Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857-1894

4. Counter-Discursive Strategies in Huysmans's En ménage

4 Counter-Discursive Strategies in Huysmans’s En ménage
In 1880, Joris-Karl Huysmans contributed a story to Les Soirées de Médan, thus becoming part of what was derisively referred to as “Zola’s tail.” A year later, in an otherwise laudatory review of Huysmans’s novel En ménage (1881), Zola gently reproached his disciple for “the search for the pathological case study, the love of human wounds.”1 While such an accusation may at first glance appear as a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, what Zola had instinctively seized upon was an apparently morbid interest in medical minutiae that seemed somehow to exceed the naturalists’ fascination with disease: their tendency, in the words of one disapproving physician, “to confuse hospitals and bookstores.”2 Huysmans’s later publications were to offer ample proof of the appropriateness of Zola’s remark. There was indeed a difference between the latter’s portrayal of the metaphorical injuries inflicted upon the proletariat by an increasingly materialistic society and Huysmans’s graphic descriptions of human rather than societal wounds, from the blisters of scrofula to the skin lesions of the Lourdes pilgrims described in nauseating detail in his last work, Les Foules de Lourdes (1906). One can certainly find painfully meticulous descriptions of physical ailments in Zola’s work (e.g., the pulmonary diseases of Germinal’s miners, Coupeau ’s delirium tremens in L’Assommoir, Pascal’s heart attack in Le Docteur Pascal, and the infirmities of the Lourdes pilgrims in Lourdes [1902], his own novel on the famous pilgrimage site, to which Huysmans’s novel appeared as a rebuttal). Likewise, the pathological case study exists 94 counter-discursive strategies in en mé nage in the work of both authors. The difference is one of focus: whereas in Zola’s work medical phenomena form merely one part of a vast whole, Huysmans’s entire literary universe is conceived from a clinical viewpoint. Charles Maingon makes the following distinction: “In the work of Flaubert or Zola, disease is a drama of limited duration. . . . All of Huysmans’s characters have more or less serious illnesses from the beginning to the end of his novels, and the author describes their large and small miseries with the precision of an entomologist.”3 The observation is accurate. Huysmans’s best-known work, À Rebours, that “breviary of Decadence,” to borrow Arthur Symons’s unforgettable phrase, can, for example, be read as a case study in neurasthenia. Indeed, as Françoise Gaillard has shown, even the structure of the work derives from the medical monograph.4 Considering that one could make the same observation about most of Huysmans’s other novels, it is perhaps not surprising that two monographs have been devoted to the role of medicine in his work.5 Moreover, in view of Huysmans’s association with literary Decadence, it seems fitting that he should have adopted a medical paradigm in transcribing his view of reality, since the very notion of decadence, with its suggestion that society and progress were pathogenic, implies disease. Seen as products of a culture in the last throes of a fatal illness, Huysmans’s so-called “decadent” novels have long been viewed as exemplars of a certain literary fashion. However, they also testify to their author’s lifelong obsession with disease. In fact, Huysmans incorporates medical discourse into nearly all of his fiction in a highly idiosyncratic way, shaping and stretching the medical metaphor until it fits his (perverse) design. Small wonder that his perspective has been described not as “a medical glance” but rather as “a veritable medical hallucination.”6 Whether Huysmans’s persistent preoccupation with illness has its source in his own experience with physical suffering or owes more to literary fashion (specifically, Baudelaire’s influence), it is clear that, in the earlyworkatleast,his“hallucination”wasdeliberate.RuthAntosh’s 1986 study, in which the author persuasively challenges the traditional division of his works into three periods (naturalist, Decadent, and religious), provides an excellent context for the study of his incorporation of counter-discursive strategies in en mé nage 95 medical discourse in his work.7 I am convinced that Huysmans used medical discourse with subversive intent in the allegedly “naturalist” works, and that his target was double. On the one hand, his parodical adoption of a clinical perspective serves to underline his scorn for the medical practitioner; on the...