A short life of the author
Joris-Karl Huysmans (5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907), born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, was a French novelist whose work traces one of the most dramatic spiritual trajectories in nineteenth-century literature: from Zola’s Naturalism through the most extreme aestheticism of the Decadent movement to fervent, mystical Catholicism. His novel À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884) — about a jaded aristocrat who withdraws from the world into a hermetically sealed existence devoted to the cultivation of artificial sensation — is one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, the founding text of the Decadent movement, and the book that Oscar Wilde called “the strangest book I had ever read” and gave to Dorian Gray as the instrument of his corruption. Huysmans is one of those writers who changed the possibilities of fiction, even if the fiction he wrote is more admired than read.
Life
Huysmans was born in Paris to a Dutch father (a lithographer) and a French mother. He spent his entire working life as a civil servant in the French Ministry of the Interior — a clerk who wrote novels in his spare time, a life of almost comically split identity. He never married. He lived quietly, worked diligently at his government desk, and produced some of the most extreme and unsettling fiction in the French language.
He began as a disciple of Émile Zola, publishing Naturalist novels — Marthe, histoire d’une fille (1876), Les Sœurs Vatard (1879), En ménage (1881) — that depicted contemporary Parisian life with Zola’s documentary method. But Huysmans was temperamentally unsuited to Naturalism’s scientific positivism, and À Rebours represented a violent break with the school.
À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884)
The novel’s protagonist, Des Esseintes, is the last member of an ancient aristocratic family — neurasthenic, hypersensitive, disgusted by the vulgarity of modern life. He retreats to a house in the suburbs of Paris and devotes himself to the systematic cultivation of artificial pleasures: rare perfumes, exotic flowers, jewel-encrusted tortoise shells, liqueurs arranged by flavour in an “organ” of decanters, paintings by Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, Latin poetry by obscure authors, and elaborate synaesthetic experiments designed to replace nature entirely with art.
The novel has almost no plot — Des Esseintes arranges his aesthetic experiments, becomes ill, and is ordered by his doctor to return to normal life. But the book’s influence was enormous. It became the manifesto of the Decadent movement — the literary and artistic movement that prized sensation over morality, artifice over nature, and style over substance. It directly influenced Wilde, Mallarmé, the Symbolist poets, and later writers from Thomas Mann to Michel Houellebecq.
Là-Bas (Down There, 1891)
Là-Bas is Huysmans’s novel about Satanism in contemporary Paris — a story of a writer named Durtal (a barely disguised Huysmans) who researches the life of the medieval child-murderer Gilles de Rais and becomes entangled with a circle of Parisian Satanists, including a defrocked priest who celebrates the Black Mass. The novel combines detailed historical research on medieval demonology with a vivid portrait of fin-de-siècle Parisian occultism. The Black Mass scene — written with documentary precision — is one of the most notorious passages in nineteenth-century fiction.
The Conversion Novels
Huysmans’s spiritual conversion — from aesthete to Catholic — is documented in a series of novels that follow Durtal’s journey from Satanism to faith. En Route (1895) describes Durtal’s retreat to a Trappist monastery. The Cathedral (La Cathédrale, 1898) is set in Chartres and is as much an essay on Gothic architecture and medieval symbolism as a novel. The Oblate (L’Oblat, 1903) describes Durtal’s life as a Benedictine oblate. These novels are deeply personal documents of religious conversion — earnest, detailed, and profoundly unfashionable in their devotional intensity.
Critical Standing
Huysmans occupies an unusual position in French literature: enormously influential (virtually every subsequent novel of aesthetic excess owes something to À Rebours) but not widely read. His fiction is demanding — dense with description, thin on plot, and preoccupied with sensory experience at the expense of human interaction. But À Rebours and Là-Bas are essential texts for anyone interested in Decadence, Symbolism, or the relationship between aesthetic and religious experience.
Collecting Huysmans
French first editions of Huysmans are significant collectibles. À Rebours (1884, Charpentier) brings $500–$2,000 depending on condition. Là-Bas (1891, Tresse et Stock) brings $300–$800. English translations — particularly the Havelock Ellis translation of Against the Grain (1922, Three Sirens Press) — bring $50–$200. The Folio Society and Limited Editions Club have produced notable illustrated editions of Against Nature.