I finished Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Là-bas on Michaelmas, a coincidence almost too apt to pass over. The feast honors the Archangels, above all Michael in his defeat of Satan in the War in Heaven; Huysmans’s novel concerns Satanic worship, the Black Mass, and a fin-de-siècle world in which belief in both God and Satan has become difficult to sustain. I read it between September 23 and 29, at the beginning of autumn, when I predictably find myself drawn by the seasonal turn of nature toward the occult and the taboo. There are pedestrian reasons for this attraction—obviously Halloween—but it is not a merely aesthetic draw that I feel. This season has a truly natural, bodily, and spiritual pull on me. The book seemed simply to assert itself: recommended some time ago by my dear friend and philosopher Dr. Thiessen, in one of our conversations after a regular Wagner viewing, it suddenly reemerged just as my recent reading had led me to probe more deeply into the forbidden.
Dr. Thiessen’s recommendation followed a pointed inquiry into my religious views, which are not easily summarized. I have long struggled between a desire for orthodoxy and an almost heretical mysticism. Nietzsche has disposed me toward contempt for religion generally, yet I cannot shake the spiritual side of myself. I have never been able emphatically to declare myself a member of one church or another, but I can declare myself ardently opposed to atheism and to any doctrine that denies the supernatural elements of the world. The taboo has therefore exerted its own attraction. As something of a contrarian, I delight in studying and understanding what lies outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse. My early reading of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell began as a desire to purify myself like an alchemist; I treated them less as genuine studies of the occult than as a circuitous form of self-help. Frazer’s The Golden Bough sent me further along a trajectory of increasingly obsessive reading on magic and the taboo as an anthropological phenomenon. Huysmans gave this inquiry something that the scholarly study of ritual cannot: living characters acting out these possibilities in the modern world.
Là-bas is Huysmans’s first novel about Durtal, his conspicuous alter ego. Huysmans began among the literary Naturalists, then achieved notoriety with the Decadent masterpiece À rebours, which is likely the unnamed “yellow book” that shapes The Picture of Dorian Gray. Là-bas is the hinge between that decadent aestheticism and the Catholic novels that followed it. Durtal returns in En route, La Cathédrale, and L’Oblat, a sequence that carries him toward a religious conversion (I have not yet read any of Huysmans’ other works, but now feel compelled to). This matters because Là-bas does not give us a conversion novel in miniature. It gives us a man with spiritual appetites and intellectual contradictions who is fascinated by the occult, spirituality, and religion, yet unable to believe them in a manner that changes his life. He almost seems to be building toward belief, but in the end the experience rolls off him, just as every other effort to suspend his natural predispositions has done.
Durtal is researching Gilles de Rais, a French knight who fought beside Joan of Arc in the Hundred Years’ War, and later became infamous as a perverted, murderous, and sadistic Satanist. This historical inquiry leads him into a modern occult underworld: the astrologer Gévingey, the healer Father Johannes, Canon Docre, Madame Chantelouve, and finally the Black Mass itself. The book’s central danger is not that Durtal will become a victim of malevolent spellcasters. If Chantelouve were simply a supernatural succubus, the novel would have a very different trajectory. After the account of Gévingey’s genuine assault by Docre, so severe that Father Johannes must heal him; after Durtal’s attendance at the Black Mass; after his consummation of Chantelouve upon a bed of desecrated hosts, one expects things to turn quickly against him. If she possessed such power, why does she not call on Docre, or on the ordinary rural practitioners who can supposedly be paid a small fee to cast curses? Why is Durtal not destroyed by his flippant exposure to the Black Mass, to a Satanic priest, and to the succubus Chantelouve herself?
The answer is not that the supernatural is merely psychological or unreal. The novel’s world grants real force to curses, healing, ritual, and spiritual combat. But Durtal is not truly seduced; he is fascinated. He seeks evil chiefly as a subject, turns experience into observation, and turns observation into his art, writing. Chantelouve mistakes his curiosity for appetite. She may think she has found an initiate to the dark arts, only to find an author simply researching his latest work. Durtal answers her letters, encourages her, and helps create the very situation he later rejects; yet her frantic passion tires him almost immediately. The Black Mass horrifies and disgusts him, but horror is not conversion. He remains a spectator, incapable of giving himself wholly to evil, but equally incapable of giving himself to a positive spiritual form.
This detachment is neither a safeguard nor a failure. It enables Durtal to finish his book, a real artistic achievement, but he knows the limitation of that achievement. What good does the completed study do him? He must simply move on to a new subject, become equally invested in it, and then leave it behind. He contemplates figures and subjects far more interesting than he is himself. The novel ends properly with the Black Mass; everything after is significant only by virtue of how unremarkable it turns out to be. Chantelouve is cast aside in disgust, her lusty ministrations slowly subsiding, and Durtal completes the book that his research and debauches have made possible. It is a satisfying ending because Huysmans does not pretend that the exposure to evil must yield an immediate positive or negative transformation.
The novel is also a meditation on historical decay. Carhaix’s bell tower provides the setting for much of its philosophical discussion, and Carhaix laments the disappearance of his art. Few know how to ring the bells; fewer still understand their occult and symbolic significance. Similarly, modern people no longer believe seriously in the supernatural. Even modern Satanists are reduced to a pale theatrical imitation of earlier horrors. Des Hermies notes that the Black Mass, without blood, murder, or genuine debauchery, appears tepid beside the crimes Durtal has studied in Gilles de Rais. The point is not that Huysmans wishes for atrocities to return. It is that the disappearance of profound belief in evil necessarily weakens the apprehension of good. One cannot wholly eliminate the Satanic, outside heaven, without also diminishing the Church. The two are not morally equal, but they are spiritually correlated: the good takes on a new significance when evil appears prevalent, and each presupposes a world in which invisible realities matter.
There is an aesthetic corollary. The decline of a radical spiritual dichotomy corresponds to the decline of beauty. Cathedrals, Carhaix’s beloved bells, liturgy, and sacred art are the obvious products of belief in the good. But evil, too, possesses a terrible grandeur. There is beauty in disgust, not because the crimes are morally beautiful, but because acts of enormous evil retain scale, scope, and a perverse desire to exceed ordinary social attitudes. They parasitically imitate the sacred order they oppose. Modern evil, by contrast, is small, furtive, bureaucratic, and ugly. Huysmans is not seduced by darkness; like Durtal, he examines it with cold fascination and refuses it when it demands assent. The power of Là-bas lies partly in its willingness to recognize evil’s aesthetic and metaphysical seriousness without turning it into a thing to admire.
Nor is this a simple defense of the institutional Church. The novel is plainly suspicious of it. Its most disturbing suggestion is that Satanic priests must be priests first: the Black Mass can exist only as an inversion of sacred forms, while hints of evil spells and occult intrigues reach even toward Rome. Meanwhile Father Johannes, who appears to possess genuine healing power, has been expelled by the Church. Gévingey and Father Johannes occupy a compromised middle ground. Carhaix, a good Catholic, occasionally shrinks from their experiences; the Church may oppose them, while Satan also recognizes them as genuine adversaries, as Docre’s curse of Gévingey demonstrates. Huysmans offers no settled positive mystical alternative. Rather, he makes official modern disbelief feel inadequate and leaves Durtal at a threshold. The sequels may develop a positive vision, but Là-bas earns its force by refusing to supply one too quickly.
What I admired most was the novel’s reality. It is not affected or needlessly provocative, as so much modern horror can be, and it does not rely upon cliché. Its occultism belongs to conversation, sex, scholarship, craft, and the shabby rooms of ordinary Parisian life. The taboo does not arrive as decoration. It presses on Durtal’s intellectual life and exposes the poverty of an age that can no longer believe deeply enough either to worship or to profane with conviction. Read at the start of autumn amidst so much visible change, Là-bas became for me not an invitation to evil, nor a conversion tract, but a provocative fictional record of the persistent hunger for a world in which the supernatural remains real.