Joris-Karl Huysmans et le refus du moderne : autour des « romans de la transition »
Joris-Karl Huysmans and the Rejection of Modernity : On the « Transition Novels »

Summary/Abstract: Huysmans moved from Zola’s naturalism to a radical critique of the modern world, which he associated with ugliness, vulgarity, and spiritual decline. In his « transition novels », from À Rebours to En Route, reflecting his evolution, he opposed a materialistic, bourgeois, utilitarian modernity to an idealized, artistic, and sacred past. Confronted with contemporary society, but also with his own destiny and personal suffering, he sought refuge in art, liturgy, and the Middle Ages, in a quest for a lost absolute. This rejection of the present reveals not only a personal existential and spiritual crisis, but also a coherent aesthetic and ideological position, articulated through Huysmans’s evolving conception of the modern and the antimodern.Huysmans moved from Zola’s naturalism to a radical critique of the modern world, which he associated with ugliness, vulgarity, and spiritual decline. In his « transition novels », from À Rebours to En Route, reflecting his evolution, he opposed a materialistic, bourgeois, utilitarian modernity to an idealized, artistic, and sacred past. Confronted with contemporary society, but also with his own destiny and personal suffering, he sought refuge in art, liturgy, and the Middle Ages, in a quest for a lost absolute. This rejection of the present reveals not only a personal existential and spiritual crisis, but also a coherent aesthetic and ideological position, articulated through Huysmans’s evolving conception of the modern and the antimodern.

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