to his own. Hence, Des Esseintes emotional distress caused by the need to adjust to societal norms propelled him to confess the truth about his sexuality.
Fear compelled Des Esseintes to confess. Huysmans recounts a terrifying ordeal that Des Esseintes went through, before revealing that it was a nightmare. In the dream, Des Esseintes was in the heart of the woods, where he was walking beside a woman. He did not know her, but he felt that she had been a critical part of his life. Despite his effort to determine who the woman was to him, he had no recollection of how he knew her. As he searched his past to find clues of the woman’s identity, a strange creature on a horseback appears in front of Des Esseintes and the unknown woman. Des Esseintes thought to himself that is what Syphilis must have looked like as he fled. When he thought he had escaped, he hears sobbing and turns to see a person that he describes as “the bulldog woman” (Huysmans, 1992, p. 68) who claimed to have lost her teeth in flight and was trying to replace them with pieces of stems. His horror continued to the point that he was fighting for his life, “He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but she held him with an irresistible movement. He beheld the wild Nidularium which yawned, bleeding, in steel plates” (Huysmans, 1992, p. 70). While he was dying in his dream, he woke up grateful that it was not the reality that had plagued him. Des Esseintes’ nightmare expresses his dislike for women, who, by societal terms, he must embrace as sexual partners. His fear for the stigma that would accompany his breach of societal norms causes him to conform to the sexual requirements that society has imposed on him. It is this fear that resurfaces in nightmares as he perceives his unfortunate eventuality if he continues to conform to societal norms.
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Additionally, solitude also has a way of messing with one’s mind and causing them to search their souls for the truth within and may even propel them to profess their findings, as was the case with Des Esseintes. The said character is portrayed as one that lived a fairly solitary life, with his love for flowers taking up all his time. He enjoyed possessing beautiful and enchanting flowers, but despite his precautions to care for them, they still did not thrive, as he had anticipated. So, he removed them from his rooms because his eyes could not bear the void he saw in them, a void that possibly reminded him of his solitude. Des Esseintes claims, “This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures, and books once cherished and dear” (Huysmans, 1992, p. 72). He had given most of his life to success, and as he was chasing success, he did not have much contact with people. His time alone allowed his mind to wander and even reveal his defects. Des Esseintes rejected the said defects but wondered if he could still trust his perception after being detached from the rest of society for so long. Thus, his solitude elicits his confession.
Moreover, the melancholy elicited by Des Esseintes solitude contributed to his confession on the reality of his sexuality. His thoughts consume him, and as he thinks about his life’s truth, he is, “again plunged into melancholy” (Huysmans, 1992, p. 72-73). The sadness drives him to read a romance novel by Dickens to soothe himself. Regardless, the contents of the book do not elicit the feelings that he thought they would. Des Esseintes establishes that the contents of the book evoked exaggerated purity which caused him to spiral further, in a different extremity. The melancholy that consumed Des Esseintes caused him to search the depths of his soul as he read the Dickens romance. The soul searching experience resulted in the confession of the truth about his sexuality, which became undeniable.
Lastly, Des Esseintes need for love from another human drove his confession of the truth about his sexuality. He wanted to love but not in a conventional manner. The kind of love that Des Esseintes wanted was that which Church practices had forbidden. The author says that Des Esseintes became obsessed, “not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats” (Huysmans, 1992, p. 72-73). Since the Church does not accommodate the kind of love that Des Esseintes desires, his life becomes unbearable as he tries to stick to the norm. Regardless, his passion for masculinity remains unquenched. His desperate attempt to experience his kind of love fuels his confession.
Des Esseintes is a tortured character that is forced to conform to societal norms at the expense of his happiness. In his attempt to abide by societal rules, he suffers emotional distress, which elicits fear, solitude, melancholy and the need for love, all of which propel him to revealing the truth about his sexuality.
References
Huysmans, J. K. (1922). Against the grain . Lieber & Lewis.
