Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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King’s is surely the worst, which somehow in its plural seems to apply the idea of this innate stupidity to all women as individuals, whereas Mauldon’s “woman” very subtly indicates Des Esseintes’s/our narrator’s misogyny being an idea, a fancy, more than an assertion. There is no central romance, no big cliffhanger, no dramatic build to draw the unsophisticated reader into the narrative. He’s a swooning misanthrope, a cad with OCD over the arrangement of his books on their shelves, an over-educated recluse. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he exclaims, 'alone was in the right' with his philosophy of pessimism, and Des Esseintes connects Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook with the resignation of The Imitation of Christ, a fifteenth-century Christian devotional work by Thomas à Kempis.

While affirming that the misery of the world is common ground that Schopenhauer and the Catholic faith share, Huysmans points out that the Catholic faith, unlike Schopenhauer, shows the causes, points out its consequences, and offers remedies. The novel focuses on the young dandy and aesthete, Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who becomes disgusted with the society of his day and tries to escape from it by constructing a "refined Thebaid" - a house where he lives completely alone, surrounded by the artistic objects and books that obsess him and living out his aesthetic daydreams. Author Tract: Much of the novel is made up of des Esseintes' thoughts and opinions about art, culture, religion, and life, many of which are also Huysmans'.It is largely plotless, and largely chronicles his aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, religion, paintings, and hyperaesthetic sensory experiences. Having spent so much time in Decadence as a literary genre before circling back around to this book, I have to say that it had little real impact and bore few surprises. Des Esseintes, the “hero” of Huysmans’s “novel”, screws around with women (as you’re about to see) in his fall into decadence, but once holed up becomes, in ways, a queer hero. Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year—but I don't care a damn!

Death by Origin Story: By the time the main action of A Rebours has started, both his parents have died. Abstract: With the manuscript of A rebours, we witness the birth of a text that marked literary history: work in embryonic form, but already a work in its own right. Like des Esseintes, the author had apparently “suffered a bout of neuralgia” and chose to convalesce there, “re-reading Baudelaire and planting ‘almost artificial flowers’ in a garden in which ‘nothing has the air of being real”. the universal admiration (Goya’s) works had won had…put him off slightly, and he had refrained from framing them for some years, for fear that by putting them on show, the first idiot who caught sight of them would deem it necessary to relieve himself of his banal opinions and to go into raptures in front of them, in a completely conventional fashion. And so we come to what has often been noted as being the linchpin of Decadence, and the book upon which the Decadent movement of fin de siecle France rests.If you're interested in learning more about the disintegration of France, and really Europe as a whole, during this time period, then I would suggest picking this up and giving it a chance. From this and subsequent visits sprung not only the obvious progeny of En Rade, but both the seed from which A Rebours was born and one of his Parisian Sketches concerning flower types and parfumerie – areas that were also given narrative importance in A Rebours. While it is true that it may have been primarily if not singlehandedly responsible for Wilde’s shift from wry if essentially populist entertainments like The Importance of Being Earnest to more ‘sordid’ aesthetic efforts such as Salome and Dorian Gray (whose lead character refers to an influential “poisonous little book” during the course of the proceedings, which was in fact A Rebours), it is also true that such literary precedents as Barbey D’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques (and his adoption and advertisement of Dandyism per se), closely related Romantic writings from the likes of Theophile Gautier (who was one of the first to adopt the derisive term of “decadent” as a badge of honor and stylistic descriptor of his own efforts) and works even Des Esseintes notes as influential such as Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and translations of Poe, the poetry of Verlaine and Stephane Mallarme, and artists like Gustave Moreau and Felicien Rops were already producing works in this vein. I’ve experienced and seen all I wanted to…I’ve been saturated with English life since my departure…what aberration was I suffering from…to believe, like some complete fool, in the necessity, interest and benefit of a real excursion? in 16°, brossura con sovracoperta illustrata (riproduzione in bianco e nero di «Salomé» di Gustave Moreau), pp.

The Yellow Scale," which depicts an amazingly burnt out aesthetic type, wrapped up in a yellow robe, yellow book (of course) in one hand, and cigarette burning out in his other limp, yellow hand.

These included the notion of intense refinement; the valuing of artificiality over nature; a position of ennui or boredom rather than of moral earnestness or the valuing of hard work; an interest in perversity and paradox, and in transgressive modes of sexuality. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siècle imagination. They were influenced by the Gothic novel and Edgar Allan Poe and liked writing about dandies, rich young men with nothing to do but be eccentric, weird and, well, decadent. Des Esseintes conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Significativa la scelta dell immagine in copertina: «Salomé» di Moreau è uno dei quadri sulla cui descrizione Huysmans si sofferma più a lungo nel sesto capitolo dell opera.

The term “bulimia” has existed long before the 20thC diagnosis, but it seems always to have referred to overeating, not so much craving or hunger. After reading "Submission" by Michel Houllebecq, where the main character's career revolves around J. However it is important to recognise Huysmans's debt to Baudelaire, as many of the themes and motifs of his book - the egotism, perversity, artificial sensations, finding beauty in 'le mal', the sense of ennui and fatigue - were formulated by Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris. As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones.The yellow book is apparently confirmed by Wilde to be a thematic allusion to Huysmans's A Rebours in Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings .