Literature of the Miraculous: Huysmans's Les Foules de Lourdes

Abstract

Literature of the Miraculous:Huysmans's Les Foules de Lourdes Bob Ziegler In the last novel of his life—after the gaudy stylistic efflorescence of A rebours, after the flamboyantly infernal descriptions of Là-bas—J.-K. Huysmans began by returning in Les Foules de Lourdes (1906) to the naturalist work of observation and recording. Undertaken after a 1903 visit to the pilgrimage site, Huysmans's book illustrates the convert's abnegation of self and the magnification of God through an acceptance of the humility of his art. Corresponding to the mysterious enormity of the miracles worked in Lourdes is the effacement of their transcriber, as the author grows smaller, his contributions less obtrusive, and his text becomes the site where he experiences "le bienfait de l'omission personnelle" (315). Annihilated by contempt, nature in A rebours had "had her day." Physical reality, deemed repulsive in the corpulent sprawl of Zola's prose, had disappeared, replaced by glistening effects of style as mirage. Using phrases abolishing the objects they ostensibly evoked, Huysmans had adopted a view of literature as an ascetic discipline, one that neared completion with the story of des Esseintes. Paring down language to an incantatory image, Huysmans had approached the idea of the work's suppression, leaving the artist communing face-to-face with readers in the absence of a text. The wasting of the plot had brought a depletion in the repertory of Decadent characters, as a hyper-reflexive subject had gone to live in isolation, depopulating his world through inattention and indifference. With the elimination of events and the evacuation of other people, Huysmans's novel had reached an impasse, unable to move beyond its vacancy and stasis. That is why, in the opening of Là-bas, Durtal considers mapping the supernatural, why Huysmans's post-conversion [End Page 23] fiction abandons the stifling Thébaïde in order to explore the mystery of God and his Creation. In Huysmans's final novel, naturalism—as Zola's diagnostic methodology—is turned against itself in order to prove the operation of a supernatural agency. Huysmans draws on medicine, enlisting science to define the limits of empiricism, as naturalism marks the end point where it is succeeded by an art of the transcendental. Les Foules de Lourdes marks a transition to the final stage of Huysmans's evolution as a writer, where what had been a literature of the body accommodates an aesthetic of the spirit. As this essays argues, Huysmans's conception of "un naturalisme spiritualiste" would inevitably culminate in a literature of the miraculous, where bodily abjection elicits expressions of spiritual goodness and where a humiliated subject invites God to lift him up. In A rebours, the book's material had died and been resurrected as art. In Les Foules de Lourdes, art dies and is reborn as its subject. After acceding to the invitation of long-time friends Léon and Marguerite Leclaire to visit them in Lourdes and compile material for a book, Huysmans had arrived on March 5, 1903, and had found himself impressed, not by manifestations of divine mercy, but by the otherworldly tastelessness of Lourdes' religious architecture. "Roused," as Robert Baldick says, "to a fury of invective and abuse remarkable even for such a past master in the art of vituperation" (319), Huysmans had raged against the hideousness of the Basilica, the Rosary, the Esplanade, perversions of art so hyperbolic they could have been inspired only by the Evil One. Yet apart from giving vent to his indignation at contemporary religious art, Huysmans entertained a far more important purpose in the execution of his project. Having come to Lourdes to exalt the Creator and humble himself as his creature, Huysmans had at first adopted a naturalist practice in order to refute Zola's naturalist allegations—that the miraculous healings effected by the Virgin were produced by autosuggestion, by an abatement of nervous disorders, or by what Charcot had called la foi qui guérit. As Huysmans reasons, diseased tissue cannot regenerate instantaneously. "La nature ne peut fermer une plaie dans une seconde, les chairs ne peuvent se restaurer en une minute. [. . .] Zola n'a pas voulu avouer cette spontanéit...