Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

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Huysmans's surrealist interpretation of Salome's performance for Herod is brought to life via Wilde's script. The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley. Twenty-three-year-old Schopenhauer, who had a great influence on Huysmans, told Wieland: "Life is an unpleasant business. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.

Patrick McGuinness is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Anne's College. 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. In painting, there was a deluge of lifeless inanities, in literature, an excess of stylistic vapidity and intellectual cowardice, because they had to impute honesty to shady businessmen, virtue to the swindler…and chastity to the anti-clerical…the immesurable vulgarity of the financier…chanting its immoral canticles of praise before the ungodly tabernacle of the Bank. Like Durtal in La Bas (and later, as I understand it, in his Catholic trilogy), he is seeking an intellectual and aesthetic escape into a mythic or at least mythologized past, where things must have been better, where the problems Huysmans’ ciphers and masks of the projected self struggle with would never have existed. I read the Muir translation of "The Metamorphosis" before I read the others--I have many issues with the Muir translation, so I'm always very discerning when looking for translations.

Their cinematic style blends electronics, classical arrangements, orchestral percussion and soundscapes evoking a timeless quality. This is indeed an unusually structured novel, in terms of the fact that there is little or no dialogue.

He had tasted the feasts of the flesh with the appetite of a capricious man afflicted with bulimia, one who is obsessed by hunger, but whose palate is quickly dulled and surfeited; in the days when he had associated with country gents, he had participated in those protracted suppers during which drunken women unfastened their clothing at dessert and slumped their heads on the table; he had also scoured the wings backstage at the theatre, sampled actresses and singers, suffered, in addition to the innate stupidity of women, the frenzied vanity of third-rate leading ladies; after that, he had kept already notorious whores and contributed to the fortune of those agencies that supply dubious pleasures for a modest recompense; finally, sated, weary of these unvarying lusts, of these identical caresses, he had plunged into the slums, hoping to revive his desires through contrast, thinking to stimulate his deadened senses with the arousing indecencies of poverty. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day.A Rebour is indeed the poisonous/liberating guide book that Dorian Gray has bound in various colours to suit his moods; the book that Symons described as “the breviary of the decadence. He exhaustively details how he chooses the colours of his rooms by comparing pigments under candlelight (orange is best), the furnishings, the pictures he hangs up, the music he enjoys (or rather, doesn’t enjoy). To be fair to des Esseintes, he falls at the aesthetic, "surround myself with gorgeous objects" end of the spectrum. Landow created the HTML design and formatted the text, adding French accents, which the Gutenberg text omits, and both ilustrations and links to materials on this site.

As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones.She performs a dance for King Herod, the Dance of Seven Scarves, and afterwords she requests the head of John the Bapitist on a silver platter. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Des Esseintes conducts a survey of French and Latin literature, rejecting the works approved by the mainstream critics of his day. They were hedonists… gambling their fortunes on horses, cards and on all those pleasures dear to hollow men.