Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans (Paris, 1848 – Paris, 1907) was a French novelist and art critic, the son of a Dutch father and a French mother. Writing in French in the second half of the nineteenth century, he moved from the Naturalism of Émile Zola toward Decadence, and he is best remembered today for Against the Grain and for the novels recounting his return to Catholicism.

His father, a lithographer, died when Huysmans was a boy, and his mother later remarried a Protestant businessman whom he resented. He began law studies without finishing them and joined the Ministry of the Interior as a civil servant, a post he found dreary and kept for decades. His first book, a set of prose poems shaped by Baudelaire, drew little notice. Novels about Parisian life followed, such as Marthe and Les Sœurs Vatard, written in the orbit of Zola.

The turning point was Against the Grain (1884), whose isolated aesthete, Des Esseintes, broke decisively with Naturalism and became the emblem of Decadence. Huysmans's pessimism, drawn partly from Schopenhauer, gradually turned toward religion. After a period of interest in the occult, reflected in Là-bas, he wrote the Durtal novels, En route, La cathédrale and L'Oblat, following his protagonist's slow approach to Catholicism. He spent two years as an oblate at the Benedictine abbey of Ligugé.

He was also an influential art critic. His reviews of the Salons and of Impressionist exhibitions helped bring Degas, Monet, Cézanne and Pissarro to public attention, and he gathered his essays in L'Art Moderne and Certains. He died of cancer of the jaw in 1907 and was buried in Montparnasse. His legacy is that of a writer who passed through several movements: Valéry and Proust recognised his originality, and Houellebecq later modelled the protagonist of Submission on him.