The Pervert, the Aesthete, and the Novelist in Huysmans's À rebours

• Published in: Romance studies : a journal of the University of Wales Vol. 25; no. 3; pp. 199 - 209
• Main Author: Ziegler, Robert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.07.2007
• ISSN: 0263-9904; 1745-8153
• DOI: 10.1179/174581507x209588

In creating the notorious character of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, J.-K. Huysmans illustrates the Decadents' parallel interests in aestheticism and deviance. Modelled on recent psychoanalytic studies of creativity and perversion, this essay explores what motivates des Esseintes's withdrawal from an outside world of right action and his retreat into a sanctuary of self-satisfied ornamentalism. Like the pervert, the Decadent rejects the need to abandon pleasure for reality, and pretends to ignore the paternal values of reason and discipline. Disguised as the bibelots with which he furnishes his retreat, he lives an atemporal existence in which there is no gap between desire and fulfilment. For des Esseintes, the impulse toward aestheticism becomes all the more urgent because of the actual worthlessness of the objects he idealizes. With the failure of des Esseintes's experiments in aestheticism as perversion, Huysmans seems to distance himself from Decadence as pathology. Whereas des Esseintes gilds, binds, upholsters, and decorates, producing nothing, Huysmans writes his book, making something tangible and real. Paradoxically, the novel viewed as the epitome of Decadent art acts as a cure the author administers to overcome the temptation of Decadent aestheticism