Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Birth : 1848-02-05, Paris, France

Death : 1907-05-12

History

Joris-Karl Huysmans, born Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, was the only son of a French mother and a Dutch father. At 20 he began a long career in the Ministry of the Interior, writing many of his novels on official time. His early work, influenced by contemporary naturalist novelists. His major novels epitomize successive phases of the aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual life of late 19th-century France. Huysmans' work is considered remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, large vocabulary, descriptions, satirical wit and far-ranging erudition. First considered part of Naturalism, he became associated with the decadent movement with his publication of "À rebours" (1884). His work expressed his deep pessimism, which had led him to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Profile

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Movies

Against Nature / À Rebours
Novel
A sensuous, celebrating smell, touch, color, skin, poetry, painting, sex, and home decorating; to the point of decadence. A man, tired of the debauched and decadent world in which he has lived becomes a recluse, and aims to create his own universe within his home. What starts as a celebration of 'nature', however, becomes a personal disaster as he turns far away from the world.
Diner Noir Istanbul
Writer
Based on Des Esseintes' literary black feast in A Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans.
Là-Bas
Novel
"The devil has no power over the will and very little over the mind, but an unlimited power over the imagination." Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1903.
Nocturnes
Novel
Chopin "Nocturnes" accompany this study in black and white inspired by Huysman's decadent novel "À rebours".
Ventriloquio
Novel
Adapted from the ninth chapter of the novel "Controcorrente" (1884) by Joris Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.