Joris Karl Huysmans

L'oblato

Aníbal Fernandes

Além

Na wspak

Charles Baudelaire

Stéphane Mallarmé

Paul Valéry

André Breton

Edgar Allan Poe

"An anthology of fugitive writings by Edgar Allan Poe, with appreciations by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, J.K. Huysmans.

An Anthology of Fugitive Writings

The Unknown Poe

Against Nature centers on Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an artistic world of his own creation.

Against Nature (A Rebours) (Royal Collector's Edition) (Case Laminate Hardcover with Jacket)

The Des Esseintes line - a once powerful, proud, and noble family lineage - has arrived at a remarkable end in the person of Jean des Esseintes. Having heretofore pursued a life brimming with robust decadence in Paris, Jean finds himself repulsed by society as a collective whole. As such, he makes a concerted choice to quietly retreat to his countryside home, with the intention of spending his remaining years in pursuit of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation, far away from the displeasing humanity which has become so repugnant to his sensibilities. Surrounded by fine art and classic literature, Des Esseintes endeavors to develop a most curious garden, to prepare his own novel perfumes, and to wend his way down numerous other rabbit-holes of intellectualism. Along the way he purchases a tortoise - which he subsequently gilds with gold, and has encrusted with jewels - to its fatal detriment.Throughout the work, Des Esseintes recalls unique, odd, and debauched moments of his life, as his idiosyncratic diet and odd sleeping habits exact their inevitable retribution upon his health. In the end, he is faced with a brutal choice: to return to Paris to receive the ministrations of professionals or to - inevitably - perish prematurely. In the final moments of the work, he deigns to parallel his return to society with that of an atheist attempting to embrace a religion which he simply cannot abide.

Against Nature

Against The Grain (À Rebours)

Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans. The Ultimate Example of "Decadent" Literature Translated by John Howard. Against Nature or Against the Grain (1884) is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. A rebours contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature. Jean des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris, which has left him disgusted with human society.

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Against the Grain

Keene Wallace

Published in 1891, "La-bas" is Huysmans' best-selling novel; its success was due, in part, to its sensational contents (descriptions of Satanism in late 1880 France.) It is in this novel that Huysmans' character, Durtal, is introduced for the first time. This character is thought to be a semi-autobiographical depiction of the author and is used in his next three books which chart Durtal's (and Huysmans') search for religious truths and his ultimate conversion to Roman Catholicism. The journey begins with the viewing of an extremely realistic painting: "In Germany, before a Crucifixion by Matthus Grnewald, he had found what he was seeking."

La-Bas

Felicien Rops

The first true flowering of Satanism in erotic art came with the Belgian artist Felicien Rops (1833-1898). Rops, who had met Charles Baudelaire in Paris in 1864 and subsequently become a devoted disciple, thereafter commingled elements of death, prostitution and the Satanic in his work, particularly in his 5-picture series Les Sataniques of 1882. Pictures in this series such as The Sacrifice and Calvary are clear and explicit representations of Black Mass and Satanism which still retain their original power to shock and disturb. These images, as well as the others in Les Sataniques, can be found in LUST FOR THE DEVIL, which collects around 80 of Rops' most outlandish and confrontational works, including a section of 30 colour plates.Also to be found here are images of death and corporeal dissolution, ranging from The Death Penalty to The Dancing Corpse; images of prostitution and addiction, such as The Absinthe Drinker and Human Trash; and numerous examples of Rops' book illustrations, reproduced in editions of decadence and diabolism that include Paul Verlaine, Joséphin Péladan, and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les Diaboliques. Present too are a number of images of religious perversion, as well as several foregrounding Rops' trademark iconography - the evil and controlling power of women - ranging from The Puppet Mistress to variations of Naturalia, whose semi-defleshed subject, the "Diabolic Female”, displays her fearful bone vulva smeared with blood.These 80 images between them display the full range of Felicien Rops' darkest subject matter, revolving around his Baudelairean fusion of sex, death and Satan; they also run the gamut of the artistic techniques Rops employed, from oil painting and etching to pencils, pastels, and watercolours; and finally they reveal both the driving obsessions and skills of an artist whose reputation now places him as a foremost innovator of the 19th century.

The Erotic-Satanic Art of Felicien Rops

Lust for the Devil

(againist the Grain)

À Rebours

Joris-Karl Huysmans was a famous French writer known for his large vocabulary and wit. Huysmans most famous novel was "Against Nature."

Robert Baldick

A Parisian clerk seeks spiritual contentment in this small, dark, mordantly comic masterpiece of everyday pessimism.

Joris Karl Huysmans

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