La Poétique romanesque de Joris-Karl Huysmans (review)

This densely written volume challenges the prevailing critical highlighting in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s work of the rupture caused by his conversion to Catholicism; it contends that persistent naturalist techniques and themes can be observed throughout his entire œuvre. By extensively examining his literary works, critical writings, and correspondence, the author confronts the convention by which the development of Huysmans’s writings falls into three categories: naturalism, decadence, and mysticism. Instead, she proposes to see it as a process of ‘inclusion’ not ‘exclusion’ (p. 47). Part I finds, from Huysmans’s own intention and awareness, the meticulous research methods of naturalism based on textual materials and evident in the decadent masterpiece À rebours (1884), but claims that decadent/mystic dream narrative, obsession with the past, and uncertainty are equally perceptible in his earlier naturalist works, such as Le Drageoir aux épices (1874). Part II analyses the literary techniques Huysmans self-reflectively employed in search of originality and novelty. It is argued that the naturalist opposition to the romantic novel is observable in practice in his unconventional use of a Preface, which is supposed to lead readers onwards but rather discourages them with pedantic literary or religious arguments, as in Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), and La Cathédrale (1898), while his endings are often circular, with predictable anticlimaxes. Huysmans’s impassioned narrative, seeking to be meticulously truthful to reality, functions to replace melodramatic expectations with the banality and triviality of love affairs and allows dramatic components such as passion, danger, and death to be found only in a form of fantasy. Part III continues to examine the naturalist technique of antidrama, but now from the perspective of characterization. Huysmans’s protagonists are enigmatic, ambivalent, and incompetent, and the absence of heroism becomes excessive, as in such antiromantic heroes as the two unattractive sisters, Désirée and Céline, in Les Sœurs Vatard (1879); a man of no intelligence and personality, Folantin, in À vau-l’eau (1882); the sickly aristocrat Des Esseintes in À rebours; and the hesitant and passive Drutal in the cycle of his four other novels. Part IV examines, from the perspective of his use of time and space, Huysmans’s interiorizing of the naturalist thesis of mimesis to depict a subjective reality whose exteriority serves only to reflect the characters’ inner workings, such as feelings of solitude, superiority, and deviation, together with a quest for serenity and sacredness. Part V concludes that Huysmans’s polyphonic writing functions to create oscillation and ambiguity, which is argued to be his ingenious way of depicting the disorder of his contemporary society. This book is an insightful and comprehensive critique that contributes much to Huysmans studies; it will be useful to those who desire a new critical perspective that goes beyond the conventional categorizations of fin-de-siècle literature.