Joris-Karl Huysmans

original
name Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans
born Feb.
5, 1848, Paris, France
died May 12, 1907, Paris
French writer whose major novels epitomize
successive phases of the aesthetic,
spiritual, and intellectual life of late
19th-century France.
Huysmans was the only son of a French mother
and a Dutch father. At 20 he began a long
career in the Ministry of the Interior,
writing many of his novels on official time
(and notepaper). His early work, influenced
by contemporary naturalist novelists,
include a novel, Marthe, histoire d’une
fille (1876; Marthe), about his liaison with
a soubrette, and a novella, Sac au dos
(1880; “Pack on Back”), based on his
experience in the Franco-German War. The
latter was published in Les Soirées de Médan
(1881), war stories written by members of
Émile Zola’s “Médan” group of naturalist
writers. Huysmans soon broke with the group,
however, publishing a series of novels too
decadent in content and violent in style to
be considered examples of naturalism.
The first
was À vau-l’eau (1882; Down Stream), a
tragicomic account of the misfortunes,
largely sexual, of a humble civil servant,
Folantin. À rebours (1884; Against the
Grain), Huysmans’s best-known novel, relates
the experiments in aesthetic decadence
undertaken by the bored survivor of a noble
line. The ambitious and controversial Là-bas
(1891; Down There) tells of the occultist
revival that occurred in France in the
1880s. A tale of 19th-century Satanists
interwoven with a life of the medieval
Satanist Gilles de Rais, the book introduced
what was clearly an autobiographical
protagonist, Durtal, who reappeared in
Huysmans’s last three novels: En route
(1895), an account of Huysmans-Durtal’s
religious retreat in the Trappist monastery
of Notre-Dame d’Igny and his return to Roman
Catholicism; La Cathédrale (1898; The
Cathedral), basically a study of Nôtre-Dame
de Chartres with a thin story attached; and
L’Oblat (1903; The Oblate), set in the
Benedictine abbey of Ligugé, near Poitiers,
in the neighbourhood in which Huysmans lived
in 1899–1901 as an oblate (lay monk).
The chief
fascination of Huysmans’s work lies in its
autobiographical content. Together his
novels tell the story of a protracted
spiritual odyssey. In each the hero tries to
find happiness in some kind of spiritual and
physical escapism; each ends on a note of
disappointment and revolt until, in L’Oblat,
Huysmans and his hero acknowledge that
escapism is not only futile but wrong.
Huysmans exemplified his hard-won belief in
the value of suffering in his courageous
bearing during the months of pain that
preceded his death from cancer.
Also a
perceptive art critic, Huysmans helped win
public recognition of the Impressionist
painters (L’Art moderne, 1883; Certains,
1889). He was the first president of the
Goncourt Academy, which annually awards a
prestigious French literary prize.