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Joris-Karl Huysmans Biography

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (French: [ʃaʁl maʁi ʒɔʁʒ ɥismɑ̃s]; 5 February 1848 in Paris – 12 May 1907 in Paris) was a French novelist and art critic who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans ([ʒoʁis kaʁl], variably abbreviated as J. K. or J.-K.). He is most famous for the novel À rebours (1884, published in English as Against the Grain or Against Nature). He supported himself by a 30-year career in the French civil service.

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Joris-Karl Huysmans Quotes

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope.

Alone, Believe, Beneath, Christian, Heart, Sea

(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

Aberrations, House, Mysterious, Reached, Sick, Yellow

His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.

Author, Fool, Grew, Humanity, Mind, Same

The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.

Battle, Fighting, Irresolute, Struggle, Winning

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.

Disappointed, Grief, Jealousy, Maladies, Past, Profound

The only really indecent people are the chaste.

Chaste, Drinking, Indecent, People

Only the chaste are truly obscene.

Chaste, Obscene

Last comes the class of persons, of nervous organization and enfeebled vigour, whose sensual appetite craves highly seasoned dishes, men of a hectic, over-stimulated constitution. Their eyes almost invariably hanker after that most irritating and morbid of colours, with its artificial splendours and feverish acrid gleams,-orange.

Acrid, Colours, Eye, Men, Nervous, Orange

Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness.

Art, Clean, Holiness, Thing

The modern painter…is an excellent couturier

Couturier, Excellent, Modern, Painter

Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.

Bellies, Dust, Fastidious, Know, Perfect, Thinking

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him

Argument, Comfort, Lasts, Pessimism, Realized

Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.

Afflictions, Church, Heart, Justify, Pity, Wish

There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days.

Artist, Days, Doubt, These Days, True

No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.

Girl, Kings, Men, Monstrous, Quivering, Sense

. . . he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.

Book, Connected, Growing, Literary, Reacted, Reality

In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, but I could not live without a cat.

Animal, Cat, Live, Love, Qualities, Quality

The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own.

Begins, Loveliest, Tune, Tunes, Vulgar

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove. . . that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

Art, Confound, People, Supernatural, Wish