Recommendations
Books Like Monsieur de Phocas
Best books to read after Monsieur de Phocas by Lorrain
Readers who respond to Monsieur de Phocas's fevered portrait of aestheticism's failure, its demimonde Paris setting, and Lorrain's deliberately excessive prose will find the wider tradition of French Decadent and Symbolist fiction.
- 1Buy
À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884) is the aestheticist novel that Monsieur de Phocas implicitly critiques: where Huysmans's Des Esseintes constructs an artificial paradise and finds in it at least a temporary meaning, Lorrain's Fréneuse has exhausted the aestheticist project and finds only emptiness — Monsieur de Phocas is À Rebours after the failure of the aesthetic strategy.
- 2Buy
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's 1890 novel treats aestheticism's spiritual corruption with a moral framework (the portrait's accusation) that Lorrain's novel refuses: where Dorian Gray is destroyed by a supernatural mechanism of justice, Fréneuse dissolves through the purely internal logic of exhausted sensation, and the comparison shows two different diagnoses of aestheticism's failure.
- 3Buy
Le Vice suprême
by Joséphin Péladan
Péladan's 1884 novel offers the Rosicrucian spiritual alternative to the dissolution that Monsieur de Phocas documents: where Fréneuse has no spiritual framework to oppose aestheticism's exhaustion, Péladan's Merodack has Rosicrucianism as a structure of meaning — the comparison shows what a spiritual framework prevents and what its absence permits.
- 4Buy
Bruges-la-Morte
by Georges Rodenbach
Rodenbach's 1892 Symbolist novel shares the fin-de-siècle aestheticism of Monsieur de Phocas but gives it a coherent emotional structure (grief as the organizing principle of an entire perceptual world) that Lorrain's novel refuses — the comparison shows the range of strategies available to the Symbolist novel for giving form to extreme interiority.
- 5Buy
Là-Bas
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Là-Bas (1891) is the decade's most important predecessor of Monsieur de Phocas: where Huysmans shows an aesthete encountering the occult as a genuine spiritual reality, Lorrain shows an aesthete encountering pure dissolution with no spiritual framework to interpret it — both novels take the failure of aestheticism seriously, but draw opposite conclusions about what follows.
- 6Buy
Monsieur Venus
by Rachilde
Rachilde's 1884 novel about gender inversion, obsessional desire, and the constructed beloved is the most direct French contemporary parallel to Monsieur de Phocas's treatment of the obsessional object: both novels show a character who tries to impose an ideal on a real person and is destroyed when the real person refuses to remain the ideal.
- 7Buy
La Duchesse bleue
by Jean Lorrain
Lorrain's other major novel (1898) shows a different aspect of the same fin-de-siècle world: where Monsieur de Phocas is the interior portrait of the aesthete's dissolution, La Duchesse bleue is the social portrait of the aristocratic woman as aesthetic object in the same demimonde Paris that Fréneuse inhabits.
- 8Buy
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The same novel as À Rebours under its English title: important to note because the English translation (by Robert Baldick for Penguin Classics, and by Margaret Mauldon for Oxford World's Classics) renders the text with the precision that Lorrain's excessive style deliberately refuses, and the contrast in prose style between the two novels illuminates the range of Decadent aesthetics.
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