En rade Reading Order

En rade (1887) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is one of the strangest novels of the French nineteenth century: a Naturalist novel of provincial failure interrupted by three elaborate dream sequences that read like symbolist prose poems. Jacques Marles and his wife Louise have fled their Paris debts to take refuge in a crumbling chateau owned by Louise's peasant cousins, and Huysmans spends the first half of the novel cataloguing the miseries of rural life — the smells, the broken infrastructure, the sick cat, the peasants' incomprehensible hostility — with a precision that owes everything to Zola and nothing to any pastoral tradition. But each night Jacques falls into a dream: first a moonlit landscape of unreal beauty, then a sexual nightmare involving Queen Esther, then a bizarre space-voyage nightmare involving lunar landscapes and a collapsed donkey. The dreams are not explained and never connect to the waking narrative; they exist as a pure aesthetic surplus, the unconscious remainder that Naturalist documentation cannot contain. En rade is transitional Huysmans — he is still working within the Naturalist tradition he absorbed from Zola, but the dreams announce the Decadent sensibility he would fully articulate in Là-bas and the Catholic novels. It is a book about the failure of escape (Jacques cannot escape Paris, cannot escape his marriage, cannot escape the miseries of rural poverty) and the impossibility of beauty being sustained in the waking world.