À rebours
1884
- aesthetics
- fiction
- fiction, general
- translations from french
- translations into english
- fiction in english
- french fiction
- classic literature
- french translations
- continental european fiction (fictional works by one author)
The story
À rebours (French pronunciation: [a ʁ(ə).buʁ]; translated Against Nature or Against the Grain) is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthetic sensory experiences. 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, inspiring works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In his preface for the 1903 publication of the novel, Huysmans wrote that he had the idea to portray a man "soaring upwards into dream, seeking refuge in illusions of extravagant fantasy, living alone, far from his century, among memories of more congenial times, of less base surroundings ... each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant." (Wikipedia)
What it’s like
Dense, jewel-toned prose that moves like a slow walk through a museum after closing: every sentence stops to name a colour, a scent, a texture, a tapestry, a liqueur, and lingers there. The mood is gilded melancholy and airless refinement, a sickroom perfumed with orchids and incense, with the grey indifference of Paris lying just beyond the shuttered windows. Its rhythm is deliberately static, long chapters of catalogue and reverie with almost no movement, so the pleasure lies in the sentences themselves rather than in any forward pull. Sensation is hyperacute and often synaesthetic: sounds become colours, food becomes architecture, and a single hothouse flower can absorb a page. Emotionally it is cool, ironic, and quietly despairing, with a protagonist who is fastidious, bored, and ailing, withdrawing from ordinary society into a self-made dream. Intensity is low in physical terms, with no action set-pieces, though its obsessions verge on the morbid and the sexual remains oblique. Best for slow reading on a rainy afternoon or late at night, for readers who love ornate, sensory prose, fin-de-siècle decadence, and the pleasure of language used as a luxury object.
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