Reflections at a Stagnant Pool: Writing Mystical Experience in Huysmans's En route

ABSTRACT

When urbanite Durtal, J.-K. Huysmans's alter ego, takes a spiritual retreat in a Trappist monastery, he spends a significant amount of time next to a pond that mirrors the imposing crucifix that stands in front of the monastery. This pond proves to be an apt metaphor for the different stages of Durtal's spiritual life: whereas the pond's drab water, full of decomposing leaves resembles the state of his soul before his confession, he also considers its stagnant water a representation of the blessings of contemplative life in the monastery. The natural site is also where Durtal has supernatural, mystical experiences: it is on the edge of the cruciform pond that Durtal lives a ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and next to the larger pond where he feels an overwhelming sense of the illuminating presence of God. However, these passages also show Huysmans's struggles with language and style when describing a supernatural encounter, and his efforts to translate his supranaturalist aesthetics into language. This paper examines the pond as a site of spiritual experience, and argues that it represents the impossibility of writing spiritual experience. It analyzes the literary portrayal of the ineffable, and explores the limits of representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Huysmans
• En route
• religious experience
• mysticism
• representation
• aesthetics
• language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Willemina Don received her PhD in French from New York University in 2012, with a dissertation on the representation of intellectuals and their encounters with religious experience in the novels of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Léon Bloy, Paul Bourget, J.-K. Huysmans, Roger Martin du Gard, and Émile Zola. She has published on Barbey d’Aurevilly and Bloy in Nineteenth-Century French Studies. Her contribution on Huysmans's En Route was included in the Actes du IVe Congrès de la Société des études romantiques et dix-neuviémistes (2011), edited by Sophie Guermès and Bertrand Marchal.

Notes

1 Cf. Millet in the ‘Préface’ to En Route (1996: 35–36); Viegnes (1986: 26); Ziegler (2004: 247–50).

2 Doubts about the nature of the host and transubstantiation play a role in other texts by Huysmans as well: Marc Smeets discusses the similarity between des Esseintes in À rebours, who surmises that hosts made from synthetic materials cannot be subject to transubstantiation, and Saint Lidwina, who spits out a non-consecrated host. As Smeets notes, the nature of the Eucharist was an object of fascination and enchantment for many faithful, as documented by Pierre Camporesti and Jules Corblet (2013: 85).

3 ‘The Dark Night’ was originally a poem written by St John of the Cross (1542–1591), on which he subsequently published two commentaries. According to St John, the soul must empty itself in order to be filled with God, be purified of vestiges of sin before it is fit to become united with God. During the ‘Dark Night’, the soul is purged through severe suffering and trials, resulting in a feeling of deep despair and complete abandonment. See Huysmans (1996: 163, 432).

4 28 December 1892.

5 For example, Dominique Millet notes that the passage in which he describes Durtal's vision next to the cruciform pond ‘n’est peut-être pas du meilleur Huysmans’ (1996: 35).