As he used to say, Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments.
If he did not go as far as De Sade in uttering atrocious maledictions against the Saviour. Yet be sure that Nature is your home, and that from the farthest excursions you will return the more certainly to those fundamental instincts which are rooted in the zoological series at the summit of which we stand. For the whole spiritual cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise, but on the emotional impulses of the mammal vertebrata which constitute us men.
Elaborately and deliberately perverse , it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work - so fascinating , so repellent , so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature.
It does not reveal a history, it has no action , but presents itself as a sort of portrayal or biography of a man whose habits, sympathies and antipathies, and ideas on all possible subjects, specially on art and literature , are related to us in great detail.
This man is called Des Esseintes , and is the last scion of an ancient French ducal title. It is a plotless novel which concentrates almost entirely on its protagonist, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes , an eccentric , reclusive dandy , aesthete , armchair traveler and antihero. Though the book is widely believed to have no structure whatsoever, it does tell a relatively simple story.
