Joris-Karl Huysmans Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Joris-Karl Huysmans

The work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, novelist, essayist, and art critic, provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of popular philosophy and literary art that took place near the turn of the century. He is one of those rare prose writers who have situated themselves and their work squarely on the cusp of a moment of literary change, when ways of looking at and representing the world are being transformed, in life as in art. And so one can follow in his writing a starling evolution, bridging the apparent gap between the social realism of late-nineteenth-century French naturalism and the highly subjective fiction of the early twentieth century, in the works of novelists such as André Gide and Marcel Proust. In no other writer can be seen so clearly the path French fiction took to get from Emile Zola to Proust. The change involves both a transformation of perception, from the objectivist pretensions of Zola and the other naturalists to a more self-centered fiction, and a change in the very function of language--as Pierre Cogny said, "de l'écriture à l'Ecriture" (from writing to Writing)--from writing to scripture.

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