SOURCE: "The Works," in The Image ofHuysmans, edited by Brian R. Banks, AMS Press, 1990, pp. 83-139.

In the following essay, Banks provides a survey of Huysmans's fiction written during his Naturalist, Decadent, and Catholic phases.

Le Drageoir À Épices, 1874

On October 10, 1874, Huysmans published at his own expense through the Dentu house a series of prose poems that marked not only his debut, but also something of a signpost for his whole life work. From the two known manuscript states and various notebooks together with newspaper files and personal anecdotes, we know that the material was not only used for articles throughout the formative years of the 1870s, but also as a touchstone for ideas on a larger scale. Apart from the reprinting of "The Herring" and "Ritornello" in Croquis Parisiens (1880), many of the elements that run through his work may find their embryonic seeds here, including A Rebours (1884). Such...