Joris-Karl Huysmans

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Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans [ɥismɑ̃ːs] (actually Charles Marie Georges Huysmans ; * February 5, 1848 in Paris , † May 12, 1907 ibid) was a French writer who was primarily active as a novelist .

Life and work

Joris-Karl Huysmans was the son of the Dutch lithographer Godfried Huysmans († 1856) and the teacher Malvina Badin. After his father's death, the widow and the bookbinder Jules Og married in 1857. Because of resentment against his stepfather, Huysmans went to boarding school, where he had a less than happy school time. After graduating from high school , he accepted a post as a middle employee in the French Ministry of the Interior . He stayed there - interrupted by several leave of absence - until 1898. His relationships with women were not very stable. They caused him many disappointments, but also provided him with material for his novels. The focus is often on a bachelor who is disappointed in life and women.

Besides his job, Huysmans worked as an author. First he published shorter texts in magazines. His first publication was in 1874 a collection of poems under the title Le Drageoir aux épices , where he first used the Flemish-looking first name Joris-Karl.

In 1876 he met Émile Zola and joined the group of naturalists gathered around him . In the same year he brought out his first novel Marthe, histoire d'une fille . The work was influenced by the naturalistic novel Germinie Lacerteux (1863/64) by the Goncourt brothers and by Zolas Thérèse Raquin (1867). Huysmans wrote so drastically, however, that the book was banned for some time as being immoral. In 1877 he demonstrated his friendship with Zola with a series of laudatory magazine articles about him and his new novel L'Assommoir .

Also appearing on Marthe following narrative works Huysmans' are mainly located in the milieu of the Parisian underclass and a dramatic realism determined. They are the novel: Les sœurs Vatard (= the sisters V., 1879), which describes the mediocre, amorous and professional existence of two bookbeaters; the story Sac au dos (= the sack on his back), which he wrote for the anti-militarist anthology Les soirées de Medan , which Zola published in 1880; the novel En ménage (= life for two, 1881), in which he depicts the artist's well-known problematic between the urge for undisturbed creation and the need for a sexual and affective relationship, but at the same time confronts two types of artist a more realistic writer and a more realistic, aestheticizing painter; the novel La Retraite de M. Bougran (= the retirement of Mr. B, 1888), in which he describes the difficulties of a ministerial official who retired early in finding a new meaning in life; A vau-l'eau (= down the drain , 1882), in which he focuses on a little official who cannot get out of his pathetic routine . The latter two novels probably also partly reflect problems of Huymans himself, who in 1881 had taken a long vacation because of nervous exhaustion to relax in a private clinic in a Paris suburb.

In 1883 he published an anthology with art reviews from the years 1879–1882 under the title L'Art Moderne (= modern art). In 1884 Huysmans brought out the work that was to secure his place in literary history: the novel À rebours (translations into German under the title: Against the Grain ). The minimal plot revolves around a decadent and neurotic young aristocrat named Jean Floressas Des Esseintes. The latter is increasingly withdrawing from the unsatisfactory social reality. In his suburban house he weaves himself into an artificial world of aestheticism and mysticism and gradually ends up on the verge of mental derangement. The novel was actually intended as a naturalistic study of a hereditary and disease-causing "decadent" individual who bears many traits of the author himself. However, it was accepted by many readers as a “ breviary of decadence ” in which they recognized their own problems and a problem of their time. A rebors became a cult book for a while, not only for followers of naturalism, but also for those of the symbolist school. Foreign readers like Oscar Wilde were also impressed. In 1885, the poet Mallarmé formulated the symbolist poetics in a long poem with the paradoxical title Prose pour Des Esseintes .

The next novel by Huysmans, and his first one, which is set in the country, En rade (= in roadstead), did not appear until 1887. In 1888 the author accepted an invitation to Hamburg and followed a long journey through Germany. In 1890 he was one of the founders of the Académie Goncourt and became its first chairman. At the same time, apparently once again entering a phase of the search for meaning, he began to open himself up to the influence of people interested in the occult and to deal with corresponding ideas and practices. The crisis finally culminated in piety and, from 1892, led him to several monastic stays in the province and to clothing as a lay brother in the abbey of Saint-Martin of Ligugé near Poitiers .

Huysmans processed the development mentioned in four novels around the same protagonist, a writer named Durtal. They are: Là-bas (= over there / over there, 1891), En route (= on the way, 1895), La Cathédrale (1898) and L'Oblat (= the lay brother, 1903). In Là-bas , Huysmans describes the religious Rosicrucian underground, which he has intensively researched . The plot of the novel culminates in the detailed description of an orgiastic black mass . Huysmans, who was deeply fascinated by Satanism , was inspired by the works of many occultists , spiritualists and black magicians , some of whom led him personally "into the dark realm, down there, where the devil is worshiped in obscene and bloodthirsty masses". A little later, Huysmans withdrew to a Paris Benedictine monastery , where he succumbed to cancer of the lower jaw after a long suffering. His last book appeared almost posthumously in 1906, the pious Les foules de Lourdes (= The crowds of Lourdes).

reception

The success of A rebors was rather limited to an intellectual audience. Là-bas, on the other hand, was a bestseller. Huysmans' greatest sales success with around 40 editions in 20 years was La Cathédrale , the action of which takes place in Chartres Cathedral and in its vicinity. Today this novel is hardly known compared to Là-bas and especially A rebours .

In Haffmans publishing at Zweitausendeins 2007 a new translation appeared from Against the Grain by Caroline Vollmann under the title Against all . Most of Huysmans' other novels are also available in newer translations or editions.

The main character in Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel “ Unterwerfung ” wrote an extensive dissertation on Huysmans' work and deals in detail with his turn to religion.

Works

  • 1874: Le Drageoir aux épices .
  • 1876: Marthe. Histoire d'une fille . Derveaux, Paris.
  • 1879: Les sœurs Vatard . Paris.
  • 1880: Sac au dos . Brussels.
    • German edition in Émile Zola and others: Evenings in Medan. A blossom harvest of stories . Translated by Fritz Wohlfahrt, Großenhain 1881.
  • 1881: En ménage .
    • German edition: Illusions . Translated by Caroline Vollmann, Munich 2007.
  • 1882: À vau-l'eau .
    • German edition: Downstream . Translated by Else Otten. Propylaea, Berlin 1925 and new edition Berlin 1996.
  • 1882: L'Art modern
  • 1884: À rebours . Paris, Charpentier
    • German edition: Against the grain . Translated by M. Capsius. Berlin 1897.
    • German edition: Authorized transmission by H. Jacob. Potsdam, Kiepenheuer 1921.
  • 1887: En rade .
    • German edition: In the roadstead . Translated by Eva-Maria Thimme. Edition Sirene, Berlin 1984 ISBN 3-924095-15-9 . And: refuge . Translated by Michael Kleeberg . Bremen 1998.
  • 1887: Un Dilemme . Paris.
    • German edition: A dilemma. Translated by Rosa Speyer. Berlin 1898.
  • 1888: La Retraite de M. Bougran . - Released: 1964
  • 1890: Là-bas .
    • German edition: Deep down . Translated by Victor Henning Pfannkuche. Potsdam, Kiepenheuer 1921.
    • German edition: Deep down . Translated by Victor Henning Pfannkuche. Harz, Berlin 1929.
  • 1890: La Bièvre .
    • German edition: The Bièvre - Elegy on a river. Edited and with an afterword by Michael and Susanne Farin. P. Kirchheim Verlag, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-87410-054-5 .
  • 1895: En route .
    • German edition: From Freethinking to Catholicism . 2nd edition Hildesheim: Borgmeyer 1914.
    • German edition: On the way . Translated by Michael von Kilisch-Horn. belleville, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-943157-92-5
  • 1898: La Cathédrale , German as The Cathedral
  • 1903: L'Oblat .
  • 1906: Les foules de Lourdes .
    • German edition: Lourdes. Mystik und Massen, (from the French and with an afterword by Hartmut Sommer. With historical B / W photographs), Lilienfeld Verlag, Düsseldorf 2020. ISBN 978-3-940357-65-6 (Lilienfeldiana vol. 23); E-Book: 978-3-940357-66-3.

literature

  • Constanze Baethge: Subversion and Implosion. The other modernity of Joris-Karl Huysmans . (Dissertation, University of Osnabrück 2003). Online (PDF; 2.3 MB)
  • Léon Bloy : About the tomb of Huysmans ("Sur la tombe de Huysmans"). (Translated by Ronald Voullié; two comments by Raoul Vaneigem ). Merve, Berlin 2009. ISBN 978-3-88396-264-1
  • Wanda G. Klee: Incarnate decadence. Studies on physicality in selected works by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Oscar Wilde . Winter, Heidelberg 2001, ISBN 3-8253-1145-7 (plus dissertation, University of Marburg 2000).
  • Annika Lamer: The aesthetics of the innocent eye. Features of impressionistic perception in the art reviews of Émile Zola , Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Félix Fénéon . Königshausen & Neumann Verlag, Würzburg 2009. ISBN 978-3-8260-4017-7
  • Rita Thiele: Satanism as a criticism of time with Joris-Karl Huysmans . Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1979, ISBN 3-8204-6386-0 (also dissertation, University of Bonn 1979).
  • Joseph Jurt : Les Arts rivaux. Littérature et arts visuels d'Homère à Huysmans. Classiques Garnier, Paris 2018, ISBN 978-2-406-07981-1 .

Web links

Commons : Joris-Karl Huysmans  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Joris-Karl Huysmans  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix in: Material for the book: New Rosicrucians by Harald Lamprecht .
  2. ↑ “Elegantly arranged oases. On the 100th anniversary of the death of Joris Huysmans ” , Rainer Moritz in the“ Büchermarkt ”program on Deutschlandfunk on May 11, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Huysmans, Joris-Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Huysmans, Charles Marie Georges (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 1907
Place of death Paris