Chapter One

Abstract

Thus, wrote Joris-Karl Huysmans in the 1903 Preface to Against Nature. Twenty years earlier, after the publication of Against Nature, Huysmans spent a few days in Médan. He recounted how one afternoon, during a walk in the countryside, Zola, with “a black look in his eyes,” reproached him over his novel, holding that he had struck a “terrible blow” against naturalism and that “no kind of literature was possible in a genre exhausted by a single book,” and invited him to backtrack, to study manners (“Preface” 249). ¹ True, perhaps, “there were many things Zola couldn’t understand.”

There were many things Zola couldn’t understand; first the need I felt to open the windows, to escape from an environment in which I was suffocating; then the desire that took hold of me to shake off preconceived ideas, to break the novel’s limitations, to bring in art, science and history, in short, to no longer use this literary form except as a frame in which to introduce more serious work. For me, the thing that struck me above all at that period was to do away with the traditional plot, even to get rid of love and women, to concentrate the ray of light on a single character, to do something new at any price. (Huysmans, “Preface” 249)