À rebours
Encyclopedia
À rebours (1884
) is a novel
by the French
writer Joris-Karl Huysmans
. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours contains many themes which became associated with the Symbolist
aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism
and became the ultimate example of "decadent
" literature.
, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul (Alone), was to become A rebours.
The character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans, on his modest civil service salary, was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. The writers and dandies Baudelaire and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly also had some influence but the most important model was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou
, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes' house:
Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble
family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside.
He fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau
). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert
's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.
He conducts a survey of French
and Latin
literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics
but adores the poetry of Baudelaire and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine
, Tristan Corbière
and Stéphane Mallarmé
, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as Virgil
and Cicero
, preferring later "Silver Age" writers such as Petronius
and Apuleius
as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. Schopenhauer
, he exclaims, has seen the truth and he clearly expressed it in his philosophy. He studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train, and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow though with his plans.
Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a nonbeliever trying to embrace religion.
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! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to say..." However, when it appeared in May, 1884, the book created a storm of publicity; though many critics were scandalised, it appealed to a young generation of aesthetes and writers.
Richard Ellmann
describes the effect of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:
Huysmans' former mentor, Zola, was less impressed and gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes' opinions and tastes were not his own. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism", and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".
While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works". The opening stanza gives some of its flavour:
The Catholic writer Léon Bloy
praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous [gluttonous or drunken] Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them." In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling: "After Les Fleurs du mal I told Baudelaire it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?" His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s.
It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde
's The Picture of Dorian Gray
. The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. Ellmann writes:
1884 in literature
The year 1884 in literature involved some significant new books.-New books:*Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland*Henry Brooks Adams - Esther*Aluísio de Azevedo - Casa de Pensão*Richard Doddridge Blackmore - Tommy Upmore...
) is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
writer Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...
. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours contains many themes which became associated with the Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism
Naturalism (literature)
Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...
and became the ultimate example of "decadent
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
" literature.
Background
A rebours marked a watershed in Huysmans' career. His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of A rebours:It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water. It scarcely admitted - in theory at least - any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Jean Des Esseintes. In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola
Émile Zola
Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...
, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul (Alone), was to become A rebours.
The character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans, on his modest civil service salary, was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. The writers and dandies Baudelaire and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly also had some influence but the most important model was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou
Robert de Montesquiou
Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac , was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy....
, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes' house:
In 1883, to his eternal regret, Montesquiou admitted Stéphane MallarméStéphane MallarméStéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
[to his home]. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bellSacring-BellThe sacring bell, also known as the sanctus bell, is the bell which rings when the Host is elevated at the celebration of High Mass....
, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis QuinzeLouis QuinzeThe Louis XV style or Louis Quinze was a French Rococo style in the decorative arts, and, to a lesser degree, architecture.Datable to the personal reign of Louis XV , the style was characterised by supreme craftsmanship and the integration of the arts of cabinetmaking, painting, and...
pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls, and a strip of altar railing. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably coloured bindings, and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. According to Montesquiou writing many years later in his memoirs, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. 'He went away,' records Montesquiou, 'in a state of silent exaltation [...] I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali-Baba's Cave.'
Plot summary
French nobility
The French nobility was the privileged order of France in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern periods.In the political system of the Estates General, the nobility made up the Second Estate...
family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside.
He fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...
). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.
He conducts a survey of French
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
and Latin
Latin literature
Latin literature includes the essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings of the ancient Romans. In many ways, it seems to be a continuation of Greek literature, using many of the same forms...
literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
but adores the poetry of Baudelaire and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
, Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière
Tristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....
and Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was a French symbolist writer.-Life:Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, to a distinguished aristocratic family...
and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
and Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
, preferring later "Silver Age" writers such as Petronius
Petronius
Gaius Petronius Arbiter was a Roman courtier during the reign of Nero. He is generally believed to be the author of the Satyricon, a satirical novel believed to have been written during the Neronian age.-Life:...
and Apuleius
Apuleius
Apuleius was a Latin prose writer. He was a Berber, from Madaurus . He studied Platonist philosophy in Athens; travelled to Italy, Asia Minor and Egypt; and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the...
as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
, he exclaims, has seen the truth and he clearly expressed it in his philosophy. He studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train, and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow though with his plans.
Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a nonbeliever trying to embrace religion.
Reception and influence
Richard Ellmann
Richard Ellmann
Richard David Ellmann was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats...
describes the effect of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:
Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his ‘marvellous’ book. BourgetPaul BourgetPaul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...
, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly; Paul ValéryPaul ValéryAmbroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
called it his ‘Bible and his bedside book’ and this is what it became for Wilde. He said to the Morning News: ‘This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen’. It was being reviewed everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them.
Huysmans' former mentor, Zola, was less impressed and gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes' opinions and tastes were not his own. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism", and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".
While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works". The opening stanza gives some of its flavour:
Hyperbole! de ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu...
Hyperbole! Can't you arise
From memory, and triumph, grow
Today a form of conjuration
Robed in an iron folio?
(Translated by Donald DavieDonald DavieDonald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...
)
The Catholic writer Léon Bloy
Léon Bloy
Léon Bloy , was a French novelist, essayist, pamphleteer and poet.-Biography:Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau,...
praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous [gluttonous or drunken] Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them." In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling: "After Les Fleurs du mal I told Baudelaire it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?" His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s.
It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine...
. The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. Ellmann writes:
Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans’s A Rebours…To a correspondent he wrote that he had played a ‘fantastic variation’ upon A Rebours and some day must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.
Sources
- Robert BaldickRobert BaldickRobert Baldick was a British scholar of French literature, writer, joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice and a well-known translator. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford....
: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (originally published 1955; revised by Brendan King, Dedalus, 2006) - Huysmans: Romans (Volume 1) ed. Pierre Brunel et al. (Bouquins, Robert Laffont, 2005)
- Huysmans: Against Nature translated by Robert BaldickRobert BaldickRobert Baldick was a British scholar of French literature, writer, joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice and a well-known translator. He was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford....
(Penguin Classics) - Huysmans: Against Nature translated by Brendan King (Dedalus Books, 2008). Includes translated selections from original manuscript.
External links
- Original French text of À rebours
- Text of an anonymous 1928 English translation
- Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
ebook in English (omits a chapter in which Des Esseintes tries to start a young man on a life of crime, and a passage describing implied homosexuality) - Illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours
- Bernard BonnejeanBernard Bonnejean(born 10 June 1950 in Ernée (Mayenne), on June 10, 1950, is a French author, specialist of catholic French poetry of 19th and 20th centuries.-Youth:...
"Huysmans avant À Rebours : les fondements nécessaires d'une quête en devenir", in Le Mal dans l'imaginaire français (1850–1950), éd. David et L'Harmattan, 1998 (ISBN 2-7384-6198-0) ; "Huysmans before A Rebours: The necessary foundation for a quest to become", The evil in the French imaginary (1850–1950), Ed. David and L'Harmattan, 1998 (ISBN 2-7384-6198-0)