 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) - original name Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans |
|
French writer and art critic, who was first associated with Émile Zola and the naturalist group and then joined the French Decadent Movement. J.-K. Huysmans' conversion through Satanism to Catholicism, from obsession with bizarre sensations to the search of spiritual life, can be followed in such works as À Rebours (1884, Against the Grain), Là-Bas (1891, La Bas), and La Cathédrale (1898, The Cathedral). Indeed, each several liquor corresponded, so he held, in taste with the sound of a particular instrument. Dry curaçao, for instance, was like the clarinet with its shrill, velvet note; kümmel like the oboe, whose timber is sonorous and nasal; crème de menthe and anisette like the flute, and one and the same time sweet and poignant, whining and soft. Then, to complete the orchestra, comes kirsch, blowing a wild trumpet blast; gin and whisky, deafening the palate with their harsh outbursts of cornets and trombones; liqueur brandy, blaring with the overwhelming crash of the tubas, while the thunder peals of the cymbals and the big drum, beaten might and main, are reproduced in the mouth by the rakis of Chios and the mastics. (from Against the Grain (A Rebours), with an introduction by Havelock Ellis, Dover Publications, 1969, pp. 44-45) Joris-Karl
Huysmans was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans in
Paris of mixed parentage. On his father's side he was of Dutch descent;
his mother, Elisabeth-Malvina Badin, was a French. After Huysmans'
father died, Elisabeth-Malvina married Jules Og, a Protestant
businessman. The early loss of his father remained a traumatic
childhood experience for Huysmans. He faithfully kept some of his
painting – his father had been a commercial artist. Huysmans studied at
the Lycee Saint-Louis, receiving in 1866 his baccalaureate. At the age
of twenty, Huysmans obtained a post at the Ministry of the Interior;
there he remained for 32 year, combining writing with work. Huysmans' first book, Le drageoir aux épices (1874, A Dish of Spices), was a collection of prose poems in the manner of Charles Baudelaire. When it was rejected by several publishers, he finally printed it at his own expense under the name Joris-Karl Huysmans. Later he invented the famous initials "J.-K.". The book received attention of major writers, including Emile Zola, and was followed by a number of naturalistic novels, such as Marthe (1876), Les soeurs Vatard (1879), and En ménage (1881). During the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Huysmans served in the army. The novella Sac au dos (1880), based on his experiences from this period, was published in Les Soirées de Médan with other war stories written by members of Zola's 'Médan' group. Early in 1877 Huysmans met Zola, who had admired the former's review of his L'Assommoir
(The Gin Palace). Huysmans shared Zola's idea that a work of art is a
"corner of nature seen through a temperament." Huysmans started to
publish art critics in the 1870s and defend such Symbolist painters as
Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. He was the Paris correspondent of the journal L'Art moderne
until 1886. "One admires his efforts," he said of Puvis de Chavannes's
famous painting 'Jeunes Filles au Bord de la Mer' (Young Girls by the
Sea), "one would like to praise them, and then—one cannot; in what
country, one wonders, do these chlorotic young women live who are here
combing their hair with a saw cut out of flint. Where, in what city, in
what country do these pale faces exist, that have not even the hectic
flush of phthisis in their cheek?" (Puvis de Chavannes, with a biographical and critical study by André Michel, William Heinemann, 1912, p. 49) For Moreau and Huysmans, the
sensual and innocent Salome became the embodiment of feminity. Salome
was the obsessional subject matter of Moreau's paintings, and Huysmans
used them in a scene in A Rebours. Michel Houellebecq has argued in the novel Submission
(2015) that although Huysmans was an advocate of impressionism, the
intimate atmosphere of his novels bore more resemblance with the much
older pictorial tradition of the Dutch masters. With A Rebours Huysmans turned his back to naturalism, flirting with "decadent" mentality. Oscar Wilde read the work on his honeymoon in Paris. In The Picture of Dorian Gray he wrote: "The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure and once, full of argot and archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterises the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes. . . . The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain." (Ibid., Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1913, p. 141) A Rebours was the "poisonous" yellow book to which Wilde's Dorian Gray refers, and whose protagonist Dorian imitates. A young Guatemalan diplomat and writer, Enrique Gomez Carillo, whom Wilde befriended on this trip, recalled that he was "obsessed by the spirit of Salome." In the blackly comic story a wealthy aesthete, the Duc Jean des Esseintes, experiments with exotic pleasures, mostly erotic. He lives in his house as in a monastery and dreams of the progress of syphilis down the ages. Finally he is welcomed into the embrace of a femme fatale, whose genitalia are made in the image of a Venus flytrap. Des Esseintes seals himself off from the world – he is afraid of being disappointed by reality, and surrounds himself with works of art. To refine his aesthetic sensibility, he has trained himself as an expert in the science of perfumes. "It was not, in fact, he argued, more abnormal than an art should exist of disengaging edoriferous fluids than that other arts should whose function is to set up sonorous waves to strike the ear or variously coloured rays to impinge on the retina of the eyes . . . " (Ibid., p. 106) Moreover, Des Esseintes has the shell of his turtle gilded and decorated with jewels. "Des Essentes stood gazing at the turtle where it lay huddled together in one corner of the dining-room, flashing fire in the dim half light." (Ibid., p. 43) However, Huysmans could not fully accept his protagonist's
eccentricities because he makes Des Esseintes wonder, whether the only
salvation might not be in a return to faith. "At the time when I was
writing Against Nature," he said later, "there must undoubtedly
have been a shifting of the soil, a drilling of the ground, to put in
the foundations, of which I was not conscious. God was digging holes to
lay his wires, and he worked only in the dark reaches of the soul, in
the night." ('Appendix', in Against Nature,
translated by Margraret Mauldon, edited and with an introduction and
notes by Nicholas White, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 196) The work had a tremendous impact in decadent circles, but
also the Catholic novelist Barbey d'Aurevilly paid attention to it, comparing the novel to Baulelaire's Flowers of Evil. Arnold Hauser sees its central character as the prototype of all Dorian Grays and "the pampered 'decadent'." (The Social History of Art: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age: Volume Four, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 173-175) Brian R. Banks traced in The Image of Huysmans (1990) the origins of this modern hero as "modelled partly on Folantin from Downstreamas
his first self-character, on King Ludwig II of Bavaria (who was
allegedly the most happy when an artifical indoor forest where
mechanical lizards crawled through the painted foliage), partly also on
Edmond de Goncourt, the dandy Barbey D'Aurevilly, and
Baudelaire, and on the more commonly cited Comte Robert de
Montesquiou". (Ibid., p. 94) In his later fiction Huysmans recorded the spiritual quest of a man named Durtal,
a writer, his fictional alter ego. Là-Bas
was a highly stylized novel of black magic practiced in contemporary
Paris. This work, in which Huysmans shows no enthusiasm for the modern
life, was written shortly before his conversion to Catholism. In the story Durtal decides to write a biography of Gilles des
Rais (1404-1440), the French marshal, who was accused of Satanism and
was briefly associated with Joan of Arc. Durtal is taken to a Black
Mass, but he finds the experience disappointing. During his flirtation
with Satanism, Durtal has an affair with Hyacinthe Chantelouve, a
member of the active Satanist Canon Docre. A pious bell-ringer, Louis
Carhaix, aids Durtal in his reserch, but the disillusioned aesthete
remains unable to embrace Carhaix's simple faith. Durtal feels that
overanalyzation of his faith and feelings has left him without values.
For him, history is a lie, but this do not prevented him from devoting
himself to the study of des Rais. Là-Bas was accepted at face value by many readers. The book became a key work promoting the sensational mythology of the Black Mass. Durtal's historical researches had much in common with Jules Michelet's book La Sorcière (1862), a study about the witch-hunts and sorcery trials of the Middle Ages. It is possible that Huysmans never saw a Black Mass, although some of the occultists of the fin-de-siècle Paris are mentioned in the text. Among Huysmans' friends was the Abbé Joseph Boullan (1824-1893), who served as the model for Dr Johannès. He is portrayed as a priest who practises magic to counter Satanism. Willian Beckford's (1760-1844) autobiographical fantasy Vatek offered another source of influence. Composed in the style of an Arabin Tale, this novel portrayed a licentious caliph, absorbed in occult pursuits and sensual pleasures. At the end he enters a hell, ruled by the Demon named Eblis. The additional 'Episodes' intended for the book contained homosexual tales. Huysmans remained unwed throughout his life. He maintained that he
was not a "true homosexual". In a letter to André Raffalovich, writer of the treatise Uranisme et Unisexualité
(1896), he said: "Your letter and your book bring back to mind some
horrifying evenings I once spent in the sodomite world, to which I was
introduced by a talented young man whose perversities are common
knowledge." (The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick, Clarendon Press, 1955, p. 82) In the early 1890s, Huysmans underwent the crisis that led
to his conversion and started his religious or mystical phase. He was
readmitted in 1892 into the Catholic church. Huysmans went in 1895 to
the Trappist monastery of Issigny to spent there a week. En route (1895) expressed the author's longing for monastic life and his struggle with his disgust of the world. La Cathédrale,
both an account of a conversion and a detailed examination
of medieval art, marked Huysmans' full acceptance of Roman Catholicism.
He once said, "art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness." After resigning his post at the Ministry, Huysmans retired to Liguge in Poitou, where he lived two years as a Benedictine oblate. When the monks were expelled, he returned to Paris. Huysmans was one of the founders of the Goncourt Academy, and in 1900 he was elected its president. Huysmans died of cancer of the mouth on May 12, 1907 – he had complained of toothache for years "Like many another man of letters, Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia," said Havelock Ellis who knew the author, "but no novelist has described so persistently and so poignantly the pangs of toothache or the miseries of maux d'estomac, a curious proof of the peculiarly personal character of Huysman's work throughout." ('Introduction' by Havelock Ellis, Against the Grain (A Rebours), 1969, p. viii) Eventually it was diagnosed that he had incurable cancer. Most of his life Huysmans had been a hypochondriac, but his final sufferings Huysmans took with Christian resignation. During the last days he was afflicted with an affection of the eyes and it became necessary to sew his eyelids shut. "Jean Karl Loris Huysmans—who was a greater artist than Zola—left the cathedrals and highways of this world in 1907, and I do not suppose that once in any year you will hear his name mentioned where people talk of books." (The March of Literature: From Confucius' Day to Our Own by Ford Madox Ford, Dalkey Archive Press, 1994, p. 847) Huysmans' intellectual life reflected the successive phases of the French literary history in the late 19th-century. The Catholic church regards him as one of its apologists. For further reading: L'estetique de Huysmans by Helen Trudgian (1934); The Life of Joris Karl Huysmans by Robert Baldick (1955); The First Decadent by James Laver (1955); Des Ténèbres à la lumière: Étapes de la pensée mystique de J.-K. Huysmans by Maurice M. Belval (1968); Joris-Karl Huysmans by George Ross Ridge (1968); Reality And Illusion In The Novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans by Ruth Antosh (1986); Joris Karl Huysmans: Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic by Annette Kahn (1987); The Image of Huysmans by Brian R. Banks (1990); Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Fin-De-Siecle Novel by Christopher Lloyd (1991); The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Ziegler (2004); Submission by Michel Houellebecg (2015); Immediacy and Meaning: J.K. Huysmans and the Immemorial Origin of Metaphysics by Caitlin Smith Gilson (2017); La critique d'art de Joris-Karl Huysmans: esthétique, poétique, idéologie by Aude Jeannerod (2020); Sex Work, Text Work: Mapping Prostitution in the Nineteenth-century French Novel by Jessica Tanner (2023) Selected works:
|
