Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (5 February 1848 – 12 May 1907) was a French novelist and art critic and one of the members of the Decadent movement. He is best known for his novel À rebours, a novel which about a disillusioned French aristocrat who furnishes his house according to his aesthetic preferences. He is also known for his quadrilogy of novels centering on Durtal: Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898), and L'Oblat (1903).
Huysmans was born in Paris to Godfried Huysmans, a Dutch lithographer, and Malvina Badin Huysmans, previously a schoolmistress. Huysmans' childhood years were not very happy. Godfried died on 24 June 1856, and while Huysmans began studying at the Institution Ortus, at Rue du Bac, Malvina quickly remarried the following year to Jules Og, a Protestant who was part-owner of a Parisian book-bindery; Huysmans came to resent him and left the Catholic Church as a child, but he completed his coursework and earned a baccalaureat in 1866. Shortly after, he worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of the Interior; he worked there for thirty-two years and found his job tedious.
In the meantime, Huysmans began his literary career by publishing a collection of Charles Baudelaire-esque prose poems called Le Drageoir aux épices, or A Dish of Spices (1874). This was the first work he published under his Pen Name, Joris-Karl Huysmans, so chosen to honour his father's Dutch ancestry. The work received little attention, but it provided glimpses of his own unique style. He later published Marthe, histoire d'une fille, or Marthe, the Story of a Whore in 1876. The novel was naturalistic in nature, opposing romanticism in favour of determinism, scientific objectivism, and detachment, and it grabbed the attention of Émile Zola, one of Naturalism's most prominent proponents and practitioners. For a time, Huysmans' novels exhibited a lot of traits from the naturalistic movement.
In 1884, Huysmans published his most famous novel, À rebours, or Against Nature, wherein a disillusioned aristocrat named Des Esseintes retreats to a house in the countryside and tries to furnish the house to his liking. This literary work signalled his break from the naturalists and introduced him to Symbolist and Catholic circles; he became acquainted with writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, Léon Bloy, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Bloy and Barbey d'Aurevilly praised the work, but Zola was more tepid. Huysmans' next novel, En rade or Stranded (1887), was not as successful as the readers found its mix of realism and fantasy confusing.
In 1889, Huysmans met Berthe Courrière, through whom he learned about the occult arts and made contact with Joseph-Antoine Boullan, a laicised Catholic priest who was also involved in occultism. He later used these experiences to write and publish Là-bas, a novel dealing with the mingling of Satanism and eroticism, in 1891; it is the first of four novels centering on Durtal, who is more or less a stand-in for Huysmans. Partly due to the controversial subject matter and partly due to successfully capturing the spirit of the age, Là-bas was his first major best-selling novel. Huysmans followed up with En Route (1895), wherein Durtal is taken into a Trappist monastery and converts to the Catholic faith. This work, serving as the "white book" counterpart to the "black book", or Là-bas, is the first of his explicitly Catholic writings, mirroring how Huysmans himself reverted to the Catholic faith. It is followed up with La Cathédrale (1898), wherein Durtal, after visiting the Trappist monastery, goes to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres and describes it in great detail. La Cathédrale became a great success, allowing Huysmans to retire from the civil service and live on his royalties.
Shortly after retiring, Huysmans went to Ligugè to become a Benedictine oblate in 1901. He used this experience to write the last of his Durtal novels, L'Oblat (1903). In this novel, Durtal becomes an oblate, and it examines the Christian liturgy, the state of Catholicism in contemporary France, and the question of suffering. He also wrote Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (1901), a hagiography about a medieval Dutch woman of the same name who was disabled after breaking her rib in an ice-skating accident, but soon acquired fame as a healer and a holy woman.
In 1905, Huysmans was diagnosed with cancer of the mouth, to which he eventually succumbed on 12 March 1907. Three days later, his funeral was held at Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where the Requiem Mass was celebrated by the Abbé Mugnier. A huge crowd followed Huysmans’ bier through the streets to Montparnasse Cemetery, where he was buried in the family grave. Huysmans never married nor had children, but he had a long-term, on-and-off relationship with Anna Meunier, a seamstress.
Major Works:
- A Rebours (1884)
- Là-bas (1891)
- En Route (1895)
- La Cathédrale (1898)
- L'Oblat (1903)
