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  • Huysmans avec Dieu: aise et disgrâce par Jérôme Solal
  • Hannah Scott
Huysmans avec Dieu: aise et disgrâce. Par Jérôme Solal. (Études romantiques et dixneuviémistes, 53.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015. 223 pp.

This book forms the sequel to Jérôme Solal's earlier study in the same series, Huysmans avant Dieu: tableaux de l'exposition, morale de l'élimination (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010), completing his bipartite exploration of Huysmans's literary production: first, his naturalist writing (Solal does not differentiate between Decadence and Naturalism) from 1876 to 1891; then the 'Catholic' texts during and subsequent to Huysmans's religious conversion, from 1892 to 1906. In the present book, Solal examines conversion as a search for meaning through an exploration of space; a search for an ideal, hypothetical place where the individual would at last be at ease and in a state of grace. Solal argues that the protagonists in these post-conversion novels must struggle to overcome the suffering of being divided from God, and the narratives are thus structured around a series of displacements in an endeavour to locate the divine. Each novel in turn presents a central spatial problem. Solal discusses the impossibility of narrating the divine experience at La Salette in Là-haut; the difficulty of finding a natural space which is not threatening or disconcerting in En route; and the impasse of locating the divine in La Cathédrale. He is interested in the challenge of inhabiting at once the earthly and heavenly realms in Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam; the issue of redefining saintliness for modern society in the Esquisse biographique sur Dom Bosco; the struggle to occupy the threshold between the monastic and the secular worlds in L'Oblat; and the problem of fully experiencing the divinity of a location selected by Mary but rendered profane by humanity in Les Foules de Lourdes. Throughout, Solal highlights the conflict between the frustrated convert's compulsion to flee the profane and his eternal return to Paris. The concept of space is also expanded at times to encompass spaces of the body, the mind, ideology, narrative structure, and the parallels between Huysmans's biography and the quest for faith undergone by his characters. Solal's various literal and metaphorical spaces are traced in this book through a series of chapters dedicated to each of Huysmans's Catholic works in chronological order, coupled with a key place ('gouffres', 'La Trappe', 'seuils', 'grotte') or material ('pierre', 'lait', 'toile'). Solal concludes that after many obstacles on the evolution from a , traversing a là-bas, to an ici, Huysmans's protagonists can only foster religious well-being if they also nourish human connections—through charity, goodwill, hospitality—and if they reconnect religion and contemporary existence during the tribulations of secularization. This work is a transitional study between a purely religion-focused approach to Huysmans's work as a [End Page 280] Catholic author and a more literary and cultural outlook, and will no doubt be a useful guide for any scholar wishing to pursue this trajectory further.

Hannah Scott
University of Nottingham
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