Là-Bas (Down There) by Joris-Karl Huysmans tr by Keene Wallace.pdf

Là-Bas (Down There)

By Joris-Karl Huysmans

This eBook was prepared by

HKA

February, 2004

The first English translation of Là-Bas

was originally published

in Paris in 1928,

under the title, “Down There.”

This text is in the public domain.

CHAPTER I

"You believe pretty thoroughly in these things, or you wouldn't abandon

the eternal triangle and the other stock subjects of the modern novelists

to write the story of Gilles de Rais," and after a silence Des Hermies

added, "I do not object to the latrine; hospital; and workshop vocabulary

of naturalism. For one thing, the subject matter requires some such

diction. Again, Zola, in L'Assommoir , has shown that a heavy-handed

artist can slap words together hit-or-miss and give an effect of

tremendous power. I do not really care how the naturalists maltreat

language, but I do strenuously object to the earthiness of their ideas.

They have made our literature the incarnation of materialism – and they

glorify the democracy of art!

"Say what you will, their theory is pitiful, and their tight little method

squeezes all the life out of them. Filth and the flesh are their all in all.

They deny wonder and reject the extra-sensual. I don't believe they

would know what you meant if you told them that artistic curiosity

begins at the very point where the senses leave off.

"You shrug your shoulders, but tell me, how much has naturalism done

to clear up life's really troublesome mysteries? When an ulcer of the soul

– or indeed the most benign little pimple – is to be probed, naturalism

can do nothing. 'Appetite and instinct' seem to be its sole motivation and

rut and brainstorm its chronic states. The field of naturalism is the region

below the umbilicus. Oh, it's a hernia clinic and it offers the soul a truss!

"I tell you, Durtal, it's superficial quackery, and that isn't all. This fetid

naturalism eulogizes the atrocities of modern life and flatters our

positively American ways. It ecstasizes over brute force and

apotheosizes the cash register. With amazing humility it defers to the

nauseating taste of the mob. It repudiates style, it rejects every ideal,

every aspiration towards the supernatural and the beyond. It is so

perfectly representative of bourgeois thought that it might be sired by

Homais and dammed by Lisa, the butcher girl in Ventre de Paris ."

"Heavens, how you go after it!" said Durtal, somewhat piqued. He

lighted his cigarette and went on, "I am as much, revolted by

materialism as you are, but that is no reason for denying the

unforgettable services which naturalism has rendered.

"It has demolished the inhuman puppets of romanticism and rescued our

literature from the clutches of booby idealists and sex-starved old maids.

It has created visible and tangible human beings – after Balzac – and put

them in accord with their surroundings. It has carried on the work, which

romanticism began, of developing the language. Some of the naturalists

have had the veritable gift of laughter, a very few have had the gift of

tears, and, in spite of what you say, they have not all been carried away

by an obsession for baseness."

"Yes, they have. They are in love with the age, and that shows them up

for what they are."

"Do you mean to tell me Flaubert and the De Goncourts were in love

with the age?"

"Of course not. But those men were artists, honest, seditious, and aloof,

and I put them in a class by themselves. I will also grant that Zola is a

master of backgrounds and masses and that his tricky handling of people

is unequalled. Then, too, thank God, he has never followed out, in his

novels, the theories enunciated in his magazine articles, adulating the

intrusion of positivism upon art. But in the works of his best pupil,

Rosny, the only talented novelist who is really imbued with the ideas of

the master, naturalism has become a sickening jargon of chemist's slang

serving to display a layman's erudition, which is about as profound as

the scientific knowledge of a shop foreman. No, there is no getting

around it. Everything this whole poverty-stricken school has produced

shows that our literature has fallen upon evil days. The grovellers! They

don't rise above the moral level of the tumblebug. Read the latest book.

What do you find? Simple anecdotes: murder, suicide, and accident

stories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresome sketches and wormy

tales, all written in a colorless style and containing not the faintest hint

of an outlook on life nor an appreciation of human nature. When I have

waded through one of these books its insipid descriptions and

interminable harangues go instantly out of my mind, and the only

impression that remains is one of surprise that a man can write three or

four hundred pages when he has absolutely nothing to reveal to us –

nothing to say!"

"If it's all the same to you, Des Hermies, let's speak of something else.

We shall never agree on the subject of naturalism, as the very mention of

it makes you see red. What about this Mattei system of medicine? Your

globules and electric phials at least relieve a few sufferers?"

"Hmph. A little better than the panaceas of the Codex, though I can't say

the effects are either lasting or sure. But, it serves, like anything else.

And now I must run along. The clock is striking ten and your concierge

is coming to put out the hall light. See you again very soon, I hope.

Good night."

When the door closed Durtal put some more coke in the grate and

resumed a comfortless train of thought aggravated by this too pertinent

discussion with his friend. For some months Durtal had been trying to

reassemble the fragments of a shattered literary theory which had once

seemed inexpugnable, and Des Hermies's opinions troubled him, in spite

of their exaggerated vehemence.

Certainly if naturalism confined one to monotonous studies of mediocre

persons and to interminable inventories of the objects in a drawing-room

or a landscape, an honest and clear-sighted artist would soon cease to

produce, and a less conscientious workman would be under the necessity

of repeating himself over and over again to the point of nausea.

Nevertheless Durtal could see no possibilities for the novelist outside of

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