| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Joris-Karl Huysmans |
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| Biography: Joris Karl Huysmans |
The novelist Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) was a leading French exponent of the decadent movement. His works, though intensely personal, present artistic and intellectual life in late-19th-century France.
Charles Marie Georges Huysmans, who wrote under the pseudonym of Joris Karl Huysmans was born in Paris on Feb. 5, 1848, the only son of a French mother and a Dutch father. In 1866 he entered the civil service and was employed by the Ministry of the Interior until his retirement in 1898.
Huysmans' earliest works reflect the influence of contemporary French masters. His first publication, Le Drageoir àépices (1874), was a collection of Baudelairian prose poems. He next wrote a series of naturalistic novels that focused on the sordidness and futility of everyday life: Marthe (1876), Les Soeurs Vatard (1879), and En ménage (1881). These works were early indexes of the distinctive style and the talent for precise, detailed description which were to characterize all of Huysmans' writing. While he was a member of Émile Zola's Médan group of naturalist writers, his wartime anecdote Sac au dos was published in the collective volume Les Soiréesde Médan (1880).
Huysmans remained a disciple of Zola for only a short time and soon asserted his independence from codified naturalism. His subsequent novels formed a loosely linked series in which the author, under various guises, traced his quest for happiness.
The first of this group was A vau-l'eau (1882; Down Stream), a pessimistic account of the empty existence of an obscure functionary. It was followed in 1884 by Á rebours (Against the Grain), the most characteristic and best known of Huysmans' novels. The jaded protagonist, Des Esseintes, quickly became the prototype for the finde-siècle decadent hero. Distancing himself still further from Zola's doctrine, Huysmans wrote En rade (1887), a curious blend of naturalistic descriptions and surrealistic dream sequences, and Là-bas (1891; Down There), a study of medieval and modern satanism.
Huysmans' last novels are primarily an intellectual and spiritual self-portrait: En route (1895) recounts his return to Catholicism; La Cathédrale (1898) is an erudite study of the Chartres Cathedral; and L'Oblat (1903) depicts the author's life as a lay monk in a Benedictine monastery from 1899 to 1901.
Huysmans also ranks as one of the foremost art critics of his generation and was one of the first to appreciate the impressionists in L'Art moderne (1883) and in Certains (1889). Huysmans died of cancer on May 12, 1907, in Paris.
Further Reading
Robert Baldick, The Life of J. -K. Huysmans (1955), is the most comprehensive work on Huysmans in English and the first fully documented biography of the novelist. It is a detailed and authoritative account of Huysmans' life and works and of the milieus in which he lived. For background see A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900 (1958), and George R. Ridge, The Hero in French Decadent Literature (1961).
Additional Sources
Audoin, Philippe., J.K. Huysmans, Paris: Editions H. Veyrier, 1985.
Banks, Brian R., The image of Huysmans, New York, N.Y.: AMS Press, 1990.
Vircondelet, Alain, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paris: Plon, 1990.
| French Literature Companion: Joris-Karl Huysmans |
Huysmans, Joris-Karl (1848-1907). Though he first became known as a writer of Naturalist fiction (Marthe, histoire d'une fille, 1876; Les Sœurs Vatard, 1879; ‘Sac au dos’, in Les Soirées de Medan, 1880; En ménage 1881), Huysmans's first publication, Le Drageoir à épices (1874), was an experiment in non-Naturalist form which points forward to the Decadent exercises of A rebours (1884), En rade (1887), and Là-bas (1891). His art criticism (collected in L'Art moderne, 1883, and Certains, 1889) shows the same sensitivity to the movement of contemporary culture, taste, and the market. Open initially to art and architecture which celebrates technological advance and the life of the modern city, it moves rapidly towards the masters of escape, dream and nightmare, mysticism and magic (Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Félicien Rops).
Neurotic antagonism to contemporary society encouraged Huysmans's movement in the early 1890s towards the Catholic Church (En route, 1895): not the embryonic modernist movement, engaging sympathetically with the secular masses, but the traditionalist version reinstated by Vatican I (1870), rooted in the nostalgic and élitist cult of authority, superstitious and obscurantist. The misogyny at the centre of his earlier writing, expressed in a cruel and perverse eroticism, is transformed into the cult of female martyrs and saints committed to reparatory suffering, taking on death and disease in imitation of Christ to redeem the world (Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, 1901). Only the Virgin Mary, the focus of Huysmans's devotion and the centre of the worship at Chartres which he exhaustively evokes in La Cathédrale (1898), escapes the humiliation of the feminine without which he appears unable to form any image of himself.
Huysmans's transition from Naturalism to Symbolism and Catholicism can be variously viewed. It represents the political refusal of the desk-bound civil servant that Huysmans remained all his life to engage with the challenges of industrialization and democratization. It is an evasion into idealism that is linked with right-wing and regressive political factions. But it is also the fruitful recognition of the exhaustion of certain aesthetic options, particularly the rationalist and positivist strait-jacket of Naturalism, and it raises the possibility of new ways of writing and thinking. What most critics, however, agree on is Huysmans's tenacity in carrying over into his later writing his original Naturalist vision. This is both a weakness and a strength. It enables him to bring a vivid intensity of expression into the realms of the abstract and the ideal, but it also confines those realms within simple, restrictive, and conservative limits.
[Jennifer Birkett]
Bibliography
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Joris Karl Huysmans |
Bibliography
See biographies by H. R. Brandreth (1963) and G. R. Ridge (1968).
| Wikipedia: Joris-Karl Huysmans |
| Joris-Karl Huysmans | |
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 Joris-Karl Huysmans. |
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| Born | February 5, 1848 Paris, France |
| Died | May 12, 1907 (aged 59) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Author (Novelist) |
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848 – May 12, 1907) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans; he is most famous for the novel À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature). His style is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, wide-ranging vocabulary, wealth of detailed and sensuous description, and biting, satirical wit. The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopaedic documentation, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the iconography of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans' work expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism, which led the author first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer[1] then to the teachings of the Catholic Church.
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He was born in Paris to a Dutch father, Godfried Huysmans, who was a lithographer by trade. His mother, Malvina Badin, had been a schoolmistress. He published his works as "Joris-Karl Huysmans", using an approximation of the Dutch equivalent of his forenames, to emphasize his roots. Huysmans' father died when he was eight years old, and his mother quickly remarried, leaving Huysmans feeling a great deal of resentment against his stepfather, Jules Og, a Protestant who was part owner of a Parisian book-bindery.
Huysmans' school years were unhappy but he obtained a baccalauréat. For thirty-two years, he worked as a civil servant for the French Ministry of the Interior, a job he found insufferably tedious. The young Huysmans was called up to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, but was invalided out with dysentery, an experience he described in his early story Sac au dos (Backpack) (later included in Les Soirées de Médan).
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His first major publication was a collection of prose poems, heavily influenced by Baudelaire, called Le drageoir aux épices (1874). They attracted little attention but already revealed flashes of the author's distinctive style. Huysmans followed it with Marthe, Histoire d'une fille (1876). The story of a young prostitute, it was much closer to Naturalism and brought him to the attention of Emile Zola. His next works were in a similar vein: sombre, realistic and filled with minutely detailed evocations of Paris, the city Huysmans knew intimately. Les Soeurs Vatard deals with the lives of women in a bookbindery. En ménage is an account of a writer's failed marriage (Huysmans himself never married, but had a long-term lover called Anna Meunier). The climax of this early period is the novella À vau-l'eau (Downstream or With the Flow), the story of a downtrodden clerk, Monsieur Folantin, and his futile quest for a decent meal.
This was followed by Huysmans' most famous novel À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature or Wrong Way) (1884), which featured a single character, the aesthete des Esseintes, and decisively broke from Naturalism, becoming the ultimate example of "decadent" literature. des Esseintes' explicit homosexual encounters influenced other writers of the decadent movement, including Oscar Wilde, and is considered an important step in the formation of "gay literature".[2] À rebours gained further notoriety as an exhibit during the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, during which the prosecutor referred to the novel as a "sodomitical" book. The book also appalled Zola, who felt it had dealt a "terrible blow" to Naturalism. Huysmans began to drift away from the Naturalists and found new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in À rebours, including Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Villiers de L'Isle Adam and Léon Bloy. Stéphane Mallarmé was so pleased with the publicity his verse had received from the novel that he dedicated one of his most famous (and most obscure) poems, Prose pour des Esseintes to its hero.
Huysmans' next novel, En rade, a highly unromantic account of a summer spent in the country, was relatively unsuccessful commercially. In 1891, the publication of Là-Bas attracted considerable attention for its depiction of Satanism in late 1880s France. The book introduced the character Durtal, a thinly disguised portrait of the author. The later Durtal novels, En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898) and L'oblat (1903), trace Durtal/Huysmans' conversion to Roman Catholicism. En route depicts Durtal's spiritual struggle during his stay at a Trappist monastery. La cathédrale finds the protagonist at Chartres, making an intense study of the cathedral and its symbolism. In L'Oblat, Durtal becomes a Benedictine oblate, finally reaching an acceptance of the suffering in the world.
Huysmans was also known for his art criticism: L'Art moderne (1883) and Certains (1889). He was an early advocate of Impressionism, as well as an admirer of such artists as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. He was a founding member of the Académie Goncourt.
Huysmans was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1892, but only for his work with the civil service. In 1905, his admirers persuaded the French government to promote him to Officier de la Légion d'honneur in view of his literary achievements. In the same year, Huysmans, a cigarette–smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. Joris-Karl Huysmans died in 1907 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montparnasse, Paris.
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Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is - especially in regard to things seen - extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature. (Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature")
...Continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the worm-eaten staircase of terrified Syntax. (Léon Bloy, quoted in Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans)
It is difficult to find a writer whose vocabulary is so extensive, so constantly surprising, so sharp and yet so exquisitely gamey in flavour, so constantly lucky in its chance finds and in its very inventiveness. (Julien Gracq)
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