JORIS KARL

See also:

• HUYSMANS
• JORIS KARL HUYSMANS (1848–1907)

HUYSMANS (1848–1907)  , French novelist, was born at Paris on the 5th of February 1848 . He belonged to a family of artists of Dutch extraction; he entered the ministry of the interior, and was pensioned after thirty years' service . His earliest venture in literature, Le Drageoir a epices (1874), contained stories and short prose poems showing the influence of Baudelaire . Marche (1876), the life of a courtesan, was published in Brussels, and Huysmans contributed a story, " Sac au dos," to Les Soirees de Medan, the collection of stories of the Franco-German war published by Zola . He then produced a series of novels of everyday life, including Les Sceurs L'atard (1879), En Menage (1881), and A vau-l'eau (1882), in which he outdid Zola in minute and uncompromising realism . He was influenced, however, more directly by Flaubert and the brothers de Goncourt than by Zola . In L'Art moderne (1883) he gave a careful study of impressionism and in Certains (1889) a series of studies of contemporary artists . A Rebours (1884), the history of the morbid tastes of a decadent aristocrat, des Esseintes, created a literary sensation, its caricature of literary and artistic symbolism covering much of the real beliefs of the leaders of the aesthetic revolt . In Ld-Bas Huysmans's most characteristic hero, Durtal, makes his appearance . Durtal is occupied in writing the life of Gilles de Rais; the insight he gains into Satanism is supplemented by modern Parisian students of the black art; but already there are signs of a leaning to religion in the sympathetic figures of the religious bell-ringer of Saint Sulpice and his wife . En Route (1895) relates the strange conversion of Durtal to mysticism and catholicism in his retreat to La Trappe . In La Cathedrale (1898), Huysmans's symbolistic interpretation of the cathedral of Chartres, he develops his enthusiasm for the purity of Catholic ritual .

The life of Sainte Lydwine de

Schiedam (19o1), an exposition of the value of suffering, gives further proof of his conversion; and L'Oblat (1903) describes Durtal's retreat to the Val des Saints, where he is attached as an oblate to a Benedictine monastery . Huysmans was nominated by Edmond de Goncourt as a member of the Academie des Goncourt . He died as a devout Catholic, after a long illness of cancer in the palate on the 13th of May 1907 . Before his death he destroyed his unpublished MSS . His last book was Les Foules de Lourdes (1906) . See Arthur Symons, Studies in two Literatures (1897) and The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899); Jean Lionnet in L'Evolution des idees (1903); Eugene Gilbert in France et Belgique (1905); J . Sargeret in Les Grands convertis (1906) .