Reading Order
Là-Bas Reading Order
Là-Bas (Down There, 1891) by Joris-Karl Huysmans is the novel in which Huysmans moves from the Decadent aestheticism of À Rebours toward the Catholicism that would eventually absorb him completely — a study of Satanism and the occult in contemporary Paris, intertwined with a historical account of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century marshal of France who was convicted of the murder of hundreds of children in the practice of Satanism. The protagonist, Durtal, is a novelist working on a biography of Gilles de Rais (exactly the biography that Huysmans was writing while composing Là-Bas) who becomes simultaneously drawn into the contemporary Parisian Satanist underground through his affair with Mme. Chantelouve and fascinated by the question of whether medieval Satanism expressed a genuine spiritual reality that the positivist and materialist world of the Third Republic was unable to account for. Là-Bas is therefore at once a novel about the occult world of 1890s Paris (the Rosicrucians, the Martinists, the practitioners of black magic and Satanic masses who were a genuine feature of Parisian intellectual life at the end of the century), a historical novel about Gilles de Rais and the fifteenth-century world of Joan of Arc, and a spiritual autobiography in which Huysmans-as-Durtal begins the journey toward Catholicism by recognizing that the occult world proves the existence of spiritual reality that positivism denies.
Where to start
Là-Bas (1891) — the novel is moderate length (about 300 pages) and requires some knowledge of À Rebours to understand Durtal's starting point; it is the second of what critics call the Durtal tetralogy (À Rebours, Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale, and L'Oblat). The Keene Willis translation has been superseded by the Terry Hale Penguin Classics translation, which is the best English version. Read in sequence: À Rebours, Là-Bas, En Route, La Cathédrale.
Complete Là-Bas Book List
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Là-Bas
Joris-Karl Huysmans·1891·Published 1891. The novel's account of contemporary Parisian Satanism drew on Huysmans's own investigation of the Paris occult world in the late 1880s; his informants included the occultist Rémy de Gourmont and the novelist Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, who had written about Satanism in Les Diaboliques (1874). The Black Mass scene near the end of the novel, which remains one of the most disturbing passages in French literature, was based on accounts of actual ceremonies.
Là-Bas — Frequently Asked Questions
Was there real Satanism in 1890s Paris?
Yes, there was a genuine occult revival in Paris in the 1880s and 1890s, and Huysmans's research for Là-Bas (1891) drew on actual people and practices, though he was also willing to dramatize and exaggerate what he found. The Paris occult world of the period included several distinct currents: the Rosicrucians (Sâr Péladan's Ordre de la Rose-Croix du Temple et du Graal, which organized Salon de la Rose-Croix exhibitions); the Martinists (followers of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's theosophical Christianity); the Spiritualists (who attended séances and communicated with the dead); and the explicit Satanists, who practiced various forms of inverted Christianity including the Black Mass. The most notorious figure of the Paris Satanist world was Abbé Joseph Boullan, who had been expelled from the priesthood and who conducted ceremonies that mixed Christianity with sexual magic; Huysmans was in contact with Boullan (who appears in Là-Bas as the character Dr. Johannès) and took his account of Satanic practice as one of his sources. The Black Mass scene in Là-Bas was understood at the time to be based on actual ceremonies, and while scholars debate how closely Huysmans's account corresponds to what he actually witnessed, the occult world he describes was unquestionably real as a social phenomenon of 1890s Paris.
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