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J.‐K. Huysmans: The First Post‐Modernist Saint?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Kieran Flanagan
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Extract

1. The man himself.

An incapacity to read French led me to the discovery of the significance of J.-K. Huysmans. In his book A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor used Huysmans’ term ‘les paratonnerres de la société’ to refer to the monastic calling, the time spent in ‘silent factories’ reducing ‘the moral overdraft of mankind’. One would expect monks to act as tuning forks for the holy, but hardly in this dramatic fashion, which seemed more the preserve of liberal theologians with advanced views. The phrase resonated in this sociological imagination. It seemed to be an answer to a long-standing effort to link sociology to an understanding of liturgical performance, where the actors endeavour to attune those present to signals of transcendence emerging from the absent. Huysmans appeared to be awarding monks a striking success in their social activities in attracting Divine attention. Apart from needing to find out the context of the phrase, a puzzle arose as to who was J.-K. Huysmans.

Initial inquiries were perplexing. Huysmans was infamous for his work A Rebours, the classical pioneering study of the art of decadence. This was the book that so influenced Wilde in The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and which elicited the lofty mot at his trial that he never spoke of the morality of an author. Further inquiry indicated that Huysmans had become bored with decadence and had returned to Catholicism. An account of his return was given in his book, En Route. The paths of both authors crossed oddly in the present day, for the only copy of this work that could be located by the interlibrary loan service at Bristol University was at Reading. His dalliance with vice in A Rebours was well known; his return to virtue in En Route seems to have been overlooked.

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Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 71 , Issue 838 , May 1990, pp. 217 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

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