À rebours

marked a watershed in Huysmans' career. 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. However, by the early 1880s, Huysmans regarded this approach to fiction as a dead end. As he wrote in his preface to the 1903 reissue of :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. 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 Jean des Esseintes. 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". This "fantasy", originally entitled Seul (Alone), was to become . 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. Huysmans biographer Robert Baldick names other models for Des Esseintes: Ludwig II of Bavaria, Edmond de Goncourt, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Francis Poictevin, and Robert de Montesquiou. The most important model, apart from Huysmans himself, was the notorious aristocratic aesthete Montesquiou, who was also the basis for Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Montesquiou's furnishings bear a strong resemblance to those in Des Esseintes's house:In 1883, to his eternal regret, Montesquiou admitted Stéphane Mallarmé [to his home]. It was late at night when the poet was shown over the house, and the only illumination came from a few scattered candelabra; yet in the flickering light Mallarmé observed that the door-bell was in fact a sacring-bell, that one room was furnished as a monastery cell and another as the cabin of a yacht, and that the third contained a Louis Quinze pulpit, three or four cathedral stalls and a strip of altar railing. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably-coloured bindings and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. According to Montesquiou, writing his memoirs many years later, the sight of these marvels left Mallarmé speechless with amazement. 'He went away', records Montesquiou, 'in a state of silent exaltation.... I do not doubt, therefore, that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic, and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali Baba's Cave.' ==Plot summary==

The epigraph is a quotation from Jan van Ruysbroeck ('Ruysbroeck the Admirable'), the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic:I must rejoice beyond the bounds of time ... though the world may shudder at my joy, and in its coarseness know not what I mean. Jean des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society. the tortoise died. Des Esseintes' library includes authors of the nascent Symbolist movement, including Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as the decadent fiction of the unorthodox Catholic writers Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Barbey d'Aurevilly. Among Catholic literature, Des Esseintes expresses attraction for the work of Ernest Hello. Eventually, his late nights and idiosyncratic diet take their toll on his health, requiring him to return to Paris or to forfeit his life. In the last lines of the book, he compares his return to human society to that of a non-believer trying to embrace religion. ==Reception and influence==

loved and that inspired Oscar Wilde". Huysmans predicted his novel would be a failure with the public and critics: "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year—but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to say ..." However, when it appeared in May 1884, the book created a storm of publicity. Though many critics were scandalised, it appealed to a young generation of aesthetes and writers. Richard Ellmann describes the effect of the book in his biography of Oscar Wilde:Whistler rushed to congratulate Huysmans the next day on his 'marvellous' book. Bourget, at that time a close friend of Huysmans as of Wilde, admired it greatly; Paul Valéry called it his 'Bible and his bedside book' and this is what it became for Wilde. He said to the Morning News: 'This last book of Huysmans is one of the best I have ever seen'. It was being reviewed everywhere as the guidebook of decadence. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them. It is widely believed that is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. On the question of Huysmans' novel as an inspiration for The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ellmann writes:Wilde does not name the book but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost, Huysmans's .... To a correspondent he wrote that he had played a 'fantastic variation' upon and some day must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters are deliberately inaccurate. Many works, according to Robert Baldick, "were manifestly inspired by Huysmans' novel — among them Remy de Gourmont's Sixtine, George Moore's A Mere Accident and Mike Fletcher, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome, and The Sphinx". is now considered by some an important step in the formation of gay literature. gained notoriety as an exhibit in the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895. The prosecutor referred to it as a "sodomitical" book. Zola, Huysmans' former mentor, gave the book a lukewarm reception. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own. However, when they met in July, Zola told Huysmans that the book had been a "terrible blow to Naturalism" and accused him of "leading the school astray" and "burning [his] boats with such a novel", claiming that "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume". While he slowly drifted away from the Naturalists, Huysmans won new friends among the Symbolist and Catholic writers whose work he had praised in his novel. Stéphane Mallarmé responded with the tribute "Prose pour Des Esseintes", published in La Revue indépendante on January 1, 1885. This famous poem has been described as "perhaps the most enigmatic of Mallarmé's works". The opening stanza gives some of its flavour:''Hyperbole! de ma mémoireTriomphalement ne sais-tuTe lever, aujourd'hui grimoireDans un livre de fer vêtu...''Hyperbole! Can't you ariseFrom memory, and triumph, growToday a form of conjurationRobed in an iron folio?(Translated by Donald Davie) The Catholic writer Léon Bloy praised the novel, describing Huysmans as "formerly a Naturalist, but now an Idealist capable of the most exalted mysticism, and as far removed from the crapulous Zola as if all the interplanetary spaces had suddenly accumulated between them." In his review, Barbey d'Aurevilly compared Huysmans to Baudelaire, recalling, "After Les Fleurs du mal, I told Baudelaire, 'it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of the pistol and the foot of the Cross.' Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross. But will the author of make the same choice?" His prediction eventually proved true when Huysmans converted to Catholicism in the 1890s. ==Early English translations==

"[T]he first English translation (by 'John Howard', i.e. Jacob Howard Lewis), considerably censored, of À Rebours was published by the small American firm Lieber & Lewis in 1922 under the title Against the Grain.... Another edition of Against the Grain was published in Paris in 1926 by Groves & Michaux in a translation which, though different, seems to bear some resemblance to that by John Howard." ==Footnotes==