Against Nature: A New Translation of 'a Rebours' (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

I think I’ve been so focussed on introducing aspects of the movement that are less well-known that I have slightly neglected the classics. Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans ( US: / w iː s ˈ m ɒ̃ s/, [1] French: [ʃaʁl maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ɥismɑ̃s]; 5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907) was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans ( French: [ʒɔʁis kaʁl -], variably abbreviated as J.

It scarcely admitted—in theory at least—any exceptions to the rule; thus it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind. Rifiuterebbe anche la cultura borghese se ritenesse che la borghesia fosse in grado di esprimere cultura. I always assumed that nineteenth-century French literature would be either too highbrow or too earnest—until I read this book. One of the more curious threads in the book is the effect which his religious education has had on him: though it has not made him a faithful man, it has inspired him to reject man and the world as worthless and flawed, and to instead spend his time living for another world, a false world which exists only in his mind. Critical reviews by Léon Bloy of À rebours, En rade, and Là-bas published contemporaneously, in various journals or reviews, as Huysmans's novels came out over the years, in 1884, 1887, 1891, can be found, collected together and published 6 years after Huysmans's death, in book form, in On Huysmans' Tomb.The hipsters are right: society is trying to destroy you--not your body, or your mind, but you, the part which makes an individual. each chapter became the sublimate of a specialism, the refinement of a different art; it became condensed into an essence of jewellery, perfumes, religious and secular literature, of profane music and plain-chant. But of course, the real iconoclast doesn't identify themselves with certain bands or aesthetics, with clothes or objects. That’s always been the problem, though, way back to the Dadaists: if you are obsessed with rejecting mainstream culture, that means you have to follow mainstream culture closely enough to know what it is doing, so you can then reject it. Think for a minute just how much space in your brain is devoted to information like that, stuff you don’t know you remember until suddenly, you hear it again.

Society is uncomfortable, it wants to invade that mind, to break the siege and to remake the person as a useful ant under the status quo. Certainly, there are some interesting scenes within the book--the famous tortoise episode actually achieving some real insight (and satire), but overall, the book is terribly dull--a piling on of detail upon detail without much central notion to hang them on. Charles Marie Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans.Des Esseintes develops a love for perfumes, and the scents evoke memories of his former lovers, including an androgynous female acrobat, and an adolescent boy. This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in a stifling atmosphere, that spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention flagged, a prey to an imagination which evoked, like delicious miasmas, somnambulistic and angelic apparitions, was to Des Esseintes a source of unwearying conjecture.