L'Oblat Reading Order

What is an oblate in Huysmans's L'Oblat?

An oblate (from the Latin oblatus, 'offered') is a lay person who formally associates themselves with a monastic community and follows a simplified version of the monastic rule in secular life — attending the monastery for retreats, participating in the liturgy when possible, and following the spirit of the Benedictine rule (ora et labora, prayer and work) in their ordinary life. Oblates are not monks: they take no vows, live outside the monastery, continue their professional life, and can withdraw from the arrangement at any time. For Huysmans-as-Durtal, becoming an oblate at the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Martin de Ligugé (which appears in L'Oblat as the unnamed monastery near Dijon) represented the closest available approximation to the monastic life that his vocation as a writer made it impossible to enter directly. The novel documents the attempt to live as an oblate — to maintain the rhythm of the Benedictine liturgical year while remaining in the world — and the failure of that attempt when the anticlerical legislation of the Combes government forces the expulsion of the monks. The political dimension is important: L'Oblat is not only a spiritual autobiography but a political document, testifying to the destruction of the traditional Catholic institutions — the monasteries, the religious orders — that Huysmans identified as the carriers of the aesthetic and spiritual tradition he had spent his life recovering.