jenks

thread death
I bought En Route straight afterwards but somehow just couldn't bring myself to pick it up - i had enjoyed La Bas so much I thought he was unlikely to reach those heights again and the idea that Hollebecq really liked En Route didn't really help...
 

catalog

Well-known member
what i like about that quote from huysmans is how it sort of blows it open a bit, the english-french thing.

things could have turned out differently. all these things are contingent.

which we know. but it's a good piece of writing cos it comes at the end of an explanation of what was going on in france and how the 'miracle' of joan of arc fed into the madness of the guy durtal is writing about/trying to understand.

it's made me think about "The North" in a new way.
 

version

Well-known member
Which is the Huysmans one about Satanism? There's a bit in V. where Pynchon's going on about black masses being held in middle-class Parisian homes in the 1910s, which I think is a bit after him.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Which is the Huysmans one about Satanism? There's a bit in V. where Pynchon's going on about black masses being held in middle-class Parisian homes in the 1910s, which I think is a bit after him.

La Bas, the one they are talking about.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah, I think it's probably this one, la bas.

but i've not read any other huysmans and this is part of a series from wht craner's saying?

i got it cos of that incredible quote re treeshagging that urbanomic sent me

I let urbanomic know about the captivating Tournier quote and he sent me this from Huysman’s book ‘Down There’ [La-Bas]:

"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.

"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided and re-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy belly of the earth.

"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the dark and wrinkled envelope of the old oaks. Beside the bifurcations of the branches there are yawning holes, puckered orifices in the bark, simulating emunctoria, or the protruding anus of a beast. In the joints of the branches there are other visions, elbows, armpits furred with grey lichens. Even in the trunks there are incisions which spread out into great lips beneath tufts of brown, velvety moss.

"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.

"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.

"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.

"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the château and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.

"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings of the wood, disappear; the tears of the leaves whipped by the wind are dried; the white abscesses of the clouds are resorbed into the grey of the sky; and—in an awful silence—the incubi and succubi pass."

That comment about the woodman cutting wood - I"ve got a friend who is really into wood chopping. When I got married, the main thing my wife wanted at the wedding was a big fire, so I bought a load of wood off a farmer and then got this mate to bring his axe down and we chopped it all day, lazing about in the sun, smoking spliffs. I got quite tired of it, but he is so into it. He was saying how annoyed he got when he had a load of wood saved up and his brother came home and chopped it all, he was really fucked off by it.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Is there actually evidence of that stuff happening or is it all urban legend?
well, at the beginning he talks about "naturalism" and how it's not real enough, it's fake, made up, as a literary movement. the only thing that's real to him is the very full on bloody stuff...

and then it's a sort of story of his route into the world of it, his obsession about this murderous satanic nobleman gilles de rais from the 15th century, and his mate says to him, 'oh it's still going on now, let me show you...'

and everything is written as if true...

but to me it's like an alan moore / hp lovecraft / machen type story... written as if true and very detailed but who tf knows
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, I meant whether he'd based it on anything he'd actually seen or heard in France at the time.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Yeah, I think it's probably this one, la bas.

but i've not read any other huysmans and this is part of a series from wht craner's saying?

i got it cos of that incredible quote re treeshagging that urbanomic sent me

La Bas, En Route, The Cathedral and The Oblate of St Benedict are centered on the character of Durtal, who is an alter ego for Huysmans himself. It tells the story of a journey from decadence to Catholicism, but brilliantly treats Catholicism as the end point of aestheticism and a form of decadence in itself.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
They're also entertaining works of cultural criticism. There's a long passage in La Bas, for example, where he extols plainchant at the expense of polyphony which reads like an even more neurotic version of Greil Marcus.
 

catalog

Well-known member
libertine lads out on the lash. there's a lot of drinking.

the bit about the qualities of the bell is very good, wht the clapper means and all that.

he reminds me of dostoyevsky but less caught up in morality and more about the zip of the words. he's a better writer
 

catalog

Well-known member
La Bas, En Route, The Cathedral and The Oblate of St Benedict are centered on the character of Durtal, who is an alter ego for Huysmans himself. It tells the story of a journey from decadence to Catholicism, but brilliantly treats Catholicism as the end point of aestheticism and a form of decadence in itself.
sounds pretty good i'll probably give them a crack at some point
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Completely different writer. He's an art critic trying to write novels. No point even comparing them.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i've only read 'devils' and this feels very reminiscent, cos of the heated drunken discussions in strange rooms, everything very well described, in terms of what people are wearing, eating, how they look. the way he (huysmans) describes how people look is really good.
 

catalog

Well-known member
That or he just had a better translator.
i mean in the way he uses words, i enjoy reading his sentences, got a good flow to them. he's able to write up long long conversations or descriptions without it getting too boring. which reminds me of dostoyevsky. but i think he's a bit better at it.
 
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