The character of Des Esseintes is partly based on Huysmans himself and the two share many of the same tastes, although Huysmans on his modest civil service salary was hardly able to indulge them to the same extent as his upper-class hero. This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul ( Alone), was to become A rebours. In a letter of November 1882, Huysmans told Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist school of fiction, that he was changing his style of writing and had embarked on a "wild and gloomy fantasy". It scarcely admitted - in theory at least - any exceptions to the rule thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.Huysmans decided to keep certain features of the Naturalist style, such as its use of minutely documented realistic detail, but apply them instead to a portrait of an exceptional individual: the protagonist Des Esseintes. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of A rebours: It was the heyday of Naturalism, but this school, which should have rendered the inestimable service of giving us real characters in precisely described settings, had ended up harping on the same old themes and was treading water. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. His early works had been Naturalist in style, being realistic depictions of the drudgery and squalor of working- and lower-middle-class life in Paris. Background A rebours marked a watershed in Huysmans' career. It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is a plotless novel which concentrates almost entirely on its protagonist, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive dandy, aesthete, armchair traveler and antihero. À rebours (1884) is a novel by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own…" - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde "It was the strangest book he had ever read. This man is called Des Esseintes, and is the last scion of an ancient French ducal title."- Degeneration (1892) by Max Nordau It does not reveal a history, it has no action, but presents itself as a sort of portrayal or biography of a man whose habits, sympathies and antipathies, and ideas on all possible subjects, specially on art and literature, are related to us in great detail. " À rebours can scarcely be called a novel, and Huysmans, in fact, does not call it so. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature."-" The Decadent Movement in Literature" (1893) by Arthur Symons "Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is - especially in regard to things seen - extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. If he did not go as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious maledictions against the Saviour."- À rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans "This condition of soul Barbey d'Aurevilly came very near sharing. "What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently? An overwhelming aversion for the trip, an imperious need of remaining tranquil, seized him with a more and more obvious and stubborn strength."- À rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans As he used to say, Nature has had her day she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments."- À rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans "To tell the truth, artifice was in Des Esseintes' philosophy the distinctive mark of human genius.
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