Background

Ethnicity: Joris-Karl Huysmans' mother was French and father was Dutch.

Joris-Karl Huysmans was born in Paris on February 5, 1848, as Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans. He later took the Dutch version, Joris-Karl, in honor of his paternal origins. He is the son of Victor-Godfried-Jan Huysmans and Elisabeth-Malvina Badin. His father died when Joris-Karl was eight.

Education

When Huysmans’s mother quickly remarried after the death of Huysman's father, the boy was sent to boarding school. He attended Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris from 1862 till 1865. He also studied privately before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1866.

Career

After earning his diploma in 1866, Huysmans began working for the Ministry of the Interior where he copied documents. When the Franco-Prussian war erupted in 1870, Huysmans was called to serve in the Mobile Guard but he suffered from dysentery and was in the hospital for most of the war. He was on sick leave in Paris in September 1870, when that city was besieged. Soon thereafter he was evacuated to Versailles with the government that would be established as the Third Republic after the revolt of the Commune of Paris.

Living through the siege inspired Huysmans to take notes for a proposed novel, “La Faim” (Hunger). The novel never materialized; instead, Huysmans wrote Le Drageoir an Epices (1874), prose poems initially published at his own expense. The project led him to work for art magazines writing descriptions of paintings in the Louvre. Two years later, Huysmans published a novella based on his experiences with the actress, now cast as the prostitute Marthe. The work was published in Belgium to avoid any scandal that might threaten his job security.

Huysmans became part of a literary circle that had formed around Zola, who was for a time something like a surrogate father to the aspiring author. The group encouraged him to write, but he was restrained by doubts. Huysmans’s autobiographical urges were leading him away from Zola’s naturalism, which entailed a careful study of reality. In 1884 the author issued A Rebours, which would be acknowledged as a masterpiece of French decadent fiction. Its protagonist is Des Esseintes, a man who disdains society and is hypersensitive about his health and environment. He tries to escape it by isolating himself in a country house; he sees no one, not even the two servants who work for him, and creates for himself strangely luxurious surroundings.

Huysmans’s subsequent novels would be inextricably linked to his real life. In 1887 he began La-Bas, nominally about Gilles de Rais, a historical figure who was executed in 1440 for murdering children. Huysmans studied the occult, the black arts, and the Black Mass as research for the book, and the novel’s central figure named Durtal does the very same thing. The author became obsessed with the elements of the novel. Huysmans believed that La-Bas had angered the members of a Satanic sect, who now sought his death. He was known to burn tablets of “exorcist paste” and to sit in defensive circles on the floor. In subsequent novels, the character of Durtal appeared again, with his experiences - including conversion to Christianity - closely reflecting those of Huysmans. One such novel, titled La-Haut ou Notre-Dame de la Salette was not published during Huysmans’s lifetime. In fact, he directed his assistant to burn the manuscript. This, however, was not done and in 1965 and 1988 editions were published based on various manuscripts.

After retiring from the civil service in 1898, Huysmans sought to join a monastery but could not find one that satisfied his ideals. He did, however, become a lay member of the Benedictine brotherhood at Liguge, only to find that a change in French laws was to take the property out of the church’s hands.

Achievements

• Huysmans was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1892, for his work with the civil service. In 1905, his admirers persuaded the French government to promote him to Officier de la Légion d'honneur for his literary achievements. In his honor, a commemorative plaque was installed in Paris. His books are translated into various languages.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Durtal Trilogy

    (Joris-Karl Huysmans’s trilogy of novels charting the reli...)

    2016
  • The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister: Selected Letters of J.K. Huysmans

    (Personal correspondence of the French novelist from 1876 ...)

    1989
  • Downstream

    (Downstream, the shortest and most autobiographical of Huy...)

    1889
  • Against Nature

    (Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fic...)

    1884
  • Parisian Sketches

    (No one, not even Toulouse-Lautrec, was so tireless a trac...)

    1880
  • En Route

    (En Route continues the story of Durtal, a modern anti-her...)

    1895
  • Against the Grain

    (Against the Grain (1884) is a novel by the French writer ...)

    1884
  • The Cathedral

    (Architecture lovers and Francophiles, rejoice. French wri...)

    1898
  • Saint Lydwine of Schiedam

    (St. Lydwine was bedridden from the age of fifteen when sh...)

    1901

Views

Joris-Karl Huysmans's innovative prose placed him in a group of French writers known as the “decadents.” Originally a follower of Emile Zola and his school of naturalism, Huysmans developed his own autobiographical themes and subjective style that had more in common with the work of Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. The author’s novels resemble his own life and preoccupations - indeed obsessions - from his hedonistic youth to monastic later years.

Huysman’s novels are characterized by very little plot or action and detailed, even clinical descriptions. His work was known for his idiosyncratic use of the French language, extensive vocabulary, detailed and sensuous descriptions, and biting and satirical wit. His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Quotations: "Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God...It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin."

"Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it."

"How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing."

"Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according to as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of the maggot is found, the rhizophagous, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms."

"The soul is pained by all things it thinks upon."

"The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I’m sick of them."

"What I want to do is to teach a lesson to all these people … I want to prove that the Devil exists, that the Devil reigns supreme, that the power he enjoyed in the Middle Ages has not been taken from him, for today he is the absolute master of the world."

"Our literature has fallen upon evil days...Read the latest book. What do you find? Simple anecdotes: murder, suicide and accident stories copied right out of the newspaper, tiresome sketches and wormy tales, all written in a colorless style and containing not the faintest outlook on life nor an appreciation of the human nature."

"It takes me two years to 'document' myself for a novel – two years of hard work. That is the trouble with the naturalistic novel - it requires so much documentary care. I never make, like Zola, a plan for a book. I know how it will begin and how it will end - that's all. When I finally get to writing it, it goes along rather fast - assez vite."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is - especially in regard to things seen - extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature." - Arthur Symons
  
  "It is difficult to find a writer whose vocabulary is so extensive, so constantly surprising, so sharp and yet so exquisitely gamey in flavor, so constantly lucky in its chance finds and in its very inventiveness." - Julien Gracq

Interests

• Artists

  Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon

Connections

Huysmans never married or had children. He had a long-term, on-and-off relationship with a young actress Anna Meunier. While the two lived together, she bore another man’s child.

Father:

Victor Godfried Jan Huysmans

Mother:

Elisabeth Malvina Badin

Partner:

Anna Meunier

References

• The Life of J.-K. Huysmans First published fifty years ago, Baldick's biography presents a narrative of Huysmans' life and work in all its various phases - from the Naturalism of the 1870s to the Decadence of the 1880s, and from the occult vogue of the 1890s to the Catholic Revival of the turn of the century - and it is written with such impeccable scholarship that it relied on today as regards matters of fact and detail.
  1955
• Reality And Illusion In The Novels Of J.-k. Huysmans
  1986
• J.-K. Huysmans
  1985
• The Image of Huysmans This book is a summa of all works on or by Huysmans.
  1990
• J.-K. Huysmans: Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic
  1987
• Joris-Karl Huysmans
  1968