Là-bas

Là-bas, by J. K. Huysmans

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Title: Là-bas
Author: J. K. Huysmans
Release Date: December 10, 2004 [EBook #14323]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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LÀ-BAS
(DOWN THERE)
by J.K. HUYSMANS

Translated by KEENE WALLACE
[Transcriber's note: Original published 1891, English translation
privately published 1928.]
CHAPTER I
"You believe pretty thoroughly in these things, or you wouldn't
abandon the eternal triangle and the other stock subjects of the modern
novelists to write the story of Gilles de Rais," and after a silence Des
Hermies added, "I do not object to the latrine; hospital; and workshop
vocabulary of naturalism. For one thing, the subject matter requires
some such diction. Again, Zola, in L'Assommoir, has shown that a
heavy-handed artist can slap words together hit-or-miss and give an
effect of tremendous power. I do not really care how the naturalists
maltreat language, but I do strenuously object to the earthiness of their
ideas. They have made our literature the incarnation of
materialism--and they glorify the democracy of art!
"Say what you will, their theory is pitiful, and their tight little method
squeezes all the life out of them. Filth and the flesh are their all in all.
They deny wonder and reject the extra-sensual. I don't believe they
would know what you meant if you told them that artistic curiosity
begins at the very point where the senses leave off.
"You shrug your shoulders, but tell me, how much has naturalism done
to clear up life's really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of the
soul--or indeed the most benign little pimple--is to be probed,
naturalism can do nothing. 'Appetite and instinct' seem to be its sole
motivation and rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of
naturalism is the region below the umbilicus. Oh, it's a hernia clinic and
it offers the soul a truss!
"I tell you, Durtal, it's superficial quackery, and that isn't all. This fetid
naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our
positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and
apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to the
nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every ideal,

every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond. It is so
perfectly representative of bourgeois thought that it might be sired by
Homais and dammed by Lisa, the butcher girl in Ventre de Paris."
"Heavens, how you go after it!" said Durtal, somewhat piqued. He
lighted his cigarette and went on, "I am as much revolted by
materialism as you are, but that is no reason for denying the
unforgettable services which naturalism has rendered.
"It has demolished the inhuman puppets of romanticism and rescued
our literature from the clutches of booby idealists and sex-starved old
maids. It has created visible and tangible human beings--after
Balzac--and put them in accord with their surroundings. It has carried
on the work, which romanticism began, of developing the language.
Some of the naturalists have had the veritable gift of laughter, a very
few have had the gift of tears, and, in spite of what you say, they have
not all been carried away by an obsession for baseness."
"Yes, they have. They are in love with the age, and that shows them up
for what they are."
"Do you mean to tell me Flaubert and the De Goncourts were in love
with the age?"
"Of course not. But those men were artists, honest, seditious, and aloof,
and I put them in a class by themselves. I will also grant that Zola is a
master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handling of
people is unequalled. Then, too, thank God, he has never followed out,
in his novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles, adulating
the intrusion of positivism upon art. But in the works of his best pupil,
Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued with the ideas of
the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon of chemist's slang
serving to display a layman's erudition, which is about as profound as
the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman. No, there is no getting
around it. Everything this whole poverty-stricken school has produced
shows that our literature has fallen upon evil days. The grovellers!
They don't rise above the moral level of the tumblebug. Read the latest
book. What do you find? Simple