ABSTRACT
In Là Bas (1891), J.K. Huysman’s fictional account of occultism in France at the fin de siècle, the charismatic decadent des Hermies recommends that, in order ‘to avoid the horrors of daily life’, his friend Durtal should not raise his eyes but instead keep them fixed on the pavement. ‘When you do that,’ he explains, ‘you see the reflections of the electric signs which assume all manner of shapes: alchemical symbols, the armoral bearings of alchemists on raised plinths, cogwheels, talismanic characters, bizarre pentacles with suns, hammers and anchors.’1 For des Hermies, as this compendium of material and immaterial images glimpsed in the reflective gleam of the metropolitan street suggests, the occult is not simply an escape from the quotidian; it is indissociable from it. Materialist and spiritualist signs are inseparable. In Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Lord Darlington famously declares that ‘we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’.2 Des Hermies can see constellations in the gutter. Where Wilde separates the supra-mundane from the mundane, Huysmans makes them mutually implicit. In a previous chapter of Là Bas, des Hermies had emphasized that the interrelationship of positivism and mysticism in contemporary Paris, apparently so incongruous, was in fact typical of ‘the tail-ends of the centuries’: ‘Magic flourishes when materialism is rife.’3
