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Against the Grain, or a Rebours, was written by Joris Huysmans in 1884, and it tells the story of a young duke named Jean des Esseintes who indulges in a life of debauchery in Paris but suffers...
[Des Esseintes] spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own.
With a title translated either as Against Nature or as Against The Grain, this wildly original fin-de-siècle novel follows its sole character, Des Esseintes, a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess.
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For example, one chapter consists entirely of smell hallucinations so vivid that they exhaust the book's central character, Des Esseintes, a bizarre, depraved aristocrat. A student of the perfumer's art, Esseintes has developed several devices for titillating his jaded senses.
That day, Des Esseintes took this incomparable book from his shelves and handled it devotedly, once more reading certain pieces which seemed to him, in this simple but inestimable frame, more than ordinarily penetrating.
Jean Des Esseintes, fictional character, a reclusive aesthete in the novel Against the Grain (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. The last in a depleted line of nobles, Des Esseintes is wealthy and effete, and he grows impotent from dissolution.
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Against the Grain became the central document of the French Decadents, partly because its elaborate description of Des Esseintes’s tastes in art and literature established a frame of...
