Enfermedad y estilo en Huysmans: desintegraciónde la figura del soltero en <i>À Rebours</i>

In the 19th century, the figure of the “bachelor” (artist) appeared as a gesture of resistance to the advance and generalisation of bourgeois and utilitarian life, which was imposed in an excessive manner. J.K. Huysmans’ À Rebours is the narration of a spirit jaded by thisimposition. Chapter six of the novel recreates the figure of the bachelor in des Esseintes as a way of life, during his past, which, because of neurosis, is exacerbated in a desire for solitude and isolation until it reveals a process of gradual disintegration of the character. I argue that, because of its stylistic composition, this novel triggers, towards the end of the 19th century, a declining process of disintegration of the nineteenth-century figure ofthe bachelor and creates a new figure, that of the "alone”, which is why I will concentrate our aesthetic-hermeneutic reading on the chapter mentioned above.