Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (1884). London: Penguin, 1959.

Original title for the novel is À Rebours, which translates to "against the grain" or "in the opposite direction" which I think is a better title for a novel about a man named Des Esseintes who does nothing but hole himself up in a country maison and seek to fill his life with artifice. Yes he goes "against nature" by creating his own perfumes from artificial materials, and by gilding the shell of a tortoise in gold and having it bejewelled with artificial stones, but what I like about the original French title is how it point toward a more general queering, if I can use the term, on the part of Des Esseintes than his specific thesis that man-made artifice trumps nature in terms of beauty.

If you've read The Picture of Dorian Gray then you know Huysmans'(s) book, which Dorian reads somewhere in the middle of the novel, before spending an entire chapter working his way through the aesthetic riches of antiquity and modern times. (It's a chapter pretty much worth skipping through.) And if you've read Dorian Gray in any situation outside of a high-school English classroom, you know that the novel is a canonical gay text, full, as all of Wilde's work is, of codes and innuendoes.

I want to argue (possibly in a paper, though assuredly it's been done before me) that À Rebours is as much a coded gay text as Wilde's book, if not more of one. This is not a hard argument to make. Here's a dream Des Esseintes has:

He now noticed the frightening irritation of the mouth and breasts, discovered on the skin of the body spots of bistre and copper, and recoiled in horror; but the woman's eyes fascinated him, and he went slowly towards her, trying to dig his heels into the ground to hold himself back, and falling over deliberately, only to pick himself up again and go on. He was almost touching her when black Amorphophalli sprang up on every side and stabbed at her belly, which was rising and falling like a sea. He thrust them aside and pushed them back, utterly nauseated by the sight of these hot, firm stems twisting and turning between his fingers. Then, all of a sudden, the odious plants had disappeared and two arms were trying to enfold him. An agony of fear set his heart pounding madly, for [...] the woman's awful eyes had turned a clear, cold blue, quite terrible to see. He made a superhuman effort to free himself from her embrace, but [...] she clutched him and held him, and pale with horror, he saw the savage Nidularium gaping open to expose the bloody depths.

His body almost touching the hideous flesh-wound of this plant, he felt life ebbing away from him—and awoke with a start, choking, frozen, crazy with fear. (105-6)

Paging Doctor Freud, right? Des Esseintes isn't gay per se; he has a history of "dating" women and bedding them and prostitutes. But throughout the novel he suffers from a kind of nervous ailment, and decides early on to devote all his energy (what little he has) to an aesthetic ideal. It's this pursuit, and the way it becomes a kind of mania for Des Esseintes, that makes him go against the grain. At one point the narrative asks, rhetorically: Had he not outlawed himself from society? He indeed has. Throughout the novel he consorts with no one. He has no sex. He shares no meals. He lives in the artificial world he's steadily creating and Huysmans makes it become a kind of heroic quest.

These things are connected in a way that's more complex than "gay men can't reproduce so they work to make homes fabulous," and this, I think, is what I'll write my final paper on for this class.