Against Nature (À rebours)

"Yes. This is a novel from the late 19th century, and what it dramatises, really, is the great antecedent of burnout, neurasthenia. Neurasthenia means the overloading, the overburdening, of the nervous system; it was a term coined by the American psychologist George Beard. He saw industrial culture, urban culture, and the emergence of a society remarked upon by many sociologists as being unprecedented in terms of the daily load of stimulus it imposed upon the mind and the body. Beard wrote a book called Neurasthenia , also a book wonderfully titled American Nervousness . The German sociologist Georg Simmel pointed out that the average person living in a city would see more people in a day than their grandparents saw in a lifetime. Now, of course, those of us who live in cities take this level of stimulus for granted; in a way, we could say that at an evolutionary level our organisms have grown, or evolved, to absorb this daily bombardment. And yet it’s happened in a very short space of time: probably the organism can’t keep pace with the pace of technological change. That was also the thesis of a famous pop sociological book of the 1970s, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock , which posited the idea that the human organism cannot keep pace with the evolution of culture and society. The book I’ve chosen, Against Nature, is hysterically funny in many ways. It’s about a languid aesthete called Jean des Esseintes who retreats to his family villa in Fontenelle, outside of Paris. The novel portrays brilliantly all the paradoxes and tortures of what we now call burnout—arguably more accurately than any nonfictional treatment. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So, des Esseintes has led this nervously overburdened life. Not of overwork, admittedly, but of excess. He’s lived a life of sexual and narcotic debauchery, and there’s every indication that he arrives at this villa mentally ill. Certainly burnt out. He tries to forge various schemes to calm himself down, to find inner peace, and each one is more cockamamie than the last. He conjures up these weird hobbyistic initiatives like encrusting his tortoise with precious jewels. Well, of course, his tortoise dies. And he cultivates these very rare, beautiful hothouse orchids. Again, they are both monstrous and unsustainable. And all of the time he comes up with these personal schemes to occupy his mind in a way that might finally allow him to reach the quasi-monastic equilibrium he so desperately wants. Just as he’s about to get there, he finds that something happens to jolt him out of his state of peace, to induce nightmares and nervousness and discomfort. The things he does to restore his peace end up disturbing it even more. It’s really about the basic predicament of burnout, that movement between stasis and innervation. The desire to cancel out all desires, which. can never really be fulfilled. Can never really succeed in getting to the point where we’re finally free of these persecuting feelings. It might just be! It is a wonderful formulation, “I would prefer not to.” This is one of the most written about stories in the history of literature. The reason it’s so subversive is that it gets us out of the binary of compliance and refusal. Because he doesn’t refuse to, right? That’s not what Bartleby says. If Bartleby said, “I refuse to do copying,” then that’s part of an established language of conflict in the workplace. The answer to that can be, “Well, you’re fired.” The thing about “I would prefer not to” is that it seems—to use a phrase of Roland Barthes’—“to baffle the paradigm.” In other words, to introduce a way of relating, a form of language, that has no precedent. What do you do with somebody who says, “I would prefer not to”? There’s a passivity about it, a refusal to play the game, that the narrator (the employer of Bartleby) remarks upon. He says something like, ‘There’s nothing more liable to infuriate than a passive resistance.’ With an active resistance, well, you know where you stand. You can take an equal and opposite reaction. But a passive resistance seems to exhaust all the possibilities of response, and that’s what Bartleby does. There’s no comeback with Bartleby. In terms of whether it’s the way forward for us, it may be that if we’re going to find ways out of our predicament, then we need a reliable picture of exactly what it is. To me, it has to do with the totalisation of the system. The sense that it blocks off—and you see this with the hikikomori —all points of exit. It can feel as though all the spaces to breathe and pause are disappearing One of the things that the formula, “I would prefer not to,” is doing, is cultivating a small space, psychic and physical, that no one can penetrate. Saying “I would prefer not to” creates an inviolable space around you, and even though Bartleby ends in bathetic tragedy, the story itself, the formula, I think, gives us some indication, some glimpse, of what it would be to say no, to place an inviolable cordon around our private, imaginative lives."