L'Ecriture comique de J.-K. Huysmans (review)

A work of considerable erudition, Gilles Bonnet's L'Ecriture comique de J.-K. Huysmans surpasses by its richness the scope of the study as suggested in its title. Bonnet's occasionally overwritten semiotic analysis of Huysmans's use of caricature, parody, pastiche, satire, fantaisie, irony, black humor, and palinode concludes with a satisfying synthesis of the whole of Huysmans's œuvre, one often still subjected, as Jean Borie complains, to arbitrary, mutilating cuts into successive "periods" or "stages." Noting that the comic is always an "art parasitaire," "un vampire qui rit en mordant" (75), Bonnet stresses the self-referentiality of Huysmans's text which, in pointing to itself, also delivers "une pluralité de significations au lecteur attentif" (304).

Emphasizing the anti-social, misanthropic, reclusive character of Huysmans's heroes, Bonnet begins by distinguishing between the satirist/caricaturist, distanced from the world he ridicules, and the humorist who, like the oblate, "s'inclut dans la communauté sur laquelle il porte pourtant un regard distancié" (13). For the caricaturist whole people are disintegrated into fragments, exaggerated features, distorted body parts resembling animals or plants - affording the writer a "régression infantile aux joies premières des essais de combinaisons" (45). In Bonnet's felicitous analogy, satirists who hold themselves above the being whose vices they contemptuously regard are like the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, who, as Huysmans writes in Certains, "ricanent, grincent, prundent sans pitié pour les affreuses détresses qui clament [...] sous leurs pieds, dans les hôpitaux voisins."

Bonnet's carefully nuanced description of Huysmans's humor enables him to differentiate between the author's early view of the grotesque, which elicits mockery and amazement, and a post-conversion attitude, in which ugliness provokes pity or compassion. Similarly, the same Huysmans who mischievously delights in the polysemic elusiveness of his works also longs for a source of unchanging, transcendent meaning. In a point on which Bonnet might have elaborated, he notes that "la Parole du Père," explicated and codified in the liturgical language of the Church, affords Huysmans an escape from the ambiguity which characterizes his writing, allowing him to rise above the "arbitraire du signe" on which Decadence is predicated. Thus, for Huysmans, the convert, reality is not resolved into the scintillation of innumerable meanings. Rather, as the symbol becomes the thing, there comes "[une] disparition de ]a sémiotique" (102).

Readers of Huysmans will recognize the aptness of Bonnet's description of the author as one whose work offers "une dramaturgie des petites misères": threadbare pants, undarned socks, the frayed wick of a lamp. Exaggerating the gravity of quotidian vexatious. Huysmans's hero is "un vieil enfant" whom the reader regards as would a "juge amusé des maladresses de sa progéniture" (145).

Bonnet's analysis is the finest when he focuses on the acerbity of Huymans's humour noir. According pride of place to Pierrot sceptique, a pantomime Huysmans coauthored with Léon Hénnique, Bonnet maintains that the humor of the work "repose avant tout sur une pulsion scopique sadique" (185). As pantomime's celebration of the absurd turns death into an occasion for laughter, black humor incorporates cadavers as material. Bonnet's insightful commentary on Jacques Marles's reverie on ptomaines leads him to assert that eating death means killing death, by permitting the subject "de s'en approprier les propriétés" (167).

Focusing on the humor that endeared Huysmans to the Surrealists, Bonnet offers a perceptive interpretation of another of Huysmans's neglected texts, La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran. There, the unemployed functionary, adrift without the structuring requirements of his work routine, subjects himself to the same rules, performs the same stultifying tasks, imagines serving under the same unintelligible godsupervisor in order to undergo voluntarily "la douleureuse expérience de la nécessité sans cause, fondement de l'absurde schopenhauérien" (199).

The final section of Bonnet's book, while less rewarding, still yields valuable insights into Huysmans's self-sabotaging fictions, dialogic narratives...