The Decadent Writer as Collector and Flâneur: On Intertextual Networks and Literary Spaces in Huysmans

Abstract

Etrange was the word most often used to describe J.-K. Huysmans' first published book, Le Drageoir aux epices (I873), and idiosyncratic group of short texts written at the borders of several genres, most notably the prose poem and the short story. Commentators most frequently call attention to the ways in which the Drageoir prefigures later aspects of Huysmans' style, first his naturalist and then his estheticist period. The editor of the recent critical edition repeats several times in his introduction that the Drageoir esquisse deja [les contours] d' oeuvre a venir and apparait comme un presage des engagements et demissions successifs envers les differentes esthetiques qu'il adoptera par la suite. (1) Such comments are, on one hand, a logical approach to an author's early work in which he is still experimenting with several styles and seeking his own literary voice. On the other hand, however, this approach to the Drageoir fails to address the text on its own terms. I argue here that Huysmans adapts and transforms the model of writer as flaneur in this early work while simultaneously figuring as a collector of various nineteenth-century textual traditions and conventions. A complex intertextuality below the surface of the Drageoir allows Huysmans to evoke, adopt, extend, parody, or reject a series of modes of writing in play during the I870's. Huysmans explores the literary territory of his period much as a flaneur might explore the city, moving with a purposeful aimlessness, receiving and reacting to various features of the landscape. It is worth pausing a moment over the concept of a collection and its relationship to the kind of literal and literary flanerie that Huysmans pursues. Naomi Schor notes the importance of both collecting and flanerie in Walter Benjamin's literary imagination, asserting that collecting, rather more than flanerie, is the activity that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially [...] book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past. (2) The texts comprising the work are heterogeneous in composition and arrangement, but the networks of images and approaches point toward an impulse to ordering, for a collection always implies a certain logic, or at least an invitation to seek similarities at or below the surface of the collected works. It is in this sense that Huysmans becomes a quasi-Benjaminian collector of texts. Benjamin asks of his own library: what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? (3) While Huysmans has assembled the collection, it becomes in turn the reader's task to impose a certain order upon it, by reading horizontally across its various texts and vertically between the Drageoir texts and literary works of the past which are evoked by the Drageoir. Huysmans' title prefigures some of the crossroads I shall explore. A drageoir is both a closed and an open space, a container that separates its content from its surroundings, without making that separation definitive, as a closed container would. Already in this image, Huysmans suggests a free-floating border between insides and outsides, a similar type of border, in fact, to that which exists between a descriptive text and the physical or mental landscape it traces. Such descriptive texts participate in the landscapes they describe, all the while remaining distinct from them. Gaston Bachelard hints at this relationship of texts to their objects in La Poetique de l'espace: L'espace saisi par ['imagination ne peut rester l'espace indifferent livre a la mesure et a la reflexion du geometre. [...] [I] l est vecu non pas dans sa positivite, mais avec toutes les partialites de 1' imagination. (4) For Louis Forestier, the interest of Huysmans' text lies in une rivalite entre les possibilites de l ecriture et un certain nombre de productions artistiques. (5) On this view, Huysmans uses the drageoir pour insister sur un desordre apparent du contenu ou, si 1'on veut, sur [. …