Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism

Abstract

This chapter focuses on J.-K. Huysmans’ contributions to nineteenth-century gothic literature. Contextualising his work as a response to naturalism and its ‘materialism’, the chapter reads in detail the gothic of Huysmans’ decadent period. À rebours [Against Nature] examines the ennui of living at the end of the nineteenth century, and in its arresting dream sequences, allegorises the condition of modernity as a degeneration of the species. In asking whether Christianity can satisfy the subject’s spiritual demands at the fin de siècle, À rebours compares to Là-Bas [The Damned], set in the world of contemporary Satanism. The chapter focuses on Huysmans’ interest in the figure of Gilles de Rais, a monster of the historical Gothic, and his own links to the world of the Parisian occult, before concluding with a brief discussion of La Cathédrale, a novel written after Huysmans’ conversion to Catholicism. This interest in a world ‘beyond’ links Huysmans’ novels of decadent gothic to those chronicling his spiritual conversion.