Number of pages: 220
Number of reading days: 17
Why I read this book: While studying The Picture of Dorian Gray in London, we discussed the significance of the "poisonous book" that Dorian reads and the context for this mysterious book. In Dorian, Wilde never specifically mentions what this book is or who it's by; but at the Queensberry trial in 1895, Wilde admitted that the book was Huysmans's À rebours: "he refused to say anything about its morality or immorality; to ask a writer to pass moral judgement on a fellow writer's work was, he said, 'an impertinence and a vulgarity'" (Robert Baldick's introduction to À rebours).
In class, my professor mentioned an interesting passage about bejeweling a tortoise, relating this novel to the dandies and flaneurs of the 19th century. I was intrigued.
Thoughts: This book provided an interesting reading experience. The protagonist, Des Esseintes, is a rather sickly and reclusive aesthete. Throughout the entire story, if you can call it a story, he strives to experience through the senses--through sight and taste and smell. He doesn't actually do anything. He only partakes of the sensual. For example, one of the most interesting passages (for me, at least) described his attempt to visit England. He takes a meal before catching the train but then has such an "English experience" that he decides not to leave after all:
"'When you come to think of it, I've seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel. I've been steeped in English life ever since I left home, and it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality. As it is, I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have thought of repudiating my old convictions, to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination, and to have believed like any ninny that it was necessary, interesting, and useful to travel abroad.'"
Did I mention this is a French novel?
Some parts of this book were extremely interesting, especially in the context of Wilde. Other bits were not so thrilling to read, and I have to admit to a little skimming. At one point, Des Esseintes catalogs every book in his library; normally, this would be very interesting to me, but I didn't recognize or hadn't read most of the books he mentions, making for very dull reading.
On the whole, I found this book very intriguing but difficult. I feel like I have a new understanding of Dorian Gray, which is possibly the best outcome that came of reading this strange novel.
Favorite Passages & Quotes:
"After all, to take what among all her works is considered to be the most exquisite, what among all her creations is deemed to possess the most perfect and original beauty - to wit, woman - has not man for his part, by his own efforts, produced an animate yet artificial creature that is every bit as good from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist, anywhere on this earth, a being conceived in the joys of fornication and born in the throes of motherhood who is more dazzlingly, more outstandingly beautiful than the two locomotives recently put into service on the Northern Railway?"
"and it is of course true that, just as the loveliest melody in the world becomes unbearably vulgar once the public start humming it and the barrel-organs playing it, so the work of art that appeal to charlatans, endears itself to fools, and is not content to arouse the enthusiasm of a few connoisseurs, is thereby polluted in the eyes of the initiate and becomes commonplace admiration, almost repulsive."
"He shut his portfolios and once more fell into a mood of splenetic indecision. To change the trend of his thoughts, he began a course of emollient reading; tried to cool his brains with some of the solanaceae of literature; read those books that are so charmingly adapted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic of phosphatic works would only fatigue: the novels of Charles Dickens."
"Then, little by little, an idea insinuated itself into his mind - the idea of turning dream into reality, of travelling to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions; and this idea was allied with a longing to experience new sensations and thus afford some relief to a mind dizzy with hunger and drunk with fantasy."
"After a while, their tongues were loosened; and as most of them looked up in the air as they spoke, Des Esseintes concluded that these Englishmen were nearly all discussing the weather."
"During the days that followed his return home, Des Esseintes browsed through the books in his library, and at the though that he might have been parted from them for a long time he was filled with the same heart-felt satisfaction he would have enjoyed if he had come back to them after a genuine separation. Under the impulse of this feeling, he saw them in a new light, discovering beauties in them he had forgotten ever since he had bought and read them for the first time."
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