How do I then say that Huysmans (an author) wrote his best novel (Backwards), taking as an object of contemplation or consideration the worst novel (Salambó) by another author (Flaubert)? The first answer comes out like this: like this. But it would be an answer that doesn’t explain anything (perhaps like any true answer, where the premise contains his answer). But we can abound a little. If eternity is made of the works of time, time is the great mold into which the works of men are poured, and the forms, the changing forms, are the particular vessels into which the anxiety of expressing itself from eternity is emptied. I think I went a little mambo.
Things have to be said several times so that the other person in one understands them.
Flaubert works Salambó on the empirical basis of the appropriation, cataloging and filing of the objects and the knowledge of the conquest of Europe on the Asian and African civilizations: the existence of the museum as a reservoir and made of the remains of what was appropriated and destroyed . Borges (here a parenthesis should be opened) does the same but not with the objects but with the books of the National and personal Library; books as a condensation of the planet’s knowledge, which are used to build citation systems as syntax: Borges thinks using the citation as a blind man’s stick. We close the imaginary parenthesis. Of course, the historical cycle of the French conquest has come to an end, when Flaubert publishes Salambó the hegemonic power is England and France is left with no adventure but its nostalgia for presumably glorious times (Stendhal), and the minds of the writers already have for object, the adventure of society (naturalism). What Huysmans does is radical: he takes the individual from society and puts him in a position to take those old catalogs of wholes and see what value they have for that individual. His character, Des Esseintes, returns to the rest of a possession that is already an evocation of subdued splendours, and submits it to the most exquisite analysis that melancholy allows. All literature is born from a previous literature, as condensation or expansion. But good literature, following these operations, swaps them into new worlds.
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