Là-Bas
In 1891, a novel about Satanism so accurately depicted the Black Mass that critics wondered if Huysmans had actually witnessed it. He had. This is the scandal that made Là-Bas notorious, but its true ambition runs deeper than provocation. Through Durtal, a writer modeled on Huysmans himself, we follow an unsettling meditation on transcendence: can the divine be found by plumbing the very depths of evil? Durtal becomes obsessed with reconstructing the life of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century nobleman, child murderer, and practitioner of black arts whose crimes shocked even a brutal age. As the historical narrative unfolds in harrowing detail, Durtal and his circle of occultists conduct their own descent into forbidden knowledge, each step pulling them further from the modern world and its spiritual emptiness. This is a novel about the seductions of the abyss, and whether what lies at the bottom is damnation or something stranger. It endures for readers who crave literature that explores the forbidden corners of human experience, where decadence meets genuine spiritual yearning.
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“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“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.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“Curious, a man's affection for the object that he manipulates.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
“This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux. Gilles now sees that the trunks are covered in frightful tumours and goitres. He observes exostosis and ulcers, pustulent sores the size of rocks, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is a vegetal leper house, an aboreal venereal clinic in which, at a turn in the path, there stands a copper beech.And as he stands beneath those crimson leaves, he feels that he is being drenched in a shower of blood; and imagining that a wood nymph lives under the bark, he becomes enraged; he wants to fumble in the flesh of a goddess, massacre the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.””
— J.-K. Huysmans
