The Mirror of Divinity
The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9839495 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Lloyd (0000-0003-1774-2441, Durham University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 556-557 |
| Publication date | 2005-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | French Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-1128 • E-ISSN: 1468-2931 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fs/kni249 |
| OpenAlex | W2009633593 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
By Robert Ziegler. Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2004. 385pp. Hb £43.95. Readers of fin-de-siècle literature will know that over the last thirty years Robert Ziegler has published many critical essays on writers associated with decadence; rather surprisingly, he has waited until a relatively late stage in his career to assemble and publish his research in book form. His second book, on Huysmans, essentially offers a series of close readings of the novels and other semi-fictional works, studied in chronological order. Taken separately, these chapters offer perceptive insights into areas one might otherwise overlook. For instance, discussing Les Sœurs Vatard, Ziegler argues that popular art is actually shown as revitalizing, emancipatory and playful, whereas the high art and cultural elitism espoused by the painter Cyprien and novel's narrator are exposed as deadening and exclusive. Huysmans's failed artists are really bourgeois consumers, ‘claustrophilic, infantilized sages’. His characters are ‘badly mothered’, and pursue art, or aesthetic experience, as a desperate substitute for union with the lost parent; hence the fact his books ‘resemble galleries as much as they do libraries’. Ultimately, ‘for Huysmans, authorship is the disease that faith will heal’, allowing him to escape from ‘linguistic narcissism’ and achieve ‘reconnection with humanity’ through ‘the universal language of the liturgy’. As these examples suggest, the approach is psychoanalytic, although Ziegler never explicitly sets out his methodology. The danger of sliding into a relentless and reductive process of decoding and encoding (whereby the literary text is interpreted according to a set of given archetypes, unconscious drives, symptomatic bodily manifestations, and so forth, whose supposed authority is never convincingly justified) is all too apparent, as is the temptation to treat biographical author and imagined characters as though they belonged to the same order of discourse
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Bourgeoisie · Decadence · Divinity · Faith · Literature · Politics · Theology · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,46 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2013 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |