Review: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Romans et nouvelles (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 2019) & Œuvres complètes, vols. I & VI (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017 & 2019)

Abstract

For many general readers of French literature the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, who began his writing career by allying himself to Émile Zola’s naturalist movement and ended it as a mystical Catholic, remains a minority interest, intriguing in parts, certainly, but subsidiary both to the traditional literary canon, and to the contemporary currents of academic discourse. Nevertheless, there has been something of a revival in Huysmans’s literary fortunes over the last few years: in 2017 Classiques Garnier published the first volume of an ambitious nine-volume Œuvres complètes, which will incorporate practically all of Huysmans’s published and unpublished works; a major exhibition devoted to Huysmans as an art critic ran from 3 April to 19 July at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; and now the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, whose editions have long been seen as marking a writer’s entry into the French literary pantheon, has finally inaugurated Huysmans into their iconic leather-bound series. It would be an over-simplification to say that all this is the result of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission [Submission], the narrator of which is a Huysmans specialist at the Sorbonne who is offered the editorship of a proposed Pléiade edition, but the lively debate aroused by the novel certainly had the effect of introducing Huysmans to a new readership. When asked about the Pléiade’s long-overdue decision to include Huysmans, André Guyaux, who, together with the critic Pierre Jourde, directed the editorial team responsible for the edition, admitted: ‘L’idée était dans l’air, mais Houellebecq y a incontestablement contribué.’ [The idea was in the air, but Houellebecq undoubtedly contributed to it.]