A Rebours (Against Nature)

by Pericles Lewis


The spirit of decadence achieved a brief flowering in the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, who broke away from Zola’s naturalism with his novel Against Nature (À Rebours; 1884). The novel describes the quest for experience of an effeminate aristocrat, Des Esseintes, the last of his line, who prefers not to leave his room, which he has turned into a museum, complete with a tortoise encrusted in jewels. Having collected all the colors, tastes, and smells of the world so that he can travel without ever going anywhere, he becomes increasingly debilitated and is forced to take his food through an enema. He celebrates this experience as a victory over nature, allowing him to eliminate from his life “the tiresome, vulgar chore of eating.” Huysmans himself took an ambivalent attitude towards his protagonist’s decadence, but the sickly Des Esseintes became a hero to a generation of minor poets and one major one, Stéphane Mallarmé, who wrote a poem in his praise.[1]


  1. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 47.


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