Socialism and Occultism at the Fin de Siècle : Elective Affinities

La Bus (1891), J.K. Huysmans's fictional account of occultism in France at fin de siecle, charismatic decadent des Hermies recommends that in order avoid horrors of daily life, his friend Durtal keep his eyes fixed on pavement. When do that, he explains, you see reflections of electric signs which assume all manner of shapes: alchemical symbols, armoral bearings of alchemists on raised plinths, cog-wheels, talismanic characters, bizarre pentacles with suns, hammers and anchors (2^0). As this compendium of material and immaterial images glimpsed in reflective gleam of metropolitan street suggests, for des Hermies, occult is not simply an escape from quotidian; it is indissociable from it. Materialist and spiritualist signs are inseparable. In Oscar Wilde's play LadyWindermere s Fan (1892), Lord Darlington famously declares that we are all in gutter, but some of us are looking at stars (III. 30^). Where Wilde separates supramundane from mundane, Huysmans makes them mutually implicit: des Hermies can see constellations in gutter. In a previous chapter of La Bas, des Hermies had emphasized how interrelationship of positivism and mysticism in contemporary Paris, apparently so incongruous, in fact typified the tail-ends of centuries: Magic flourishes when materialism is rife (219). In febrile atmosphere of late-nineteenth century London, too, magic flourished alongside its old frere ennemi. It is not simply that occultism was a reaction against increasingly discredited materialism of nineteenth century. Their relationship was more dialectical than that. At a collective level, it was perhaps closer to what Freud called a reaction-formation, a compensatory response that represses its complicity with phenomenon that it constitutes as its opposite (93-94). As an exoteric movement, spiritualism had for almost half a century been infatuated with problem of providing empirical evidence for afterlife. In late nineteenth century, esoteric movements such as theosophy, which self-consciously appropriated aspects of spiritualism that it sought to displace, also sought material proof of immaterial. If, therefore, fin de siecle was characterized, as Terry Eagleton

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