À rebours Reading Order

À rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is the Decadent movement's canonical novel — the book that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray reads and that defined fin-de-siècle aestheticism. The novel has almost no plot: Jean des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has exhausted every pleasure Paris offers, retreats to a hermetically sealed house in the suburbs and proceeds to construct a complete artificial world out of rare books, perfumes, jewels, colored liqueurs, and a tortoise whose shell he has encrusted with gems. The narrative consists almost entirely of Des Esseintes's aesthetic meditations as he organizes his obsessions and is gradually destroyed by them. Huysmans himself moved from Naturalism (he had been part of Zola's circle) through Decadence and eventually to Catholic mysticism — a trajectory that À rebours anticipates: Des Esseintes's aestheticism is a displaced religiosity, an attempt to replace God with sensation that fails in the same way all substitutes for God fail. The novel ends with Des Esseintes's doctor ordering him back to Paris or he will die, and Des Esseintes's half-prayer acknowledging that he can no longer believe in anything including his own tastes. It is simultaneously the definitive statement of Decadent aestheticism and its critique.