Catholic Idiom and the Dialectic of Reading: A Meditation on Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Novel À rebours

Huysmans’s novel À rebours can be seen as an epitome of the dialectic implied by the term peccata lectionis: reading can only come into its own through certain ‘sins’ inherent to it while possibly compromising it. Such ‘sins’ are involved in the decision of the novel’s single protagonist and anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to withdraw into the solitude of his country house to live a life dedicated to aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. While celebrating his own eccentric fancies and artificiality of taste, the protagonist’s days of decadence, in their very antagonism towards both society and nature, are spent pursuing what can be called ‘reading of culture’. As ‘the reading of culture’ and its dialectics in the novel extend to and draw upon a wealth of references to the Catholic cultural tradition, the latter leads to a textual logic and a particular kind of lectio. It is in keeping with the novel being widely regarded as a harbinger of the ‘Catholic turn’ in its author’s career, Des Esseintes, at one point of the narrative, comes to explore the so-called ‘Catholic idiom’. Whereas his critique is aimed at 19th century Catholic writers in France and their indebtedness to the definitive rhetoric of the French Grand Siècle, the ‘Catholic idiom’, its particular textuality and the ‘reading of culture’ that is manifest in it may lie elsewhere in Huysmans’s novel itself. These likely reside in the textual logic of catalogues or ‘compendia’, that is, the listing of names within a category, which evokes mediaeval textual practices. The catalogue or ‘compendium’ as a genre within Huysmans’s novel fulfils the artificiality and vigour of the protagonist’s ‘reading of culture’—and the whole dialectic of the peccata lectionis.