À rebours (translated into English as Against Nature or Against the Grain) (1884) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalog of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. À rebours contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.

Background[link]

À rebours marked a watershed in Huysmans's career. His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of A rebours:

It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water. It scarcely admitted - in theory at least - any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.

Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Jean Des Esseintes. In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul (Alone), was to become A rebours.^[1] The character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself, and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans, on his modest civil-service salary, was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. The writers and dandies Baudelaire and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly also had some influence, but the most important model was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes's house:

In 1883, to his eternal regret, Montesquiou admitted Stéphane Mallarmé [to his home]. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls, and a strip of altar railing. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably coloured bindings, and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. According to Montesquiou writing many years later in his memoirs, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. 'He went away,' records Montesquiou, 'in a state of silent exaltation [...] I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali-Baba's Cave.'^[2]

Plot summary[link]

Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside.

He fills the house with his eclectic art collection (which notably consists of reprints of paintings of Gustave Moreau). Drawing from the theme of Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, Des Esseintes decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation^[3]. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.

He conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. Amongst French authors, he shows nothing but contempt for the Romantics but adores the poetry of Baudelaire and that of the nascent Symbolist movement of Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé^[4], as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. He rejects the academically respectable Latin authors of the "Golden Age" such as Virgil and Cicero, preferring later "Silver Age" writers such as Petronius and Apuleius as well as works of early Christian literature, whose style was usually dismissed as the "barbarous" product of the Dark Ages. Schopenhauer, he exclaims, has seen the truth, and he clearly expressed it in his philosophy^[5]. He studies Moreau's paintings, he tries his hand at inventing perfumes, and he creates a garden of poisonous flowers. In one of the book's most surrealistic episodes, he has gemstones set in the shell of a tortoise. The extra weight on the creature's back causes its death. In another episode, he decides to visit London after reading the novels of Dickens. He dines at an English restaurant in Paris while waiting for his train and is delighted by the resemblance of the people to his notions derived from literature. He then cancels his trip and returns home, convinced that only disillusion would await him if he were to follow though with his plans.

Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a nonbeliever trying to embrace religion.

Reception and influence[link]

Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to say..."^[6] However, when it appeared in May, 1884, the book created a storm of publicity; though many critics were scandalised, it appealed to a young generation of aesthetes and writers.

Richard Ellmann describes the effect of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:

Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his 'marvellous' book. Bourget, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly; Paul Valéry called it his 'Bible and his bedside book' and this is what it became for Wilde. He said to the Morning News: 'This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen'. It was being reviewed everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them.^[7]

Huysmans's former mentor, Zola, was less impressed and gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a book", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".^[8]

While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works"^[9]. The opening stanza gives some of its flavour:

Hyperbole! de ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu...

Hyperbole! Can't you arise
From memory, and triumph, grow
Today a form of conjuration
Robed in an iron folio?
(Translated by Donald Davie)^[10]

The Catholic writer Léon Bloy praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous [gluttonous or drunken] Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them."^[11] In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling: "After Les Fleurs du mal I told Baudelaire it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice?"^[12] His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s.

It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism. Ellmann writes:

Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's A Rebours…To a correspondent he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon A Rebours and some day must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate.^[13]

See also[link]

• Bernard Bonnejean

Footnotes[link]

Sources[link]

• Robert Baldick: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (originally published 1955; revised by Brendan King, Dedalus, 2006)
• Huysmans: Romans (Volume 1) ed. Pierre Brunel et al. (Bouquins, Robert Laffont, 2005)
• Huysmans: Against Nature translated by Robert Baldick (Penguin Classics)
• Huysmans: Against Nature translated by Brendan King (Dedalus Books, 2008). Includes translated selections from original manuscript.

Additional reading[link]

Le mal dans l'imaginaire littéraire français : (1850 - 1950). Paris [u.a.]: Éd. L'Harmattan [u.a.]. 1998. ISBN 2-7384-6198-0. 

External links[link]

• Original French text of À rebours
• Text of an anonymous 1928 English translation
• Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Project Gutenberg ebook in English (omits a chapter in which Des Esseintes tries to start a young man on a life of crime and a passage describing implied homosexuality)
• Illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg from the 1931 Illustrated Editions issue of A Rebours

Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1904
Born	February 5, 1848 (1848-02-05) Paris, France
Died	May 12, 1907 (1907-05-13) (aged 59) Paris, France
Occupation	Author (Novelist)
Religion	Catholicism

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (pronounced [ʃaʁl maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ɥismɑ̃s]) (February 5, 1848 – May 12, 1907) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans ([ʒoʁis kaʁl]). He is most famous for the novel À rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature). His work is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting, satirical wit. It also displays an encyclopaedic erudition, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the iconography of Christian architecture in La cathédrale. Huysmans expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism, which led him first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer^[1], then back to the Catholicism in which he had been raised.

Parents and early life[link]

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, leading Huysmans to feel resentful against his stepfather, Jules Og, a Protestant who was part-owner of a Parisian book-bindery.

Huysmans was unhappy at school but gained 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).

Writing career[link]

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 similar: sombre, realistic and filled with detailed evocations of Paris, a city Huysmans knew intimately. Les Soeurs Vatard, dedicated to Zola, 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 his early work 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. The description of des Esseintes' "alluring liaison" with a cherry-lipped youth 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 won further notoriety as an exhibit in 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. Barbey d'Aurevilly told Huysmans that after writing À rebours he would have to choose between "the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross", and Huysmans, who had received a secular education and abandoned his religion in childhood, did indeed return to the Catholic Church eight years later.^[3]

Huysmans' next novel, En rade, a highly unromantic account of a summer spent in the country, did not sell as well as its predecessor. In 1891, Là-Bas attracted considerable attention for its depiction of Satanism in the late 1880s. The book introduced the character Durtal, a thinly disguised self-portrait. The later Durtal novels, En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898) and L'oblat (1903), record Durtal/Huysmans' conversion to Roman Catholicism. En route depicts Durtal's spiritual struggle during his stay at a Trappist monastery. In La cathédrale the protagonist is at Chartres, making an intense study of the cathedral and its symbolism. In L'Oblat, Durtal becomes a Benedictine oblate and finally learns to accept the world's suffering. After his retirement from the Ministry in 1898, Huysmans planned to leave Paris and move to Ligugé, where he hoped to set up a community of Catholic artists, including Charles-Marie Dulac (1862-1898), a young painter he had praised in La cathédrale. However, the project was never realized as Dulac died a few months before Huysmans completed his arrangements for the move to Ligugé.

Huysmans was also known for his art criticism in L'Art moderne (1883) and Certains (1889) and as a founding member of the Académie Goncourt. He was also an early advocate of Impressionism and an admirer of such artists as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

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 for his literary achievements. In the same year, Huysmans was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. Joris-Karl Huysmans died in 1907 and was interred in the Cimetière de Montparnasse, Paris.

Style and influence[link]

This section requires expansion.

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)

Works by Huysmans[link]

• Le drageoir aux épices (1874)
• Marthe (1876)
• Les Soeurs Vatard (1879)
• Sac au dos (1880)
• Croquis Parisiens (1880, 2nd ed. 1886)
• En ménage (1881)
• Pierrot sceptique (1881, written in collaboration with Léon Hennique)
• À vau-l'eau (1882)
• L'art moderne (1883)
• À rebours (1884)
• En rade (1887)
• Un Dilemme (1887)
• Certains (1889)
• La bièvre (1890)
• Là-Bas (1891)
• En route (1895)
• La cathédrale (1898)
• La Bièvre et Saint-Séverin (1898)
• La magie en Poitou. Gilles de Rais. (1899) (see Gilles de Rais)
• La Bièvre; Les Gobelins; Saint-Séverin (1901)
• Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901, France) (on Saint Lydwine de Schiedam) (Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur)
  • Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, translated from the French by Agnes Hastings (London, 1923, Kegan Paul)
• De Tout (1902)
• Esquisse biographique sur Don Bosco (1902)
• L'Oblat (1903)
• Trois Primitifs (1905)
• Le Quartier Notre-Dame (1905)
• Les foules de Lourdes (1906)
• Trois Églises et trois Primitifs (1908)

Current editions :

• Écrits sur l’art (1867-1905), edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2006.
• À Paris, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions Bartillat, 2005.
• Les Églises de Paris, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Éditions de Paris, 2005.
• Le Drageoir aux épices, edited and introduced by Patrice Locmant, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2003.

See also[link]

• Joseph-Antoine Boullan
• Stanislas de Guaita
• Henri Antoine Jules-Bois
• Joséphin Péladan
• Our Lady of La Salette

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Robert Baldick, The Life of J.-K. Huysmans (Oxford, 1955; new edition revised by Brendan King, Dedalus Books, 2006)
• George A. Cevasco, J.K. Huysmans in England and America: A Bibliographical Study (The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, n.d., c. 1961)
• James Laver, The First Decadent: Being the Strange Life of J.K. Huysmans (Faber, London, 1954)
• Patrice Locmant, J.-K. Huysmans, le forçat de la vie, Bartillat, 2007 (Goncourt Price for Biography).

External links[link]

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Joris Karl Huysmans

• Joris Karl Huysmans, A site that includes almost all of Huysmans' published work as well as contemporary material about him.
• Joris Karl Huysmans, biography.
• Works by or about Joris-Karl Huysmans at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions color illustrated)
• Works by Joris-Karl Huysmans at Project Gutenberg
  • Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Project Gutenberg ebook (Also known as Á Rebours or Against Nature)
  • Là-bas (Down There) by J. K. Huysmans, Project Gutenberg ebook (Also known as The Damned)
  • The Cathedral by J. K. Huysmans, Project Gutenberg ebook
• Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Huysmans
• The Word-Painter of Paris by Colin Wilson
• Bernard Bonnejean "Huysmans avant À Rebours : les fondements nécessaires d'une quête en devenir", in Le Mal dans l'imaginaire français (1850–1950), éd. David et L'Harmattan, 1998 (ISBN 2-7384-6198-0)

In the Nursery
In the Nursery, 2009
Background information
Origin	Sheffield, England
Genres	neo-classical/martial electronica
Years active	1981–present
Labels	ITN Corporation

In the Nursery are a neo-classical/martial electronica band, known for their cinematic sound. The duo has provided soundtracks to a variety of TV programmes and films, and is known for its rescoring of silent films.

Career[link]

Twin brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone and guitar player Anthony Bennett formed this Sheffield, England-based band in 1981.

Influenced by Joy Division,^[1] the trio originally tagged along with the UK's industrial music scene, releasing the six-track When Cherished Dreams Come True in June 1983. The "Witness (To A Scream)" single and Sonority EP followed before the band moved to the Sweatbox label for the fearsome Temper EP.

The full-length Twins was recorded without the departed Bennett at Bradford's Flexible Response Studio. The album adopted a more subtle approach by favouring theatrical atmospherics over industrial clatter. Multi-lingual vocalist Dolores Marguerite C made her debut on the Trinity EP adding French narration to "Elegy'. Dolores and military-styled percussionist Q were added to the line-up on the subsequent Stormhorse, the soundtrack to an imaginary film that provided the cinematic blueprint for all their future recordings. The quartet's final recording for Sweatbox, 1988's Köda, completed the transition to a classical instrumental sound and utilised computer sequencing in the recording process for the first time.

Following the collapse of Sweatbox, the band moved to Third Mind Records to complete the delicate L'Esprit. The album was recorded with engineer Steve Harris who had contributed to Köda and would feature on all the band's subsequent releases. Sense and Duality were followed by a logical progression to real soundtrack work on 1993's psychological drama An Ambush of Ghosts. Their music has also featured in Interview with the Vampire, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, and The Rainmaker. In the late 90s the band was commissioned, as part of the Optical Music Series, to provide new scores for the silent classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Asphalt, and Man with a Movie Camera. Anatomy of a Poet, a concept album about the creative psyche, featured author Colin Wilson reciting romantic poetry against a lush backdrop of strings, and also included a cover version of Scott Walker's "Seventh Seal".

A retrospective compilation of their work was the first release on their own ITN Corporation label. Further concept albums have included Deco (inspired by the Art Deco movement) and the ambitious Lingua, an exploration of language featuring vocal contributions from around the world. The Humberstones also record more dance-oriented material under the Les Jumeaux moniker, and as such were involved in pre-production work on Sabres of Paradise's classic techno anthem "Smokebelch".

The 2011 release Blind Sound is a more consistently dark album from the Humberstone brothers and features more real percussion than previous releases.^[1] In 2011, "White Robe" from An Ambush of Ghosts was used on a trailer for Game of Thrones.^[1]

Album discography[link]

• When Cherished Dreams Come True (1983, mini-album)
• Sonority (1985, EP)
• Temper (1985, EP)
• Twins (1986)
• Trinity (1987, EP)
• Stormhorse (1987)
• Compulsion (1988, EP)
• Köda (1988)
• Counterpoint (1989)
• L'Esprit (1990)
• Sesudient (1990, EP)
• Sense (1991)
• Duality (1992)
• An Ambush of Ghosts (1993, soundtrack)
• Anatomy of a Poet (1994)
• Deco (1996)
• The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1996, soundtrack)
• Asphalt (1997, soundtrack)
• Lingua (1998)
• Man with a Movie Camera (1999, soundtrack)
• Groundloop (2000)
• Hindle Wakes (2001, soundtrack)
• Engel (2001)
• Praxis (2003)
• A Page of Madness (2004, soundtrack)
• Electric Edwardians (2005, soundtrack)
• Era (2007)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (2008, soundtrack)
• Aubade (2010, a collection of recordings from 1983–1985)
• Blind Sound (2011)

External links[link]

• In The Nursery Official website
• Images of the Abbeydale Picture House, which appears on the cover of the Era album
• (French) Interview 1990 from Prémonitions zine

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c} http://www.archive.org/details/InTheNurseryInterviewsOnOutsightRadioHours, 1-May 2011 interview on Outsight Radio Hours