Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist and art critic who wrote in the naturalist, Symbolist, and Catholic styles. His most famous work is the Decadent novel À rebours. Huysmans was born in Paris in 1848 and worked as a civil servant for 32 years. He was drafted for the Franco-Prussian War but discharged due to illness. His early work focused on everyday life in Paris, but he later turned to more controversial topics such as Satanism. Huysmans’ semi-autobiographical character Durtal appears in several of his works, including those that detail his own conversion to Catholicism. Huysmans died of oral cancer in 1907.
Joris-Karl Huysmans is the pen name of 19th-century French novelist and art critic Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans. His early work was in the naturalist school, and he later wrote Symbolist and Catholic literature, paralleling his own conversion to Roman Catholicism. Huysmans is best remembered for his 19th century novel Decadent À rebours.
Joris-Karl Huysmans was born on February 5, 1848 in Paris, the son of a Dutch lithographer and former school teacher. When Joris-Karl was eight years old, his father died and his mother remarried soon after. After receiving his baccalauréat, Huysmans spent 32 years in a clerkship position in the French Ministry of the Interior. He was drafted for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but discharged for dysentery.
Huysmans’ first published book was a collection of decadent prose poems entitled Le drageoir à épices (1874). It was followed two years later by her first novel, Marthe, histoire d’un fille (Marthe, Story of a Girl). This novel and those that would follow over the next decade were written in the naturalist school and praised by Emile Zola. Marthe was about a prostitute, and other themes explored by Huysmans in his early work included broken marriages, dead-end jobs and everyday life in Paris.
À rebours, detailing the increasingly bizarre entertainments of an exhausted and lonely anti-hero, marked a turning point in Huysmans’ career. Zola, among others, condemned the work, which represented a major change of style for Huysmans. Critics were scandalized by the book’s content. However, although the work lost some of its author’s supporters, it gained him a new following among Symbolist and Decadent writers, including Oscar Wilde, Paul Valéry and Stéphane Mallarmé. Wilde incorporated À rebours into his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, although he did not mention it by name.
A few other Décadent works would follow À rebours, including En rade in 1887 and Là-Bas in 1891. The latter became famous for its depiction of Parisian Satanism and saw the debut of a recurring semi-autobiographical character in Huysmans’ works, the Durtal writer. At Là-Bas, Durtal is working on a book about medieval serial killer Giles de Rais when he finds himself torn between the influences of a pious cathedral bell ringer and a woman involved in a satanic cult who becomes his lover.
Durtal would reappear in Huysmans’ next two books, En route (1895) and La cathédrale (1898), which deal with the protagonist’s conversion to Catholicism. La cathédrale became his best-selling work in his life and enabled him to retire from his job as a civil servant. Durtal appeared in another of Huysmans’ novels, L’Oblat, in which he becomes an oblate, or prayerful layman. Durtal’s experiences through Huysmans’ work reflect the real life of the author.
Huysmans was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1892 for his work at the Ministry of the Interior, and was promoted to Officier in 1905 in honor of his contributions to French literature. Sadly, he was diagnosed with oral cancer the same year. Joris-Karl Huysmans died on May 12, 1907 and is buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris.
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