· J.-K. Huysmans, Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic by Annette Kahn (te). Through close textual analysis of the work of this late nineteenth-century Decadent writer, Annette shows us a brilliant but depressed soul who drew on art rather than nature or reality for his fictional universe and for his own quest for meaning. Annette shows the close connections between his art criticism and his prose poems and works of fiction. Beginning his career as a Naturalist, associated with Zola, he derives his inspiration from paintings of a particularly depressing kind. Though he sees the value of the contemporaneous Impressionists, their interest in color and in the play of light runs counter to his own gloominess. He prefers distressed landscapes with smoke stacks to fields of poppies. The exhausted or sexually perverse women of Degas and Moreau become part of his narrative vocabulary. Annette shows how the works of such artists as Raffaëlli make their way into À Rebours, En Rade, and a host of other works. Eventually Huysmans discovers the phantasmagoric paintings of Redon and integrates dreams and hallucinations into his work. Through Annette’s fidelity to Huysmans own words, we learn how painting informs Huysmans’ literature and, conversely, how Huysmans’ literary art incorporates and evokes visual art.
