Chapter One

Abstract

Thus, wrote Joris-Karl Huysmans in the 1903 Preface to Against Nature. Twenty years earlier, after the publication of Against Nature, Huysmans spent a few days in Médan. He recounted how one afternoon, during a walk in the countryside, Zola, with “a black look in his eyes,” reproached him over his novel, holding that he had struck a “terrible blow” against naturalism and that “no kind of literature was possible in a genre exhausted by a single book,” and invited him to backtrack, to study manners (“Preface” 249). ¹ True, perhaps, “there were many things Zola couldn’t understand.”