Les Hors-Nature Reading Order

Les Hors-Nature (1897) by Rachilde is her most sustained and disturbing novel, a portrait of two brothers — Paul-Éric and Reutler de Fertzen — whose bond is so intense and exclusive that it shuts out the entire world and eventually turns into a destructive mutual consumption. Rachilde uses the incest theme (never explicit but structurally central to the novel's emotional logic) as a vehicle for exploring what happens when the bonds of nature are replaced by bonds of pure will and mutual construction — the 'hors-nature' (outside nature, beyond the natural) of the title is both a condition and a judgment. Paul-Éric, the dominant brother, is one of Rachilde's most fully realized creations: a man of total aesthetic sensibility who has constructed his brother as the object of his desire and his creation, and who is destroyed when the brother escapes the construction. The novel belongs to the same tradition as À Rebours in its treatment of the artificial as a replacement for the natural, but where Huysmans's Des Esseintes constructs objects, Rachilde's Paul-Éric constructs a person — his brother — and the consequences are correspondingly more catastrophic. Les Hors-Nature is less well known than Monsieur Vénus but is Rachilde's most fully realized novel, the one in which her specific intelligence — forensic, unsparing, structurally precise — is most consistently deployed.