Halfway through Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist becomes obsessed with a yellow-bound book. Entranced by its story, which details the life of an eccentric Parisian, Dorian’s descent into depravity quickens.
One of Wilde’s interrogators at the infamous trial of 1895 asked him: to which novel had he been referring? And did he agree with the book’s morals?
Wilde named À Rebours, by J.-K. Huysmans; he would add nothing more.
Joris-Karl Huysmans The Author
Huysmans was born in 1848 to a middle-class family in Paris. Following an unhappy period of schooling, he took an unremarkable bureaucratic job. He began his literary career with a few novels after the blunt Naturalist style popularized by Émile Zola.
By the early 1880s, Huysmans yearned to embrace a new form of novel: one with a grander scope that encompassed all the arts. Taking a holiday he had spent in isolated convalescence as his model, he penned his first Symbolist text.
Huysmans' Novel, À Rebours
1884's À Rebours (variously translated as "Against Nature”, "Against the Grain", and "Wrong Way") tells the story of Des Esseintes, Parisian aristocrat. Tired of debauchery and finally disgusted by the coarseness of Paris, he flees to his country house. Frail and oversensitive, he adopts a nocturnal existence and determines to surround himself with beautiful things. He buys up paintings, amasses rare books, and supplies himself with exotic teas and perfumes.
The recluse’s aim is to synthesize and rarify the pleasures of the outside world. For instance, his dining room, supplied with a fish tank and nautical accessories, becomes his imaginary cruising ship, which he may leave at any time.
Language in À Rebours
Huysmans requires little plot. There are some flashbacks to Des Esseintes’ Paris days, but these are few and treated episodically. The focus of this novel is the prose: purple, exotic, and wandering, Huysmans gives both Des Esseintes’ most pleasurable moments and his most disgusting memories lush treatment.
Whether extolling the delights of custom book-binding or recalling the extraction of his tooth, each sensory experience comes across as both florid and intensely compelling. Even Des Esseintes' forced decampment to Paris at the book's end is described with all the force and fever of a man’s last speech.
Des Esseintes' Morality
Des Esseintes pursues his flights of fancy with alarming intensity, and often without considering the consequences: it was his pleasure-seeking ways, in Paris, that led to his neurotic and decrepit state, and as though recreating this sequence of events, he jewel-encrusts his pet tortoise to death.
And yet this is not a character who lacks morality. Rather, his is a kind of sensual morality: his constant attention to every detail of aesthetic experience comes across as a kind of worship of the human body in all its capabilities. He had lost his Catholic faith after seeing the corrupt activities of churchmen in Paris, but it is clear in his reverence of religious texts and constant yearnings for a monk’s lifestyle that he remains a very spiritual man.
À Rebours as Symbolist Text
While Des Esseintes is in himself an extreme character, pessimistic, neurotic, and anti-social, it is not hard to sympathize with him; his passion for aesthetics is contagious. It is this intensity of feeling that marks other writers of the Symbolist movement, among them Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine.
The Symbolists would be a strong influence on the Aesthetic movement in England, to which Oscar Wilde belonged. Both movements became dedicated to separating the act of writing beautifully from any didactic intent. And so, as Wilde did, when asked of morality they maintained their silence.
References
Baldick, Robert. The Life of J.-K. Huysmans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.
The Oxford Companion to French Literature. Ed. Sir Paul Harvey and J.E. Heseltine. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959.
Holland, Merlin. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. Toronto: Harpercollins Canada Limited, 2003.
