Abstract

The French author Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel Against Nature (1884) is notorious for its depiction of anti-social, extravagant life-style, as well as for its highly descriptive style, saturated by details and criss-crossed by a multitude of cultural references. This reading of Huysmans’ novel argues that the depiction of the main character’s attempt to gain existential self-control, by isolating himself from society, forms a phenomenological expression of the way in which the breakthrough of the germ theory of disease contributed to a general feeling of a subjective lack of control in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a manifestation of a wariness of aesthetic influence, the novel’s style mirrors the main character’s relation to society. The style forms a rupture of the aesthetics of naturalism in the novel, by means of which it contributes to the formation of another aesthetic norm—that of modernism.

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