Reading Order
À Rebours Reading Order
À Rebours (Against Nature, 1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is one of the founding texts of Decadence and the most concentrated artistic manifesto of the 1880s — a plotless novel (hardly a novel at all: what Oscar Wilde called 'that poisonous book' in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and what French critics called a 'bréviaire de la décadence') about the aristocratic aesthete Des Esseintes who retreats from Paris to a house in Fontenay-aux-Roses and attempts to create an artificial world that surpasses nature in complexity and refinement. Huysmans was a disciple of Zola and had published naturalist novels in the Zola tradition, but À Rebours is a complete break: where Naturalism claimed to document the real world with scientific precision, À Rebours documents an artificial world constructed to replace nature with art, to replace the social with the aesthetic, and to replace biological instinct with cultivated sensation. The novel consists almost entirely of essays on the various sensory experiences Des Esseintes arranges for himself: his library (Latin Decadent poetry, Baudelaire, Poe, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam), his painting collection (Moreau, Odilon Redon), his perfumes, his mouth-organ of liqueurs, his aquarium, his tortoise decorated with precious gems. The most famous episode — Des Esseintes's attempt to travel to England which ends when he gets only as far as a London-themed restaurant in Paris and decides he has experienced all he needs of England — is Huysmans's most sardonic embodiment of the Decadent thesis that experience is always inferior to the imagination of experience.
Where to start
À Rebours (1884) — the novel is short (about 200 pages) and organized thematically by sensory category rather than chronologically by narrative; it can be read in any order by chapter. The Robert Baldick Penguin Classics translation is the most widely available English version; the Marc Fumaroli edition (Gallimard/Folio) is the definitive French text. Read first in the Huysmans sequence, before Là-Bas, En Route, and La Cathédrale, which trace the spiritual trajectory from aestheticism to Catholicism.
Complete À Rebours Book List
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À Rebours
Joris-Karl Huysmans·1884·The book that effectively ended Naturalism and launched Decadence as a French literary movement. Oscar Wilde read it in Paris and incorporated it directly into The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as 'the yellow book' that corrupts Dorian — one of the clearest cases of direct literary influence in the late nineteenth century. Paul Bourget, Stéphane Mallarmé, and J.A. Barbey d'Aurevilly all identified À Rebours as the most important French book of its decade.
À Rebours — Frequently Asked Questions
Why is À Rebours the Bible of the Decadent movement?
À Rebours (1884) became 'the Bible of the Decadent movement' because it provided the most complete and coherent embodiment of the Decadent aesthetic that anyone had yet written — not as a manifesto (which would be a critical text arguing for Decadence) but as a novel that performed Decadence as a form of life. The Decadent aesthetic can be defined through À Rebours: the preference for the artificial over the natural (Des Esseintes prefers painted flowers to real flowers, literary landscapes to real landscapes); the cultivation of sensation as an end in itself (Des Esseintes's elaborate arrangements of perfume, music, food, and visual experience are purely aesthetic exercises with no social or productive function); the withdrawal from the social world into an enclosure of pure aesthetic experience (the house at Fontenay-aux-Roses); the fascination with decay, rarity, and perversity (the Decadent Latin writers he prefers to classical Latin, the Moreau paintings he prefers to academic painting); and the aristocratic contempt for the bourgeoisie and their utilitarian values. All of these became the defining characteristics of the Decadent movement in France, England (where Wilde incorporated them into The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dorian's actual reading of the 'yellow book'), and the rest of Europe. The irony is that À Rebours also ends the Decadent project it exemplifies: Des Esseintes's nervous breakdown in the final pages, when his doctors tell him he must return to Paris or die, is read as Huysmans's admission that the Decadent withdrawal from life is literally lethal, and the novel's conclusion foreshadows Huysmans's subsequent conversion to Catholicism — which he dramatizes in En Route (1895).
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