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Drawing on two categories suggested by art historian Michael Fried -- absorption and theatricality --, this article suggest a specification relative to how we feel and express a particular emotion: contempt. To better understand the distinction between absorbed and distanced contempt, and all the emotional consequences that ensue, three specific and contrasting examples taken from Flaubert, Baudelaire and Huysmans are analysed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bien que le recueil des Soirées de Médan (1880) se présente comme un manifeste du naturalisme, il est à première vue difficile de voir dans quelle mesure les actions des personnages sont déterminées par le contexte de guerre. Il est plus fréquent de les considérer comme transgressives en ce qu’elles heurtent les normes sociales au moment de leur publication. Si les personnages semblent d’abord se réfugier dans des espaces où il leur est possible d’échapper à la guerre, le conflit s’y immisce néanmoins. Leurs actions peuvent ainsi être interprétées comme des gestes attribuables au contexte dans lequel ils évoluent plutôt que comme des actes transgressifs. En cela, le recueil respecte la logique déterministe de l’esthétique naturaliste et présente des personnages qui agissent en fonction du milieu et des circonstances dans lesquels ils se trouvent, selon les lois naturelles présentées dans la théorie zolienne.

The phenomenon of the “symbolic image” is examined using the example of the flower in Salome’s hand in Gustave Moreau’s painting “Salome Dancing before Herod” and the lotus in Salome’s hand in J.-K. Huysmans’ novel “Against the Grain.” The history of the terms ‘imago’, ‘archetype’, and ‘symbolic image’ in psychoanalysis is traced, as well as the influence of these psychoanalytic concepts on the perception of imagery in literature and painting. The relevance of the study lies in the enduring interest of literary scholars in issues related to the interplay between psychoanalysis and literature, as well as the theme of ekphrasis in literature. It is demonstrated that one of Moreau’s receptions of the “flower in Salome’s hand” became the lotus in Salome’s hand in Huysmans’ novel “Against the Grain.” It is established that Huysmans perceives Moreau’s famous phytomorph primarily as an unconscious concept of evil, anxiety, pain, illustrating his reasoning with vivid associations related to the perception of the flower in Moreau’s work. In conclusion, the author of the article points out that the imago-images of the “flower in Salome’s hand” and “lotus in Salome’s hand” become the starting impulse for creating an archetype that generates various new versions of “Salome’s flowers,” comparing lotuses and lilies in the works of H. del Casal, Elisa, and O. Wilde.

This article examines the image of 'flowers of evil' as an imago image — an imaginary image of a real object. The term 'imago' was first used in this sense by Carl Jung in 1912. The work proposes a novel approach to investigating the image of 'flowers of evil'. The com­pa­rative historical, analytical and psychoanalytic methods of text examination revealed that, in his novel À rebours, Huysmans espouses Baudelaire's celebrated image, representing it pri­marily as a notion of something bizarre, extraordinary, transmuted and dangerous. This is achieved through the reception of the image of 'flowers of evil' embodied by Huysmans in a series of vegetative appearances, such as the collection of exotic plants, the lotus in the hands of Salome and the nidularium seen in a dream. It is concluded that Huysmans uses phy­to­nymic images to demonstrate his belief that his decadent contemporaries, personified in the cha­racter of Jean Desessent, perceive Baudelaire's work superficially, inaccurately and too lite­rally, making them accomplices in the 'burial' of everything associated with 'old' values. Therefore, as a poetic image, Baudelaire's 'flowers of evil' align with the explored 'imago' methodology as they generate multiple interpretive chains representing independent acts of creativity.

This paper is the first attempt to interpret the visual 'construemes' by the constructivist poet Alexei N. Chicherin, published in the anthology Mena vsekh (Moscow, 1924). 'Const­rue­mes' can be considered the most enigmatic artefacts of the Russian avant-garde. Although 'construemes' can be easily confused with meaningless visual zaum ('the transra­tio­nal'), Chicherin's actions and the very nature of his personality prevent one from inter­preting 'con­struemes' as actionist endeavours to scandalise or a 'play on nonsense'. Analysis of the poet's treatise Kan-Fun (Moscow, 1926), which required finding the key to deciphering the 'const­ruemes', reveals the positivist nature of Chicherin's visual-phonological exercises. In the trea­tise, the poet argues for the primacy of the eye and vision. He illustrates synthetic 'signs' or 'pictograms' with the quotidian example of propaganda posters, capable of influen­cing mil­lions more effectively than words alone. The study emphasises the enigmatic nature of the titles of Chicherin's books, the Nie­tzschean subtexts of his self-presentation, encrypted allusions to the esoteric and magical tra­dition of the Tarot, and religious symbolism. Sixteen illustrations help understand Chi­che­rin's logic behind the creation of his four 'construemes', including the most mysterious com­position called 'Raman' ('the shortest Kan-Fun Novel in the world'). The structure of this text synthesises the verbal, visual-graphic, acoustic (phonological symbols) and musical (notes) levels. The article also examines Chicherin's proven techniques: the appropriation of the sacred dimension and self-presentation as an actor possessing genuine knowledge and ca­pable of competing alone with the entire literary environment.

El presente artículo se propone cotejar dos lecturas antimodernas de Platón y la tradición platónica, la de Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) y la de Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) que resultan a la vez complementarias e inversas. Estas apropiaciones, que abren y cierran el siglo XIX, expresan el auge y el declive del “platonismo romántico”. De Maistre recurre intensamente a los diálogos de Platón, a los que cita, comenta, traduce y reescribe, así como a diversos textos del neoplatonismo antiguo y de la tradición platónica moderna. Por su parte los textos de Huysmans, en particular À rebours (1884), la novela más representativa de la sensibilidad decadente, expresa la crisis de ese platonismo romántico, tal como se advierte en cuestiones tales como el nihilismo, el recurso a la figura del simulacro y el replanteo del tópico del andrógino. El platonismo y su crisis interrogan la temporalidad histórica, desde la aceleración revolucionaria hasta la decadencia finisecular.

This paper compares two anti-modern readings of Plato and the Platonic tradition, both complementary and opposite, that of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and that of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). These appropriations, which respectively open and closes the nineteenth century, express the rise and decline of the "romantic Platonism." De Maistre quotes, comments on, translates and rewrites Plato's dialogues, as well as various texts from the ancient Neoplatonism and the modern Platonic tradition. On the other hand, Huysmans's texts, particularly À rebours (1884), the most representative novel of decadent aesthetics, express the crisis of romantic Platonism, as shown by its nihilism, the figure of the simulacrum and the modification of the androgynous topic. Thus, Platonism and its crisis explore historical temporality, from revolutionary acceleration to fin-de-siècle decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the inventory as a literary strategy in the nineteenth-century French novels Bouvard et Pécuchet by Flaubert (1881) and À rebours by Huysmans (1884). We argue that the authors adopt the inventory process to determine the main characters’ identities in the lack of a proper plot line. For the petty-bourgeois Bouvard-Pécuchet couple, life is a plotless repetition of something ever new to do; for the sophisticated aesthete des Esseintes, it is a plotless repetition of what he wants to go on being. In comparing the two texts, we establish a reversal symmetry between depth and surface. Des Esseintes’ inventories (flowers, perfumes, books, gemstones) are presented as solid and deeply meditated, their narrative status relating to categories like mastering, intimacy, and distillation. In contrast, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s inventories sound precarious and spontaneous, relating to categories like naivety, extraneity, and cluttering. The same reversal symmetry is also found when comparing the ending of the two novels when their protagonists’ fates are decided. Taking inventories as a critical part of the social negative of the era, the two novels represent the pathological poles of the same generational malaise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Le dérèglement dans À rebours de Huysmans et Madame Gervaisais des frères Goncourt doit être rapproché du sentiment de décadence, prégnant en Europe occidentale à la fin du XIXe siècle. Le duc des Esseintes et Mme Gervaisais subissent les désordres d’un monde disharmonieux, désordres auxquels la musique participe. Sa présence au coeur des romans sous forme d’ekphrasis témoigne à la fois d’une fascination pour cet art parfois jugé supérieur, et d’une compétition entre les arts.

The essay will focus on Degas as ‘cruel’ painter, draftsman and sculptor of ballet dancers. In this essay, the Degas’s poetics, philosophy, aesthetic of dance are dealt with as a specific stage of European thought on art and poetry. In particular, they are analysed in the light of the theories developed in Europe in the second half of 19th century and in the first half of 20th century in relation with the art criticism, philosophy, literary criticism, visual thought. Degas was not a painter alone, but a sculptor, photographer, and poet. Late in his career, Degas turned to poetry as a new language for his artistic expression. Degas valued a multi-faceted form of art, as expression of the doctrine of Synaesthesia, which has been carefully examined and characterised from several vantage points. The creative efforts of the artist were the result of a conscious effort to search for means to revolutionise the philosophical-literary, the figurative thinking that dominated about classical dance. The essay deals with this specific aspect of Degas’s thought about dance, which can be also considered as medium of communication with social and political implications.

Au XIXᵉ siècle en France, les monstres sont plus que visibles ; ils occupent le devant de la scène. Ils sont présents dans des domaines aussi divers que la science (avec la tératologie —la première “science” des monstres), la politique, où se dessinent des évènements “monstrueux” signalant une rupture de la norme, et la foire, où les spectateurs paient pour voir des formes grotesques. En prenant les exemples de deux œuvres littéraires : Notre Dame de Paris (1831) de Victor Hugo et A rebours (1889) de Joris-Karl Huysmans, nous examinerons comment la production à grande échelle des monstres a cependant pour résultat la banalisation du monstre comme figure extraordinaire. Nous soutiendrons qu’il existe une évolution du “monstre-humain” romantique au “monstre-objet” décadent qui reflète la monstruosité morale du créateur lui-même : une métamorphose du visible à l’invisible. Cette notion prend racine dans le contexte d’une notion évolutive de la construction philosophique nature/artifice où s’inscrivent d’importantes avancées technologiques, telles que les machines-outils (destinées à construire les pièces de machines). Cela marque un changement dans les perceptions des rôles de l’homme et de la nature dans le champ de création. Le monstre évolue d’un être extraordinaire (semblable aux créatures de la foire) à un objet banal, facile à reproduire, qui reflète les peurs de la production de masse dans une société industrielle. Enfin, en abordant les enjeux de la monstruosité et de la visibilité, nous montrerons comment le monstre devient visible même dans la forme du texte littéraire du XIXᵉ siècle, avec la naissance d’un roman-monstre.

Par le biais du comité hollando-scandinave et de ses principaux chefs, le Bureau socialiste international tenta de couper l’herbe sous le pied des zimmerwaldiens et des amis de Lénine en organisant une grande conférence internationale de paix à Stockholm, où il espérait ranimer les discussions entre les socialistes des deux camps belligérants. Mais ce projet, dont le but était clairement antibolchevique, échoua du fait de la concurrence du soviet de Petrograd, de la mauvaise volonté des deux camps, de l’opposition animée par les tenants de la ligne révolutionnaire et du refus des gouvernements en guerre de délivrer des passeports. La révolution d’Octobre et les négociations de Brest-Litovsk sonnèrent le glas de cette tentative de marginaliser la gauche révolutionnaire. Mais elles marquèrent également l’éclatement définitif du mouvement de Zimmerwald.

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission has been analysed as a novel of decadence in this paper. Referring to the works of Michel Winock, François Livi and Michel Onfray, it has been found that a decadent novel can be associated not only with the works of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Pierre Loűys, Jean Lorrain and others produced at the end of the 19th century but also at subsequent periods. Such characteristics of decadent writing as the threat of catastrophe, fundamental changes in society, nostalgia can be found in the analysed novel. François, the main character of the novel, an expert on Huysmans and a professor at Sorbonne University, supports Huysmans’ ideas to some extent trying to find the link between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century by comparing processes in society. Huysmans sought an ideal in the Middle Ages, while François travels to Rocamadour, famous for the statue of the Black Madonna, with a hope to find a spiritual revelation but becomes aware that the world of the past has gone forever. Changes in society made Huysmans leave the monastery, similarly, François gets frustrated as he loses his job when the Muslim Fraternity comes into power. Using the dystopian genre, Houellebecq depicts unbelievable changes in society – the new government proclaims Islam an official religion of France. Society is governed by new rules, the authority is concerned about two things – demography and education. Those, who refuse to convert to Islam, lose their jobs. Changes in society are even linked with geopolitical changes. Meanwhile Houellebecq reveals significant differences between the decadence of the end of the 19th and of the 21st century. Huysmans’ decadence results in neuroses, a desire to seal himself off from the world in alcohol, drugs, etc., to surround himself with works of art, while François in Submission enjoys erotic pleasures, gradually becomes an alcoholic, he does not suffer like Huysmans’ protagonist Des Esseintes. It can be stated that Submission is a decadent novel only at thematic level since aesthetic values, characteristic of the decadence of the 19th century, are left in the background. The only justification of François is that he speaks about his conversion to Islam hypothetically, it shows that he has not made up his mind to take this step.

En prenant appui sur le premier roman publié par Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904), on envisagera la reconfiguration du protagoniste qu’opère la fiction pirandellienne, dans un itinéraire qui va de la déperdition à une forme de libération paradoxale, qui n’est pas sans rapport avec l’évidement du personnage qu’initie le roman flaubertien.

This article attempts to reconstruct the key aspects of the criticism of literary naturalism present in J. K. Huysmans' 1891 novel Là-Bas. The analysis is based on the opening dialogues of the characters and the following aesthetic considerations which appear to express not only the creative and spiritual transformation of the author himself, but also the ambience of anti-positivist turn of fin de siècle which, entering modernity, tries to free itself from the reductionist frames of naturalism and reveals an increasing interest towards the unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Dans l’œuvre huysmansienne, en particulier celle de la transition entre sa phase décadente, marquée par Là-bas (1891), et la période du naturalisme mystique, dont le fruit le plus mûr reste La Cathédrale (1898), il est possible de retracer la transformation complète et profonde du traitement de la vanitas. Le présent article propose une analyse de trois étapes de cette évolution. Il part de la vanitas macabre de Là-bas, proche de l’esthétique de Félicien Rops, auquel Huysmans s’intéresse dans les années 1880, et du motif de la tentation de saint Antoine dans les arts de la fin du Moyen-Âge et du début de Renaissance. Ensuite, il examine l’approche huysmansienne à la Crucifixion de Cassel et au retable d’Issenheim de Matthias Grünewald, qui constitue un passage entre l’esthétique de la danse macabre et celle du naturalisme mystique. Finalement, il étudie le legs des ekphraseis de Grünewald : l’apologie de la vie et un regard nouveau sur la vanitas dans La Cathédrale.

Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission, tells the story of a muslim’s party’s victory at the presidential elections in France. In the midst of the fear-laden solidarity that followed the events at Charlie Hebdo, the novel could be read as a confirmation of the danger Islam represents for the French republic. But in the story narrated by its hero François, the state’s, and later his, conversion to Islam are seen as positive events, that set up a social structure where their repressed desires can be openly pursued. By showing that the imagined, reified Islam which France fears, turns out to be a way of affirming and legitimizing its deepest desires, Houellebecq shows that far from being the radical alterity it is often depicted to be when seen through the lens of terrorism, Islam, as caricatured by islamophobia, is the next step in France’s civilisational development.

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When urbanite Durtal, J.-K. Huysmans's alter ego, takes a spiritual retreat in a Trappist monastery, he spends a significant amount of time next to a pond that mirrors the imposing crucifix that stands in front of the monastery. This pond proves to be an apt metaphor for the different stages of Durtal's spiritual life: whereas the pond's drab water, full of decomposing leaves resembles the state of his soul before his confession, he also considers its stagnant water a representation of the blessings of contemplative life in the monastery. The natural site is also where Durtal has supernatural, mystical experiences: it is on the edge of the cruciform pond that Durtal lives a ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and next to the larger pond where he feels an overwhelming sense of the illuminating presence of God. However, these passages also show Huysmans's struggles with language and style when describing a supernatural encounter, and his efforts to translate his supranaturalist aesthetics into language. This paper examines the pond as a site of spiritual experience, and argues that it represents the impossibility of writing spiritual experience. It analyzes the literary portrayal of the ineffable, and explores the limits of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Si le terme de métadiscours est devenu usuel depuis Harris (1959), son utilisation au sein d’œuvres littéraires peut être tracée avec davantage d’ancienneté. La réflexion sur le travail de l’écrivain, grâce à l’utilisation du métadiscours au sein d’œuvres fictionnelles, connaît un développement particulièrement soutenu à la fin du XIXème siècle. Parmi les auteurs qui trouvent dans le métadiscours un moyen de renouveler le genre romanesque, Huysmans constitue sans nul doute l’un plus novateurs en la matière. Au-delà de ses nombreuses insertions critiques dans À Rebours, c’est dans l’incipit de Là-bas que Huysmans semble faire culminer son désir de voir s’étendre les limites du roman par l’insertion d’un métadiscours dont les objectifs vont au-delà d’une remise en cause de l’ « impasse du naturalisme ». Dès lors, le métadiscours étend ses possibilités, il gagne en autonomie et en profondeur pour devenir tout à la fois objet et moteur de l’intrigue. L’art du roman doit alors s’entendre aussi comme un art sur le roman.

En el poema “La música”, Baudelaire procede de la sensación bruta al terreno moral. En el célebre soneto “Correspondances” el camino es inverso: de lo espiritual (1er cuarteto) a lo material (2.º cuarteto) para mezclar ambos en los dos tercetos (música coral de elevaciones sensuales). El poema “Harmonie du soir” de Baudelaire también mezcla moral, religión y sensación. Motivados por este poema, poetas como Verlaine y Rimbaud escriben los suyos sobre la aleación de los sentidos, a menudo con un matiz moral. Puede pensarse que no ocurre lo mismo con sus sucesores; en especial, Huysmans propone un contraejemplo en À rebours, donde el excéntrico conde des Esseintes elabora artefactos para el disfrute de los sentidos pero que de ningún modo rebasan el nivel sensorial.

The antithesis of the iconic Seine, the vile and polluted Bièvre River was part of the industrial landscape of pre-Haussmannian Paris. By 1875, the Bièvre was so unsanitary that the city took measures to bury it underground. At the end of the century, J.-K. Huysmans, who had detailed his strolls around the Bièvre in writing, ruptured with the Naturalist school. It seems counter-intuitive to label Huysmans, an author renowned neither for nature writing nor poetry, as an 'eco-poet'. However, his prose poems 'La Rive gauche' (1874) and 'La Bièvre' (1880; 1890) express awareness of environmental decline. In my analysis of these poems using contemporary ecocriticism, I argue that the river's disappearance coincides with the birth of the Decadent movement, which has an ecological underpinning. In its transition from urban waterway to underground sewer, the Bièvre became part of a new aesthetic that sought to both bury and reconstruct the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J.-K. Huysmans' decadent hero feels endangered in the world that surrounds him, is obsessed by time that flows by and causes inevitable physical degradation. he however struggles against time and space, turning his life into work of art. Guided by his imagination he changes the reality around him and runs away from time hiding in a world of his own, created in defense from the mundane. For some Against the Grain is only a novel that consists of loosely connected episodes, for others it is a perfect example of playing with time and space directed by a decadent aesthete. For the needs of his hero, huysmans prepared a perfect arena: a reigned hermitage in Fontenay-aux-Roses, its seclusion making it possible for the hero to carry out all his experiments planned. The novel is an account of events happening in internal space: aesthetic sensations, dreams, recollections, reminiscence, a demiurge stricken with neurosis.

A literary criticism of the book "Le Temps retrouvé" by Marcel Proust is presented. Topics discussed include his work which has been misunderstood for the piece of embroidery and stiches; reference of a book "A Passage to India" by E. M. Forster; and his views on the relationship between human beings and automatism.

Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, Soumission, tells the story of a muslim's party's victory at the presidential elections in France. In the midst of the fear-laden solidarity that followed the events at Charlie Hebdo, the novel could be read as a confirmation of the danger Islam represents for the French republic. But in the story narrated by its hero François, the state's, and later his, conversion to Islam are seen as positive events, that set up a social structure where their repressed desires can be openly pursued. By showing that the imagined, reified Islam which France fears, turns out to be a way of affirming and legitimizing its deepest desires, Houellebecq shows that far from being the radical alterity it is often depicted to be when seen through the lens of terrorism, Islam, as caricatured by islamophobia, is the next step in France's civilisational development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The temptation of decadence persists in the critical tendency to diagnose authors and their works, to trace out genealogies of an infamous familial line, from Charles Baudelaire to Joris-Karl Huysmans. This study proposes an alternative approach to defining decadence by its descent, assembling a discursive inheritance of portraits of the artist: descriptions of the artist-as-subject that serve as critical representations of aesthetic ideas. By examining how portraits of the artist function in Baudelaire's art criticism, in the formulations of his posthumous critics, and in Huysmans's compendious novel, I will trace out an unacknowledged continuity from the decadence of aesthetics to the aesthetics of decadence. Decadence, as it descends from Baudelaire through portraits of the artist, originates in the problem of subjectivity in aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a provoking passage in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov shows, the (perfidious) killing of children represents a distressing topic in the context of the aesthetics of evil. Its abhorrent character cannot be dissolved through literary stylization. In Gustave Flaubertʼs novel Salammbô (1862) the Carthaginian infant sacrifice to Moloch, together with Hamilcar's deception concerning his own son, marks an aesthetically suggestive extreme point in a nihilistic sequence of images of cruelty. In comparison to that, the motif of ritual perversion seems even to be intensified in the representation of the late medieval Satanist and child killer Gilles de Rais in J.-K. Huysmansʼ Là-Bas (1891), a novel which impressed, for example, Luis Buñuel who planned a film version. But Gilles de Rais, whom Durtal, Huysman's hero and alter ego, describes as a 'virtuose en douleurs et en meurtres', turns into a penitent imploring salvation. Thus Huysmans tries to overcome a closed aestheticism by his recourse to (medieval) Christian spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this article is to situate J.-K. Huysmans' En ménage in his work as a whole and more generally in the tradition of the "roman d'art" in 19th Century French literature. "Roman d'art" works, such as the Goncourt brothers' Manette Salomon or Zola's OEuvre, often focus on the incompatibility of the artist's creative force and his love for a woman. Even if a woman appears as a muse at first, she often becomes an obstacle to the vocation of the artist. Even though the artist is very important in Huysmans' novels, he does not directly treat the opposition between love and creation. If a woman brings problems, it is not because of her influence on the creativity of the artist, but due to a particular theme developed by Huysmans: how to assure material comfort without being disturbed by 21 Ibid., p. 474. Fukuda, La représentation de l'artiste chez J.-K.Huysmans Nordlit 28, 2011 62 female presence? This problem is exaggerated by the artistic profession, which involves working at home. Not being capable of doing housework, Huysmans' hero cannot live totally alone. André, the hero of En ménage, leaves his wife who has been unfaithful to begin a single life with a housemaid. In his relationships with his wife, his housemaid and his lover, all he worries about is his work environment. Nevertheless, he ends up creating nothing, not because of a woman, but because of his own mediocrity and laziness. In this "roman d'art" without a muse, André's character is typical of Huysmans' comical but harsh realism, which subverts the myth of the artist torn between love and creation.

In literature, the garden is part of a dual process of configuring or reconfiguring the world. Naturally, the concrete garden acts as a representation of places, spaces and plants. In texts, however, we have the added dimension of the garden itself being represented by language. This literary motif historically highlights the themes of eroticism and of the relationship between the individual and his collectivity. Thus, the classical and romantic garden depicts the positive fusion between man and a certain nature. However, in the late 19th century, there is an inversion of this rhetoric: the decadent garden favours the cultural or even the artificial pole in such an extreme way that nature becomes deleterious and lethal. Moreover, the garden is no longer a narrative motif serving only the development of a story and the construction of characters; its linguistic components become essential. It thus becomes an autonomized æsthetic object, capable of creating new meanings.

Through the application of Charles Mauron’s psychocritical method, we have searched which elements of Huysmans’ Croquis parisiens were the first formulation of some “obsessif personal myths”, continued in later novels: from En ménage (1881) until the last of Durtal’s cycle L’oblat (1903). The connections we have found between the elements of these Croquis and the posterior work of Huysmans’ are: the vocational singleman who has the leading role (André Jayant, des Esseintes or Durtal), the guilty sexuality of Huysmans’ “fictional heteronymous”, the usual presence of Pierrot and the castration anxiety he produces, the femmes fatales and/or fantastic in the imagination of the author, the powerful and productif Huysmans’ onyrism, and, at last, the common use of metaphors of liquid origin. All of them are present in germ, as a first formulation, in these Croquis, what shows the seminal importance of this collection of short stories.

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J.-K. Huysmans’ decadent hero feels endangered in the world that surrounds him, is obsessed by time that flows by and causes inevitable physical degradation. He however struggles against time and space, turning his life into work of art. Guided by his imagination he changes the reality around him and runs away from time hiding in a world of his own, created in defense from the mundane. For some Against the Grain is only a novel that consists of loosely connected episodes, for others it is a perfect example of playing with time and space directed by a decadent aesthete. For the needs of his hero, Huysmans prepared a perfect arena: a reigned hermitage in Fontenay-aux-Roses, its seclusion making it possible for the hero to carry out all his experiments planned. The novel is an account of events happening in internal space: aesthetic sensations, dreams, recollections, reminiscence, a demiurge stricken with neurosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Image & Narrative is the property of Image & Narrative and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This chapter considers a neurological approach to analyzing the decadent and fantastic fictions of the French fin-de-siècle. It focuses on three texts whose depictions of male nervosism were influenced by Charles Baudelaire's biography of Edgar Allan Poe and by contemporary medical discourses, including those of Jean-Martin Charcot and George Miller Beard: Joris-Karl Huysmans' À Rebours (1884), Jules Lermina's Les Fous (1885), and Guy de Maupassant's Le Horlà (1885-1887). Although these authors were philosophically antipositivist and antimaterialist, they used scientific theories of neurasthenia, neurodegeneration, and visual hallucination to probe the frontiers between body and spirit, the known and the unknowable., (© 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)