Huysman morsels

Extracts from 'La Bas'

“But this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?

“They will turn out,” replied Durtal, “just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.”

 

It’s curious isn’t it, man’s affection for the object of his adoration, the mechanic’s love of his engine. These people end up loving the machines they have been in charge of as if they were other human beings. And bells are in a class of their own in this respect. They are baptized, just like people, and anointed, and anointed with a special oil; according to pontifical rubric, they also have to be sanctified, from the inside, by a bishop, who will make the sign of the cross seven times with the oil of infirmity; in that way they may send a message of consolation to the dying which shall sustain them in their final agonies.

Bells act as the Church’s heralds; the voice from without just as the priest is the voice from within; the last things bells are are lumps of bronze, upside-down mortars that get swung about. In addition, bells, like fine wines, mature with age; their tone becomes richer and more mellow; they lose that sharp edge, their raw flavour. Perhaps that begins to explain how one can become so attached to them!

As far as he was concerned, prose fiction had now been supplanted by history. The novel in its every aspect vexed him; the over-arching plot structure, portioned out chapter by chapter, neatly packaged up by the gross, how could it be otherwise than dull and conventional? Yet history, too, only seemed a stop-gap in light of the fact that he had little belief in its scientific foundations; events, he told himself, are only a springboard for style and ideas, since all facts could be emphasized or played down depending on the temperament and bias of the historian who assembled them.

As for the primary documents themselves, it was worse still! None was irreducible and all were liable to revision! Even if they were not apocryphal to begin with, other sources, no less valid, could always be advanced which challenged their authenticity, these new documents themselves being subject to dispute as fresh archival evidence emerged, evidence which in turn could be refuted.

Did history itself, given the contemporary predilection for grubbing around in dusty archives, serve any greater purpose than to allow a bunch of amateur annalists to pursue their literary ambitions by constructing Chinese boxes packed with succulent morsels which the institutes could duly reward, salivating as they did so, with medals and diplomas?

For Durtal, history was the most grandiloquent of lies, the most childish deception of all. In his opinion, old Clio (the French Muse of History) should by law be represented with a sphinx’s head, flapping mutton chop whiskers and a padded bonnet. The truth of the matter was that exactitude was an impossibility.