A Rebours by J.K. Huysmans(1884): The Prophets of Decadence

The classic novel of true decadence... No Fun and No Future. A detailed tapestry of Nothing and Everything. Beauty in Decay and contempt for Bourgeois Values and ultimately seeking the Traditional and Transcendent from a path of Nihilism and Decadence. We are all Des Esseintes...

[@niceguytye666]

Under-viewed and appreciated video, very very well summed up and explored!

[@omiorahman6283]

Sounds beautiful

[@inthesegoingsdown]

It has both beauty and ugliness in it, its bizarre and possibly only a dying culture could have produced it. And this is 1884! The key with these Decadent writers is that they never embrace it or espouse it...it is the setup for the modern horror literature of the early 20th century.

[@whall5477]

This book was immersive and great up to a point for me the whole thing got pretty monotonous about 70 percent of the way through. After Sybil dies in Dorian Gray, there's that long chapter of what I suppose is Dorian's life from early twenties to forty something up to where he murders Basil, where you can tell Wilde clearly lifted the premise from this, Dorian is just delving into all these indulgences that are very expensive, decadent and extravagant and tap through all the senses and endless cornucopia of pleasure. That's my favorite chapter. This is like that chapter but for an entire book. As much as I enjoyed a lot of it, the premise and the delving into his mind and his tastes, it wore me out. Frankly in my view Wilde borrowed from this and improved on it as a character development/trajectory that led up to murder. This just felt like that chapter going on way too long without the backbone of a story.

[@inthesegoingsdown]

Well Wilde made an actual Thriller/weird tale out of it with an actual narrative structure whereas Huysmans just focuses literally on what one character does day by day. I think that was his point to make a novel about "nothing", this infuriated many of his contemporaries. I actually see Arebours as a kind of horror story, it drips with atmosphere and Des Essientes fever dreams of the Syphilis plant vampire woman is pretty chilling. Ultimately the horror is looking into the void from the precipice of am emptied life.

[@MrOreo2010]

The description of his liqueur-orchestra is simultaneously beautiful and absurd. On the one hand, I want to have one of those devices (let alone the imagination at work in comparing tastes to instruments), on the other, and the novel seems to hint at it (and that goes for all the pleasures he has amassed in his cave) it probably gets boring after a few weeks. Either way, the book provides you with a renewed interest in the pleasures with which our world abounds, and provides you with an extensive reading list, as well as a list of great pieces of art to marvel at.

[@inthesegoingsdown]

Agreed, in many ways this book is as much a resource/gateway for discovering or rediscovering forgotten artists and writers. Still there is a not so subtle message in this that all this drowning oneself in pleasures and sensations(and even past , dead Forms) is ultimately futile and self destructive. This so called Self Awareness is lost amongst many adherents to this so called Hedonistic life. Thanks for Watching!

[@TheTurtledude99]

My friend sent me a description of Des Esseintes which she thought sounded exactly like me, so I looked it up and found this vid. Gonna give it a go now thanks for the review.

[@inthesegoingsdown]

Its a great book! We are all Des Esseintes now!;)

[@gimbutas1]

I think the name is "Ha WEES Mon". "Slowly going insane" ? Maybe escaping from the insanity of Modernism. My generation's version was disco, pills, pot and booze. Then came LSD. There was more of a search for oblivion rather than an expanding of coneciousness. So much for the evolution of Man.

[@dfcsons]

I've never heard of this before. It sounds interesting, but I'm hesitant. I have a lot of impatience for misanthropic musings. I do trust your recommendations though.

[@inthesegoingsdown]

It is not a conventional novel but it is interesting and intensely atmospheric(and very readable unlike say something like Joyce's Ulysses). Des Esseintes is hardly a vile misanthrope, he's like a neurotic hipster nerd who has actual good taste(mostly) and tries to make his own virtual world with 19th century technology. Of course he goes too far... Huysman's next novel was an interesting and gruesome novel about the Black Mass in Paris, La Bas.

[@dfcsons]

@@inthesegoingsdown you make a great point about Ulysses, there is much 'required reading' that I slogged through out of a sense of responsibility and didn't enjoy at all.

[@inthesegoingsdown]

I'm someone who did not read fiction in my 20s and half of my 30s because of the bad taste of what I had to read in school. Some of it was good but I was too young to understand it or put it into context...you need the weight of years to understand literature...books written not for teens but other educated mostly men of the upper class. There are so many good books from the 19th century I never have to read anything from today ever.

[@dfcsons]

@@inthesegoingsdown funny that...I had the opposite reaction. With the exception of one or two, I loved the novels we were assigned in school. Different nation's curriculum's perhaps? But like you, outside of biographies, I don't read a lot that's current. I'm a big fan of horror-westerns, which are quite trendy now, so I've sought out a few of those.

[@gimbutas1]

"Became a Catholic". In other words, he stopped play acting at Satanism and became a REAL Satanist.