Joris-Karl Huysmans

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Joris-Karl Huysmans was a French novelist whose work tracked, in fiction, the crisis of belief in late nineteenth-century Paris — from aesthetic exhaustion through an immersion in the period’s occultism and Satanism to a return, hard-won, to the Catholic Church. He was born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans in 1848, of Dutch descent on his father’s side, and signed his books with the Dutch form of his given names; he died in Paris in 1907. For most of his working life he was a clerk in the French Ministry of the Interior; the novels were written around the desk.

He came up inside Émile Zola’s circle and began as a Naturalist, committed to the unvarnished documentary method the movement prized. He broke with it in À rebours (1884), the novel of the reclusive aesthete Des Esseintes, who withdraws from a world he finds vulgar into a private museum of rare sensation. The book became the breviary of the Decadent movement and, with its catalogue of refined and exhausted tastes, the period’s most quoted statement of art turned against nature.

The work that places Huysmans in the history of Western esotericism is Là-Bas (1891), often rendered Down There. Its protagonist, Durtal — Huysmans’s recurring self-portrait — researches the fifteenth-century child- murderer Gilles de Rais while being drawn into the contemporary underworld of Parisian Satanism, a thread that culminates in a scene of the Black Mass. The novel drew on the milieu of the occult revival then alive in France, including the schismatic priest and self-styled mystic the abbé Boullan, whom Huysmans knew and corresponded with, and whose feud with the magus circle around the Marquis de Guaita Huysmans took seriously. What Là-Bas records is therefore partly reportage: a writer carrying his documentary habit into territory most of his contemporaries treated as either fraud or sensation. Whether the rites he described existed as he described them remains disputed; scholarship reads the book as much as a portrait of his own spiritual desperation as a survey of a real cult.

He observed this world; he did not practise in it. The same investigation that took Durtal toward the Black Mass carried Huysmans, over the following decade, toward Rome. In En route (1895) Durtal makes a retreat at a Trappist monastery; La Cathédrale (1898) is built around the symbolism of Chartres; L’Oblat (1903) follows him into life as a Benedictine oblate, the station Huysmans himself took at the abbey of Ligugé. The late books read his earlier fascination with Satanism in reverse — as the negative proof of a sacred order he had been circling all along.

Huysmans matters here less as a thinker about the occult than as its most exacting fictional witness. His novels are among the fullest contemporary records of the fin-de-siècle religious mood: the sense that materialism had emptied the world, and that what rushed in to fill it might be holiness or its inversion, often hard to tell apart.

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