Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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Illustrating his preference for artifice over nature (a characteristic Decadent theme), Des Esseintes chooses real flowers that apparently imitate artificial ones. During the trial, Wilde's affinity for Huysmans's A Rebours is brought as evidence against his character. Go Mad from the Isolation: Whilst he's not all worried about this happening, des Esseintes' doctor clearly is.

Is it any good, this story about a man pottering about his house, living in his head, his imagination feeding off itself, slowly going mad?To understand and appreciate this book, which by its very nature seems to reject the reader, or perhaps to withdraw from the reader any semblance of the forms of contact and intimacy that are the usual business of one person writing and another person reading the words, is to accept that the process by which we come together in this case is ultimately bizarre.

As the first and most prominent group of authors to subscribe to the tenets, principles and stylistic aesthetic of the genre, it could even be put forth therefore that this book is the rock upon which the abandoned and deconsecrated church of Decadence has been built. Against Nature , in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers. This seam of extremism played itself out via the Symbolist movement and it (arguably) reached its peak in the poetry of Maeterlinck and in the art of (among others) Arnold Bocklin and Ferdinand Hodler. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.

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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. They were hedonists… gambling their fortunes on horses, cards and on all those pleasures dear to hollow men. Des Esseintes cares little for classic French authors like Rabelais, Molière, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, preferring the works of Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Nicole, and Pascal.Reception and influence [ edit ] Title page of the 1926 first complete English translation with the caption "the book that Dorian Gray loved and that inspired Oscar Wilde". The book's plot is said to have dominated the action of Dorian, causing him to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism.

In the end, “whatever he tried, an immense feeling of ennui oppressed him…then his health grew weaker and his nervous system more strained,” until he finally decides to create a sanctuary of intellectual and artistic stimulation off in the suburbs, near enough to Paris to reassure him, but far enough away to isolate him from “a hateful age of undignified boorishness.

Nature has had her day…there’s not a single one of her inventions…that human ingenuity cannot create; no forest…no moonlight that some theatrical scenery flooded with electric light cannot reproduce; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate to perfection; no rock that papier mache cannot be made to look like; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot equal…the moment has come when it’s a case of replacing her, wherever it’s possible to do so, by artifice. He fills his rooms with perfumes and almost suffocates his stupid self, fainting across his window sill and falling ill.