Crampton and Engerth: The ‘mechanical brides’ of J-K. Huysmans

Laurence Wright

doi:10.4102/lit.v41i1.1711

Abstract

This article explores the startling comparison Huysmans introduces early in Á Rebours ( 1884 ) between two French steam locomotives, Crampton and Engerth, and representations of the female form. It suggests that the trope should be read as a modernist cameo proleptically anticipating the story’s later interrogation of homoerotic sexual and gender identity. By detailing some of the railway technology involved, the article explains why the comparison between the female form and the steam engine is flighted between two locomotives rather than one, demonstrating that the bizarre literary figure presents more than a generalised personification of machinery. Baron Jean des Esseintes’ judgement that the two locomotives are more beautiful than Woman plays itself out in significant variations through the texture of the novel, leading eventually to a painful recognition that his rarefied, decadent/aesthetic approach to existence is indeed Á Rebours , ‘against nature’, or ‘the wrong way’.

Highlights

Á Rebours1 by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) is the defining late-19th-century instance of the French decadent novel, best known in relation to English literature as an important inspiration behind Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).2 Published in 1884, the work sets out to be deliberately peculiar and scandalous, a strategy that becomes interesting when set against the life of its author, who reverted to his early Catholicism only 8 years after its publication and went on to produce work of serious piety, an inclination that lurks beneath the surface of this novel even at its most subversive
Rather than a facile instance of outrageous misogynist personification, which is the usual understanding of what Huysmans is doing here, it is the transmuting of the female form into an imaginative modernist construct freighted with homoerotic longings that constitutes the originality of Huysmans’ figurative invention
What are we to make of his strange comparison between the female form and two French steam locomotives? I want to dub them his ‘mechanical brides’, a term popularised by Marshall McLuhan’s (1967) early text of that name, in which he gleefully exposed the typical machinations of media culture

Summary

Introduction

Á Rebours (usually translated as ‘Against Nature’ or ‘Against the Grain’ but meaning literally ‘the wrong way’) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) is the defining late-19th-century instance of the French decadent novel, best known in relation to English literature as an important inspiration behind Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Published in 1884, the work sets out to be deliberately peculiar and scandalous, a strategy that becomes interesting when set against the life of its author, who reverted to his early Catholicism only 8 years after its publication and went on to produce work of serious piety, an inclination that lurks beneath the surface of this novel even at its most subversive. Á Rebours (usually translated as ‘Against Nature’ or ‘Against the Grain’ but meaning literally ‘the wrong way’) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) is the defining late-19th-century instance of the French decadent novel, best known in relation to English literature as an important inspiration behind Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).. The writerly performance undermines and contests the earnestness of the naturalist novel, exemplified by Émile Zola in works such as Thérèse Raquin (1868) or Nana (1880), an aesthetic that typically focuses on the lives of the poor and neglected, portraying their suffering in grim detail with a view to rousing social conscience. Huysmans’ novel is a serious yet still playful challenge to this belief in literature as a vehicle for social betterment, a rebellion against a powerful prevailing artistic orthodoxy to which Huysmans himself had earlier subscribed.

Discussion

Conclusion

Funding information