Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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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”. To understand and appreciate this book, which by its very nature seems to reject the reader, or perhaps to withdraw from the reader any semblance of the forms of contact and intimacy that are the usual business of one person writing and another person reading the words, is to accept that the process by which we come together in this case is ultimately bizarre. Instead what we get is a pervasive portrait of the psychology of a man, indeed the thinly disguised author of the narrative itself.

I think I’ve been so focussed on introducing aspects of the movement that are less well-known that I have slightly neglected the classics. K. Huysmans and "The Strange Death of Europe" by Douglas Murray, which mentions the book "Au Rebours" and the author's journey to salvation, I decided I should try reading the book itself. Some, educated like him in religious institutions, had preserved the special stamp this education confers…and hid from each other the bouts they indulged in with whores, shamefacedly avoiding the others eyes as if it were a crime.In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of " Decadent" literature, [1] inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking. I'm just focusing on the edition: the 2004 Penguin Classics reprint of Robert Baldick's 1956 translation but with a new introduction and notes by Patrick McGuinness (and a new cover, of which more anon). A Rebours also contains descriptions of several prominent works of art, including French symbolist artist Moreau's Salome Dancing before Herod.

He is an insufferable elitist snob, hating everyone in the world and all they do, despising the majority of art and literature and liking only a very few painters and authors. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Aside from the difficult chapters about literature, it’s very entertaining, drawing you into a unique, intimate, bizarre world.

Culturally Religious: Des Esseintes had a Catholic upbringing and was instructed by the Jesuits, but at some point he abandoned the faith and turned to the philosophical ideas of the German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. A Rebour is indeed the poisonous/liberating guide book that Dorian Gray has bound in various colours to suit his moods; the book that Symons described as “the breviary of the decadence. This seam of extremism played itself out via the Symbolist movement and it (arguably) reached its peak in the poetry of Maeterlinck and in the art of (among others) Arnold Bocklin and Ferdinand Hodler. 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.