Huysmans's surrealist interpretation of Salome's performance for Herod is brought to life via Wilde's script. Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray , Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics. Aristocrats Are Evil: The novel begins with a description of portraits of some of des Esseintes' ancestors, one of whom inhabited a Decadent Court and sounds very much like this. He even has the woman wear a nun-style coif to avoid being put off by her silhouette seen through his windows. Des Esseintes conjures up pretend worlds for himself too, with the aid of perfumes which he mixes together to make powerfully suggestive scents.

Landow created the HTML design and formatted the text, adding French accents, which the Gutenberg text omits, and both ilustrations and links to materials on this site. Huysmans initially tried to placate him by claiming the book was still in the Naturalist style and that Des Esseintes's opinions and tastes were not his own.As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones.

In one of the more amusing passages, Des Esseintes, after reading the novels of Dickens, decides to take a trip to England. He is an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete and the last representative of an aristocratic family. Huysman's erudite encapsulations of Classical history and literature are marked by a strong sense of the privileged position he was able, by means of his wealth, to attain.I do not doubt therefore that it was in the most admiring, sympathetic and sincere good faith that he retailed to Huysmans what he had seen during the few moments he spent in Ali Baba's cave. After reading "Submission" by Michel Houllebecq, where the main character's career revolves around J. It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own . In spite of this, des Esseintes still owns some Latin works by the early Catholic authors, and he could not help but connect Schopenhauer's pessimistic outlook with the resignation from the Imitation of Christ. It is widely believed that À rebours is the "poisonous French novel" that leads to the downfall of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.