Dreams, Nightmares, and Lunacy in En rade: Odilon Redon's Pictorial Inspiration in the Writings of J.-K. Huysmans

Abstract

This essay illuminates selected aesthetic approaches that are symptomatic of the key role that Symbolist art played in the evolution of the poetic topoi of folly and madness in fin de siecle French culture, as nineteenth-century Romantic representations of exalted poetic frenzy gradually moved towards twentieth-century Modernist visions of nightmarish absurdity. Arguably, while the former may lead to meaningful prophetic insight, the latter often trigger an acknowledgement of life’s meaninglessness, in European literature and painting alike. In the process of transition, French Symbolism paved the way for such major twentieth-century figures as Joyce or Yeats, among many others. Within this evolution, Huysmans’s novel En rade (1886), written during the author’s Symbolist phase, is a seminal text. For Huysmans in particular, Symbolism was in many ways defined as an antithesis to Naturalism: more specifically, he applied the former to his prose writing as an artistic method that focused on the irrational world of emotions, fantasies, and dreams. In En rade, similarly to the famous A rebours (1884) that preceded it as Huysmans’s first non-Naturalist novel, the Symbolist outlook finds expression in the protagonist’s rejection of contemporary society, nostalgia for the past, and escape from reality into elaborate fantasy and dream (which is often a decadent nightmare). Indeed, the foolishness (folly) of human society puts the protagonist of En rade, Jacques Marles, on the verge of insanity, or even lunacy. The procedure of inter-art comparison is essential for seeing the novel’s symbolic coherence, since the protagonist is assailed by grotesque nightmares that are largely inspired by Odilon Redon’s phantasmagoric drawings and lithographs of the late 1870s and the 1880s. Huysmans praises the latter in A rebours and in his prose poetry volume Croquis parisiens (second edition, 1886).