Agata Sadkowska-Fidala

In his short novel published before À Rebours, entitled À vau-l’eau, Huysmans tells a story of a protagonist unable to find good food. His quest for a passable restaurant remains unfulfilled, and joins other unfulfilled needs linked to his social life. It becomes clear that behind this quest, told with numerous details and a significant emphasis, there are other, more profound needs that Huysmans will name, more and more directly, in his post-naturalist novels. At the deepest level, the quest comes down to the impossibility to accept life’s difficulties, its duality, and to the wound of an unhappy childhood and a lost mother, so little named and therefore so present in Huysmans’ works.

From the publication of À Rebours, Huysmans’ books feature a solitary protagonist, dreaming of a situation outside society, time and space, and even the body and sex. To this desire corresponds the increasing modification of the novel formula: a reflection of life in anomaly, the novel is transformed, to become a reverse novel, sick, deformed, bizarre. The refusal of regularity hides another refusal, that of conforming to a reality that does not correspond to the depth of personal experience. The work of Huysmans, especially in its postnaturalist part, brings a constant questioning of the norm under its various aspects, and constitutes an attempt to create a universe made to measure, necessarily a universe in anomaly. The journey that leads, in the field of novel, from À Rebours to L’Oblat, allows us to trace the stages of this evolution.

Barbey d’Aurevilly didn’t like his century, judging it as a distress ti me. This period personifi es for him all possible vices, opposed to the happy ti me before the Revoluti on and the XVIIIth century. His novels express his enormous nostalgia for the past. This nostalgia is visible on all the levels of his literary technique, as character constructi on, confi gurati ons of ti me and space, the plot. All these elements are inevitably leading to the conclusion that everything is over, history is irrevocable, future is hopeless and the Christ hasn’t come yet on the Earth to give us the chance of the resurrecti on.