A Lost Paradise on the Left Bank: An Ecocritical Analysis of J.-K. Huysmans’ ‘La Rive Gauche’ and ‘La Bièvre’

Abstract

The antithesis of the iconic Seine, the vile and polluted Bièvre River was part of the industrial landscape of pre-Haussmannian Paris. By 1875, the Bièvre was so unsanitary that the city took measures to bury it underground. At the end of the century, J.-K. Huysmans, who had detailed his strolls around the Bièvre in writing, ruptured with the Naturalist school. It seems counter-intuitive to label Huysmans, an author renowned neither for nature writing nor poetry, as an ‘eco-poet’. However, his prose poems ‘La Rive gauche’ (1874) and ‘La Bièvre’ (1880; 1890) express awareness of environmental decline. In my analysis of these poems using contemporary ecocriticism, I argue that the river’s disappearance coincides with the birth of the Decadent movement, which has an ecological underpinning. In its transition from urban waterway to underground sewer, the Bièvre became part of a new aesthetic that sought to both bury and reconstruct the natural world.