We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Like Taine and Nietzsche, [Huysmans] craved for some haven of refuge to escape the whirring wings of Wotan's ravens.
The tension in family fictions between consanguinity and illegitimacy, adumbrated in the previous chapters, is amplified in certain novels which question in extreme form the status of individuality amidst the sociopolitical mælstrom of modernity. The intersubjective network on which the density of Naturalist plots often rely (and which is finally parodied to death by Gide's ‘sotie’, Les Caves du Vatican (1914)) ultimately threatens the coherence of the family plot, as we shall see in chapter 6 in the cases of Hennique's Un accident de Monsieur Hébert and Zola's Paris. Both infer by the evocation of radical politics the dangers of narcissism in the self-concerned family romance in both its adulterous and incestuous forms. What both novels reflect is the political irresponsibility of a narrative form (and of a lifestyle) whose focus on private desires ignores the demands of public life, or fails to register the political dimension of private life. The decadence of modernity is pathologized by these Naturalist novelists as a form of social blindness, an unwillingness to engage with the political. Nowhere is this quest for privacy voiced more audaciously than in A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. His suspicion of the commercial metropolitan centres of modernity and their very public culture of spectacle, presided over by the likes of Octave Mouret, is addressed elsewhere in a warning about the social effects of the grands magasins:
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
